Author: Rahsheen on Black Web 2.0

Grind.com is a new social network aimed at connecting you with the types of people who will aid your success. The site begs the question, What’s YOUR grind? Network with a vibrant community of urban professionals who work hard, play hard, and are always on their hustle. Grind opens up this new community of movers and shakers to the public today.

Grind was founded by Eric Walden, a California data professional. The name was chosen because of the unique imagery that it conjures up, which goes along with the direction of the site.

“I like the image that comes to mind with the word grind,” said Walden. “Like gears grinding in an automobile to propel the vehicle forward, being on grind means to always be hustling, or otherwise engaged in money-making activities.”

For many users, Grind will be a much-needed addition to the social networking landscape. Privacy is being considered from the door, taking a subscription-based approach to sharing content. Only the people you authorize can view your Shouts.

“Grind.com keeps profiles and search options private enough that the only people who can find you are the ones actually looking for users in their neighborhood networks,” said Walden. “Even with a completely public profile, Grind users won’t be bothered with unsolicited comments or messages.”

Join the community via a standard sign up process, or sign in directly with Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, and Ning. Share your grind via simple status updates known as “Shouts.” You can also attach your location, include images, links, and call out users directly via the @ symbol.

Not forgetting about the growing mobile market, Grind was created to support mobile platforms including Java, Blackberry, and the iPhone. Mobile features include:

• Browse through statuses and attachments
• Share photos taken with your phone’s camera (not supported on some phones)
• Search through members and statuses
• Link to Twitter
• Link to Facebook
• Find places of interest around you

While many social networking services are simply focused on connecting and communicating with people, Grind.com is focused on getting you in touch with the right people. It currently packs just the right set of features that make testing it out worth the effort, allowing you to forward updates to other networks and keeping the privacy question simple.

So, what’s your Grind?

Qhub Gets Badges

Remember Qhub? It’s the service that lets you create your very own Q&A website. Q&A is hot right now for some reason. Apparently, people like asking questions. With the plethora of related services that have popped up recently, Qhub has decided to take a page from Foursquare’s playbook and add badges. It’s pretty simple: you earn badges for being a useful community member. Don’t act like you don’t suddenly have an urge to create or join a Qhub so you can earn badges.

Echo Gains High Profile Customers

Echo, realtime reactions engine formerly known as JS-Kit, bagged a few more customers today. The Washington Post, Newsweek, Slate, Time, Forbes, AMC, Morningstar and Sports Illustrated all signed up. Echo says that they are pushing 400 million realtime streams, not even including these new customers. Looks like Echo is making big moves and you can join the party for as little as $99/year, which is probably why your average blogger sticks with Disqus.

Diaspora Raises Over $115,000

In response to the shenanigans going on with Facebook recently, many have called for a completely private alternative. Yes, people are looking for a private social network to replace Facebook. They want an open and transparent closed and private social network. I could make puns on this all day, but money talks and four New York University students have raised $115,000 for their Diaspora project. The concern here is that Diaspora is not an original idea and definitely not the only game in town. As a matter of fact, OneSocialWeb and others are much farther ahead. The real question is, who is going to bother installing and running these networks? Are you looking to run your own Facebook?

Secret Telecom Anti-Net Neutrality Plan a Fake

While many are still unclear as to exactly what this net neutrality thing is all about, others are pushing relentlessly for one side or the other. The Center for American Progress dropped a bombshell on their Think Progress blog which detailed the telco’s secret plans for fighting net neutrality. The problem is that the PowerPoint document and the entire Net Brutality campaign was created by a group of students for a competition, not by the telecom companies. The one American member of the six-person team says they had no contact with and received no assistance from any telecom companies.

Voiceroute Pte Ltd, the folks behind Socialwok, have launched Socialwok Outlook Social Connector for Office 2010, 2007, and 2003 today. Socialwok is the service which allows you to easily connect and collaborate with your co-workers. Use your existing email address to to create a private social network to share ideas, emails, files, documents, and other rich media using status updates.

“Socialwok is committed to bringing the power of social networking technologies like passive sharing to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). There are many SMBs on the Microsoft Office platform already using Microsoft Outlook for everyday messaging. As such, it is a logical choice for us to integrate with Microsoft Outlook 2010 especially since this version of Outlook includes native support for social networking. We are excited about bringing business social sharing and collaboration to Outlook”, says Ming Yong, Socialwok CEO.

