Introducing the Google Friend Connect API

from Social Web Blog by Mendel

While it's always been easy to add social features to your site with Google Friend Connect, it just got a little more flexible with the introduction of the Friend Connect API. This API lets you access the core features of Friend Connect to use them on your site in interesting ways.

Friend Connect lets you instantly awaken and strengthen the community that visits your website in way that is easy (just copy-and-paste some code) and open (we use OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial). The combination of ease and openness puts you and your visitors in full control of your social information, activities, and relationships throughout the web.
Whether you're a site owner or developer, the new Friend Connect APIs offer something for anyone who is interested in helping the web become more social:

• Site owners - Integrate Friend Connect more deeply into your site. JavaScript APIs allow you to integrate a social community directly within the markup of your page, and our REST APIs allow you integrate existing login systems and your existing data with new social data and activities. These are your visitors and this is your site, so you should be able to add social features the way you want.
  
• Plugin developers - Make plugins to integrate with popular content management systems, bulletin boards, or any open framework. To get you started, we have created open source plugin samples for WordPress, Drupal, and phpBB.
  
• Gadget developers - Make OpenSocial applications with greater control over how data flows across servers with signed requests. Use server-side authentication mechanisms so that a site with Friend Connect can act as an OpenSocial container.

To start using this API, set up your site at google.com/friendconnect and then click on the "For developers" link to get the snippets.


We're excited to see the creative ways you find to use this API to enrich the social web. To learn more, check out the documentation on Google Code.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

Go buzzword-free, I dare you!

Posted Tuesday, January 13, 2009 by Scott Roth

OK, here's the deal. I'm a marketer that markets to marketers. So, that means chances are pretty likely that if you're reading this, you are also a marketer. Which means in theory, we should be speaking the same language for the most part. So here's my promise to you - and the reason why I think you'll enjoy the contents that you find here: 2009 is going to be the year that I attempt to go completely buzzword-free in my communications. I know, buzzwords are everywhere so it's going to be hard to do, but here are two reasons why I think it's important.

1. Too many times, especially in the business-to-business space, marketers are their own worst enemy when it comes to communicating with their audiences. We spend too much time trying to use the latest catch-phrases and coolest new ways to describe things, that we often leave the intended recipient of our message scratching their head, trying to figure out what we were talking about in the first place.
2. Throwing out too many buzzwords in a single sentence just simply makes you sound like someone who is trying to compensate for something they really don't know anything about, even if you really do know a lot about the topic. I'm guilty of it, in the past, when I didn't really feel comfortable or wanted to make an idead sound bigger than it really was, I would fall into the trap of "inserting buzzword here" to try and make up for it. Not anymore, 2009 is a new year baby!

So, are you ready to join me on this journey to just cut to the chase? I'm ready to start sharing and collaborating on marketing ideas and strategies that don't get caught up in a lot of talk, but not a lot of action. We live in a pretty complex world, and hopefully this little slice of cyberspace will be a safe haven for sophistication, simplicity, and saying more with less.

Join me this year as we explore straightforward email marketing, SMS, interactive, and one-to-one marketing strategies for a complex world - all with an occasional dose of humor to keep it real.

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There's No Such Thing As A Crystal Ball

from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology by Fred

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I was asked to speak to a group of entrepreneurs later this week. I agreed to do it and asked them what they wanted me to talk about. I got this response:

this group would find it particularly interesting to hear from Fred about the technologies and technology strategies that he thinks will be especially significant moving forward.

I thought about that for a second and decided that I'd talk about the exact opposite. I don't know what the future will hold any more than anyone else. There is no such thing as a crystal ball and I can assure you that I don't have one.

So the title of my talk will be "There's No Such Thing As A Crystal Ball" and I will talk about what I do and what every great entrepreneur I've ever worked with does to figure out what bets to make. It starts with getting your hands dirty and engaging deeply with the leading edge products and services that are in your market.

I am fortunate that the leading edge products and services that are in my market are social media and web based services that are filled with people who are doing the very same things I am doing. And so I get to do this in parallel with all of you and exchange notes.

That process leads me forward and informs the bets I want to make and who I want to make them with.

