Delicious founder on site's potential: 'The time has passed'

Delicious founder on site's potential: 'The time has passed' - CNN.com: "More than five years after the social bookmarking website was sold to Yahoo for a reported $15 million, Joshua Schachter's Delicious is suddenly in the news again.

Yahoo flipped the struggling property Wednesday to the pair who founded YouTube for an undisclosed sum. People immediately turned to Schachter for his take.

'I think the time [for Delicious] has passed, but maybe they'll do something cool with the name,' Schachter told CNN in an interview from his new office here. 'I use it somewhat, but I'm not a heavy user anymore.'

The new owners, having formed a venture in San Mateo, California, called AVOS, are 'currently heads down working hard' on their vision for Delicious, the company said in an e-mailed statement. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who shepherded the world's largest online video service to Google, have been vague about their plans for Delicious and declined an interview request.

'We're excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,' AVOS CEO Hurley said in a statement. 'We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web.'

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SHOW #104 - NerdBoyTV: Cardcloud

In this episode of NerdBoyTV, Ryan Yee interviews Renato Valdes, CEO of Cardcloud. Use the Cardcloud app to transmit your contact information to whomever needs it. No reprints. No piles of cards. Your business card "in the cloud" is always available.

6 Predictions for Social Networks in 2011

6 Predictions for Social Networks in 2011: "The past year was an eventful one for the world of social networking. Facebook went on an acquisition spree. Twitter started growing up. And MySpace? Well it’s the same old story over there.

In 2010, we predicted that Facebook would conquer the web. We just didn’t know the social network would do it so convincingly. We’re not oracles, though, and we did miss on some of our acquisition picks. Well, time for round two.

Now that Facebook (Facebook) is clearly king, what is going to happen to the rest of the world’s social networks? What will happen to Bebo (Bebo)? What’s next for MySpace (MySpace)? And will Facebook finally hold that IPO?

Here are my predictions for what will happen in the world of social networking in 2011:

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Facebook stalker continues to harass 12-year-old girl

Technolog - Facebook stalker continues to harass 12-year-old girl

"Hot on the heels of a woman who's suing Facebook after the world's largest social network bounced her account (for reasons that remain unclear), comes a story from Australia about a mother who can't get Facebook to shut down a stalker using the site to harass her 12-year-old daughter and her friends.

'A Sydney mother-of-three, her daughter and daughter's friends have been subjected to a two-week ordeal at the hands of a Facebook stalker and they have been unable to get the social networking company to intervene,' the Sydney Morning Herald reported Thursday.

This dramatic tale of a Facebook stalker hacking and harassing young girls on Facebook speaks to a couple of issues regularly faced in this brave new world of social media — the dangers awaiting children online and Facebook's oft-complained-about lack of customer service.

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Should parents "friend" their kids on Facebook?

Should parents "friend" their kids on Facebook? - Yahoo! News

"To friend or not to friend is the big question facing many parents dealing with teenagers on Facebook.

Three quarters of parents questioned in a Nielsen survey said they are friends with their children on the popular social networking website which boasts 500 million active users. But a third admitted they are worried they are not seeing everything their children are doing on the web.

Perhaps with good reason, as nearly 30 percent of teens said if given the choice they would unfriend their parents.

'The No. 1 parenting issue, as least with my discussion with parents, is living on Facebook,' said Regina Lewis, a consumer adviser with online services company AOL, which jointly developed the survey.

'It is part of the modern-day parenting reality.'

The average number of friends on Facebook is 130 but for teenagers it can be much higher, according to Lewis.

'I thought the percentage of parents who were friends with their kids was strikingly high. It is more than 70 percent,' she said, adding that children were twice as likely to want to unfriend their mother than their father.

For some children friending a parent is not always an option. In 41 percent of households there was a rule that children who use Facebook have to be friends with their parents.

'For some parents that became a non-starter,' said Lewis.

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How to Claim Your Facebook Places

How to Claim Your Facebook Places - Yahoo! News

'"If your business is a brick and mortar location that customers visit in person, odds are good that it will end up in Facebook Places whether you put it there or not. Even if you don't choose to take advantage of Facebook Places to promote business, you should still claim ownership of your place to ensure the information is accurate.

With half a billion Facebook members, odds are good that at least a few of them are your customers. That means there is a likelihood that someone will 'check-in' to Facebook Places at your place of business and your establishment will have a Facebook Places page whether you intend to use it or not.

You don't have to bother claiming your Place. But, if it's going to be there anyway, you may as well at least manage and maintain the basic details. By claiming the Facebook Place you are able to edit the address, business hours, profile picture, contact information, and other settings such as designating admins authorized to alter the Places page.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Merging E-Mail and Social Networking, Yahoo Tries to Avoid Google's Mistakes

Merging E-Mail and Social Networking, Yahoo Tries to Avoid Google's Mistakes - Newsweek

In February, Yahoo got to watch with schadenfreude as Google drove its new Buzz social network straight over a cliff with inadequate privacy controls. Now Yahoo has decided it wants to head for pretty much the same cliff, just with a slightly firmer grip on the wheel.