This is a very exciting announcement for Socialwok as it only marks the beginning of a much greater strategy. According to Ming, Microsoft will soon become the dominant player as far as cloud-based office productivity applications goes. This is very likely since Microsoft already has a stronghold in the desktop arena and is including free cloud services with it’s latest Office 2010 release. “By working closely with Microsoft, my company aims to realize our vision of being the largest business social collaboration network for cloud based office productivity in the world.”, says Ming Yong, Socialwok CEO.

“Using Microsoft’s suite of developer tools like Microsoft Visual Studio and Outlook Social Connector, software vendors like Voiceroute are helping us build a rich ecosystem of third-party applications that work seamlessly with Office 2010. Office Web Apps is a key platform for taking the work done on Office by 500 million around the world into the cloud. Engaging and encouraging vendors like Voiceroute to develop cloud-based social collaboration services that integrate with Office 2010 is an excellent demonstration of our continued commitment to bring the benefits of cloud computing to the masses across the browser, the phone or the desktop.” – Haresh Khoobchandani, Senior Director, Business Marketing Organization for Microsoft Singapore

Not only is this a big step for Socialwok, but it seems that Microsoft has definitely realized the social web is important for their success. Not only that, but they see the power of leveraging a “rich ecosystem of third-party applications.” Third-party developers have been a driving force behind the social web. This is especially true for Twitter. In addition to Apple’s App Store, there is the Google Apps Marketplace, Foursquare’s new marketplace, and many others.

In a somewhat disturbing victory for the RIAA, a federal court has found Limewire responsible for copyright infringement on their network. This could be bad business for file-sharing as we know it.

The Lime Group, parent company of Lime Wire, lost the suit against the music industry, who was granted summary judgement by U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood. They were also found to have engaged in unfair competition, and induced copyright infringement.

“The evidence demonstrates that [Lime Wire] optimized LimeWire’s features to ensure that users can download digital recordings, the majority of which are protected by copyright,” Wood said in her 59-page decision. “And that [Lime Wire] assisted users in committing infringement.”

There may be details that have not come out at this time, but Limewire is still a piece of software at it’s core. It’s unclear exactly how educated Woods may be on the technology, but this is a very broad brush to paint with. The wording here seems akin to charging a gun maker with a murder committed by one of it’s customers. You may as well also charge Google for assisting in locating torrents and CNET for allowing Limewire to be downloaded in the first place.

Limewire is an insanely popular file-sharing service, having been downloaded over 200 million times according to CNET’s Download.com. 58 percent of people who say they downloaded music from a file-sharing service did so using LImewire. They are the primary choice for the average person as the software covers all the bases without being too technical.

The most dangerous part of this decision is that the court holds founder Mark Gorton personally responsible for the copyright violations. This could scare away other companies and individuals from innovating in the file-sharing or music space at all. The RIAA says they are entitled to the maximum judgement, which would be $150,000 for each registered work downloaded. Assuming only 1000 songs were ever downloaded from Limewire, which is a ridiculously small estimate, that’s already $150 million owed.

We can only hope that this is not the end of the story. While protecting copyrighted works is of utmost importance, going after software that could be used to violate copyrights is not the solution. Limewire looks forward to a status conference with Judge Wood on June 1st regarding the judgement.

It’s been a pretty basic disagreement that we all thought would be over quickly. Apple decided not to include Flash on the iPad. That seems to be the event that sparked all this. Steve Jobs later wrote a detailed letter as to exactly why Flash was left out in the cold. Now, it seems Adobe feels the need to fire back. They have been running huge ads in support of Flash on quite a number of websites today. They begin with a big “We [heart] Apple” banner and end with an incendiary remark about your freedom being taken away:

“What we don’t love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web.”

This new ad campaign comes in concert with a new Freedom of Choice channel on Adobe’s website. I understand what Adobe is trying to say here, but I’m just having a hard time buying into it. Adobe hasn’t really been that interested in freedom until they got locked out of Apple. Flash, a very important part of the web as we know it, is also the bane of many users and developers alike.

While Jobs’s Thoughts On Flash aims to explain why Flash is a problem in it’s current state, Adobe’s new ad campaign and website barely get to the primary issues. Even the included open letter to Apple does not address the main points. It all reads like ad copy. Adobe simply seems to be trying to sell us Flash with ideals of freedom on the web with no real reasons as to why Flash is needed.

We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs. No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.

