"the social network" entries
Facebook Growth By Age Group: Share of College-Age Users is Declining
With the U.S. now accounting for only about a third of all Facebook users, we are starting to see a gradual shift away from its original demographic of college-age users (18-25): 46% of all users are 18-25 years old, down from 51% in late May. The number of users in the 18-25 segment is growing, but at a slower pace…
Portable Contacts API Starts to Get Real
This evening Joseph and John of Plaxo and I have been hosting a hackathon at Six Apart for the Portable Contacts API (video about PorC). The Portable Contacts API is designed "to make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the…
Radar Theme: Collective Intelligence
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] "None of us is as dumb as all of us," but the opposite of this profound truth is also true. Systems that channel individual behaviours to create new and valuable data are showing up everywhere. We point to Amazon Recommendations…
Breaking Down What's Happening on the Social Web
The past few weeks, John McCrea, Joseph Smarr, and I have been shooting a 15 minute video podcast called TheSocialWeb.tv. Each week we try to break down what's happened in the Social Web in a way that is understandable so you don't have to be living and breathing this stuff. This week we discuss Meebo's announcement of Community Instant Messaging…
Google's Social Graph API Learns a New Trick
This past February at Social Graph Foo Camp, Google released the first version of their Social Graph API. (see past Radar coverage) This API was focused on making it easier for developers to understand who a user is and find their other accounts around the web via publicly declared data. Today I'm driving up to Foo Camp along with Brad…
Is SocialMedia Overstepping Facebook's Privacy Line?
SocialMedia is an advertising network which places ads within social applications such as those on Facebook and MySpace. SocialMedia claims to be more effective in this type of advertising, due to a patent-pending technology they've developed named FriendRank. SocialMedia CEO Seth Goldstein claims that SocialMedia ads can pay up to 2.5 times more than traditional ads within social networks and…
On Wikipedia, storms, teacups, and _why's notability
In which our hero ponders the Internet's underwear, the oxymoronic nature of social software, and that not only should you not hate the playa but you shouldn't even hate the game. It must be a weekend, the interwebs have their panties in a bunch again. This time it's about the Wikipedia entry for _why the lucky stiff, one of the…
Thinking in Wikis
I clearly remember thinking, when I ordered my copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, "this has got to be a new low for O'Reilly. How can it be anything but a waste of a ream of paper?" I mean, "Wikipedia: it's an online encyclopedia that anyone can improve". There, what else is there to say? Throw in the URL and…
Ignite Boston shows the way to beat commerce interruptus
I felt like was I drifting back to the dot-com boom last night during
Ignite Boston.
Movements that I saw getting stalled seven years ago seem to be
finding their way forward again. I think such projects, nationwide, will pull us out of the
slump that left so many dreams in the bit bucket after 2001.
Google Friend Connect and limits to sharing
We’re all tired of acquaintances tugging on us to sign up for new
social networks. But we wouldn’t want to have just one big social
network, either. Google’s
Friend Connect,
which was announced on Monday and covered by
Radar
as well as other sites, represents a small step toward a middle
ground.
Complete information sharing would mean mingling your data and social
networking functions fully with any site that supports a Friend
Connect widget. Instead, Friend Connect negotiates the
traditional tension between sociability and privacy.