I spent some time this morning putting together my deck for my "There's No Such Thing As A Crystal Ball" talk tomorrow. Since I've already blogged this "meme" and got awesome comments on it (several of which have found their way into the talk), I figure I should keep going by posting my first draft of my deck. Please keep the comments and suggestions flowing. I will make sure to credit this community with the co-creation of the presentation.

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Kutiman Killed the Video Star

from Roi Carthy :: Product Launch Consultant by Roi Carthy

If you haven’t heard of Kutiman yet you’re about a week late on the latest music sensation to be incubated on the Web. Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman, is an Israeli musician and producer that released a project titled Thru You on the Web seven days ago. It has since garnered over a million views and generated a buzz both on the blogosphere and on Twitter.

The project consists of seven music tracks/videos that are made exclusively from video material found on YouTube. Kutiman spent 3 months in his bedroom splicing and dicing over one hundred videos for samples of singers and instruments—from guitars, pianos, drums and harps, to synthesizers, a bouzouki and even a cash register.

The resulting seven tracks which range in genres—from R&B, Funk and Reggae, to Jungle, Afro and Jazz—are quite impressive. The project as a whole is reminiscent of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….., a brilliant and seminal album created completely by the sampling of other albums (hear it here).

Apart from the revolutionary music creation aspect, this story also has an interesting social media angle. The entire snowball effect that resulted in over a million views, a crashed website and a fair bit of buzz, was initiated by three people associated with the project. They emailed twenty people in total and it took a life of its own from there. From zero views to over a million in less than 7 days with no marketing dollars, blackhatting or SEO’ing involved. The team around Kutiman attribute much of this to word traveling across Twitter. If this is true, Kutiman may in fact be the first music star to be born on Twitter. There’s no question that we are sure to see other up and coming musicians harness it as well in the future.

Here are a couple of Kutiman’s tracks:

Parisian Investors Share Valuable Tips with Startups at Seedcamp Paris

from Blonde 2.0 by blonde20

Back in January, when I attended Seedcamp Tel Aviv, I wrote about some of the priceless tips that investors shared with the startups there. In a similar panel discussion at Seedcamp Paris, Parisian investors and VCs shared more valuable tips. Among the investors in the panel discussion, which was moderated by Index Ventures’ Saul Klein, were Anne Gousset of Paris Développement (an incubator), Chipper Boulas of Boulas Ventures, Luis Courtot of Courtot Ventures, Xavier Lazarus of Elaia Partners and Philippe Colombel of Partech VC. It was interesting to hear what they all had to say.

The investors in Tel Aviv spoke a little bit about the current economic crisis. However, in Paris last month this crisis seemed to be a focal point of the investors’ discussion. Xavier of Elaia Partners brought up the point, right of the bat, that many companies that would have easily been funded a couple of years ago are now dealing with a much higher hurdle. Startups now not only need to show that they have a great product but also that it is sustainable, because nobody knows how much time it will take for the economy to improve.

Luis expanded on this, saying that now it is important for startups to demonstrate “proof of concept.” He said that a couple of years ago, as an investor you could simply fall in love with a product or service. However, he said, “today there is still love in the air but you need to demonstrate proof.”

Chipper emphasized this point and added that when startups are preparing to present their product to investors they need to make sure that their product offers a very clear value to a targeted set of users that solves a real problem. In this day and age “you don’t want to be a luxury– you need to be a must have.” Chipper said that in order to invest in a business he must believe that the aspiration is big enough that in 3, 4 or even 5 years this could be a major business. There must be a burning need for this product and the startup team must demonstrate very concrete stepping stones on how they are going to become a success.

The investors also mentioned that you don’t just need to have a good product – your startup’s team is just as important. If your team doesn’t have a clear mind or vision, as well as a good set of personal values and morals then it will be hard to build confidence. You must not only present your company well, but you must present yourself in a positive light as well.

Anne of Paris Développement added the fact that investors hear presentations from a huge number of startups and the ones they remember are the ones that kept their presentation simple. Don’t try to squeeze too much into your five minutes– whet the investors’ appetite with your presentation and when you’re done presenting they’ll ask you more if they are interested in what you have to offer.

To watch the full panel discussion, see the videos below.