When markets are open, anyone with a great idea has a chance to drive innovation and find new customers. Adobe’s business philosophy is based on a premise that, in an open market, the best products will win in the end — and the best way to compete is to create the best technology and innovate faster than your competitors.

The emphasis here is mine, but exactly highlights the problem many have with Flash. If they want anyone to jump on the Flash bandwagon and support their cause, they need to follow their own advice. We need to see Flash running quickly and efficiently in the mobile arena. If it can’t really do so as it is on full-fledged computers, I’m not sure that’s even possible.

via All Things Digital

Facebook has finally decided to directly address the privacy concerns of the media, it’s users, and it’s ex-users. The meeting is scheduled for 4pm today, May 13th. While Facebook has attempted to downplay the outrage from users, as it has done with previous changes in the past, this latest situation is just too much too ignore. According to sources inside the company, the meeting is to discuss and possibly change the companies privacy strategy.

Over the many redesigns, feature additions, and privacy changes that have come across just recently, Facebook has been able to pretty much ignore user complaints. While everyone would complain about the changes, nobody ever did anything about it beyond creating a Facebook group or blogging about it. Now, prominent tech figures and many previous fans have actually closed their accounts due to Facebook’s latest changes.

First, they changed the language on the site to increase engagement round fan pages and groups. This ensured users would end up associating themselves with things unintentionally. The next step was launching the Graph API and implementing Instant Personalization. This made it simple for publishers to implement a Like button on their sites and associate visitors with their content. It also made your personal info freely available to a few 3rd party sites with plans to expand that number in the future.

If this were not enough of a shake up, we then saw a security hole where any of your friends could get a glimpse of your chat history and pending friend requests. Shortly after that, we find out that Yelp, one of the chosen 3rd parties given access to your personal data via Instant Personalization, had a security hole that allowed any third party to get access to all of your Facebook data without you ever visiting Yelp or doing anything out of the ordinary. You didn’t even need to be logged into Facebook.

It’s easy to see how many users are outraged and turned off by the social networking giant. Many so much so that they’ve totally given up and deleted their accounts. One of the primary issues with the changes Facebook makes is that they are all opt-out instead of opt-in. This means you are automatically tossed into the fire and are expected to a) know what has happened and b) know how to opt-out. Most Facebook users haven’t a clue about this stuff and others even doubt if this opt-out policy is even legal.

It’s debatable whether Facebook will be able to turn this thing around or even if they are looking to do so. While they have lost a few users, they are still #1 and this may just be a play to simply cool things down a bit.

via Facebook Calls All Hands Meeting On Privacy

HTC Corporation has taken legal action against Apple Inc., filing a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) to halt the sale and importation of the iPhone, iPad and iPod in the United States. This is coming on the heels of Microsoft going after most of the mobile industry by going after Android OS. Of course, HTC is protected through a deal which pays Microsoft royalties for using Android. Wrap your head around that one. The announcement from HTC reads very similar to the one issued by Microsoft just a short while ago:

As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible,” said Jason Mackenzie, vice president of North America, HTC Corporation. “We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones.”

We also have to remember the fact that Apple originally filed suit against HTC earlier this month, alleging infringement on some 20 patents. HTC may get some support in that suit from Microsoft because of their close ties, though. Nokia has also filed a similar suit against Apple, siting that Apple has violated 10 of its patents.

It seems like these companies have had some pent up frustrations over the years. Its nothing new that these mobile technologies share similar features, but it’s not clear exactly what is causing this recent burst of hostility and legal action. This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as lawsuits in the mobile arena go. The connections between hardware manufacturers, software developers, carriers, and other players are pretty confusing to say the least and it seems that something has disturbed the fragile ecosystem.

As for HTC, the young company say its committed to innovation. The currently offer 12 different handsets among carriers in the United States and plan to continue expanding and diversifying their portfolio. No one can deny that HTC is a major player in the game and makes some of the hottest devices out there. We can only hope that they don’t take any major damage from going at it with the likes of Apple.

The king of office software launches Office 2010 to businesses today, May 12th. It is a major departure from what we have seen before in it’s visual design and user interface, but may still seem familiar to those already used to previous versions. There are many new features hiding under the hood, including a free online component that will let you store your documents in the cloud and access them from anywhere.

Microsoft dominates as the Office Suite of choice for individuals and especially businesses. This continues despite services like Google Docs, Zoho, and others offering cheaper web-based solutions. The push into the web is more than likely a response to these services. It’s important that Office users have the same flexibility to change computers or work at different locations as the competitors may offer. In addition, the popularity of netbooks, iPads and other less powerful devices focused on web browsing means that a web-based solution is imperative to retain existing users and remain an option for new customers. Moving into the cloud and keeping the web based services free may put MS a step ahead given their already dominant position.

