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...
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India’s population and the number of mobile phone connections in the country seem to be growing at similar rate. Ok maybe, just maybe, the mobile revolution is growing much faster. A recent report by Boston Consulting Group concluded that India will reach 237 million internet users by 2015. Considering the increasing mobile connections, and the soon to be launched 3G services, the number definit...
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...
In the last couple of hours, Facebook has been unstable for many users (including us), according to numerous tweets from those affected. In the last 15 minutes or so, Facebook seems to be completely inaccessible. While downtime happens far more rarely to Facebook than, say, Twitter , world’s largest social network has occasionally had stability issues. It’s a big deal: with 500 million active ...
Taking an if-you-can-beat-them, join-them-and-beat-them attitude, SCVNGR is today unveiling its integration plans for Facebook Places and launching new features to take of advantage of both Facebook Places’s read and write APIs. SCVNGR is just one of a handful of companies that has access to both APIs . The startup believes it is the first mobile game to integrate with Facebook Places. SCVN...
Digg , the user-powered social news website, has released its new version – Digg 4. If you are not familiar with exactly what Digg is, here’s the long and short of it. Created in 2004 Digg allows users to post links to stories they find interesting to share with other members of the site. Whenever other users view these links they have the option to vote on whether they like it or not – choosing b...
In the process of accumulating more than 10,000 employees worldwide, Google also accumulated a lot of former employees. Many of these Xooglers (yes, that’s what former Googlers call themselves) have decided to scale down and start-up. Xoogler-founded businesses are making headlines everywhere as they are acquired by Google, its competitors, find funding from other Xooglers, and blaze new tr...
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In the process of accumulating more than 10,000 employees worldwide, Google also accumulated a lot of former employees. Many of these Xooglers (yes, that’s what former Googlers call themselves) have decided to scale down and start-up. Xoogler-founded businesses are making headlines everywhere as they are acquired by Google, its competitors, find funding from other Xooglers, and blaze new tr...
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Orkut has long been the dominant social network in India. Exactly what made millions of Indians throng to the mostly forgotten social network from Google is still a baffling mystery to me. Nevertheless, Facebook – the most popular social network in US and all over the world , has now surpassed Orkut even in India.
Traffic analytics firm comScore is claiming that Facebook became the top social...
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum , where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Even the best organizations make missteps. Whether it’s a product that doesn’t work correctly or an employee that makes an odd comment, let’s face it: Stuff just happens. In most situations, though, the most important...
Three teenagers, whose names appeared on a “kill list” posted on Facebook alongside the names of 66 others, have been killed in the past 10 days in a southwestern Colombian town. The Colombian police are investigating the case, but are unsure who posted the list, or why it contains these particular names. According to CNN and local media outlets, two killings happened on August 15 — two days...
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum , where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Facebook has joined the likes of Yahoo and LinkedIn with the rollout of a new Q&A product called Facebook Questions . While the Q&A format is nothing new on the web, Facebook’s more than 500 million users...
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum , where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Facebook has joined the likes of Yahoo and LinkedIn with the rollout of a new Q&A product called Facebook Questions . While the Q&A format is nothing new on the web, Facebook’s more than 500 million users...
You can’t block CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook . Try it. You’ll get an error message that says, “General Block failed error: Block failed.” We don’t know whether it’s a bug or an intentional inside joke, but Facebook’s developers have created jokes and pranks in the past, so we wouldn’t put it past them. Of course, we’re also not sure why you’d want to block him; it’s not likely that he’s spa...
As the world of dominant brands becomes more fragmented, established companies and startups are hiring community managers to cultivate an engaged community in a digital world where customers’ experiences with the product is amplified through social media , whether good or bad . And it’s not just the experience that a users value; the relationships and connections they are able to make with c...