Popout

Popout

Sponsored, But Good

Image via CrunchBase

from outbrain by John LoGioco

How about an advertising program that brings benefit to the reader, the publisher and the advertiser! Our new program called Sponsored, But Good is designed to do exactly this. If you’re like most people, you’d probably agree that you rarely find ads you see online interesting. Unlike ads on search engines which appear in response to your search query, ads on content pages tend to be unappealing and intrusive. Since we’ve based our entire company on bringing readers of content useful links to other recommended content, we thought: why can’t ads be just as interesting and engaging?

Our thinking goes like this: readers come to your blog or site to read. They are looking for other great stories to read, which is why the engagement rates on the recommendations we provide today are so high. So through Sponsored, But Good, advertisers can now participate in bringing your readers interesting content by sponsoring the distribution of great, interesting stories about their brands. There are millions (well, at least many thousands!) of wonderful articles and blog posts that have positive, authentic things to say about specific brands and products. These authentic endorsements are often written simply because the author loved some aspect of the product or service. Sponsored, But Good allows advertisers to promote great, authentic endorsements of their product or service to readers who may be interested in the message.

Today we are launching the beta version of the program and you will see advertisers starting to populate the system over the next few months.

What will the sponsored recommendations look like on my blog?
Advertisers will pay for the recommendations to be distributed, and not for the content itself. These sponsored recommendations are clearly marked with an icon as shown below. Upon mousing over the "i" icon, the color changes to indicate it's clickable and when clicked, a bubble appears informing the reader that the distribution of the link is sponsored and not the content itself.

(this is a ficticious example as GM is not yet a client)

Upon clicking the above link the reader will go to this public page on CNBC's site. As you can see the author, Phil LeBeau is speaking favorable about his test ride in the Volt;

From an advertiser's perspective, having the ability to expose readers who may be interested in green automobiles to this kind of authentic endorsement is very compelling.

So a few answers to questions we know you'll have:

Can I control what sponsored recommendations show on my blog?
Yes you have full control. Larger publishers have full control over what sponsored recommendations will show on your site and all bloggers have use of the "Link Zapper" to zap any link, sponsored or organic that doesn't quite fit.

How do I earn a portion of the proceeds myself?
If your site, or a collection of sites you own, is editorially approved by outbrain and has 100,000 US pageviews a month or more, you’re eligible for direct compensation from the program and should contact us. If not, we still want the passion you put into your blog to be rewarded as you can choose a charity from your Outbrain dashboard and we’ll donate a meaningful portion of the proceeds generated on your site to it at year’s end.

How Many Sponsored Recommendations Will Show? We will not show more than 1 sponsored recommendation in our widget at a time. In many cases we won't show any sponsored recommendations - we always want to make sure your readers get interesting and timely reading recommendations. When we don't have a great sponsored recommendation to show, we will continue showing recommendations, including links to your own content.

Do I Have To Participate?
No. You can opt out of the program (and opt back in) at any time through your outbrain dashboard. You can also set your charity preferences there:

• Go to http://www.outbrain.com/ln/ManageBlogs
• Select “Settings” for the blog of your choice
• Select your charity or opt out of the program in the “Sponsored Recommendation” section

If you are currently registered and showing external recommendations (in your dashboard this is shown as "Best Recommendations") you will be enrolled in the program by default.

If you are registered and don’t choose a charity, proceeds from your site will be donated to the International Red Cross.

If you are not currently set to show external recommendations, you will not be enrolled in the program automatically and you’ll need to enroll by following these easy steps;

• Go to http://www.outbrain.com/ln/ManageBlogs
• Select “Settings” for the blog of your choice and choose "Best Recommendations"
• Select your charity or if you have over 100K page views a month contact us.

With our new program, Sponsored, But Good, everyone wins;

Readers: Who are our highest priority, continue to discover great new content through our recommendations, whether sponsored or organic.

Bloggers/Publishers: Can make money from the program if they are editorially approved and meet certain traffic requirements. Those bloggers with more passion for writing than traffic will be able to choose a charity which will receive donations at year end from Outbrain.

Advertisers: Finally have a scalable method to amplify some of the great things their peers and customers are saying about their products and services. We will help advertisers surface the right conversation to the right people through our reader focused approach that aims to cut the unnecessary waste out of online advertising.

