So, there’s two ways to look at this. One would be to gawk at the fact that ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports broadcasting, is using iPads and Xbox 360 consoles — common devices that are widely available to mere mortals — to drive content to millions of consumers. Another would be to gawk at the fact that ESPN has somehow managed to keep its finger on the pulse of innovation, despite being swallowed by Disney and being a part of one of the planet’s most monolithic corporations. Thankfully for you, we’re going to cover both angles here. Our eyes were opened after stepping foot in the company’s Bristol headquarters and really getting a feel for how the company views technology and its integration into programming, and it led us to a philosophical conclusion about how corporations should (but oftentimes aren’t) be taking advantage of what’s readily available. Ready to get schooled? Head on past the break.

The wildest part is that ESPN is actively using the iPad and iPod touch to dictate screens on live telecasts right now. As in, today (Junior). The iPad has been out for just over two months, yet somehow ESPN — a massive corporation that should technically have all sorts of red tape bogging down this type of forward thinking — has managed to not only get a setup working in its labs, but actually get the new setup working and onto shows that we’re enjoying each and every day. Let’s try reiterating this another way: a broadcasting company that is oft hailed for having some of the best graphics and on-screen technology in the universe is using the same tablet that you gave your mom for Mother’s Day to do it. No proprietary hoopla, no overpriced / underpowered PDA from yesteryear — just an average iPad that any Joe or Jane can pick up today and shoehorn into their life. Going from purchase to live-on-the-tele in two months is no small feat, and ESPN deserves a massive amount of credit for being both quick on its feet and ambivalent to the usual pressures of corporate acceptance.

As for the Xbox 360? It’s being used for similar reasons. Put simply, ESPN’s techies have no interest in wasting months and years creating proprietary IP that they could theoretically sell to others in the future. Instead, they’re interested in serving the fan, and serving the fan involves using whatever tools are readily available in order to push the envelope faster than the competition. Each of the Virtual Playbook segments that you see on ESPN relies on just a couple of things: a developer Xbox 360 (slightly modded for integration into a broadcasting company) and a copy of an EA Sports title. Oh, and that same iPad to highlight players as the virtual play unfolds to viewers around the world. Just think about that: instead of waiting eight years for Pixar to create some sort of crazy new graphics scheme to let ESPN build their own plays and discuss them on-air, these folks picked up a $200 game console and started banging away on the code to make it happen.

We were also briefed on a forthcoming motion capture system that’ll allow the network to show how high a skateboarder (and eventually, a snowboarder) is rising in a big air competition… in real time. And we’re not talking about some guesstimating solution; we’re talking about embedding tracking tags onto the bottom of decks and using an array of simple, off-the-shelf object tracking sensors to show how high a skater is going as the trick unfolds. The real kicker? These tags are the same ones used by logistics companies to manage inventory in warehouses, and ESPN’s primary test subject is an unused office chair with tags strapped to the arms. You may laugh, but what this proves is that ESPN is still thinking like a startup and using whatever is at their disposal at the moment to beat the competition to the punch. Can you imagine the progress we’d see if major software vendors, standards makers and hardware manufacturers took a similar approach? Folks, it took seven years for the 802.11n draft to be “certified.” It’ll take ESPN fewer than a dozen months to change the way the world views new heights set by X-Gamers.

Upon talking to those involved with the projects discussed here, we got the impression that the bigwigs basically let the technologists run their own show (within reason, of course). They understand that ESPN wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is without its innovating approach, and by letting the kids in the sandbox play with whatever toys they can get their hands on, the entire network is able to reap the benefits. Somehow, ESPN is able to be nimble in a world that’s too often bogged down by authorization meetings and endless approvals by executives who have no idea what’s truly going on. We can’t count the times we’ve questioned a company on what’s obviously a boneheaded decision, only to be told that focus groups and fancy algorithms assured them that the public would love it. If more companies would stop overthinking things and start having fun, we’re pretty confident that we’d see more innovation, more discovery and less waiting for the next big thing.

