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i have personally never been fond of online rss readers and prefer the desktop-based netnewswire, but with a slew of updates and the recent addition of search, google reader may finally be mature.

along for the ride in the search release are a few other reader tweaks. you can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. enread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are when you come back from vacation. finally, reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you’ve navigated to.

Technorati Tags: google reader, rss

lulu, an online distributer and publisher of digital content, is suing hulu, the nbc universal/news corp. joint online video venture. lulu is accusing them of copyright infringement, unfair and deceptive trade practices, and federal cyberpiracy.

according to the the press release, lulu believes that the name hulu was intentionally chosen to create confusion in the marketplace.

“We have spent more than five years and tens of millions of dollars in investment successfully building the Lulu brand and website into a place or millions of creators and consumers to publish, buy, sell and manage digital content,” said Lulu CEO Bob Young. “It is clear we are required to move quickly to protect our intellectual property and defend ourselves against this infringement before it significantly damages our business.”

this news comes as kind of a surprise considering that nbc universal/news corp. took five months to come up with the name (and have yet to open the service to the public), but at the same time is somewhat expected given that hulu means ‘cease’ and ‘desist’ in swahili.

the zulu were unavailable for comment.

Technorati Tags: lulu, hulu, nbc universal, news corp.

if you would like an invite to grandcentral and get your very own ‘one number…for life‘, please let me know. i was recently invited to the private beta by a generous friend and in the spirit of generosity i’m sharing all 10 invites i have. all you have to do is drop me a comment or send me an email to receive your ticket into the club.

please also take a look at some other private beta invites that i have.

update: over 50 invites sent out and i’m completely depleted, phew! thanks for stopping by everyone!

Technorati Tags: google, grandcentral, private, beta, invite

we all know that one of the main reasons why facebook became so popular is the great privacy settings the site offers. the ability to show and hide certain aspects of your profile to people or networks in a way that you just cannot on other social networking sites really is where facebook shines. but recent moves by the company are a little more than unsettling.

facebook has decided to launch a ‘public listing search’ that allows anyone to search for a specific person and retrieve their name and profile picture. you can prevent your profile from coming up in the public listing by changing your profile settings to something other than ‘everyone’, but this will not be done by default and you will have one month to make the change before facebook allows search engines to index your information.

if you’re concerned about your privacy at all, this is a change you should make immediately. once your information is indexed by the search engines, this move will essentially make facebook the wikipedia of people search. non-facebook users will be able to go to google, type in your name and retrieve your name and profile picture, courtesy of facebook.

of course this move benefits facebook, by increasing their search traffic, since more people will be directed towards facebook (as they look for information on you), but also because these users will probably feel compelled to sign up to either add you as a friend and find out more about you or even just take the site for a spin. this move is also great for data-miners trying to get as much information on you as possible. but for the unwitting users, this will open up their profiles (even if its just a name and a picture) to a much larger audience than they want or expect.

in addition to changing your search privacy settings on facebook, i encourage you to take a look at marc canter’s proposed bill of rights for users of social networking sites.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, privacy, people search

popular culture attributes the creation of facebook, the popular social networking site and current media darling, to mark zuckerberg. but is that the real story or was it founded by someone else? in this e! true hollywood story we will let’s take a look at some of the other people who have thus far claimed to be the brains behind facebook.

p.s. if you invented facebook, please blog your side of the story and let me know. i will add you to the list of possible founders of facebook.

everyone’s story deserves to be heard. don’t let the media shut you out! once i’ve heard everyone else’s story, i will pick a winner for the m! true silicon valley story behind facebook.

divya narendra, cameron winklevoss and tyler winklevoss

the trio claims that they created a social networking site called connectu and had hired mark zuckerberg to complete the coding for the site. once mark was hired, he allegedly stole the code from the site and not only sabotaged connectu but used the stolen code to develop facebook.

aaron j. greenspan

aaron greenspan, who was one of mark’s classmates at harvard, claims that he created a social networking system called housesystem before both connectu and facebook, and he has the emails to prove it (and has shared them with the nytimes). according to him, zuckerberg didn’t just borrow concepts from greenspan’s site but also stole the name from him.

peter cashmore

pete seems to have outdone everyone. claiming that his version of facebook started back in 1997 (when the other 5 claimants were just babies). his site, called faces book never reached production and was only in a concept stage (makes sense since pete was years ahead his time and the market probably wasn’t ready to embrace the concept), but included almost all the functionality that we see in facebook today.