Yes we are doing something quite different with this program, but our true guiding light is to do right by you and your readers. Participating in this program helps us keep our lights on, earns you or a charitable cause you care deeply about some money and above all helps your readers discover new and interesting content. Our goal is to find an advertising medium that distributes the benefits equally between the reader, publisher and advertiser. In our opinion this perfect balance hasn’t been found yet. We hope you’ll join us in working towards this goal.

Update - LouisGray, Mashable, CenterNetworks and VentureBeat covered the release.

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Flickr Photos Become Stock Photography at Getty ImagesFlickr Photos Become Stock Photography at Getty Images

from *Mashable*! - The #1 Social Networking and Social Media News Blog by Jennifer Van Grove

Many of us use online stock photography when we’re looking for images to spice up a presentation or blog post. A lot of us also love to scour Flickr for the same purpose, since with a little digging we can typically find truly beautiful and captivating photos to express what our words can’t.

Recognizing that the same holds true for professionals, Getty Images, the popular site for print and media stock photography buys, is hoping to make the search for, and purchase of, high quality Flickr images for commercial purposes less of hassle with the Flickr Collection — which made its debut last night.

In the exclusive partnership that was initially announced last July, Getty Images editors handpicked photographs from Flickr’s community of 3 billion images and plans to refresh the collection with thousands of new ones each one month.

Just because they’re Flickr photos, don’t expect them to come too cheap. Images from the Flickr Collection are meant for professional use, typically come with royalty-free or rights-managed licenses, and start at $49.99 for 500KB RGB photo and go up in price with increased size.

At first glance, there are already thousands of gorgeous photos, each with their own story to tell, and searchable by people, location, concept, subject, composition, and viewpoint.

We’re a little unsure of the how the deal is structured with Flickr in terms of payments, though we do know that Flickr photographers, professional and amateur alike, do need to go through the Getty Image signup process, which could take a while, to set up payment receipt and image licensing options.

We love that Flickr members are now getting recognized and compensated for their hard work, and we hope to see the partnership between Getty Images and Flickr continue to grow. If you’re a photographer whose Flickr images are now being distributed and sold through Getty Images, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the process and the partnership in the comments.

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Google Reader Steals the Conversation with New Commenting Feature

from *Mashable*! - The #1 Social Networking and Social Media News Blog by Adam Ostrow

Google Reader is getting more social this evening, with the addition of comments to your friends’ shared items. To get to the feature, you first need to drill down to your Friends’ Shared Items, then click “Comment View.” From there, you’ll be able to add comments to any of your friends’ shared items, and also see which of your friends have recently commented on stuff.

This feature has some interesting implications for bloggers and aggregators like FriendFeed. Since Google Reader displays the full-text of RSS feeds, the “Comments” feature essentially acts much like the comments on blogs and provides a disincentive to actually visit the website to share your thoughts. On the other hand, it is friends-only, creating what Google is calling in effect a “private conversation” that might be different from what you see on publicly visible blog comments.

That said, Comments aren’t exportable at this time, meaning they won’t show up on services like FriendFeed, where Google Reader shared items are visible as just a headline, and a Note if the user has chosen to include one. Often, this leads to lots of conversation around the items, but it seems like part of that conversation could now stay within Google Reader.

For now, the implementation is a bit awkward. For example, you can’t comment on stories from the “All Items” view, which includes selected friends’ shared items in addition to the feeds you subscribe to, and is where I spend most of my time in Google Reader. However, Google says they have “much more planned for this feature,” meaning we could see comments show up in lots more places soon.

It’ll be interesting to see the reaction to this from bloggers. Hopefully Google decides to make comments exportable, so we can include them in the commenting section of blogs, the way we currently do here on Mashable with our “social media comments” feature.

Write your Name in Ancient Egyptian Scripts

Image via Wikipedia

from Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog by Amit Agarwal

Write your Name in Ancient Egyptian Scripts

Hieroglyphs were an interesting writing system adopted by the ancient Egyptians some 5000 years ago.

The individual characters in this writing style, which can still be found inscribed on Egyptian pyramids and tombs, were represented by graphical symbols and can either be written in rows or columns.

If you are curious to see how your own name (or any other English word) would look if it were written with Egyptian Hieroglyphs, try this name translator for horizontal writing style or the one at University of Pennsylvania if your need a hieroglyph in vertical format.