Yahoo is beefing up its Yahoo Updates service, a relatively unknown social network that allows users to post status updates, photos, and other content by integrating it directly into Yahoo Mail. The numbers make a compelling case: Yahoo Mail has some 280 million users, so if the Sunnyvale, Calif., company can flip a switch and create a social network around that—why, it'd be a sudden player against Facebook, a global force at nearly 500 million users, and Twitter, at 75 million.

No doubt that is the same thought that occurred to Google when it introduced Buzz as an add-on to its popular Gmail service. That launch didn't go so well. Yahoo is paying close attention to the litany of mistakes Google made, especially the flaw that allowed some users' lists of frequently e-mailed contacts to go public. The privacy outcry then was swift and loud, with journalists whose confidential sources were revealed, as well as battered spouses whose ex-husbands suddenly saw their status updates, among those affected. Yahoo says it has been slowly adding Updates functionality to its various products—Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Profiles—and studying how users respond. This "phased integration," Yahoo says, has elicited "overwhelmingly positive feedback."

President Obama Wants YOU... to Twitter for Him

READ this article on Mashable.com

Think you’re such a social media expert that you could tweet for a living? Well, President Obama is looking for an official social networks manager, and you might be just the tech whiz for the job.

According to President Obama’s website, The Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America is in the market for a new hire. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mia Cambronero, who currently holds the position, said, “[I] will be stepping down from my infamous role as ‘Barack Obama’s twitterer… We’re looking for someone who is available to start immediately.”

And what exactly are they looking for over at the White House? According to the job posting:

“The Social Networks Manager is responsible for maintaining the Democratic Party and Organizing for America accounts on all social networks (such as Facebook (), Twitter () and MySpace () accounts, etc.) The Social Networks Manager works closely with the rest of the New Media department to execute grassroots campaigns to advance the President’s agenda for change.”

Said person must also be willing to work hard — “this isn’t a 9-5 job,” the posting said — and be “passionate about engaging millions of Americans in advancing President Obama’s agenda and changing the country.” Yeah, that’s not daunting at all.

GeoCities closes today -- farewell!

By Christopher Null / Yahoo! Tech

"It's the end of an era in the world of the web: Yahoo!'s GeoCities service is finally shutting down today. The shutdown was originally announced in April of this year.

GeoCities was one of the early success stories of the nascent online world. Launched in 1995, its popularity quickly exploded. By 1999 it had become big enough to attract the interest of our very own corporate bosses, and Yahoo! paid over $3.5 billion for it that year, making it one of the web's most legendary acquisitions.

GeoCities let anyone build a simple website hosted by the service, for free. Over the years an endless number of quirky and, some might say, utterly useless websites, and in recent years a whole host of competing offerings have come on the market. Most notably, GeoCities was a key precursor to the blogging industry, which rose to prominence as similarly free services such as Blogger and WordPress, which also let anyone create a website about anything -- only with a little more structure than the notoriously free-form GeoCities.

As the BBC notes, at one point GeoCities was the third most popular destination on the Internet.

While GeoCities may be gone officially, it will always be remembered. In fact, GeoCities lives on indefinitely courtesy of the Internet Archive, which has been busily archiving GeoCities-hosted sites since its closure was announced. The 'historical record' of GeoCities can be found on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, though of course that record will never be 100 percent complete.

Ah, well.... Join me and raise a glass to GeoCities as we see it off into that great digital graveyard in the sky."

Gelato = online dating, plus a dash of Facebook & a pinch of Twitter

By Ben Patterson / Yahoo! Tech

"So, think your perfect match is probably a '30 Rock' fan? Then check out Gelato, a new online dating site that lets you find potential mates who've, say, added '30 Rock' to their Netflix queues, mentioned it on Facebook, tweeted about it, or watched a recent episode on Hulu.

Gelato (which I first learned about thanks to the New York Times) bills itself as 'real-time search meets online dating,' and that's more or less on the mark. The idea here is that rather than trying to find that special someone based on the standard, sterile profile info (such as 'Favorite movies,' 'Likes,' 'Dislikes,' and so on), you'll probably get a clearer picture of a someone by checking out their latest Facebook updates, tweets, Flickr photos, and Netflix rentals.

So here's how it works (and don't worry, no one's going to be pouring over your Facebook updates without an OK from you first): First, you create a Gelato account and connect it to either your Facebook or Twitter profiles, and then you go ahead and add some of that generic info (relationship status, looking for, ethnicity, religion, politics, and so on).

All pretty standard, but here's where it gets interesting: You can then connect a variety of other accounts to Gelato, including feeds from your Netflix, Hulu, Flickr, Amazon, Pandora, and Last.fm. Once that's done (and you can specify whether you want all that activity public, or restricted to your Gelato friends), all your updates will appear in a 'lifestream' on your Gelato profile—and it's all searchable by other Gelato members (provided you've made your feeds public).

