What do you do when you first fire up your browser? Most probably, you log into various sites that require a username and password – Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the like. For me, personally, it’s quite a chore, as I need to log into over 10 different services before I start doing anything. Now, Mozilla sets out to alleviate this issue with a new Firefox plugin called Account Manager. It currently doesn’t do much; it recognized that you’ve signed in into a website and displays an icon that..   show all text

Amybeth Hale is a Talent Attraction Manager with AT&T’s Interactive Staffing team. She uses social technology to help drive awareness of job opportunities as well as interact with candidates. Connect with her on Twitter at @researchgoddess. As conference season is upon us (including SXSW, of course), I began thinking about all the things one might need to survive and stay connected with a busy schedule of travel and networking. Personally, I’m headed to San Diego to attend both SourceCon a..   show all text

With iPad preorders officially starting tomorrow, attention has shifted to iPhone 4.0 software and what features it might bring to both the iPad and future iPhone models. Apple Insider is now adding fuel to the long-standing rumors that the next big update to Apple’s iPhone OS will feature support for multitasking — that is, the ability for third-party apps to run in the background. As anyone with a jailbroken iPhone knows, the multitasking limitation for third-party applications in the i..   show all text

Live TV can be tough, especially if you’re in a cranky mood. Case in point: WVLT TV Volunteer News reporter Gordon Boyd, whose on-air freak-out has gone viral this week. Reporting from a courthouse in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, Boyd seems to be having a bit a trouble wrapping up a story about a harrowing sentencing. As he goes to deliver the final sentiment, he botches the line, saying gravely: “Staying and doing nothing is as heinous as doing at all.” The slip of the tongue prompts th..   show all text

A new study from security firm Barracuda Labs provides some interesting insights into the state of the Twitterverse. Unfortunately for the microblogging startup, the stats say that most of its users aren’t very active. The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts (PDF) in order to figure out how people are using Twitter. It started with one assumption: an active or “True” Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times. By tha..   show all text

This year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) festival is rapidly approaching. Beginning with the Interactive Media events on March 12th, Austin, Texas will be the place to connect with the brightest in tech and media and get the scoop on some exciting new ventures. Whether you plan to physically attend or not, social media will be critical to how people connect and share ideas at this world-class event. If you want to keep in touch with all the goings-on, look no further than these tools that you..   show all text

When it comes to competition, CNN president Jon Klein fears Facebook. The man at the top of the news network believes that the social network is more of a threat to his business than other broadcast media organizations. In a recent question-and-answer session with BusinessWeek, Klein specifically states, “We want to be the most trusted source,” and, “I’m more worried about the 500 million or so people on Facebook versus the 2 million on Fox.” The intriguing statements come just weeks after..   show all text

Bikers rejoice, Google has just added intelligent biking directions for more than 12,000 U.S. bike trails as a new option inside Google Maps. The company writes that the new biking features will “include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes.” The new option now sits..   show all text

Google lanzó finalmente Google Apps Marketplace, una tienda de aplicaciones basada en la web que sirve como plataforma para que desarrolladores de software puedan vender aplicaciones que se integrarán con las herramientas empresariales que ya ofrece Google Apps. Algo ya habíamos oído de este proyecto, pero ahora la compañía reveló todos los detalles. En un post en su blog oficial, Google explicó que Estamos haciendo que sea más fácil para los usuarios y proveedores de software hacer negocios ..   show all text

Minipost: Twitter lanza un acortador de URLs, en principio no para competir con bit.ly, tinyurl.com y similares, sino para mejorar la seguridad. Empezarán a implementarlo en los mensajes directos, y cualquier URL que sea acortada, verá incrementada su seguridad, puesto que se verificará el destino para evitar que en estos sitios haya problemas como simular ser la web de Twitter, Cross site scripting… Twt.tl es el dominio elegido para estos enlaces. Más información: Uberbin via: blog de Twitter..   show all text

Back in October we wrote about Appboy, a social network for mobile app developers and users. Since launching, Appboy has continued to evolve into a community for both developers and users to find and rate apps, as well as submit ideas for new mobile applications. Appboy has just rolled out a big update to its site which improves the design, adds stronger integration with Facebook and Twitter, and makes it easy to keep up with what your favorite app developers are doing. The site has also l..   show all text

