Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Tim O’Reilly said that in the age of Web 2.0, data is the next “Intel Inside”. With the ever increasing popularity of social networks, the volume of personalized user data is a virtual goldmine for Internet businesses. Facebook has been getting much press lately due to its tremendous growth, as well as emphasis on security and privacy. Interestingly, Dan Birdwhistell wrote an interesting guest post at TechCrunch, claiming to have a legal workaround to accessing and storing Facebook user data for 3rd party use. He says,

There’s one thing about Facebook that most people still seem to have wrong: that it’s a walled garden. Quite the contrary, the Platform allows for full data portability and has since its inception. It actually isn’t a walled garden at all.

(more…)

Do you have a MySpace account? No? Let me guess why.

MySpace has been quite popular for some time, and some people have actually used it to successfully promote their sites/businesses. I, however, could never bring myself to create an account with them. The reason? MySpace is a sight for sore eyes. The pages are crammed with widgets at every nook and cranny, they take forever to load, loud thumping music shocks you into a heart attack, navigation makes you run in circles, and the blogs look like they were stuck in the 90s. Clearly, it’s in dire need of a major makeover, and that’s exactly what they’re promising. So, better late than never?
(more…)

Google just launched a preview of their newest social networking effort called Friend Connect. In a nutshell, Google FC is a free service that allows owners to turn their sites into a community – without having to install any applications or perform programming. With a simple copy-and-paste of Google-generated code, one can have the ability to let visitors sign in and become part of the site’s user group. Once in, users can post reviews/comments and their own pictures on the site via widgets, enriching the site’s content and making it more dynamic. Other “social” functionalities are available via code snippet, all based on the OpenSocial platform.
(more…)