Alexander B. Howard is the Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, where he reports on technology, open government and online civics. He’ll be reporting live from the upcoming Gov2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., on September 7-8. Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly $50. Social so...
Videó »
In an increasingly global world, it’s not unreasonable to believe that some tactics used in developed markets will be successful in China. But it’s also important to recognize that new trends or even new uses of familiar tactics make every market different, a fact I was reminded of after moving to China three months ago.
For example, advanced analytics tools for monitoring the social media space...
The initiative Twitter began back in June to make t.co the default URL shortener for all its users will be completed by the end of this year, said the company in an email it sent out to its entire user base on Wednesday night. The service hopes through this move to improve its security, which has suffered due to the sharing of links pointing to fraudulent sites or malware. But the move is also ...
I’ve been working in New Media/Web 2.0/Social Media for 7 years now. The first 3-4 were pretty rough. It was hard to sell in the vision that many of us saw. The last 2-3 years has been amazing. Companies are practically falling over themselves to implement social media. It’s a bit counter intuitive that the recession would spark so much growth in this industry. Except for the fact that social medi...
Steve Jobs has revealed iTunes 10, the newest version of iTunes complete with a new logo, new features and its very own social network for music called “Ping” that he described as Facebook meets Twitter for music. Ping allows users to follow others, just like Twitter. You can follow artists or your friends to find out what they’re listening or what they’re creating. It has custom song and album...
There are some arguments that won’t go away and that over the value of social media seems to be one of them.
Sarah Lacy over at Techcrunch has suggested that those complaining about how the social web does or doesn’t work are actually using it incorrectly. She has received a varied reaction and, while I may not see eye to eye with the full post, I would be inclined to agree that some have lost...
Travelers and city adventurers looking for a better way to harness geolocation data for their own amusement, get ready: Gowalla is releasing a brand new beta feature designed to crowdsource the best a city has to offer. Gowalla Highlights is a web-based product that currently consists of 18 place-based questions that query members about their favorite date night locales, watering holes, spots...
Social news site Digg endures another user revolt as redesign leaves 'Diggers' at a loss Digg's August redesign was always going to be a totemic moment for the "social news" site. And so it came to pass, as users stage a high-profile revolt against some of the site's changes. Protesting at the removal of the upcoming news page, the default setting of "My News", deleted favourites, the apparen...
More than just powder will be coating the mountains and chair lifts at Vail Resorts this fall. The Colorado-based company has unveiled a new social gaming app for its 2010-2011 ski and snowboard season that allows visitors to track their activities and share them with their friends and family — all via radio frequency (RF)-enabled chips embedded in their season passes and lift tickets. The app, c...
Hype Aside, Most of Us Are Not Checking In is a post from Chris Pirillo Despite all of the hype surrounding various check-in services, most of us are not bothering with any of them. Companies such as Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, Shopkick and the almighty Facebook all offer services which let you report your physical location online. This allows you to connect with friends on the fly or rec...
Google continues its pattern of social gaming-related acquisitions with the acquisition of SocialDeck. Inside Social Games has discovered a letter posted to SocialDeck's website, announcing the acquisition. The letter says :
Big news! We're super excited to announce that someone found ou social games as fun as you have - in this case, that "someone" is Google. SocialDeck has b...
Watch out MTV, the music video has just got a new gold standard. Indie band Arcade Fire has released a vid for the song “We Used to Wait” off of their new album, The Suburbs , and it’s basically one big ball of HTML5/Google Maps/musical goodness. The video was announced today on the Official Google Blog , which details exactly what elements went into its creation. Dubbed “The Wilderness Downtow...
Microsoft announced on Monday morning that it was increasing the price of an Xbox Live Gold membership by $10 , from $49.99 to $59.99 a year, including for existing members in the U.S. starting November 1st. Members in the U.K., Canada and Mexico will also see price increases. The new price, the first time the company has ever raised its rates, represents a 20% increase, which will likely have a s...
Google has had its share of social media flops , and many smart analysts think the search giant just doesn’t have “social” in its nature. As I discuss in my column at GigaOM Pro, Google needs to play in social, because search and advertising must tap into the data generated by social media activities to improve relevance and targeting. The company announced its real-time search last week, wit...
After the site was down for the past week and looked like it had some technical difficulties Sunday, online “chat with strangers” service Chatroulette is finally back up and running. The new interface is really spartan: a couple of video chat screens for both parties, a text chat box and an un-labeled grey bar that took me a while to figure out was the “Next” button. But the big question is this...