This is the third post in a three-part series. The first part was Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification. The second part was Money changes everything. Nick Carr, like the rest of the “Web rots our brains” contingent, views links as primarily subtractive and destructive. Links direct us away from where we are to somewhere else on the Web. They impede our concentration, degrade our comprehension, and erode our attention spans. It’s important, first, to understand that every s..   show all text

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Thanks to a partnership with Vlingo, owners of Android 2.0 or higher-equipped phones can now check in to Foursquare and update their status on Facebook and Twitter simply by speaking into their phones. To try it out, download the free Vlingo app to your Android handset. Using your voice, you can then update your location status on Foursquare by saying “check into Logan Airport”, locate your friends with commands like “where are my friends?” and “who’s nearby?..   show all text

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Note: Data Week is a new series that collects notable stories and developments from the data world. Data visualization and art Artist and scientist Stephen von Worley announced the launch of a new blog, Data Pointed, showcasing his data visualization research. "One part magazine and two parts blog", the site tells the story of von Worley's own data visualizations, and surveys choice picks from others. The lead story covers the results of the XKCD color name survey, illustrating the en..   show all text

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I took the venerable Consumer Platform Adoption Ramps chart and added Android and the latest data on iTunes, iPod and iOS. To make it more readable (but conceptually more complicated) I put the data on a log chart. Discussion The time span covered is nine and a half years. The top of the graph marks the one billion threshold. Reaching one billion in less than 10 years is an interesting challenge for any platform and, at first glance, it seems that both iOS and Android have a shot at it. This ..   show all text

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In a surprisingly quick and even stealthy move, AOL has renewed and expanded its search agreement with Google, even though many had expected there to be more competitive bidding throughout the fall to win the deal. The five-year partnership to provide search technology and search advertising by powering AOL Search is more wide-ranging than the one it replaces, also including improved search products, global search, mobile search and also a video distribution arrangement with YouTube, which coul..   show all text

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Since Yammer launched as the “Twitter for businesses” at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, the startup has continued to improve on its already solid product, releasing mobile apps and new desktop clients, adding threaded conversations, hosted versions and more. The fact is that in just under two years, Yammer, which we use at TechCrunch for internal communications, is being used by more than one million users and 80,000 companies worldwide (which includes 80% of the Fortune 500). That’s ..   show all text

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For some in Silicon Valley, Asia remains an alluring black box. A promising world with pockets of hyper growth, obscured by a tangled web of unfamiliar languages, customs, regulations and native ecosystems. Although the walls are coming down fast, the road to Asia’s markets remains an intimidating one for many. Enter Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups (a recently launched $30M super angel fund) and Geeks On A Plane, a program that takes tech entrepreneurs and investors to emerging mark..   show all text

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Sarah Cohen, the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, figured there had to be an easier way for journalists to organize their notes on chronological events. “Time and place are two of the most important aspects in stories,” Cohen said. “Most reporters I know are still keeping a 40-page chronology in Word for long running stories.” So, with a grant from Duke, Cohen hired two research s..   show all text

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Excited about your new Facebook page but don’t know what’s next?  What does a truly advanced company look like in social business?  They can say yes to seven or more of these ten criteria. We’ve been interviewing the most sophisticated brands in the world when it comes to social business for our upcoming report on “Enterprise Social Strategists Role”.  We’ve come to learn which companies are advanced and why.  Secondly, I meet a variety of..   show all text

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Ever since it became stable enough to use on a day-to-day basis on a Mac last year, Google Chrome has been my browser of choice. Other browsers have been adding some nice features — but Chrome keeps adding them faster. And today on its second birthday, that rate of change isn’t slowing down. Google has officially rolled out Chrome 6 as the latest stable version of the browser today. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone using the dev or beta builds of the browser, but it..   show all text