Read more from the original source:
ESPN bypasses corporate red tape with iPad and Xbox 360, wannabe innovators should take note

A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges – washingtonpost.com

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we’ll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a “University of Phoenix” joke.

more >>

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A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges

IE slips further as Firefox, Safari, Chrome gain

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IE slips further as Firefox, Safari, Chrome gain

Windows XP still powering 71 percent of business PCs

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Windows XP still powering 71 percent of business PCs

Mercer Consulting’s annual roundup of the global cities with the best quality of life is here, and Zurich once again comes out on top. The best place in the U.S.? Honolulu at No. 28

Best Places : See the Slide Show on BusinessWeek.com

By Carl Winfield

New York, London, and Paris are internationally renowned cities but consultants at Mercer Consulting have picked Zurich, Switzerland, as the best place to live in the company’s annual survey.

Consultants rated each city on a variety of factors including the level of traffic congestion, air quality, and personal safety reported by expatriates living in more than 600 cities worldwide. In the top 25, U.S. cities such as San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago were all edged out by Geneva, Switzerland, Vancouver, B.C., and Auckland, New Zealand. The highest-scoring U.S. city is Honolulu, which came in at No. 28.

Still, Mercer acknowledges that cities with a high quality of life are not necessarily the most exciting. “There are a lot of ’sleepy’ towns that got high ratings,” said Rebecca Powers, a principal consultant in human capital for the company. “But if you were to judge them on something like nightlife, there are some that probably wouldn’t have rated as high.”

SOURCE

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The World?s Best Places to Live 2008

Google: “We’re Not Doing a Good Job with Structured Data”

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Google: ?We?re Not Doing a Good Job with Structured Data?

Music forums were abuzz all weekend about Live Nation’s inability to handle the millions of simultaneous online requests for Phish tickets. The fabled jam band is reuniting for a summer tour after several years off, and is playing some Live Nation-owned venues, which means that tickets for those shows were available only through Live Nation. Unfortunately, Live Nation (a spin-off of Clear Channel) is relatively new at ticketing and its Web ticketing service couldn’t handle the strain. The worst: apparently some would-be purchasers were offered seats, only to have the system break down when they tried to complete their purchase.

Error–tickets not found.

(Credit: Phish Dry Goods)

Maybe they should have tried the phone.

While I’ve never bought a ticket from Live Nation, I’ve turned to phone orders with Ticketmaster twice in the last year–for Bruce Springsteen and Sigur Ros–when the Web site was slow or offered only undesirable tickets. Each time, I got a much better seat than I could have gotten online. I imagine Ticketmaster allocates a certain number of seats at each purchase level for phone, and the lines aren’t nearly as busy as the Web site, meaning the decent seats last longer.

SOURCE

Source:
Live Nation can?t keep up with Phish demand

Micheal Arrington of TechCrunch, with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the WEF-Davos, last week. Sandberg, who joined Facebook in March 2008, talks with Micheal Arrington of TechCrunch about the conference and the state of Facebook.

SOURCE

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Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the WEF-Davos

the world  has changed, in the space of a few tweets.

1. i can reach about a thousand people with one 140 character message
2. if im looking & am priced right i can find a project to work on in a matter of hours
3. if i have the following that has the following, i can get any peice of news out there in seconds, Robert Scoble follows me on Twitter, fancy that ! ( name dropping, sorry, but you get the point )
4. this is fundamentally differnt from YAHOO or MSN or GTalk
   ( to be cont ´d in a few mins )

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.. in the space of a few tweets?

Mark Zuckerberg finds ways to create revenue from Facebook’s 150m members

Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.

In an attempt to finally monetise the social networking site, once valued at $15bn (£10.4bn), it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight.

The company, which has struggled to make money from advertising, has been demonstrating the benefits of its new instant polling tool to some of the most influential business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s global markets director and sister of founder Mark Zuckerberg, 24, said multinational companies had been bowled over by the ability to receive real-time feedback from the site’s millions of users.

“I had tonnes of people saying ‘this could be so incredible for our business’. It takes a very long time to do a focus group, and businesses often don’t have the luxury of time. I think they liked the instant responses,” she said.

At the conference, Facebook asked a range of questions to its users around the world, before feeding the answers back to delegates within minutes. It selectively-targeted users in Palestine and then Israel with the same question about global peace, before debating the results at a discussion forum. It also asked 120,000 US members whether US President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package would be enough to save the US economy. Almost 60pc said it would not.

“Davos is really a key place to launch an instant tool like this,” Ms Zuckerberg said. “It’s beneficial for everyone to see us as a global community of 150m users. The vast majority are not just college students in the US talking about things in their bedrooms. We are showing how we are a serious and insightful community.”

