25 posts filed under this category.
Twitter now supports story summaries in an expanded Tweet view powered by Twitter Card markup. I wrote a PHP generator and WordPress plugin to help your content look good on Twitter. Associate your page with a Twitter account, display images in timeline, and more.
Open Graph protocol is a set of HTML+RDF markup elements used to summarize webpages on the public Internet when those pages are shared on Facebook, Google+, mixi, LinkedIn, and more. In this post I will summarize Open Graph protocol markup for easy inclusion in your site templates.
Yahoo! announced support for enhanced search results last week based on Facebook Share and RDFa markup. Website owners can add a few meta tags to their pages to boost click-throughs from a more visual Yahoo! Search result and east the process of sharing a link on Facebook at the same time. In this post I will cover the major categories of enhanced share types — audio, images, video, news, blogs, games, documents, and multimedia — and walk through how site owners can stand out on shareable platforms.
Facebook filed eight legal complaints in United States federal court against Power Ventures, operators of social aggregator Power.com. Facebook claims Power collected Facebook usernames and passwords, stored Facebook data on their servers, used the Facebook trademark without license, sent e-mails posing as Facebook, and knowingly circumvented Facebook's attempts to block access.
Over the past few months the OpenSocial spec has grown to include JSON, Atom, and XML outputs over a RESTful interface. In this blog post I will provide a brief overview of OpenSocial RESTful protocols and its data implementation for any website interested in standardized descriptors of social data.
Last week I decided to rewrite the Twitter.com front-end on Google App Engine to incorporate modern front-end programming best practices, exceptional performance, and establish a solid platform for further development. TwitterFE.com is a fully-functional read-only clone of Twitter.com designed to make your web browser sing. I created the site as an example of web development best practices anyone can integrate into their web presence.
The social web has filled our websites with too much third-party clutter as we figure out the best way to integrate content with the favorite sites and preferences of our visitors. Intelligent websites should tune-in to the content preferences of their visitors, tailoring a specific experience based on each visitor's favorite sites and services across the social web. In this post I will teach you how to mine the rich treasure trove of personalization data sitting inside your visitor's browser history for deep personalization experiences.
Data portability is only useful if outside systems can comprehend the exported data. Well-described and interoperable data sets open new possibilities for context-aware social applications, importing your friends, photos, or genetic markup from an existing system into your current tool of choice. In this post I will discuss website best practices for exporting portable, descriptive data sets in the name of data portability.
In this post I will take a deeper look at the current best practices of the social Web from the point of view of its major data hubs. We will take a detailed look at the right and wrong ways to request user data from social hubs large and small, and outline some action items for developers and business people interested in data portability and interoperability done right.
Facebook is proactively deleting Pages and other content from its site in an attempt to limit fake listings created by unauthorized entities. The new enforcement procedures started on Thursday night with many Facebook users receiving notifications of their deleted pages and an apparent violation of the Facebook Pages Terms of Service.
Social computing has changed the way we interact with the Web. Our information consumption and production benefits from the participation of the crowd in its various forms, creating niche audiences and new types of curators independent of space and time. We're connected to local experts on hiking, cooking, parenting, programming, and much more. Yet social media extends beyond the realm of content creators, bolstered by the comments, ratings, rankings, sharing, and reading masses that help us find the content we seek. Forrester Research released a report last week, Social Technographics, detailing levels of social media participation among 10,000 adults and…
This month's CSO Magazine features an interview with MySpace security czar Hemanshu Nigam. The article discusses the wealth of available information about the site's 150 million members for both good and bad purposes, and ways MySpace is working to clean up and protect its community and brand. Parent company News Corp. wants to create a safe community attractive to new users and advertisers, yet MySpace members are so active and so varied it's not always an easy task. Nigam formerly worked for heavy-handed intellectual property enforcers Microsoft and the MPAA. Interesting excerpts No senior citizens MySpace members can no longer…
I spent the last few days among webmasters at the PubCon conference, where most conversations were focused on marketing yourself online to humans and search engines. The 2000 attendees focused on ranking themselves as high as possible in search engine result pages and driving site traffic. Methods of achieving these goals cover a full spectrum of white hat to black. Social networking and crowdsourcing sites are new focuses of the search engine marketing sector, taking advantage of loose editing and account creation restrictions to boost a site's visibility. Social networking and e-commerce Should every item in your product catalog have…
The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum features Blake Ross on the cover and a few details about his new startup Parakey cofounded with Joe Hewitt. The desktop application is described as a personal organization, editing, and sharing application. It's designed to make the life easier for less technical users who would like to save, modify, and share information without too much hassle. (via Matt Mullenweg) Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt have worked together in the past on the Firefox browser, breaking away from the application suite that was Mozilla Seamonkey and blazing a new path. At first there were…
Social networking site Facebook has opened up access to its service via a set of RESTian APIs, giving developers access to a user's profile data, friend list, inbox, calendar, photos, blog posts, and more. The API could be used to create a desktop or mobile version of a user's Facebook data or easily migrate them to a new social network, photo site, or calendar. (via GigaOm) Web applications are limited to 100,000 requests a day and desktop applications are restricted to 5 requests per second….