Social connector is another new feature aimed to keep Office on the cutting edge. It allows you to integrate your social web life directly into your Office experience. This lets you integrate information about your contacts from the social web so that you know their current contact information in addition to what their current status and activities might be.

It looks like Microsoft has definitely been paying attention to current trends and has no plans to be left behind. For existing users, the new version should be a welcome update. For future users, they will be able to choose a solid brand without sacrificing the ability to work in the cloud. Office 2010 launches May 12th at an event in New York and should be available for businesses immediately. Individuals will have to wait until June for the official retail launch.

If you’re impatient, you can still download the beta and get a feel for what is to come. You can also try Office Live to see what the cloud offering is like.

It seems like the hits keep on coming for Facebook and your privacy. This latest security exploit involves Facebook’s new Instant Personalization features. This is the method that Facebook has rolled out that allows 3rd party sites the ability to access your personal information from Facebook in order to provide you with a customized view of the site. Yelp, along with Docs.com and Pandora was one of the few sites first allowed access. In what illustrates the most basic fear as to why you don’t want random 3rd parties accessing your data, a Cross Site Scripting took advantage of Yelp to gain access to your Facebook info.

According to TechCrunch, this is how the exploit worked:

The script in my example would capture the browser cookies set for Yelp.com, extract a key required to make Open Graph API requests to the Facebook API, and send that key to my site. My site would then make a request for your name, email, etc. and store it in a database.

To put it in more basic terms, you visit a site with the evil code on it and it uses Yelp to get at all of your Facebook information. You don’t have to actually visit Yelp, do anything on Yelp, or even know what Yelp is. Yelp has been given full access to your Facebook account to enable Instant Personalization. Without even knowing what has happened or that it even happened, someone just got all of your goods.

Luckily, this exploit was discovered by Web security consultant George Deglin and he wasn’t really after your data. He immediately reported it and Facebook shutdown Instant Personalization. They then worked with Yelp to get the problem fixed. The key points to take away here are that, by opening up to third parties, Facebook is pretty much putting you at risk. Who will discover the next major security hole with Instant Personalization or the Facebook Graph API? Up until now, these exploits have gone public pretty quick and Facebook has had time to recover, but what happens when the bad guys find the hack first?

Silentale is a service just launching their public beta that wants to help you keep track of all your contacts and interactions with those contacts. They are apparently calling themselves he “Dropbox for communications,” collecting and storing your contacts’ information and messages in the cloud for you.

360° view of the people you know – their contact details & your conversation history across emails, social & business networks.

Your personal CRM available anytime, anywhere.

Contacts

Silentale connects with all of your social networking and communications accounts, including email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Apps, and more. It pulls in all the information available about your contacts. This isn’t just limited to your followers, friends, or address book. It looks at those locations as well as who you have actually been talking to. This is similar to how Gmail handles your contacts, storing them all, but allowing you to separate and refine. It also combines your contacts across your social networks, creating one entry with all the relevant data.

Messages

Silentale attempts to create a complete history of all of your messages. This includes things like emails, tweets, and Facebook messages. It will even include attachments. This gives you one interface to access all of your messages. View them in full, link to the particular message on the external service, open attachments, links, and open up contact details.

Search

This is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. What good would all this data be without a robust search engine behind it? Silentale makes it easy to search for specific contacts and locate conversations you’ve had with those contacts. Locate meeting information, directions, documents, and other data without having to remember where it was originally posted. You can even do more involved searches using the advanced search operators.

Silentale is being compared to other services like Gist and Socialwok, but is really not as involved as those. Gist collects your contacts’ information, but is more focused on learning information about those contacts and their activities, not simply what you have discussed with them. Socialwok is about project management and collaboration. They do share the general use of trying to keep track of what’s going on in your social media world, though. It will be interesting to see how they ineract in the future.

Silentale offers a free account that limits you to 6-months of history and 5 services, but is offering free premium accounts until May 31st.

One of the primary reasons that Hootsuite is such a good Twitter client for the individual is that, from the start, the goal was to create an interface for managing all your social networking accounts. Not only was it created to manage your brand, but was built for groups to manage a brand. Up until recently, you only had the option of adding other managers for your accounts, but there was no hierarchy. Everyone had access to the social networking accounts, but here was really no way to coordinate.