Facebook’s presence at the economic and business summit is a radical image change for the social network, which is stereotyped as a website used by students or schoolchildren. It now promotes Facebook users as “serious and insightful” adults in an attempt to advertise its members as a useful demographic for marketers.

Marketing experts have said the vast amount of personal information Facebook holds, together with the loyalty of its users, could be worth “untold millions” to companies engaged in market research.

The power of Facebook, and its members, in driving corporate decisions was illustrated last year, when a campaign on the site led to Cadbury reversing its decision to withdraw the popular Wispa chocolate bar. Cadbury has sold 70m Wispas since it reintroduced the bar in October after the Facebook campaign attracted 40,000 signatories.

Facebook has already sold the new polling system, called engagement ads, to CareerBuilder, a global graduate recruitment company, and AT&T, the US telecoms giant, is trialling the system. A Facebook spokesman said the company’s advertising department is marketing the new service to thousands of companies worldwide and it hopes the polls will go live this spring.

All the company’s previous attempts to monetise the site have failed after members railed against the site’s invasion of their privacy. Mr Zuckerberg pulled Beacon, a service that notified users of their friends’ purchases on external sites such as Amazon, after members launched a campaign in December 2007.

Mr Zuckerberg said the coming year will be “intense” for Facebook as advertising revenue dries up.

Facebook was valued at £10.4bn in 2007 when Microsoft paid £175m for a 1.6pc stake, but analysts have dismissed the valuation as “ridiculous” as the site has failed to find ways of exploiting its vast membership for commercial gain. Madan Sheina, at technology consultancy Ovum, said: “With the economy spiralling into a downturn, that figure might seem to be exaggerated right now.”

The company has denied reports that it is so strapped for cash that it has been forced to approach Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds for emergency funding. It has also cancelled plans to allow employees to sell off their shares early because of the economic climate.

Market research company eMarketer recently cut its estimate of advertising spending on the social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, this year by £351m to £912m. It said US advertising spending on Facebook
will fall by 20pc to £147m.

Rival research company IDC said advertisers are turning their backs on social networking sites because they have a lower “click-through rate” than traditional online ads. Only 57pc of social network site users clicked on an advertisement and made a purchase last year, compared to 79pc on the internet at large.

Experts at Deloitte said Facebook is suffering from the double-whammy of collapsing advertising revenue and the soaring cost of electronic data storage. Deloitte estimates that the cost of storing photos and videos on sites like Facebook has increased by more than £70m a year.

“The book value of some social networks may be written down and some companies may fail altogether if funding dries up,” said Paul Lee, Deloitte director of research for technology and telecommunications. “Average revenue per user for some of the largest new media sites is measured in just pennies per month, not pounds.

“This compares with a typical average revenue per user of tens of dollars for a cable subscriber, a regular newspaper reader or a movie fan.”

SOURCE

Continued here:
Networking site cashes in on friends

We’ve covered a few tidbits of what the Windows 7 Beta has to offer, including the mess of machines we’ve installed it on, but we finally gathered together all our thoughts and impressions of the OS into one meaty pile of words and screencaps. Naturally, we’re working with a beta here, so things can absolutely get better (or worse), and Redmond might be hiding a feature or two in the wings — or for the inevitable SP1 — but we’d say Microsoft has really put its best foot forward here. Check out all our ramblings after the break.

Note: all testing was performed by a real live human blogger, running clean installs of Windows 7 Beta (build 7000) natively on a years old Dell Dimensions 9150 and a brand new Vaio P.

What we love

Installation

It’s fast, painless, and usually complication free — what more could we ask? More here.

Speed improvements
This seems to be the thing people most wanted out of Windows 7, and it certainly seems to deliver. We’d say the benefits are most drastic in seriously underpowered hardware, like netbooks — which is, of course, exactly where it’s most needed. Our Vaio P, for instance, booted in two thirds the time it took with Vista. Naturally, the OS is by no means delay free. We bump into slowdowns all the time, with all sorts of apps, but they seem to happen less often, and Microsoft has done the work of mitigating the traditional “hurry up and wait” aspect of booting up the computer — if you can see the desktop, you aren’t far from making something happen, instead of waiting for 100,000 start-up items to do their thing. We would like to point out that most folks installing Windows 7 might be looking at their first clean install in a while, and the OS is definitely not immune to slow downs as more stuff is installed and more things are going on — as we type this we’re trying to sync a Zune and watching the rest of the OS grind to a halt in the process. Speed gains aren’t just at the surface level, either. File transfer times have been improved, especially with SSD.