AOL acquired Userplane today, a 12-person startup in Los Angeles powering text, voice, and video chat for MySpace, IGN, Honda, Date.com, and others. Userplane is the first startup featured at SF Tech Sessions and later acquired but I know they won't be the last. Attendees of April's tech session had a sneak peek at the MySpace instant messaging integration a week before it was formally announced at Digital Hollywood. Userplane is a small, privately funded team and will continue to deploy white-label messaging solutions to sites around the Web. The network will now federate with AIM's network, allowing custom accounts…
Yahoo! and Microsoft's instant messaging networks are now able to exchange messages between users. A Windows Live Messenger user can IM with their Yahoo! buddies within the Windows Live application and without having a Yahoo! account. Same thing in reverse for Yahoo! users. These initial features are just the beginning of planned interoperability between Yahoo! and Microsoft's networks. The interoperability should be especially popular in east Asia, where Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger are extremely popular. Desktop clients based on open-source libraries such as Gaim currently provide a single client for text-messaging access to multiple networks today, and the…
Seth Sternberg of Meebo joined me and Om on this week's edition of Om and Niall PodSessions covering the latest trends and developments in instant messaging. Microsoft and Yahoo! launched new versions of their messaging software this week, including many features I will never use. What do end users want from their instant messaging software? Seth doesn't think the big portals have added a new feature that users have been clammoring for in years. Chinese company Tencent has captured about two-thirds of the Chinese market with its QQ client. Estonian company Skype has enjoyed tremendous success with its P2P and…
Yahoo! Messenger now supports plugins, allowing developers to reach a potential audience of 60 million users inside their IM client with HTML and JavaScript. The new plugins can be integrated directly into a chat window or inside a user's contact list view. Messenger plugins provide easy access to a user's favorite content but they can also interact with a contact and his or her actions. If your baseball-loving friend logs in the scoreboard plugin could be activated so you have something current to talk about. You can even pre-format a message with the latest statistic from the game. The…
Windows Live just released its first official product, taking the beta tag off Messenger and opening it up to the other 90% of its users. Windows Live Messenger adds a new UI for 240 million users of the application formerly known as MSN Messenger. The new IM client allows you to place a call from your PC to any phone, connecting PSTN networks to the soft client through a relationship with Verizon. All Messenger contacts are synchronized using the Windows Live Contacts across Mail, Spaces, and soon other services such as Mobile. Offline messaging is in there too. My favorite…
Mugshot is an open-source social networking application and developer platform created by Red Hat. The project features desktop applications for Windows and Linux (OS X is partially supported) and server software if you would like to build your own system nodes. Mugshot features link sharing and collaboration (a link swarm), and music and TV tracking, sharing, and recommendations among other things. My afternoon's a bit too busy to dig into the platform, but if you're interested in open social networking features built on top of XMPP, Firefox, and GNOME check out the Mugshot developer wiki for more information….
Popular social networking site Facebook is moving beyond schools and into the workplace. A new version of the site went live this morning allowing new registrations on corporate e-mail addresses. I was able to signup using my Microsoft address and completed my profile. Basic profile information still seems geared towards college students and dating. Members can self-select what they would like to find on the network including friendship, dating, a relationship, random play, or "whatever I can get." My Microsoft social network on the site is currently filled with recent graduates who most likely had a profile before entering the…
The New York Times reports Accel Partners invested $13 million in Thefacebook.com, a social networking site focused on the college market. Jim Breyer, currently on the board of Wal-Mart and Real Networks, will join the company's board.Tags: thefacebook…
I was just informed by a source within Friendster that employees were called into a conference room this morning and pink slips handed out. I will post more information as the details emerge about the size and the scope of the layoffs since early reports vary the number from five people to one third of the company. [Update 19:30] Seven or eight people were laid off due "headcount adjustments" I am told. Friendster has about 20 total employees and is based in Mountain View.
Flickr users will soon be able to print their photographs from within Flickr. Flickr announced it will partner with EZ Prints for high-quality digital photofinishing fulfillment.