since two people never think of the same idea at a similar time, I can only conclude that zuckerberg used a mind-reading contraption to literally steal the idea from my brain. This will be the basis of my $1 billion lawsuit to be filed later this month.

sridhar vembu

sridhar vembu, the ceo of zoho, also has an incredibly strong case, one that involves a thought-patent, or a thought-ent, not unlike that of pete (but perhaps slightly less developed). he explains that the idea of creating facebook came to mark zuckerberg through a chance meeting the two had back in 2004 in harvard square. here’s how the meeting went:

i saw a young man, who looked about half my age, walking in the opposite direction. as he approached, he stopped and asked “hey, your face seems real familiar, have we met before?”

i asked him “have you been to princeton?”

“yeah, like a year ago, when i was checking out colleges.”

I said “ok, i was a grad student in princeton in early 90’s, and I became quite famous for writing the most boring phd thesis ever. you may remember my face from one of those year books at princeton”.

that very moment, his eyes lit up, and he screamed “yes, yes, omigod, face on the book, face book, i got it, now i really got it, that’s what i am going to do, facebook. thank you, thank you, thank you, i love you!”

sridhar and his lawyer plan to start with a cease-and-desist letter and will invoke the thought-patent shortly after.

zoli erdos

so far we have seen tales of stolen code, stolen concepts and names, even stolen thought-ented ideas. zoli’s story comes with an interesting twist. frustrated by the incredibly impractical paper-based year-books, zoli decided to take the entire concept online. the problem was that when zoli had this great idea, the internet hadn’t yet been invented. so to take his idea online, zoli first created the internet, then created an online year book not unlike today’s facebook.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, connectu, divya narendra, cameron winklevoss, tyler winklevoss, housesystem, aaron greenspan, faces book, pete cashmore, sridhar vembu, zoli erdos

pownce, kevin rose’s twitter competitor, has received an update with some new features. let’s take a look at what’s new and what’s useful. also, if you would like an invite, please let me know.

on-site image previews and video playback

if someone shares a link with you that contains a photograph or a video, you no longer have to follow the link and open it in a new page to view it. you can now preview images and playback video right from the message. video is currently embeddable from youtube, google video, metacafe, revver, and vimeo, and displayed as follows:

image previews are currently only supported from zooomr but photobucket and flickr support is expected in the future.

as you can see, in both cases, the link to the original files is maintained if you want to see a larger version.

your other online profiles

pownce now let’s you display links to your profiles from other sites. all you have to do is go to your settings (from the top menu-bar), click on other profiles (from the menu on the left) and then choose the networks you want to add and add your user name for each network. while the list of available networks is quite comprehensive, notably missing from the mix (and not completely unexpected consider the site’s past history with digg and the current confusion surrounding the site’s future) is netscape.

upcoming events

at the top-most, right-hand corner of your profile page you can see the next five upcoming events that you have created or have been invited to. by displaying events in this prominent way, pownce ensures that you wont miss an event.

improved customization options

in addition to the previous three features, you also have more customization options. for example,

you can now open links in a new window by default! tou can also set your default note view to something other than ‘notes & replies’, and you can select whom you’re note. tired of seeing all replies displayed inline? no worries, you can set it to just ‘notes’. and finally, you can specify whom notes should go to by default (such as your ‘best friends’ or ‘coworkers’ set).

with all these great additions, pownce continues to grow, improve, and become a mature micro-blogging platform. that said, the one thing that is notably missing is any mention of an api for developers.

Technorati Tags: social media, pownce, invites

for those of you not familiar with him already, muhammad saleem (mu) is renowned by many as a social media expert, as he is currently the #6 on the digg top users list, and employed by netscape as a paid scout. He also serves as a regular on pronet advertising, and also finds the time to keep his personal blog vibrant.

NowSourcing had a chance to catch up and interview the social media expert:

check out the interview.

Technorati Tags: nowsourcing, muhammad saleem, nowsourcing, interview

or: what i learned from 55 nasty digg comments

i recently submitted a story from maxim online to digg about who they claimed were the 12 greatest video game heroes of all time.

the comments made on that submission taught me important lessons that i think are well worth sharing and that i hope maxim will learn soon.