Stability
It’s a beta, so we won’t harp on this. We’ve had a few BSoDs, and a couple of failed installations that we feared would “brick” our computer, but ended up failing gracefully. Overall, a pretty tame experience for a beta, but Windows 7 definitely isn’t bug free.

New Taskbar

Ooh, this is a tricky one. We’d say it’s most likely going to boil down to a debate between power users and the casual types. It does introduce a certain amount of interface inconsistency to the OS, with non-active applications taking up the same amount of space and sitting right next to running applications, and it means you’re an extra click away from switching windows within an app in certain scenarios — extra windows are buried in a pop-up menu, though you can turn off this functionality. Also, Microsoft has made the odd move of removing any apps that you “pin” as a permanent icon to the taskbar from the frequent items section of the Start Menu — which will no doubt prove frustrating for people expecting to see their frequented apps in that familiar place.

Certain apps also have “jump lists” that can be accessed by right clicking on the icon, bringing up recent documents, frequent tasks and the like. This kills two birds with one stone, allowing for easier access to more tasks right where they’re relevant, and killing off some of the myriad of icons that tend to populate the system tray. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for developers to catch on — most of Microsoft’s own apps don’t even support this functionality yet.

Further cleaning up the system tray is an “Action Center” for listing various nagging warnings — instead of closing them out and forgetting about them, you just leave them in the Action Center and forget about them.

Peek

Gimmicky? Sure. But it’s not everyday that a little gimmick like Peek — activated by hovering over a button on the bottom right hand corner of the screen, turning all open windows into just their borders — gives new life to the frequent task of finding the desktop and hunting for windows.

Peek is also activated when you click on an item in the Taskbar with multiple windows open. A pop-up shows large thumbnails of each item, and when you hover over it all windows — below and above it — disappear into their borders. Perfect for finding that misplaced dialog box.

Windows Explorer

Microsoft has reworked some things here, reorganized some others, and made sure to put frequent and relevant tasks in an easy to find spot across the top. We won’t get into all of it, but overall we’d say things are more intuitive and “pretty.”

Windows Media Center
Microsoft hasn’t done a ton here, mainly a new, easier setup method and some interface enhancements — borrowing a bit from Zune in the now playing section. Engadget HD will be looking into this a bit more deeply, so stay tuned.

Window management

They really went overboard on this one, and we’re loving it. There are bunches of ways to find, sort and place windows now, some of which include:

• Shake: grab the title bar and shake vigorously to minimize all other windows.
• Maximize at top (pictured): drag the title bar to the top of the screen and Windows 7 will try and grab it and maximize it if you let it go in the right spot.
• Pop to the left, pop to the right: Windows + Left or Right arrow key to maximize the window to that half of the screen.

More fun shortcuts like this can be found here.

Gadgets run free

Microsoft axed that constricting sidebar, now allowing Gadgets to litter the desktop however you choose — another good excuse for Peek. Unfortunately, some gadgets seem to chafe at this — we’ll have to wait for updates to many of them before they start to look “right” sans sidebar.

Networking

Microsoft’s done a lot of work here, and it really shows. They might not be to the point of “it just works” yet, but the HomeGroups functionality actually allows mere mortals, using no magic tricks or slight of hand, to set up their own home network, and merge existing networks — and actually find and share media, printers and documents! It’s a crazy concept, we know, and won’t get into all the technicalities — through a string of bad luck or some broken functionality, it didn’t “just work” on our first few tries — but we were able to go through Microsoft’s simple hand-holding process from enough different angles and do-overs to get our PCs talking to each other at last.

Multiple display support

Having set up many a projector in our day, we know the incredibly frustrating task that can be at times. Windows 7 makes it easy — just tap Windows + P and there’s a quick selector menu for choosing to extend, duplicate or isolate the screen to your monitor or the projector.

Microsoft has also improved the general display settings, making it easier to detect and arrange multiple monitors.

Play to device

Speaking of talking to each other, one of our favorite new features is the new “play to device” functionality in Windows Media Player. After you set up device sharing — which is vaguely but not really related to HomeGroup setup — you can right click on a song or playlist and blast it out of any device you have set up to receive such blasts. That means an Xbox 360, a Media Center Extender, a family member’s PC (they obviously have to approve this functionality at the outset), or whatever other devices support this function in the future. You can also stream music and video out of networked collections in the other direction, but that’s way less fun.