So, for example, if you want to find single guys in Seattle who've watched, tweeted about, rented, or otherwise mentioned '30 Rock,' you can do so in a Gelato search. Or ... if you're looking for single women in Manhattan who've been tweeting about (or listening to, in the case of Pandora and Last.fm users) the Black Eyed Peas, you can search for that, too. (Of course, the only people you'll find in Gelato's search results are fellow Gelato members who've agreed to make their various feeds public.)

Pretty cool, but as usual, there are a couple caveats. First: You should be comfortable with letting a third party (like Gelato) handle your Facebook/Twitter/Netflix/Hulu feeds and profile info (again, plenty of privacy options are available, and connecting your account to Facebook and/or Twitter is performed via Facebook Connect and Twitter's official APT). Also: Because Gelato is so new, there aren't a whole lot of people to choose from yet.

Still ... real-time searching for love? Nice. Why didn't they have this when I was single?"

SHOW #82 - NerdBoyTV: Reallusion with John Martin

In this episode of NerdBoyTV, Ryan Yee interviews John Martin, VP of Marketing for Reallusion, creator of CrazyTalk and WidgetCast. John talks social media and explains how his products fit into today's Web 2.0 world.

No texting at dinner! Parenting in the digital era

By AP: Yahoo! Tech (CLICK to read more)

"Holly Kopczynski always prided herself on raising her kids the right way, teaching them etiquette basics like saying 'please' and 'thank you.'

Then it happened.

'We were at a restaurant for my mom's birthday. I looked over and there are my daughter and my oldest son texting, holding their phones under the table,' said the mom of four in Lewiston, Idaho. 'I just came unglued. I was like, `Are you kidding? You're at your grandma's birthday party. Put those phones away now!''

We all know teens love their gadgets — more for texting than talking. But the devices are posing some new challenges for parents. How can they teach their tech-savvy kids some electronic etiquette?

So far, parents are learning on the fly, imposing new rules for their young offenders such as 'no texting at dinner.'

Beth Herina of Ringwood, N.J., made that rule two years ago because her 13-year-old son was texting friends at the dinner table. She has another rule, too: No texting on family outings.

'He can text en route but not when it is family time,' she said. 'And I ask questions about who he is texting.'

Her son Dylan may not like mom's rules, but she considers them mild. Her brother-in-law goes into his children's cell phone accounts to read their texts.

When it comes to gadgets like cell phones and computers, some kids and even some adults don't seem to consider their gadget behavior rude, said P.M. Forni, co-founder of Johns Hopkins University's Civility Initiative."

VIDEO: Revealing Intimate Details on the Internet

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High-tech kids lost in face-to-face relationships

By Christopher Null : Yahoo! Tech (CLICK to read more)

"Social networks and cell phones... you and I may find these technologies sacrosanct, but for kids getting weaned on this stuff, relationships in the real world may be suffering badly.

With the average teen sending or receiving over 2,000 text messages a month and spending nine hours a week on social networking sites, experts are worried that in-person, face-to-face social interaction is beginning to take a back seat to this twitchy, impersonal, and detached form of communication. The problem: When people rely exclusively on short bursts of written communication, those doing the texting miss out on the subtleties that come with a verbal and (especially) face-to-face discussion.

As the Wall Street Journal suggests, looking at a smiley face in an email isn't the same as seeing an actual smile on an actual face, and text-addicted teens are simply failing to learn the intricacies of bodily cues like eye movement and physical motion, not to mention all the nuance that comes with verbal conversation, cues which are learned only though a lifetime of practice in the read world. The result: Many fear we are raising a generation of kids who simply can't carry on a conversation -- or even look another person in the eye."

Internet Age re-inventing music business: Bandwidth

By Glenn Chapman / AFP: Yahoo! Tech

"Music and Internet worlds merged on San Francisco's posh Nob Hill as insiders brainstormed about industry rocking Web 2.0 trends from social networking to smart phones with cameras.

Internet technologies will transform a music industry in which recording studio revenues have tumbled along with CD sales, according to those gathered for an elite Bandwidth Conference.

'The technology is really there to empower the consumer and the artist,' said Gracenote vice president of product and content management Stephen White.

'It is about creating better experiences around music, and we think the same is true for movies, TV, and other entertainment content.'

Gracenote specializes in music recognition technology and is used in Apple's iTunes online shop. Sony bought the California company last year for a reported 260 million dollars."

Chicago woman sued over tweet (via MSNBC)

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Was Facebook started as a college prank? (courtesy of Morning Joe)

New book on the founder of Facebook...could it be that this social networking site was created with the objective of getting laid? LOL

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Digital media's impact in Iran

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Is Iran crisis Twitter's coming out?

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Iran cracks down on online media

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