yichi, from vikiworks, has released a duo of incredibly well-done social media icon packs.

the first icon pack covers flickr, wordpress, digg, technorati, twitter, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, and more.

the second icon pack includes newsvine, furl, blinklist, blogger, and others.

all icons are available in 64 by 64 png format.

Technorati Tags: social media, social bookmarking, icon pack

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jaiku, the micro-blogging platform that competes with twitter (click here for comparison) and countless others, now supports jabber-based instant messaging.

Here’s what you get in a nutshell:

• Notifications of new Jaikus from your contacts
• Web feeds items from the feeds you follow
• Commenting using @screenname
• Post your own Jaikus (even to channels!) right from your desktop

what this means is that in addition to using jaiku’s web and mobile interfaces, you can now use jabber-based instant messaging clients (i.e. google talk) to create and post new messages and comments to jaiku, and receive notifications directly from the service.

Technorati Tags: jaiku, micro-blogging, twitter, jabber, instant messaging, gtalk

israeli blogger yehuda berlinger is on a mission to go through a list of about 5,000 web 2.0 companies and bring to you a list of all open positions. so far he has gone through 586 companies out of the 5,000 and has come up with over 1900 jobs.

Of course, I’m recording a lot of other information about each company, including short summaries, web 2.0 category, top managers, contact information, a personal rating, and so on. I may be willing to give this out to anyone who is $really nice$ to me.

if you’re on the market, check out round one of the list. round two is expected in a week or two.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, jobs, yehuda berlinger

unlike other professional networking sites (like linkedin), yahoo has prepared a concept of a business networking site that will be truly social.

the business networking space has plenty of options for you to choose from but where yahoo’s network will be different is that it doesn’t necessarily help you directly get in touch with the upper management at potential employers or people in your industry that you would want to collaborate with. instead, yahoo! kickstart is focused towards a much younger market and helps connect college students with alumni at companies that interest them.

the concept already exists at many colleges and universities but is done manually, on paper and by phone, rather than through an online social network. for example, when i was going through recruiting and was thinking about applying to jp morgan, my career advising and planning services office flew in two recent graduates from our college who were working at the company, to come and talk to all potential applicants about the application and selection process, their work environment, how they manage their social lives with work, and lifestyle in the city. yahoo! kickstart takes this entire process online.

from what i’ve seen of the network so far, it seems that yahoo has created a great cross between linkedin and facebook. the site takes the individual and resume-based profiling feature from linkedin while looking more like facebook in terms of networking, group creation, company profiling and so on. just like facebook took the traditional paper-based college facebook online, yahoo! kickstart could be a stepping-stone from facebook to monster or career builder and finally linkedin.

Technorati Tags: business networking, social networking, facebook, yahoo, kickstart, linkedin, moster, career builder

when the news first broke that the iphone had been unlocked, everyone’s first reaction was that at&t is screwed. while it’s definitely true that at&t is screwed (since the iphone was clearly the best thing they had going for them), here’s a reason why this unlocking screws over apple just the same.

according to gene munster, a lead analyst with piper jaffray,

While we do not know the exact details of the agreement, we conservatively estimate that AT&T gives Apple $3 per month (over the life of the 24 month contract) for every iPhone customer already with AT&T and $11 per month for every new subscriber.

furthermore, according to a note from american technology research, another financial firm,

About one quarter of consumers adopting Apple’s heavily-hyped iPhone handset are ’switchers’ to AT&T from other carriers

so if apple is to recieve $3 per month for every current at&t customer purchasing an iphone, and $11 per month for every new at&t subscriber, if the iphone is locked, this is money apple could’ve gotten but won’t. using these statistics, and the projection of 10 million iphones expected to be sold by the end of 2008, here’s the amount of money apple stands to lose from the iphone’s unlocking (due to people abandoning or not signing up with at&t):

the calculations are done as follows:

1. percentage of unlocked users multiplied by 10 million (total users projected by end of 2008) = total unlocked users.
   
2. 25% of total unlocked users multiplied by $11 plus 75% of unlocked users multiplied by $3 = total shared revenue lost per month.
3. total shared revenue lost per month multiplied by 24 (total duration of iphone contract) = total shared revenue lost.

now let’s take a look at the amount of shared revenue apple could lose:

1. if 10% unlock: $120,000,000 lost
2. if 25% unlock: $300,000,000 lost
3. if 50% unlock: $600,000,000 lost
4. if 100% unlock: $1,200,000,000 lost

it is clearly not logical to expect many people already in a contract to jump ship (because of the fine they would have to pay), but if 100% all potentially new at&t subscribers (which means 25% of all iphone buyers) go the unlock route instead, in that case, apple stands to lose $660,000,000 in shared revenue from at&t.

it seems reasonable to expect that a substantial amount of new iphone buyers would have heard about the unlock and will opt to not activate with at&t. even if 50% of only the new users go the unlock route, apple loses $330,000,000.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, att, unlock

after facing a complete, hour-long outage last week, bbc news is reporting that google’s blogger platform and the over 34.5 million sites hosted on it are now under attack,.

the attackers are posting malicious entries on the blogs containing links that take the unwitting reader to a booby-trapped download that affects your pc and allows the attacker to hijack it and mine it for data or use it for more attacks.