The tool take the first 16 characters of your name and converts them into the same hieroglyphs symbols that were used by Ancient Egyptians.

iSynth Brings Microsoft’s Powerful 3D Photo Viewer Photosynth To The iPhone

Image via CrunchBase

from TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid

iSynth (iTunes Link) is a new application that brings Microsoft’s impressive Photosynth 3D photo viewer to the iPhone. Photosynth stitches together user-submitted photos of the same subject, allowing users to ‘fly-through’ the area by clicking on each successive photo. The technology works best in places and events with many user-submitted photos (popular Synths include the Taj Mahal and President Obama’s inauguration). The site is very fun and often gorgeous, and is certainly worth checking out if you haven’t seen it before.

iSynth brings much of the functionality of the original Photosynth to the iPhone, and for the most part it works well. In fact, the touch-screen interface makes the experience even more intuitive than the original - tapping on the screen causes the app to zoom in on the highlighted photo, shifting the viewer’s position in the 3D scene. Unfortunately, because the iPhone’s screen is so much smaller than a computer monitor the feeling of ‘walking through’ each scene isn’t quite as good as it is on the original application, but it’s still fun nonetheless. And the application is perfectly suited for those moments when you just need to kill time for a few minutes - just fire up the app and take a virtual stroll around the Taj Mahal.

The free iPhone application was developed by Greg Pascale, a former Photosynth intern who received permission to build the app from Microsoft (though Microsoft didn’t build the application and does not support it). Also worth checking out is Microsoft’s Seadragon Mobile (iTunes link), which allows users to flick through large albums of high-resolution photography, including 2D versions of albums from its Photosynth product.

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Google Reader: Now With Comments

Image via CrunchBase

from ReadWriteWeb by Frederic Lardinois

The Google Reader team just announced the addition of an important new feature to Google's popular feed reader: you can now comment on any item that your friends have shared with you. In order to keep track of these conversations, Google has now also introduced a 'comments view' that will only show an excerpt of the post, but which highlights the comments your friends have made.

Sponsor

Whenever a post in your list of shared items has comments, a little speech bubble will appear on top of your friend's icon. If more than one of your friends has shared the same item, Google will present you with separate conversations under each person who shared it.

The comment feature is also available in the mobile version of Google Reader.

As of now, the comments you make in Google Reader remain in Google's silo and won't be syndicated back to the original blog. It is not clear if Google will give developers access to these comments so that they can create plugins that aggregate these Google Reader comments and display them on the original post or on an aggregation service like FriendFeed. In the announcement, however, the Google Reader teams stresses that it wants to give its users the ability to have private conversations.

Google has been relatively slow to add social features to Google Reader and most of the discussions around shared items now happen on other services like FriendFeed and Facebook. It will be interesting to see if users will actually use this new feature in large numbers, but it is definitely an interesting addition to Google Reader. In the announcement, Google specifically mentions that it has "much more planned for this feature," and we can't help but wonder if Google is planning to allow users to comment on any item in Google Reader (similar to the SearchWiki functionality in its search engine).

Discuss

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Google Voice

Google today finally announced its plans for GrandCentral, the telephony service it acquired in July 2007. GrandCentral will be reborn as Google Voice, a comprehensive suite of telephony services, including all of GrandCentral's features. In addition, Google Voice will also include an automated voicemail transcription service, the ability to send and receive text messages, and integration with your Gmail contacts. Users can now also call any number in the the U.S. for free.

Sponsor

Opening up GrandCentral

After acquiring GrandCentral, Google continued to operate the old service, but didn't allow new users to sign up. Now, Google has announced that it will first port existing users over to Google Voice in the next couple of days, and will then open up Google Voice to new users.

Interface

The new interface will look a lot like Gmail, with your inbox, SMS messages, access to voicemail and other features in a sidebar on the left.

Making Calls

You can make calls directly from the Google Voice web interface. After you initiate the call, the service will actually first call your mobile phone or landline, and after that your call will be placed over Google's network.

Calls within the U.S. will remain free, and users can purchase credit to make international calls (we don't have information about the international rates yet, but we assume that they will be competitive with those that Skype currently offers).

Google Voice will also offer free conference calls.

