Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Was Facebook’s greatest move to skip usernames? Posted in Main on January 18th, 2010 by Pingdom On most social networks, you have to create a username when you sign up. Not only that, that username has to be unique, no duplicates allowed. Facebook on the other hand just takes your real name, no username, and it doesn’t matter if there’s someone already on the site with the same name as yours. There are probably hundreds of factors that add up to explain Facebook’s success, but the question is if using real names instead of usernames isn’t one of the key features that have helped Facebook grow as large as it has. We think there are three main reasons why using real names and not requiring usernames has helped Facebook grow bigger than any other social network on the planet.

Ning, the company that lets you build your own social network, crossed the two-million network mark this month. Co-founded by Marc Andreessen, Ning helps people create niche social networks around special interests from social justice to late-night comedy shows. The Palo Alto-based company now has 41 million members across its networks, adding 1 million new communities since April of last year.

spark a fork or split

Reputation

Trust

hthth    "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -H. P. Lovecraft 4 minutes ago from web

Elgg: a powerful social engine. Elgg empowers individuals, groups and institutions to create their own fully-featured social environment.

lgg plugins If you would like to add extra functionality to your Elgg network, check out the plugins repository.

Elgg demo site

novaspivack @melissapierce danka! less than 10 seconds ago from TweetDeck in reply to melissapierce As for T2 -- we've made more progress... new stuff in lab to automate even more of the process for webmasters... not in my screenshots yet less than a minute ago from TweetDeck After 9 years of working on semantic web, it's good to see it finally being understood by business people. Not just us geeks. 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck Today I have been inundated with new interest in T2. Seems that vertical semantic search is hot all of a sudden. Finally. 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck The Twine T2 project is by far the most advanced vertical semantic search ecosystem platform. Check out: http://bit.ly/75amWI 5 minutes ago from TweetDeck The new battlefield of search is going to be around vertical semantic search. This is the year. It's coming. 6 minutes ago from TweetDeck

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.

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.