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Google is celebrating the second anniversary of its Google Chrome browser with the release of new stable and beta versions, bringing and even cleaner and simpler user interface and increased speed and performance. As the Google Chrome Blog points out, Chrome 6 is years beyond where most imagined browser technology when it was first introduced just two years ago. Sponsor The Google Chrome Blog takes a retrospective look at how much browsers have changed over the past two years, remarking that ..   show all text

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Twitter officially disabled Basic authentication this week, the final step in the company's transition to mandatory OAuth authentication. Sadly, Twitter's extremely poor implementation of the OAuth standard offers a textbook example of how to do it wrong. This article will explore some of the problems with Twitter's OAuth implementation and some potential pitfalls inherent to the standard. I will also show you how I managed to compromise the secret OAuth key in Twitter's very own official clien..   show all text

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[Updated at 1:05 p.m.] Mariner Energy, owner of the production platform, said in a press release that no hydrocarbon spill has been reported after an initial flyover of the incident. "Mariner has notified and is working with regulatory authorities in response to this incident," the statement said. "The cause is not known, and an investigation will be undertaken. During the last week of August 2010, production from this facility averaged approximately 9.2 million cubic feet of nat..   show all text

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I've never been much of a fan of incubators. Some have made the model work. My favorite of the bunch is Betaworks, based here in NYC. Betaworks is more than an incubator, but they have shown that they can make the incubation model work with projects like bit.ly and chartbeat. But one aspect of incubation that I like very much is the idea that multiple projects are sharing the same workspace. The term for this kind of work setup is coworking. There are various approaches to coworking. There is t..   show all text

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Twitter has just announced the service’s official iPad app. It’s free and comes with a slew of touch interface bells and whistles built right in. The app is intended to allow for seamless navigation between tweets, photos, web pages, videos and other media and updates. It’s also usable even for those who don’t have Twitter accounts. Twitter for iPad [iTunes link] has a few new UI touches that you haven’t seen elsewhere. These features are custom-designed for the la..   show all text

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As the fugitive businessman Asil Nadir flew back to Britain from his North Cyprus bolt-hole last week, Sean O'Neill, the crime editor of The Times, scooped Fleet Street by being the only print journalist on the plane. Yet those searching Google for the latest on the breaking story that morning would have found no sign of O'Neill's exclusive – only follow-up stories by rival news organisations such as The Guardian and ITN.

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Yesterday, at the Apple music event in San Francisco, I had a short chat with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, as he strolled through the demo room for the media, just after he had announced various updates for the iPod, Apple TV and iTunes onstage. One of the those was the introduction of a new social network for music called Ping that Apple (AAPL) has integrated within iTunes 10 and which looks an awful lot like the experience you get on Facebook. Essentially, it is a vertical version–in this case..   show all text

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A new study by email software purveyor Xobni confirms what we bloggers know to be true, there’s actually no such thing as a day off in the Internet age (Want more visceral proof than an email study? Check out the timestamp of this post). Information anxiety has pretty much put the kibosh on “time off” as two out of three Americans and Brits check their email outside of regular business hours (ha) and half of Americans email while on vacation (double ha). The Xobni study, an on..   show all text

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Of all topics, this is one of the perennials. People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation. I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, so far, and I’ll tell you what you might try. Maybe others ..   show all text

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Are you addicted to Twitter? Do you have an iPad? Even if the answer to both is “no” right now, after you see Twitter for iPad, those answers are going to change — quickly. Yes, the wait is over. Launching tonight in the App Store is Twitter for iPad — the first official native iPad app from the company. We all knew it was coming (Twitter even said so a few months ago), but it has been a long wait. It was definitely worth it. Like most people, I wander into hyperbole fro..   show all text

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People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information. And with devices of all shapes and sizes connecting to the Internet, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make this easier. To date, we’ve created applications for a variety of mobile phones, giving you instant access to Tweets and grea..   show all text

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Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software: sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping, the music-only social network that Apple is opening up its 160 million existing iTunes users. No, I’m not blown away by the 160 million number. What I’m impressed by is the thinking behind Ping. Ping may function like a cross bet..   show all text

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