Security researcher Alex Eckelberry from Sunbelt Software first noticed the booby-trapped links turning up on Blogger on 27 August.

Now many hundreds of blogs on the site have been updated with a short entry containing the link.

Technorati Tags: google, blogger, bbc news, social media

online networking is moving beyond just socializing and into the professional arena. from doctors to educators, here’s a look at some of the best professional networking sites and the professions that are utilizing them.

networks for the medical profession

though there are countless networking sites for physicians, doctors, and medical students, sermo is by far the most popular. sermo let’s physicians connect and share observations from their daily practices and ‘challenge or corroborate each others opinions’. this helps people in the medical profession apply the idea of collective intelligence towards better patient care.

related networks: doctors’ hangout, student doctor, doctor networking, social md, clinical village

music-based networks

of all the music-based social networking sites i’ve used, last.fm provides the cleanest, least intrusive and easy-to-use experience. the site tracks your music and based on what you listen to most – locates other artists, albums, and songs according to your preferences. The service let’s you connect with people who share your musical tastes and allows artists and lables to upload their own music to the site and share it with other users.

related networks: ilike, jam now, sell a band, buzz net, sound pedia

networks for educators

there are some older and more established networks for teachers, but yahoo is about to take teacher-focused social networks by storm. yahoo! teachers is ‘designed by teachers for teachers’ to help them connect, create, share, and modify lesson plans for their students. the site is currently not open to public but the private beta preview looks very promising.

related networks: yacapaca, nextgen teachers

photography-based networks

with photobucket, smugmug, zooomr, and many more, the photography-hosting/sharing/networking space is far from under-served. that said, flickr stands out from the crowd and continues to grow faster than the other top 4 combined.

related networks: fotki, fotolog, photobucket, smugmug, zooomr

networks for business verticals

linkedin is the most popular professional networking site and it is also the number one business networking site ( excluding employment search sites like monster, careerbuilder, etc.). the site is maintained in a minimalist yet comprehensive - functional fashion and offers countless opportunities for networking with contemporaries or working in ancillary fields, without compromising your privacy.

related networks: ryze, doostang

this is by no means a comprehensive list of professional networking sites or the professions that have made the leap to online networking. in fact, many professionals continue to use all-purpose networks such as facebook, myspace, and linkedin, rather than focusing on their niche.

Technorati Tags: social networking, professional networking, business networking, social media, facebook, myspace, linkedin, flickr, last.fm, sermo

we first learned about the nbc universal and news corp. partnership with aol, msn, myspace, and yahoo! to try and check the google-youtube threat back in march, but it wasn’t until today that they picked out a name for the venture. you would assume that since it took them 5 months to do so, they would come up with something totally mind-blowing but that is sadly not the case.

the name they have chosen is ‘hulu’, which can mean thunder, hair, butt, old, cease, desist, and a couple of other things that are just as unrelated to the venture itself.

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.

that said, the service does promise to have some excellent programming.

At launch, full episodes and clips from current hit shows, including Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader and Top Chef, plus hits from the studios’ vast television libraries, will be available free, on an ad-supported basis, within a rich consumer experience featuring personalized video playlists, mashups, online communities and video search.

Technorati Tags: nbc universal, news corp., aol, msn, myspace, yahoo

when i was reading today’s release from facebook, i was instantly reminded of a similar announcement that compete made and that i reported on four months ago. compete had announced that they were moving to a new metric (called attention) for calculating popularity on the web.

attention is a time-based measure, so logically the more time we spend on a site, the more attention we give it. we think of attention as a pie-chart - its finite - so the sites that are increasing in attention over time are performing well along this metric.

facebook has provided more details on an earlier announcement about their new way of measuring the popularity of applications that are ranked in their directory.

currently, the focus is on total number of users, but going forward it will be based on user engagement.

we define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day).

these touch points are:
- canvas page views
- link clicks in fbml
- mock-ajax form submission
- click-to-play flash

The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together.

it’s good to see that we are slowly moving beyond absolute numbers and towards interaction-based measurements. as for how this is going to affect facebook applications, the ‘zombies’ application, one of facebook’s most viral add-ons went from 3 million users to 90,000 users in one day.

Technorati Tags: compete, attention, metrics, facebook, engagement

as bloggers become the quintessential workers on the web, there is a need for a blogger-specific ‘getting things done’ mantra and Leo Babauta has delivered.

it tailors the system to fit the needs of bloggers — and incidentally, can be used in the same way by almost any web worker.

gtd for bloggers: the art of stress-free blogging is a short but incredibly useful read and will help you get more done in less time by collecting information in one unified inbox, processing this information more efficiently, creating a system to organize your life, and accomplish more while worrying less.

Technorati Tags: blogging, gtd