Voicemail

The automated voicemail transcription feature looks like it will be one of the most useful functions of Google Voice. Transcriptions are fully automated and Google will mark passages in the text where the algorithm was not very confident about the transcription. Transcriptions will automatically appear in your inbox, but Google Voice can also email them to you, or even send you an SMS with the text.

Future Integration with Android?

We can't help but wonder if Google will integrate the voicemail and transcription service with Android as well. In this video, Google shows the mobile version of Google Voice in the browser on an Android phone, but we assume that Google will release a dedicated Google Voice app for Android in the future and maybe even make it an integral part of the Android experience (if the carriers allow Google to do so, that is).

Just What the Doctor Ordered

Google Voice looks like a clear winner to us. It takes the best features of GrandCentral and adds a number of important and interesting new features like SMS messaging and voicemail transcriptions. Clearly this is one of the most important products that Google has released in the last couple of months and we will post a more detailed review of the service once it becomes available to us.

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Facebook’s Real-Time Homepage Goes Live Today

Today Facebook is rolling out the update to user homepages that brings a new look, enhanced filter system, and most importantly, realtime updating. Real-time updates are Facebook’s response to Twitter, which has been able to thrive on offering users immediate updates from their friends and favorite celebrities (Facebook’s original News Feed took hours to update).

The new design also includes an emphasis on sharing media and links with friends. Before now the Facebook homepage offered a “What are you doing now?” message nestled at the top. This has now been replaced with Facebook’s ‘Publisher’ interface, which lets users share status updates, photos and links, as well as content from their Facebook Apps.

Because the real-time stream will only display items for a brief period of time (depending on how many friends you have), Facebook is using a new ‘Highlights’ sidebar to show some of the older stories that it thinks you’ll probably be interested in (it sounds similar to the old News Feed).

Facebook’s blog post on the update notes that the new homepage will be deployed over the coming days, so it may still be awhile before you can try it out for yourself.

Initial Impressions
I’m apparently among the first to have the update. So how does it work?

• It feels a lot more like Twitter. The whole page focuses around conversations, which isn’t a bad thing at all (I’m noticing fewer items around photos and events)
• Items may be posted in real time, but it doesn’t seem like the page updates as the items come in (I’m having to refresh to see new content)
• The Highlights section doesn’t exactly do a great job at highlighting news stories. With only a narrow column to work with the stories don’t stand out. And with so little real-estate, sponsored items (which are basically just ads) are more irritating.
• The ability to filter the News Feed by Friend Lists is great (I can’t believe we’ve gone this long without it) You actually could filter by Friend Lists in the old version, though the feature was less visible. You can also ‘x’ out friends you never want to see appear in your News Feed again.

A Look At The Improved MySpace Music

Over the last few weeks MySpace Music has quietly rolled out a number of new features that should make the service significantly more appealing to consumers. While MySpace Music kicked off to an fairly impressive start when it launched last September, seeing a huge amount of traffic and streamed songs, even its President Courtney Holt has conceded that it wasn’t very user-friendly and didn’t bring many new features to the table. The initial launch of MySpace Music was mostly about laying the groundwork to build a sustainable business. Now, the site is shifting focus to deliver what its consumers want.

The most readily apparent update is the site’s new music player, which is quicker than its predecessor and will soon feature user-customizable skins. Searching has also been overhauled, with a new focus on helping users find artists with a Google-like “Did you mean”, as well as verified artist profiles so users don’t have to stumble across impostors.

The site is also placing a new emphasis on playlists, a feature that has been very popular (with over 105 million playlists created since MySpace Music’s launch), but one that also had some irritating restrictions, including a limit on the number of playlists that each user could create. The new version allows users to create as many as they’d like, each of which can be up 100 songs in length. Users will now also be able to display their full roster of playlists in their profiles (previously they could only publicly share one playlist) and can also share a static URL associated with each playlist with friends, who can listen to the playlist even if they aren’t MySpace members. Perhaps most important, the site will soon allow for playlist embeds, though they haven’t been rolled out yet.

Another upgrade to the site is the introduction of album pages, which allow users to browse an artist’s disc catalogue and to (finally) buy entire albums at once (previously they could only purchase one song at the time). Users can also keep tabs on their favorite artists using activity feeds, which were deployed a few weeks ago.