That changed with the creation of Owners and Teams. Now, it’s simple to add an account and invite team members to help manage it. It gives you the power to organize efforts without sacrificing the security of your social media accounts. It also helps your brand to be more agile and react in a timely manner. You can modify team member roles at any time and team members can even integrate their personal accounts into the same interface to keep things simple.

There was still a missing piece here. While it was easier to coordinate, there was still no real way to delegate work or track what others on the team were doing. You could easily end up duplicating efforts or having messages fall through the cracks. This could be highly detrimental for your image.

With a few new feature additions, Hootsuite has filled in the gaps and taken your social media management to the next level. Most important is the Message Assignment feature. Use this to assign specific updates and messages to specific team members, including an optional note to give them a heads-up. This allows you to divide work among your team in an efficient and simple manner. For instance, customer complaints, technical support, blog posts, and kudos could all be handled by specific individuals. As the manager, you can see what your team is doing and ensure quality. Team members can also forward messages to each other in the case that another team member could better handle the situation.

To increase efficiency, reduce redundancy, and keep everyone on the same page, Hootsuite has shared columns and drafts. This means the whole team sees the same set of columns and messages. The shared drafts allow you to store pre-written responses to make sure there is a level of consistency in your communications. You can quickly see what messages have been taken care of, what is outstanding, and which have been transferred using the Assignment Tracking feature. Finally, use the Forward Updates by Email function to share messages outside of Hootsuite. This makes it easy to show off your hard work to upper management or handle special issues.

Hootsuite helps you monitor what’s going on in your niche and respond quickly where necessary. The team management features can help organizations of any size maintain a consistent brand image and maintain favorable sentiments. All this in a simple and easy to use interface.

How are you managing your brand?

Twitter has confirmed a bug that makes it possible to force any user to follow you. The bug was first discovered by the Turkish blog and then put to the test by Webrazzi. They created a dummy account and were able to get some high profile geek follows like @ev, @finkd, @readwriteweb, @mashable and @techcrunch.

Before you go trying this out, Techcrunch reports that Twitter is working on fixing the bug. One of their “solutions” involves resetting your follower count to zero if you attempt to exploit the bug. If you just have to see it in action, create a dummy account as Webrazzi did. Now, let’s say you want some high profile people following you:

1. Load up Twitter’s web interface at Twitter.com. The bug doesn’t work through any 3rd party clients which is probably some limitation or feature of the API. On the same note, you may be able to get this to work via SMS, but that requires more setup time.
2. Simply send a tweet of the form “accept @username” and @username will be forced to follow your account.

It seems like Twitter and Facebook, both giants in their areas, are slowly exposing more chinks in their armor. This is not unusual as the most popular are the ones people are always gunning for. The issue here is that Both are still on the way up. They are trying to move the crowd and can’t afford to slip up right now. Facebook just corrected a bug that allowed anyone to view your pending friend requests and chat history. Now, users were able to manipulate their follower counts and force high-profile people to follow them on Twitter.

These types of mishaps won’t go unnoticed and, as I’ve said before, these bugs seem so simple that one has to wonder how they have possibly been overlooked. Twitter’s follower numbers are already pretty much worthless, but they are still a metric that many brands look at to measure ROI.

Google Buzz took a lot of heat regarding privacy when it first launched. It seems to me that the issues popping up as of late regarding the likes of Facebook and Twitter are much more disturbing. While Google’s actions can be argued as a difference of opinion or strategy, Facebook and Twitter just appear to be getting sloppy.

US President Barack Obama addressed a class of graduating students at Hampton University in Virginia recently. During his speech, he warned of the dangers that our technology-driven society puts us in as a nation. While many may complain about information overload, Obama points at more pressing underlying issues. According to AFP:

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

Obama seems to be concerned about the fact that technology provides us with access to a wealth of information, but a lack of education and knowledge puts us in a dangerous situation of not being able to tell fact from fiction. He mentioned Thomas Jefferson and talked about the founding father’s belief that the fate of democracy lie with the education of the masses.

“What Jefferson recognized… that in the long run, their improbable experiment — called America — wouldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who didn’t have the best interests of all the people at heart.

“It could only work if each of us stayed informed and engaged, if we held our government accountable, if we fulfilled the obligations of citizenship.”

As Hampton University is a historically black college, Obama also touched on the disparity between the educational achievements of African Americans and other groups worldwide. He pointed to recently deceased Dorothy Height, who did not give up on her dream of a college education even as a black woman in 1929, as an inspiration in seeking education.

