The online whiteboard of Kristofer Palmvik
Pearlman said that yes, Facebook does want people to share more information publicly than they are today. Her explanation? She said that it’s hard for people to tell the difference between users with similar names when looking for their friends. More publicly shared information would make your friends with common names easier to identify.
Maybe it’s better to host your own. That’s the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users who have published their content online only to see the tools they use become broken or less desirable.
Supporting feed readers will now be able to request updates from WordPress blog feeds as soon as they become available, instead of polling a server periodically to check for updates. (Your blog posts typically get picked up by RSS aggregators 15 to 60 minutes after you posted them - this will change that.) The feature is already being rolled out, several WordPress users report seeing the cloud element in the source code of their RSS feeds.
Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it’s often hard to see beyond that."
SCVNGR, which got a major investment from Google Ventures earlier this year, is taking check-ins to the next level by adding additional game-like challenges to virtually every one of the 20 million places in its database. For now, SCVNGR is only available in the U.S., but the company plans to expand internationally soon.
The soccer World Cup has now ended, with Spain the victor. England was unceremoniously dumped out before the quarter finals - but if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country. A post on the BBC Internet site explains how the BBC World Cup 2010 website used "dynamic semantic publishing" technology.
People use Facebook a lot already, but the addition of the new Groups feature today will lead them to use it even more - and in different ways.