Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 23/2009
Step in, ladies and gentlemen – welcome to the weekly Blogistan-round-up! It's my duty to entertain you (and sometimes maybe even piss you off), but who cares – it's all in the blog, st00pid! From Google Wave to the sluttiest brides in 2008, the blogosphere is here to cover your every information need.
Google announces Wave
The buzz is on – Google has announced the release of their newest project called “Wave” later this year. The stakes are high, as Wave claims to redefine the way we communicate and collaborate on the web. E-Mail, contacts social networks – Wave will tear down the boundaries between documents and dialogue:
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Google posted a couple of screenshots, future beta testers can sign up here. This in-depth presentation from Google I/O waters my mouth; and btw: Wave will be completely Open Source.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ[/youtube]
So much for Twitter's trending topics
“But all good things, they say, never last”, sang prince. And now TechCrunch is saying the same about Twitter's trending topics:
Up until recently, Twitter?s trending topics – which are prominently displayed on their Search homepage and now also in the sidebar when you?re using the Twitter website – were an awesome way to get a feel of what was buzzing on the Web, in a way that virtually no other web service was able to do.
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But then came the pirates and Michael is really pissed!
Today, when you look at Twitter?s trending topics, you?ll notice that the large majority of trends are memes started by a single user or a group of users, with the main goal offering entertainment rather than spreading information. That?s all fine and dandy – no harm in having fun – and I realize well that Twitter?s trending topics are not necessarily required to be giving you and me an overview of stuff that really matters, but I can?t help but think it?s a pity that that list is starting to turn into the top 10 of chain letters people used to circulate through e-mail messages in the late nineties.
Oh dear gosh, I wish more people would recognize that manipulating social media platforms is so much more fun than obeying their “laws”…
The real name problem
Many native Indians have names like “Robin kills the Enemy”. Their name is in their passport, the same applies to people with exotic names like Lisa Strawberry. But if your name sounds like made up (but actually isn't), you might have trouble keeping your Facebook account. An article on Spiegel Online [in German] reports that a couple of users got deleted without any previous notice. Facebook's policy requires you to use your real name, and with the ongoing success of the platform a lot of users are running multiple fake profiles with strange names. Removing these might be a good idea for FB in terms of scalability and reliability, but the collateral damage has become so big that the group Facebook: don't discriminate against Native surnames!!! already has more than 4.000 members, among them the likes of Linnie Birdchief, Carl Fourstar jr. and Sandy White Hawk. Facebook speaks person Barry Schmidt admitted mistakes, and the said accounts have been reactived, but the waiting period is quite long as only 850 people are on the payroll of the world's largest social network.
Russian investors buy a share of Facebook
New York Times reports that Russian internet investment company Digital Sky Technologies acquired 1.96% of Facebook for the sum of $200 million:
Digital Sky won because its founders Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger have strong experience running Internet properties in Eastern Europe and Russia, and “a deep, advanced understanding” of social networking technology, Zuckerberg said.
We all know that FB is burning money at an amazing rate, but Zuckerberg still plays it cool – after all, he is running the largest social network in the world. Yet still numbers have gone down: when Microsoft purchased 1.6% in 2007 they had to pay $240 million – during the last two years, the overall value of the platform has decreased from $15 to $10 billion despite the growth in user accounts.
Happy B-Day, Mr. Shoemoney!
Jeremy Shoemaker turned 35 this week – congrats, man! I love your blog and there you're the person who taught me the most valuable lessons about online marketing and blogging – thx for your excellent posts and keep up the great work! You definitely got a fan in Vienna :mrgreen:
This week's href=”http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/29/friendshirtme-free-shirt-friday/”>T-Shirt of the week is also definitely worth a look: it was printed by Friendshirt.me. And the comments say it all… when I saw this app I instantly had to order mine!
What is a Micro-Scobble?