Brand new Paint

Aww, it’s so pretty!

What we’re looking forward to

Device Stage

A pretty neat feature, in theory, Microsoft brings device management straight into the OS — no longer relegated to a sub-menu of some media player or control panel. Unfortunately, it didn’t work with any of the myriad of devices we had laying around — including the Zune, Samsung’s super-basic YP-S2 mass storage player, a PowerShot SD1000 or the very D90 (pictured) that Ballmer has demoed this feature with. If Microsoft won’t even drink the Kool-Aid with the Zune, or at least build in default support for mass storage devices and generic cameras, it’s hard to see this catching on, but we’re sure there will be more happening here at launch. There’s a compatibility list here.

Multitouch

We’re working on tracking down some gear to give Windows 7 multitouch capabilities the real once over it deserves. Stay tuned! In the meantime, check out this video of multitouch Virtual Earth 3D running on Windows 7 and a HP TouchSmart.

What it still needs

Good software

Sure, this is an incredibly subjective topic, but bear with us. You know that new Peek feature? Well, guess which one single app didn’t show its border when we activated Peek: Zune. Sure, it’s one of the best looking apps on our whole computer, but it’s also incredibly at odds with the majority of our computing experience, and took us a week or so to master back in the day. If Microsoft can’t latch onto some sort of consistent usability and interface paradigms, not to mention basic software development guidelines, how can we expect anyone else to? The “sameness” of software on the Mac side might be frustrating, but we’d say the frustration of re-learning how to operate nearly every single application on the Windows side greatly exceeds that. Also, we need some better Twitter apps.

WinFS
We keep making fun little baby steps in this direction — for instance, the universal search features now built into the operating system makes it much easier and faster find that one particular file, app or function we were looking for — but we still want the incredible power and promise of WinFS. It’s clearly not happening this generation, but that doesn’t mean we can’t complain about it.

A unified vision
Overall, we get a certain vibe from Windows 7 — and most Windows releases — that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. There are too many ways to do the same or similar things, like set up a network, or play music. Sure, it’s getting easier to accomplish those tasks, there’s the new HomeGroup functionality, a myriad of setup wizards, and the ever-present and intimidating “advanced” setup modes; or the choice between Zune, Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center. Or if you’re failing to accomplish something, the OS is all-too-ready to send you to a help page, but you don’t get the idea that these groups really talk to each other. They might be “linked” together, but they’re not “unified” in purpose. There have been plenty of times when we just had no idea where to begin a task, from the seeming endless options on the left side of the control panel, or when the OS forgot about helping us do the task, and just gave us a link to a help section instead — even if a wizard would’ve been the more appropriate way to go. There’s no simple solution to all of this, but the older and bigger Windows gets, the more obfuscated certain tasks become — and that’s not a fun trend.

What we hope we never see

Image courtesy of Boing Boing Gadgets

Three hundred different overpriced versions of Windows 7. We know that Microsoft sells its operating system to a lot of different people, and we’re aware that some people only need the stuff that’s in Vista Basic, while other people Media Center and motion-filled desktop backgrounds, but please, for the love of Bill Gates, don’t hit us with Windows 7 Home / Basic / Business / Ultimate / Whatever. Build a smart installer and figure out how to put the right components on the right computers, but stick the OS in one box and sell it for one price. If you have to sell some crazy enterprise thing at an extra cost, so be it, but stop confusing consumers and stop overcharging — pick a low, flat rate and stick to it.

Wrap-up

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Windows 7 Beta in-depth impressions

It seems that the world and his dog now have a Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku or Plurk account. Some of us see these services as an extension of our mobile phone or our blog, some as a way to get into internet communications. Whatever you like to call it, microblogging has propelled itself into the internet limelight. It seems that people just can’t get enough of posting 140 characters of text.

Perhaps the reason these services have become so widespread is that the creators of these networks have released public API’s, allowing third party developers to utilize the services these networks offer. Examples of these API’s at work can be found inside our very favourite internet browser; Mozilla Firefox. Eliminating the need to install software and run it on your desktop, Firefox allows you to install powerful add-ons that add to the functionality of pre-existing websites.

Today I wish to share with you four Firefox add-ons that will add microblogging functionality to your browser meaning you will never miss a beat when it comes to updating or interacting around your microblog.

