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On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. Read the rest of this entry »
Over a period of three years, fantasy author Peter Brett wrote 100,000 words on his HP iPaq during his long subway commute. And here I get all excited when I manage to post a new word I learned to my blog, while sitting at a bar. Given the length of most epic fantasy novels (or cycles) I would have thought it an impossible task to thumb out more than, say, 5-10% on something like a smartphone. But this guy seems to actually thrive doing it.
He talks about his experience, and why he went with an HP iPaq of all things, in this interview. He’s pretty bullish about the Kindle, much more so than I am, but it’s true that it is a breakout device; authors and publishers need to start working with e-books early or risk ending up like the recording industry. My question is, if he knew he was going to be doing so much typing, why not get something with a really sweet keypad like a Sidekick or Blackberry?
Seeing the explosion in growth of Twitter right now, it’s pretty clear that the hot trend on the web is to have a service which acts as a central hub for information, and allows third-party sites and services to built on top of it. For most of its life, Facebook has been almost the exact opposite, insisting that developers work from within its walls to keep much of the data — and the users — there. Tomorrow, it looks like Facebook may be knocking down its dam to let its streams of data flow more freely.
Facebook is expected to announce that third-parties will now have access to data from the site that was previously unavailable, before an event set to take place at 4PM PST tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal has a few of the details, including that developers should be able to access the all-important photos and videos that users upload. Apparently, these third-party developers, assuming they get users’ permission to use this data, could build their own sites and services with some of it.
Also of note is that apparently Facebook will begin supporting more open standards for the transporting of data. It’s not yet clear exactly what this will mean, but presumably it could help alleviate some of the issues I wrote about last week in noting that Facebook, Google and others were creating what were essentially proprietary profiles, that forced all of us to actively use and update all of their services. I’ll be very interested to see what this means when it comes to Facebook Connect.
If Facebook really is opening most of its data, it would seem to me it’s a smart move to stop some of the momentum that smaller rivals, like Twitter, are getting. After all, Facebook still has its big stick — over 200 million users and more importantly, their data. Now it may be able to fully swing it.
[photo: flickr/rachel thecat]
Google Earth
The idea behind Google Earth has always been a powerful one: It allows users to explore places that they either can’t or won’t go. But with its vast amount of maps and topographical data, it also is a very powerful tool for combing the Earth — and that can be very useful when you’re searching for something. Which is exactly how it helped a grieving family find a plane that crashed, and took the lives of loved ones, that had been missing for over two years.
Despite countless time spent searching all the areas in Arizona that authorities and the family thought the plane might have gone down, there had been no luck all this time in finding the plane. Then, something rather incredible happened. A person who had also been involved in the attempts to find Read the rest of this entry »
As we speculated this weekend, Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop, A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API. Read the rest of this entry »
TechCrunch recently published an article about the worldwide traffic stats published by ComScore. The stat is from November 2007 to November 2008. Blogger rules the chart with 222 million unique worldwide visitors with 44 percent rise as compared to November 2007. MySpace is steady with 126 million unique visitors. Windows Live has declined by 22 percent. Wordpress has a rise of 68 percent with 114 million unique visitors.
The greatest rise is of Facebook. Its unique visitors count has increased by 116 percent. It is near the 200 million figure and will cross pass it soon. Read the rest of this entry »
