2011

The biggest announcement at Facebook’s f8 event in San Francisco today was a radical new profile design. Called Timeline, the new design turns your profile into a colorful, easily searchable timeline of your entire life – at least the parts of it on Facebook. The Timeline won’t go live until a few weeks, but you … Read more

Whenever Facebook launches a major re-design, there is a user outcry. Partly that’s because Facebook is known for its clumsy and confusing design, partly it’s because people are resistant to change. This time round though, the main issue is that Facebook is trying to be something it is not: a newspaper. The change causing all … Read more

Today at the Strata Summit on Big Data, Google’s Bradley Horowitz noted an intriguing statistic about Google Plus usage: users of Google Plus are two to three times as likely to post content to private circles than they are to post it publicly. As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick commented, these numbers suggest the Circles metaphor … Read more

Today Ning chairman and co-founder Marc Andreessen announced the “merger” of his company with a larger company, Glam Media. In other words, Glam acquired Ning. It’s interesting to look back at the history of Ning, a DIY social networking service that launched in 2005 when the Web 2.0 tech boom was in full flow. I … Read more

According to reports, Facebook’s f8 developer conference this coming Thursday will have the motto “Read. Watch. Listen.” Other than reminding me of a certain tech blog’s name, this motto excites me because of the promise it holds that Facebook will fully embrace multimedia. But that has some major implications, which will affect many in the … Read more

It’s been a fascinating year in the social networking space, as heavyweight champion Facebook fends off some solid blows from muscley contender Google Plus. However over the past week, it’s been nearly all Facebook – with the release of the Subscriber button and vastly improved lists (akin to Google Plus “circles”). This week, or perhaps … Read more

One of the most intriguing of this year’s Web battles is between Facebook and Google Plus, as the two products vie for social networking supremacy. Yesterday we explored the ramifications of Facebook’s new Subscribe button, which partly aims to match Google Plus on public sharing. Today we turn out attention to another new feature that … Read more

It’s been fascinating to watch the to and fro between Facebook and Google +, as the two products vie for social networking supremacy. As you’d expect, a strong challenger (Google +) has forced the current social networking world champion (Facebook) to make some defensive moves. Facebook made two big changes this week: automated friend lists … Read more

HTML5 is the next version of the Web’s markup language and is enjoying increasing popularity amongst the developer community. The level of interactivity it enables has probably been the most talked about feature of HTML5, largely due to Apple’s controversial refusal to allow Adobe’s Flash technology onto its mobile devices. As a result, HTML5 is … Read more

iPad magazine apps have been one of the bigtrends over the past year. Flipboard is the most well known and successful so far, but others have tried to get a slice of the action. News.me is a notable example, created by the same Twitter-focused stable (Betaworks) that produced TweetDeck and Bit.ly. The New York Times … Read more

Earlier this week we looked at the remarkable growth of Tumblr, a blogging and curation service that now gets over 12 billion page views per month. Tumblr is mostly used as a consumer curation tool – it’s an easy way for people to re-post articles, images and videos. But Tumblr can also be used to … Read more

This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per … Read more

There’s no shortage of services that take content from the Twitter firehose and present it in a different way. But one caught my eye recently, because it’s doing something I’d always hoped a really good RSS aggregator would do: track topics. Nobody ever built the RSS topic tracker that I’d dreamed about. It’s not a … Read more

A new iPad app called Groovebug just launched. It uses your iTunes music collection to create “an iPad magazine tailored to your musical tastes.” The familiarities to Flipboard seem a little forced. You do use the swiping motion to go from one page to another but, outside of that, it doesn’t feel much like a … Read more