Group items tagged

The upcoming six months are going to transform the social web. Yesterday, MySpace was the first social network to release a public API which extends users’ friend connections (or as Facebook would call it, “social graph”) to the rest of the web. It is highly anticipated that Facebook will be launching a competing version next month at their second annual F8 event.

Dynamic profiles redefine what users should expect in terms of how they can represent themselves in a social or business network

OpenSocial consists of APIs for profile information, friend information (social graph) and activities, such as a news feed.

This openness is part of what Vic Gundotra, Google’s head of developer programs, meant when he said last week, “In the next year we will make a series of announcements and spend hundreds of millions on innovations and giving them away as open source.”

That ranges from Habbos creating their own  pretend shops to IMVU's emphasis on user-created content--Rosenzweig says that almost 100% of its 1.6 million items are user-created, seeing its top ten developers raking in $100,000 over the last year--to Three Rings' Whirled, which encourages users to build their own games from the ground up. The big question, of course, is how to monetize that content. In IMVU, said  Rosenzweig, creators "do what they do because it's cool, but they like making credits" by selling the items in world. That can then be cashed out through IMVU, which leads to 90% of its revenue, taking a cut while transfering IMVU credits to real world dollars. That user attitude is true of Dogster and Catster as well--users don't get a cut of the money generated by creating games around their items and boosting activity. They just enjoy creating and sharing. For Whirled, Three Rings is still experimenting with its business model for sharing and creating content.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been and remains one of the world’s harshest censors of the Internet

There are paradoxes in this issue like other aspects of politics in Iran; the government censoring of the Internet does not follow a systematic pattern and the more famous the blogger the harder it is for the authorities to harass her/him. The recent death of Mirsayafi in the Evin prison - a less known blogger with an obscure blog who insulted the supreme leader - demonstrates these paradoxes well.

Social networking sites are becoming increasingly popular. Mir Hossein Mousavi, a reformist presidential candidate, is on the twitter.

Der Beitrag legt zunächst Kontinuitäten der Internetentwicklung dar, um die Annahme eines revolutionären Sprungs zu widerlegen, wie sie der Begriff des ›Web 2.0‹ impliziert. Für die kommunikationssoziologische Analyse wird anschließend ein praxistheoretischer Bezugsrahmen skizziert, der unabhängig von konkreten Anwendungen des Social Web einsetzbar ist. Schließlich werden aktuelle Veränderungen diskutiert, die einerseits das Zusammenwachsen von Rezeption, Produktion und Distribution von Wissens- und Kulturgütern, andererseits die Erweiterung von Öffentlichkeiten berühren, sowie derzeit offene gesellschaftliche Fragen daraus abgeleitet.

Researchers discovered Facebook gave people more choice on how they conduct relationships and was "a way of storing biography and enhancing social memory".

As a result it could change the way people associated at a fundamental level, meaning former relationships and associations can be revived, according to the study.

#1 - "Self-Directed Learning" Increases

eLearning 2.0 Grows

growth in discussions and social networks for collaborative learning

Bebo Becomes the Most Visited Social Networking Site in the UK

The image of the antisocial, sunlight-deprived game geek is enshrined in the popular consciousness as deeply as any stereotype of recent decades.

That’s changing. Online PC games in which thousands of players gab and explore together are attracting tens of millions of subscribers.

The list, released recently by the market research company NPD Group, highlights the soaring popularity of mass-market franchises like Guitar Hero and the Wii at the expense of critically acclaimed projects aimed at the same young-male audience the industry has relied on for years. (As recently as 2006, sales charts were covered with single-player diversions and sports games.)

The prevalence of unwanted friend requests, spam and sexually suggestive material has driven some users away, even giving rise to the term “MySpace refugee.”

Users will soon be able to tailor their profile for subsets of friends

New features for mobile devices are being added, as well as new social applications.