Robert Scobble is a tech evangelist and twitter legend. Disqus blog published and interesting interview with man responsible for the tweet-frequency-unit “Micro-Scobble”:
I grew up in silicon valley, I had no choice. My Dad was an engineer and I grew up in Cupertino about a mile from Apple Computers. I had an Apple Computer in 1977, in my junior high I was in the first computer club , and I got a tour of Apple when they were one little building. So yeah, I?ve always been around tech.
My bride is not a slut. She just looks like one.
Judith sent me this great article – thx! Take a look at the Top 5 Sluttiest Wedding Dresses Spotted In 2009! Even though is nearly breaks my heart that Miss Carey is no longer single, I have to admit that with this elaborate sense of taste she'd get a job in any brothel in the whole world:
The Mariah Carrey slutty wedding dress certainly doesn't leave anything to the imagination. Fully equipped with garter belt, stockings, and a main fashion piece better off worn under the dress or on the wedding night, this dress starts us off with its moderately tame slutty fashion.
Video of the week
This one goes out to the Open Source Community – I usually don't publish ads as the video of the week, but in this case Redhead has done a fantastic job – and with over 3 minutes, in these short-clip times this is almost an online feature movie. Congrats to Peter Novak on this fantastic job!
Pic of the week
New to my weekly round-up: starting this week, I will publish a “pic of the week” – no special topics whatsoever. Since I started digi-SLR myself my appreciation for those perfect shots has grown immensely. Choosing the proper pic wasn't easy at all, but this Manasquan Reservoir by Joisey Showaa is one fantastic shot:
And that's about it for this week – thx for visiting my blog, see you again next week!
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Nothing like listening to old-school dubstep mixes and surfing the net on a lazy Sunday afternoon – even though I have to admit that turning up the music is kind of my only option right now, since the new Samsung LCD screen I bought yesterday experiences some kind of identity crisis, confusing itself with some kind of alien sound-device by producing a constant annoying noise. But enough complaining, let's turn our heads and look back on the 
How you're doing? I hope you had a great start into the new year, and believe me: 2k9 is gonna be a wicked year for web 2.0 folks, and I mean “wicked” in the good, old-school jungle way. I do have the impression that the European commercial community is just waking up, and I'm seriously looking forward to bigger budgets being spent on web 2.0 advertising as this will boost the whole scene. My personal 1st of January had a very nice surprise in stall for me: datadirt received a Pagerank update and is now proudly sporting a 5.
Ready from some good ole fun after the dreadful distress of buying all your X-Mas presents? Word your way through Dan's list of 
This week, Swedish Start-up Company 
Main bloggerilla topic of the week: the new WordPress aka 2.7. Matt and his team change a lot in the backend – it's like Obama said: “Change, we can do it!” What O did not mention though was the fact that change makes most folks rather uncomfortable. In that respect, it's more like TLC sang-rapped: “Don't go chasin' waterfalls / listen to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to.” In other words, I've heard a lot of user complaining about a so-called uglification of the CMS. My five cents: so far I've only updated half of my blogs, and I really dig the new look and all the new features.
It's been a week full of surprises: Pownce closed pretty unexpectedly, while 
Microblogging-platform Pownce announced its shutdown on 15th of December yesterday. The company was bought by Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type and TypePad. The team will continue to work for Six Apart on new projects – seems the company saw no light at the end of the infamous twitter-tunnel: while Pownce hat a couple of unique features to offer, the community never reached the critical size that turns microblogging-fun into a profitable business.
Another week bites the dust: and much ado is going on about something that hardly anybody understands: the global financial crisis is spilling over from bankruptcy-filing banks to the car industry and plenty other businesses. Neither Obama nor the new Austrian government (if this comparison sounds strange to you: I live in Austria) will have an easy job: and while the EU is planning coordinated measures, I keep asking myself one question that nobody could answer so far: The governments deem giving cheap credits to banks appropriate. Why don't they hand out those credits – on the same terms – directly to needy companies?