1. Pingfire

Pingfire is an add-on that connects to your Ping.fm account to allow the updating of services such as Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Plurk, even your Wordpress blog simultaneously.

Sitting nicely on your toolbar, a simple click will bring up a Pingfire input box, allowing you to specify where you wish to post to, the title of your post (if you are posting to your blog for example) and of course the message – which features a visual counter, alerting you if you exceed your 140 character limit on Twitter, Plurk et al.

You can select which network you wish to post to, using @fb to post to Facebook and @tt for Twitter, it doesn’t just work as a mass status updater.

One of it’s most useful features is the ability to quote text on any given webpage. All it requires is you to highlight the text you wish to post, click the Pingfire button on your toolbar and selected text and the URL to that page is added to your message.

To setup Pingfire, download the add-on from the official Firefox Addons website, supply it with your Ping.fm Key and you’re all set.

2. Yoono

Yoono touts itself as a tool that can “socialize your browser”. Weighing in at two megabytes, Yoono is deployed in your Firefox sidebar, allowing you to interact with people on your social networks, view their updates and also update your own. After sharing your login credentials, Yoono routinely updates your feeds, allows universal status updates and opens up your instant messaging networks to communicate straight from your browser.

Yoono currently supports MSN, Yahoo!, Gtalk, AIM, Facebook, MySpace, iMeem, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube, Last.fm, Seeqpod, Picz and Friendfeed.

It also boasts browser enhancements such as bookmark synchronisation, content sharing via its drag and drop interface and more recently integrates a shopping widget. Shopping portals such as eBay, Amazon, Buy.com and Shopping.com are supported.

Simply put, Yoono is a social aggregator that, combined with it’s recommendation system, allows you to keep your finger on your friends activity without any extra software or even leaving your browser.

3. Plurk Sidebar

Plurk rose to fame when Twitter was experiencing the worst of it’s outage issues. Many users complimented its interface and ability to start more in-depth conversations through its threaded replies.

Although there is currently an unofficial one, there is not a publicly available Plurk API. This has led to many “workarounds” when it comes to building add-ons that compliment the service. That said, there is a Plurk Firefox add-on which is aptly named Plurk Sidebar.

Plurk Sidebar doesn’t feature the layout and interaction that is featured on it’s website. It does however bring a more Twitter-esqe feel to Plurk, using the Mobile version of Plurk as its foundation.

Installation of the Plurk Sidebar requires you to download the addon to your desktop and to physically drag and drop it into your Firefox Addon’s window.

Once installed, drag the Plurk icon onto your toolbar. As the sidebar uses Plurk’s mobile site, you will not need to supply this add-on with any login credentials, it should use your Plurk cookie for this.

4. FriendFeed Sidebar

The FriendFeed Sidebar is not technically a Firefox addon, more of a Firefox tweak. Many readers will be aware of MySocial 24×7, an addon that incorporated FriendFeed functionality into a Firefox sidebar. Unfortunately development was halted as Firefox released the third version of it’s browser, meaning most users were left without the ability to interact with FriendFeed without visiting the site itself.

Recently FriendFeed released their “Real Time” feature, an update that allowed users to see updates on their friend’s activity as it happened without the need to refresh. This Firefox tweak harnesses this new feature and incorporates it into a sidebar without the need for the installation of a third party addon.

The process is easy. Simply follow these simple steps:

1) Add the following link to your bookmarks: http://friendfeed.com/realtime?embed=1

2) Right click the bookmark inside and select properties.

3) Tick the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”.

Once this has been done, select the bookmark from your list and it will display the FriendFeed real-time updates in a sidebar.

Conclusion

Many of these add-ons have a direct crossover and it may mean you won’t need to install these four tools mentioned inside the same Firefox installation. Some of these tools have greater practical applications inside the workplace as they don’t require you to visit the actual website in question.

Do you have any tools that you think would warrant a place on this list? If so, the comments section is your friend.

More about: Facebook, firefox tips, friendfeed, microblogging, Twitter

SOURCE

Originally posted here:

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we continue our series on recommendation technologies, outline 10 ways that social media will change in 2009, look at 8 mobile technologies to watch in 2009-10, review the state of blog search, and more. Also we note the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb’s new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

Originally posted here:
Weekly Wrapup: Recommender Systems, Social Media Trends, State of Blog Search, And More?

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.

Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack and @Noah were assigned to build version 0.1 while the rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.