Looking forward, we’re hearing that MySpace is moving towards rolling out a new hub focused on music videos - and one that will likely compete with the proposed venture in the works between UMG and YouTube. MySpace has the unique advantage of having rights to music videos from every major label (the rights were secured when MySpace Music first formed), which could give it the leg up in what appears to be an upcoming battle in this space.

How to “Friend” Someone On Facebook Without Showing Your Status Updates

Image via CrunchBase

I’m sure that this has happened to you before. Someone you have ties to, whether it’s a co-worker, your boss, or even worse, a parent, has finally discovered social networking and wants to be your newest Facebook friend.

For me personally, that’s no big deal. I’m fairly open about my online activities. Everything I write, Digg, or otherwise share goes through my FriendFeed to my Twitter then ultimately onto my Facebook (my, that sounds naughty). Besides that, just about everyone I’d consider a co-worker is already on Facebook, and would have little issue about my other Internet activities.

Putting all that aside however, imagine for a moment that I worked at Domino’s Pizza and that I don’t want my boss to know that I just became a fan of Papa John’s (writing this one’s gonna make me hungry). Here’s what I would do to keep that fact confined to my closer friends:

On your Facebook home page, you should see the ‘Settings’ menu close to the search field on your upper-right. Open that menu and go to ‘Privacy Settings’.

On the next page, you’ll have four choices: Profile, Search, News Feed, and Applications. What you’ll want to edit here are your Profile privacy settings.

By default, everything on your profile is limited to your Friends and your Networks (your first Network is likely your city of residence, but you may have joined more). From the screenshot above, you can see that I’ve limited everything on my profile to my Friends and their Friends. Anyone else who visits my profile will only see that I have a profile, but will not see what’s on it.

In my example, you’re going to want to edit the setting on your Status Updates, since you don’t want your boss to know that you’ve “fanned” the competition. Click that dropdown menu and then select ‘Customize’.

You may want to tweak your overall privacy setting here, but what we’re aiming for is the “Except These People” list at the bottom of this dialog. Type out the name of any of your Friends to restrict that person from viewing anything in your Status Updates.

For all you faithful Facebook fans, we’ve got a lot of tips and tricks on how to make the most of the site. If you have any privacy tips or concerns to share, please drop them in a comment. I’m off to order pizza.

Enjoyed the article? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think about it.

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Guide for Bookmarklets

This guide will help you understand the advantages of bookmarklets over add-ons, how to install bookmarklets followed by a list of essential bookmarklets that should work across all popular browsers including Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
Why Use Bookmarklet over Add-ons

If you were to choose between a bookmarklet and a browser add-on, both offering similar functionality, here are a couple of reasons why you may want to go with bookmarklets:

1. Add-ins are browser specific so tomorrow if you decide to move from Firefox to Opera or Google Chrome, your favorite add-ins will no longer work. On the other hand, a bookmarklet written for Firefox is very likely to work with Safari or IE.

2. Some add-ins can break (or won’t install at all) if you try installing them on a newer version of the browser. And this is a big problem considering that new browser patches are released every couple of months.

3. Unlike add-ins that require installation, you can add and remove bookmarklets without restarting the browser.

4. Poorly coded add-ins can significantly slow down your browser while bookmarklets have negligible (if any) effect on memory usage as they are executed on-demand.
How to Install Bookmarklets

If you are new here, the following video will help you understand how to install bookmarklets in your browser bookmarks toolbar - it’s as simple as dragging a link from the web page to the bookmarks region.



The above video is for the notebook bookmarklet but the technique is the same for other bookmarklets as well.
Most Useful Bookmarklets

Now that you know the benefits of using a bookmarklet and how easy it is to add one to your own browser bookmarks, let me share some of my favorite bookmarklets that are both useful and powerful:

Twitter Reactions - This helps me track all recent conversations (tweets) on Twitter that have linked to the web page that I am currently reading in my browser (also see Twitter Guide).

In Techmeme? - If I come across a new tech blog, I use this Techmeme bookmarklet to discover stories from that site that may have made it to Techmeme in the past. This indicator can help decide if I should add that site to my reading list or not.