Our technology seems to be a double-edged sword. These tools can be used to edify and enrich your mind, but are just as useful in creating apathetic and uninformed zombies. These people either do nothing in the interest of our country, or become soldiers marching for people who don’t have the country’s interests at heart. Our access to information is very powerful, but only useful when one has the education to make sense of it all.

Do you agree with Obama here? Is our always-on access to information of all kinds dangerous to our society?

Image courtesy Hampton University on Flickr

The nature of projects like Twitter’s @Anywhere and Facebook’s Graph API open up a lot of opportunities for the web. This is not only for developers, but for average web users as well. The key lies in the fact that these technologies rely on simple languages like HTML and Javascript. No advanced development skills are necessary to do some very interesting things.

In a previous post, we covered the basics of setting up @Anywhere on your website. Here, we will take things a step further and describe how to create a members only or VIP section. This will be a page or section of a page on your site that is only visible to certain people. These are Twitter users who have authorized your site to connect to their Twitter account via OAuth. This connection could later be used as part of a marketing funnel or leveraged using more advanced techniques.

This is all possible using a little bit of Javascript. In my implementation, I stuck the code into the sidebar on one of my WordPress blogs. This method is the easiest and most useful because it will attract more eyeballs. Also, putting Javascript inside a post or on a page is actually more difficult than it sounds. Here is the example code:

<span id="authContent"></span> <script type="text/javascript">
twttr.anywhere(function (T) { $j = jQuery.noConflict(); var currentUser, screenName; if (T.isConnected()) { currentUser = T.currentUser; screenName = currentUser.data('screen_name'); $j('#authContent').append("Hello, " screenName); } else { T("#authContent").followButton('BlackWeb20'); };
});
</script>

First, we create a <span> element with an id of “authContent” (you could pick any name you like) which will be a place-holder for our content. What follows is an @anywhere block that does a couple of things:

Digging Deeper

I kept this example dead simple so that it would be easy to grasp the basic concept, but this is definitely just the tip of the iceberg. All you’ve got here is a way to get people following you that might actually be interested in your brand or site, but you can take things much further. Here are a couple of examples that I’ll leave as exercises for the reader:

Google Buys BumpTop

Bumptop is a freeform desktop application that break out of the usual ways you might expect an operating system to behave. Rather than your standard windows and icons setup, you have something that behaves a lot more similar to a desktop in real life. The difference here is that you get advanced tools that make interacting with and organizing your stuff much easier. Its unclear at this point exactly why Google bought Bumptop. Maybe we will see some fancy new functionality on an upcoming Android release. As far as the Bumptop software in it’s current form, you have to download it by the end of today, May 7th, or you may not have another chance to play with it.

via TNW

Apple Has Sold Over 1 Million iPads

Just 28 days after it’s introduction on April 3rd, Apple has already sold 1 million iPads. This is as of May 3rd. I’m still not sure all the hype surrounding the iPad was worth it, but the things are selling like hotcakes and are causing ripples in the tech community as companies scramble to make sure their products are supported.

via Apple.com

Ning Will Stay Free for Educators

Millions of users were outraged when Ning recently announced that it would no longer be free. You can’t really be mad at them as they are actually making the majority of their revenue and even generating most of their traffic from the users that actually pay. Shortly after the announcement, while many searched for alternatives, a petition went up pushing for Ning to keep the service free for educators and their students. 1100 people signed it and it looks like Ning was listening. For everyone else, premium plans are as low as $2.95/month or $20/year, so all is not totally lost.

via NYT

Google Redesigns for the Spring

This isn’t something that happens very often. Google has made slight changes to their search results page, adding a sidebar that gives you quick access to features that help refine your searches. Not a major change for you average site, but Google keeps things so sparse that this is close to a complete redesign.

Today’s metamorphosis responds to the increasing richness of the web and the increasing power of search — revealing search tools on the left and updating the visual look and feel throughout.

details at the Google Blog

FCC Makes Moves on Net Neutrality

After losing a case against Comcast regarding it’s practices towards net neutrality, the FCC has not given up. They still plan to push a new agenda regarding regulations for broadband companies. The question is what that agenda will be and how it will affect consumers and ISP’s. The FCC didn’t fail with Comcast because nobody wants regulations, they just picked the wrong way to go about it. This is why they’ve come up with a new way.

details at Engadget