The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 31st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38:

oh this is going to be addictive

Standing Room Only We struggled with a codename and a product name. “It’s FriendStalker!” joked @Crystal, our most prolific user. The userbase was limited entirely to the company and our immediate family. No one from a major company of any kind was allowed in. For months, we were in Top Secret Alpha because of competing products like the now-defunkt Dodgeball. We operated using a “long code”, or a full 10-digit phone number linked to a small-potatoes gateway. The original product name / codename “twttr” was inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS shortcodes are five characters. We prototyped with “89887? as our shortcode. We later changed to “40404? for ease of use and memorability. Twttr probably had about 50 users in the long code days.

I was following everyone on the system. We had an admin page where you could see every user. As Head of Quality for the company, it seemed like my duty to watch for opinions or issues from our users. This caused confusion, though, when family members of our team were suddenly being followed by a seemingly random person. Thus, Private Accounts were born. @Jack and @Florian created a means for users to mark themselves private, and we admins had the ability to tell who wanted to be private so we’d know not to follow them. Actual, real privacy with secure protection came a bit later. I’d say there were about 100 users when Private was invented.

Later Twttr Design The interaction model and the visual metaphor for the service were constantly in flux. The meaning of being someone’s “Friend” versus “Following” someone changed regularly. At that point, you could either get all SMS messages or get none. There was no Twictionary back then; data in the system were referred to as “posts” or just “messages”. The lack of clear terminology led to some pretty spirited debates leading up to the Spring of 2006.

We launched Twttr Beta on @Ev’s birthday. We could now invite a slightly larger circle of friends, but still excluding any large companies (with a few trusted exceptions within places like Google). I’ll never forget the family-friendly feeling of that day. We all knew that we were going to change the world with this thing that no one else understood. That day stands out in memory as the deep breath before a baby’s first cry.

Meanwhile, Odeo and the corporate board were at a tension point. Not only was the value of Twttr difficult to describe, the relevance of Odeo was declining monthly. Drastic cuts were recommended. One day in early May 2006, @Ev let four of us go: @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, me, and @Rabble. @Noah and @TimRoberts would later be asked to leave as well. It was a tough decision and huge shock to each of us. We all handled it differently. Looking back on it, I think Twitter allowed us to stay connected when we might not have otherwise been. After all, we weren’t even public with the site yet, so each of us continued to add value just by using it with each other.

Twttr, directly. During this transition, Twttr.com launched to the public. Still, very few people understood its value. At the time most people were paying per SMS message, and so wouldn’t Twttr run up our bills? Also, how were we supposed to use this thing and who cares what I’m doing? Each one of us original users became a kind of personal evangelist for Twttr, trying to get our coworkers and friends to use it. At this point, Obvious Corp was born as an incubator with Twttr as its sole project.

Twitter Friends@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded. Back then, we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message. In February of 2007 @Jack wrote something which inspired me to get started on this project: “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.”

Just in time for SxSW, @RayReadyRay rigged a very sweet Flash-based visualizer that ended up on display on the halls of the conference. I wasn’t working there, but I used to visit regularly to see how our baby was doing. I happened to be at the office in SF when the visualizer went live on site in Austin. I remember finding a bug just before showtime, as @Biz and @Jeremy talked over the phone. Everything miraculously fell into place by the time people filtered out of the sessions to see their comments floating along the hallway screens. Boom #1: Twitter won an award in the Blog category, and @Jack thanked everyone in 140 characters.

MTV Music Awards: Boom #2.

Apple WWDC 2007, and then TV, and then print and pretty soon Cable news: Boom #3.

@Jack became the CEO of a newly spun-off Twitter, Inc. during the Boom Times. People still didn’t quite “get it” but at least some people had heard about it. The team created permalinks and RSS feeds. @Blaine pushed for IM integration. Each major feature added tremendous gains in users, and in usage per user. Still small by social networking standards, Twitter delivered something immediate and vital that no other service could attain.

For a lot of people, the entire API launch was really the time when Twitter first left the nest. But that is another story, for another time.

If you liked this post, you might enjoy following me: http://twitter.com/dom

SOURCE

Go here to see the original:
How Twitter Was Born

3M showed off a prototype device using its mobile projection engine, a shipping component that device makers can OEM. This nifty little technology will let you project the image from your PDA, for example, onto a small or large surface area.

See the rest here:
3M?s Tiny Mobile Projector