Capture Screenshot - This helps me capture screenshots of web pages directly in the web browser that I can directly upload to Flickr, Blogger, Evernote and other online services.

Short URL - This is too obvious but still a must-have bookmarklet. It lets you create short URLs for any site using bit.ly, a service that is far better than TinyURL as it offers real-time click statistics.

To English - If I come across a web page that includes words not written in English, this bookmarklet will automatically detect the source language of that page and translate the full page (or specific words) into English for me using Google Translate.

Readability - Another must-have bookmarklet that helps you read web articles distraction free. You can format pages like a newspaper or an ebook with clean background and large font styles.

Resize Page - This is handy for tech bloggers who frequently capture screenshots of web browsers. You can tweak the height and width field in the bookmarklet and take screenshots of a consistent size for uploading on your blog.

Show Password - This will unmask the real characters of an auto-fill password that are otherwise hidden behind asterisks in the password field of a web page. Only works if the password associated with that site is saved in the browser.

Show RSS Feed - If your web browser has trouble detecting the RSS feed associated with a site, try this bookmarklet. It will not only show you the full contents of that feed but also give you options to subscribe in your favorite newsreader.

Edit Website - This bookmarklet help me edit web pages as if I were editing some page on a open wiki. The changes are of course lost when you reload the page.

PrintWhatYouLike - A brilliant bookmarklet that helps you format web pages for printing. You can save changes locally as a PDF file (more ways to reduce printing costs).

GMail This! - Select some text on the webpage and click the Gmail bookmarklet to compose a new email message pre-populated with the selected text.

Get Long URLs - Short URLs generated by TinyURL and other URL shortening services say little about the landing site but this bookmarklet can rewrite all short links on a web page so you know exactly where those links are pointing to.

Tidy Read - This will reformat the current web page into a printer friendly format. It actually changes the default CSS style of a site and renders it again using the print stylesheet. Great for reading cluttered web pages.

Sitonomy - This will help you know which technologies are used on a particular site. You’ll know about the site’s advertising partners, their web stats program, what web server are they running and more. Information provided by Siteonomy.

Download PDF - I use this bookmarklet to download web pages in PDF format - the printed files are light and useful in situations where I have to send the full web page via email.

Aardvark - An excellent bookmarklet to help you unravel the mystery behind web page design. Click any paragraph, image, table or any other element of a web page to determine it’s HTML source, image dimensions and other properties.

Google Trends - This bookmarklet will help you quickly determine the relative popularity (web traffic) of any web site using the Google Trends for websites service.

Delicious Talk - See how many people have saved a particular page on delicious and what tags have they used to describe the page.

Important: To add any of these bookmarklets in to your browser, just drag the highlighted link into your bookmarks bar. If you using Internet Explorer, right-click on the link and choose "Add to favorites."

Related: Some more bookmarklets

DriverSide

Image via CrunchBase

DriverSide, a startup that is taking the unique approach of helping users maintain their cars rather than buy or sell them, has closed a $5.3 million Series B funding round led by Allegis Capital, with Catamount Ventures and the company’s founders also participating in the round. As part of the deal, Allegis’ Bob Ackerman will be joining the DriverSide board of directors. The startup has now raised a total of $8.4 million.

DriverSide founder Trevor Traina says that because of the economic downturn, DriverSide has actually been able to thrive where other car sites (and the automotive industry in general) have have been hit hard. A recent study conducted by DriverSide and Kelton found that 82% of car owners are keeping their car longer because of the recession. Instead of looking to buy or sell their vehicles, most people are buckling down with their current cars and are interested in keeping them running for as long as possible, as cheaply as possible.

That’s where DriverSide comes in. The site helps take the guesswork out of car-repairs, offering firm estimates for the cost of parts and labor, along with advice from certified mechanics and an editorial staff headed by a Yahoo Autos veteran. The site has grown to 250,000 registered users since its launch last June, and is also forming partnerships with a number of automotive companies. And unlike most other car sites, where users only visit very sporadically (namely when they’re looking to buy a new car), DriverSide can attract long-term users.

In conjunction with today’s funding announcement, DriverSide has also announced that it has partnered with Integrated Services, the maker of LubeSoft, a POS system for managers of lube shops. DriverSide will be offering LubeSoft customers online customer virtual “garages”.

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