1. do your research before you write.

if you are going to write about something that is ‘the greatest‘ and ‘of all time‘, especially when it comes to something as subjective as video games, you better have done your research. you should generally stay away from extremes unless you’re absolutely certain about the points you’re arguing, and from the looks of it, maxim was far from where they should’ve been.

maxim’s article was more a discussion of some of the great games that we’ve seen in recent times along with some older ones. after choosing games that they liked, they put forth the main characters from those games as the greatest video game heroes of all times. the post on its own wasn’t poorly done, rather it was just presented in the wrong way. had it been titled something in the line of ‘great games and the heroes that make them work’, it would’ve been much more palatable, especially considering that their list forgot to include all time favorites like link, samus, and solid snake.

2. don’t be greedy

if you wan’t to be loved by social media, you have to stop being greedy. the second problem with the maxim article was that it was spread out over 12 pages, causing people to respond with comments like this one:

Pardon the comment abuse, but here’s the entire list without the retarded commentary. (You can wade through 12 pages of Maxim, or you can just image some swaggary babblings to accompany the compiled list and save yourself the trouble):

1. Kratos (God Of War; PS2)
2. Master Chief (Halo series; Xbox, Xbox 360)
3. Pac-Man (Pac-Man series; all systems)
4. Jimmy Hopkins (Bully; PS2)
5. Leon Kennedy (Resident Evil 4; PS2, Wii)
6. Nathan Hale (Resistance: Fall Of Man; PS3)
7. Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem series; various systems)
8. Gordon Freeman (Half-Life series; various systems)
9. Sonic (Sonic The Hedgehog series; various systems)
10. Dirk The Daring (Dragon´s Lair; various systems)
11. Mario (Super Mario series; various Nintendo systems)
12. Pitfall Harry (Pitfall series; various systems)

we all know that this was done as a simple way of increasing page views. while it’s okay to spread content over multiple pages if you’re writing text-heavy content like nytimes and businessweek, this ‘article’ really should’ve been on one or two pages. readers on socially driven sites want to be able to quickly see the content, consume it in a flash, and be able to comment on it, and you shouldn’t expect them to thumb through 12 pages only to find out that you got the list wrong.

socially driven sites can send a well-written article thousands of visitors. the decision is up to you to either spread the content over a dozen pages and generate multiple page views from a small number of people, or lay your content up front and have it seen by thousands of visitors.

Technorati Tags: maxim, video games, digg, social media, page views

as if the list of people claiming to be the original founders of facebook wasn’t long enough already, we have one more name to add to the list. aaron j. greenspan too claims that he came up with the idea of facebook during his stay at harvard university.

he says he was actually the one who created the original college social networking system, before either side in the legal dispute. and he has the e-mail messages to show it.

in addition to the e-mail messages he has shown to the nytimes, greenspan has written a 306-page, yet-unpublished autobiography of his adventures at harvard which also covers the creation of housesystem (a social networking system for the college, pre-dating facebook), from which mark zuckerberg allegedly copied key ideas and even the name for his site.

this is not the first time greenspan has come forward. back when reports first surfaced regarding a $900 million bid for facebook coming out of yahoo, in an open letter written to mark, greenspan asked,

remember the web site you signed up for at harvard two days before we met in January, 2004, called houseSYSTEM — the one I made with the universal face book that predated your site by four months?

meanwhile, facebook continues to ask for connectu’s case against them to be thrown out of court.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, mark zuckerberg, aaron greenspan, harvard university, housesystem

after adding people search and the ability to import friends directly from your gmail address book, twitter has launched a new section on their site called explore. this section will be dedicated to tools created by the twitter team as well as fan creations, that help you interact with the site and explore what’s going on.

the first exploration tool to be launched by twitter (which has been created by stamen design, the team responsible for the digg visualization tools) is twitter blocks. as with many of samen’s designs, twitter blocks is pretty to look at, but it’s not immediately intuitive to understand.

twitter blocks is ‘an abstract way to navigate your twitter neighborhood or block,’ the neighborhood or block being the community of your friends, your followers, and the people you are following. looking at the picture below, the blue blocks represent tweets from yourself, and the line of orange blocks running through the neighborhood represents your friends and their height represents how long ago they tweeted (higher means older):

clicking on a user’s avatar takes you to that particular tweet (status message at that point):

from here you can also load that user’s neighborhood and explore what’s going on there. clicking ‘zoom out’ will take you back to your main explore page. where you can see grey lines protruding from both sides of the orange blocks. these lines represents tweets from users following, or the users followed by, the orange blocks that are your friend.

twitter blocks is an interesting way to explore your twitter neighborhood, and while some users will find themselves spending some time with the tool, others will inevitably wonder if this is the best use of the twitter team’s time and resources.

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, stamen design, visualization, explore, twitter blocks