Behind Facebook's privacy debacle The site screwed up, big-time. But is this the beginning of the end, or just the cost of social networking? By Mary Elizabeth Williams iStockphoto/Salon Since making the profile information of its 400 million users more, oh, let's call it "accessible," last month, the 6-year-old social networking site has felt the wrath of its populace.

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on

A new service called Attention Auction isn’t going to fix that problem, either. But it’s a start. People bid to get you to read their email. You find someone you want to contact, see how many other messages are in their inbox and how they are priced, and then bid for your message to get in the line. If your message isn’t read you can increase the price and push it higher in the queue. As a recipient you’ll see messages sorted from the highest price to the lowest. Open the message and get paid.

Google Bookmarks currently supports Google Maps, Google Toolbar, and Google Web Search. Items you bookmark or star in any of these products will appear on your Google Bookmarks home page, where you can add labels or organize them in lists. If you currently use another program or application to create bookmarks, you can use a bookmarklet to easily create Google Bookmarks instead. Drag this bookmarklet to your browser's bookmarks bar: Google Bookmark Any time you visit a webpage that you want to save to your Google Bookmarks page, simply click the bookmarklet in the bookmarks bar.

Today we’re debuting lists in Google Bookmarks, an experimental new feature that helps you easily share those sites with friends.Bookmarks are a great way to keep track of your favorite content across the web and we want to help you share them with your friends. To use lists, visit Google Bookmarks at google.com/bookmarks or by clicking “Manage all” in your Google Toolbar. From there, select the links you want to share and click “Copy to list.” Lists are private by default, but once you’ve created one you can share it with specific friends or even publish it to the web. For example, if a friend of yours is visiting Seattle for the first time and you have some local attractions bookmarked, you might want to create a new list for “Seattle attractions” and share it with your friend.

Google will algorithmically analyze your list to identify other potentially relevant links, such as the Seattle Aquarium. Similarly, when we detect that a list is relevant to a specific region, we provide a map of those places and relevant info for each place, such as addresses, hours and reviews.

Evri Ties the Knot with Twine — Twine CEO Comments and Analysis March 11th, 2010  Share Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here. This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web.

At the time of beta launch and for almost six months after, Twine was still very much a work in progress. Fortunately our users and the press were fairly forgiving as we worked through evolving the GUI and feature set from what was initially just slightly better than an alpha site to the highly refined and graphical UI we have today. During these early days of Twine.com we were fortunate to have a devoted user-base and this became a thriving community of power-users who really helped us to refine the product and develop great content within it.

These losses meant we could no longer create compelling content or to manage the Twine community. So we put Twine.com on auto-pilot and let the traffic fall off. While painful to watch, this at least had the benefit of reducing the pressure to scale the system and support it under load, giving us time to focus all our energy on getting T2 finished and raising more funds.

Evri Acquires Radar Networks In Semantic Search Consolidation 10 Comments Share6 Buzz it by Erick Schonfeld on Mar 11, 2010 After shopping itself around to all the major search engines, Radar Networks finally found a buyer in another semantic search startup. Today, Evri is announcing that it will be acquiring Radar Networks, along with its core technical team and its main product, Twine. Rumors surfaced yesterday on ReadWriteWeb that Evri was being acquired, but that is not the case. Evri is the acquirer. I spoke with both CEOs this morning. They would not disclose the terms of the deal, but it is safe to assume that it was largely an equity-based transaction. Both Evri and Radar Networks share Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital as their largest shareholder. Radar has raised $24 million in total capital, while Evri has raised $8 million. (At least that is what has been publicly disclosed. Paul Allen has poured much more money into Evri almost single-handedly, perhaps even more than Radar raised). Radar was unable to raise more during the recession and kept pushing out the release of its next product, T2, an ambitious project to create a semantic index of the Web. Using this semantic index, T2 can do a better job understanding what each Web page it indexes is about.

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How old is the average Twitter or Facebook user? What about all the other social network sites, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on? How is age distributed across the millions and millions of social network users out there?

Google is trying to push more media sharing and status update features into Gmail as soon as this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. Gmail users would be able to see a stream of status updates from friends and photos and videos shared by them through Picasa and YouTube. Although Facebook has come to dominate the social networking space with 400 million users, Gmail contacts represent a formidable latent social network with hundreds or thousands of e-mails and chats between friends. While Facebook could support weak links in your broader social network, Gmail could strengthen your closest relationships.

I can think of so many valid reasons why you need this massive 10 rack HP datacenter: Folding@home, downloading torrents, compiling your homemade videos, backing up your precious ROMs and so on. Just stick it in the backyard and you’ll be good to go. What’s that? $600k only gets you the enclosure and not the blade servers? Oh, well. Maybe you don’t need it after all. The $600,000 price tag also doesn’t include IT support so you’ll likely need to hire a couple of 14-year old high school rejects to manage the servers. In fact they could probably hang-out in the 20ft x 8ft x 8ft enclosure has it has hookups for air and water. Interested? Expect delivery in about six weeks after you obtain a second mortgage on your home and place your order. [HP via MaximumPC]

Gartner recently published a list of five new predictions about “social software” that show mix of optimism and pessimism about whether these tools will be embraced by businesses. The most grandiose prediction is the first — that by 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary communication tool for 20 percent of business users.

Gartner also argues that the distinction between email and social networks is disappearing, with social networks adding email-like capabilities while email adds social data.

A young UK-based startup called Favilous has joined the crowded social bookmarking space. It hopes to differentiate itself from the legions of existing bookmarking services by building a community behind the bookmarks, so users can share descriptions of sites and help each other discover new online destinations (see a clip from one of their tour slides below).

On the site, users can see other users’ popular bookmarks as well as the most popular bookmarks in various categories, including “Top Sites” and picks for categories such as food, entertainment, and travel. Once you sign up, you pick a number of categories, for example, blogs or music, that are of interest to you. Favilous populates the top sites in each of those categories, and to edit this list, you need to expand the category to see “all sites” and narrow it down from there, or else enter in a URL manually.

It's not really a problem for me, with my single-digit Twitter following, but anecdotal evidence shows that once a social networking community gets too big, the back-and-forth that created it evaporates. What I'm saying is, Ashton Kutcher is very lonely. A Wired editorial defends the idea of online obscurity, that those smaller groups and their casual sense of community have something that should be admired and retained. Once a group gets too big, members fade into the background, not wanting to speak in front of such a large audience, and in the case of Twitter, the person being followed becomes larger than life. It's an interesting idea—should we be more vigilant in protecting the small groups of which we're a part? [Wired]

January 24, 2010 by Ben Parr View commentsView Comments What the Web of Tomorrow Will Look Like: 4 Big Trends to Watch

1. The Web Will Be Accessible Anywhere

The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability.

In other areas, the improvements are questionable at best. Graphical user interfaces are typically full of symbols. Most graphical elements you see on your screen are meant to stand for ideas or concepts

Details and realism can distract from these concepts.