Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

spark a fork or split

Reputation

Trust

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.

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

We got a great response to last week's frequently asked questions about Google Wave, and decided it's worth expanding further on the differences between Wave and the current crop of web-based collaboration offerings. Wave combines features from email, instant messenger, Google Docs, wikis, and forums and throws its own spin on things. For a quick visual of its offerings versus similar tools, check out this feature-by-feature comparison table. (Click the image below for a closer look.) You'll notice that Wave doesn't have a green yes in every cell in its column; it's still missing functionality that's holding it back from being a viable alternative in a production environment—specifically, user permissions (everyone can edit everything) and the ability to export a wave or publish it so that anyone can see its contents (not just folks logged into Wave). This table is slated to go into chapter 1 of the first edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave, so give me a shout if you've got ideas for how to polish it up before we rev up the printers.

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.

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.

Join us for a sneak preview of Drupal Gardens Beta. We give a complete walk through of the new features planned for version 1.0. One of the primary goals of Drupal Gardens is to empower users to quickly and easily assemble socially smart and powerful Drupal 7 websites without programming. Site Templates to accelerate site building ThemeBuilder for faster site design WYSIWYG Editor Integration with Social Networks and other socially smart features How to create microsites for your organization's new product launches or events

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

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.