Spam and phishing have been ongoing problems at Twitter for some time, and tonight the company announced that it is stepping up its efforts to stop them with some new features, described as being able to “detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links.” In a blog post, Twitter writes that the protection works by “routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service … even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able ..   show all text

Hay puros gerentes en los ministerios, pero como no pudieron conseguir un buen diseñador gráfico? Via El Mostrador nos enteramos que el nuevo logo del nuevo gobierno es tan feo que da risa. Ellos dicen que “representa volver a nuestras raíces” y que ademas es “moderno” y “simboliza el futuro”, entonces solo podemos inferir que el futuro que nos espera es bien como la callampa. Gracias amigos del gobierno. Aquí esta el logo: Aqui uno que hizo Isidoralavadora, mucho mejor que el otro: Y aquí..   show all text

3D is set to be big this year, and Samsung is hoping to tempt early adopters with a promotional offer that attempts to combat one of 3D TV’s main problems — lack of content — by bundling in a 3D movie with certain sales. The promotion takes the form of a new “Starter Kit” that offers U.S. consumers the chance to enjoy 3D movies in their own living rooms, rather than having to head to nearest cinema to check out the eye-popping action. In 2010, Samsung will offer a range of 3D-capable TVs, ..   show all text

Santiago’s high-rises and tree-lined boulevards appear mostly unscathed, but many people in the city still do not know if their lives will ever be the same.

Are you a Twitter newbie? Do you have a friend who is a Twitter newbie? Are Twitter newbies flooding your feed? Not to panic. There’s nothing wrong with being a newbie, but to prevent you from making the common mistakes, Social Media Today describes 10 of them. Here are just a few: 1. Doing Little or Nothing With an estimated 25 to 30 percent of Twitter accounts either empty or “one tweet and done” is it surprising that these accounts generate little interest from others on Twitter? Your i..   show all text

Today at the #140tc Twitter Conference in Seattle, Washington (which I keynoted this morning), HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes announced that its popular Twitter application will be integrating with both MySpace and Foursquare, starting this week at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. HootSuite is one of the more popular Twitter applications, one specifically geared towards power users and businesses. It has been on a roll recently, launching integration with Wordpress and rolling out..   show all text

The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space. Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; YouTube; Wordpress: these companies, built from the ground-up, are mainstays in social media. None of them were created by a large tech company, and all but one remains independent. It’s an interesting phenomenon, when you think about it. Large tech companies have had limited to no success creating their..   show all text

Google has just launched Google Public Data Explorer. The new Google Labs tool offers a visual way to look at and analyze large public data sets on a variety of popular search topics. The tool is specifically designed for avid data crunchers like students, journalists, policy makers, and could be seen as Google’s prettified approach to a user-driven computational search engine (think Wolfram Alpha). Public Data Explorer is its own dedicated utility that expands and improves upon existing f..   show all text

The magnitude 8.8 quake that struck near Maule, Chile, Feb. 27 moved the entire city of Concepcion 10 feet to the west. Precise GPS measurements from before and after the earthquake, the fifth largest ever recorded by seismographs, show that the country’s capital, Santiago, moved 11 inches west. Even Buenos Aires, nearly 800 miles from the epicenter, shifted an inch. The image above uses red arrows to represent the relative direction and magnitude of the ground movement in the vicinity of t..   show all text

Online music service Pandora could hit $100 million in revenue this year, which would represent more than twice as much revenue as the company pulled in for 2009 and potentially set the stage for an IPO. The new estimate comes from a Wall Street analyst quoted in a New York Times profile of Pandora, a company that has narrowly escaped all but certain death several times since its inception in 2000. The Times credits much of Pandora’s rise to its wildly successful iPhone app, which doubled ..   show all text

Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.

BBC News has a very cool interactive chart up, showing how Internet had grown from 1998 to 2008 in various parts of the world. In 1998., the only countries with significant Internet usage were USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden. Of course, I remember using the Internet in Croatia every day back then, but it’s true: for most people, it was “this new thing” and it didn’t play a very important part of our everyday lives. Moving the slide..   show all text