Digg has decided to add the social flavor to its site by allowing users to expand their profiles with a lot of additional information, and communicate with other Digg users. This, in essence, means Digg now has a more Facebook/My Space like social networking dimension. With the expansion of Digg’s audience (millions of monthly users worldwide), the tech heads have seen preferred stories disappear from the main page to make room for business news, sports coverage, and other comedy content, according to Business Week. With the occurrence of diversification in interest areas it is only natural that user interaction has been added to help users find others with similar interests.

The new approach allows users to better define their presence by having the option to post multiple photos, personal interests, biography, links to their personal blog, their social network profile. As on other social networks, a user can control who is able to see their content (all Digg users or chosen friends). There are more changes coming, scheduled to be implemented by the end of the year…

There is going to be a section where you will see these suggestions of news items and pictures and videos based on what you have been looking at…
It will find connections—people you constantly agree with and just don’t know it.

The ability to share is expected to activate the more passive users on Digg to take part in forming the content on the site.

We are creating this in-between world for people who maybe don’t want to share information with the whole planet…
We all have a short list of probably 5 to 10 people whom we feel compelled to share certain information with.

Share This

Do you know your ecological footprint? American Public Media released a quiz game called Consumer Consequences where anyone can get an interesting ecological assessment of their lifestyle. The idea is to see how many planet Earths we’d all need as a species if we lived the lifestyle of the person taking the quiz. The calculations are based on data taken from official sources and other proven sources, so the estimate you get at the end, even though arguably accurate, will give you a good idea of what your ecological footprint is. You’ll be surprised at the least with the results, provided you give honest/accurate answers.

During the game you will have background graphics representing your neighborhood, as well as illustrations of your impact on the environment globally. Kind of like a lifestyle collage. It changes according to your answers as you progress to the end of the quiz. The impact is modeled using the “ecological footprint” model created by Redefining Progress. After every answer there are contextual tips and interesting information shown at the top of the game interface.

Take the quiz, see how many Earths your lifestyle demands. At the very least, the quiz is amusing, but can also induce some healthy ecological self-criticism.

Share This

Google AdSense announced the launch of AdSense for Mobile.

This service is intended for webmasters who have created sites especially for viewing on mobile devices. Ads run on an auction model, and are contextually targeted to the content being viewed on the page. It’s now available to webmasters from 13 countries worldwide: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (in the coming weeks).

Here is a short introduction to the AdSense for Mobile platform.

Share This

Facebook launched a paid advertising platform called Flyers. There are two options, Basic and Pro. Basics gets you 5000 views for $10 ($0.002 CPM, if we regard views as impressions), and Pro lets you determine CPC in a similar way you would determine price-per-click on other paid advertising networks (max CPC for ranking and max daily budget for spending control).

A flyer is basically an image enabled listing which will be shown in the left column of a user’s profile below quick search and links. There is a 25 character limit for the title, and a 200 character limit for the flyer text. That’s it about flyer creation. The second step is to specify the demographics for the intended audience (people that the flyer will be shown to). You can specify age, sex, location, keywords of interest, political views (!), relationship status, education status, and workplace (which is a text field which kind of confuses me as there’s no instructions for filling in). That’s it for flyer targeting, now onto expenses. You can set maximum CPC (min $0.01), maximum daily budget (min $1), duration (continuous or date scheduled).

In the Basic version, the main difference from the Pro version is in the targeting (only basic parameters) and pricing (days running).

This system definitely gives the advertiser a direct channel towards Facebook users. This may be an alternative approach to Facebook app creation. My feeling is that flyers would be most successful if coupled with Facebook apps (FB app promotion and/or complementary promotion - combined FB app and PPC product or service promotion). While Facebook definitely has a large user base (now more than 40 million users), it may be uncertain how the FB user community will react towards flyers. One can expect good results since flyers will be highly targeted and shown within user groups that are topic specific, but social networks have a tendency to surprise advertisers unless advertising is approached in a specific manner.

Will you be using Facebook Flyers as part of your advertising efforts?

Share This

Yahoo! introduced its newest social network called Yahoo! Mash. It’s still in beta, but you can get in by invitation. I got in through inviteshare.com (Thanks Ongo!). Naturally, you have to have a Yahoo! ID in order to sign-in, but if you don’t have one you can get it in about 30 seconds, the time it takes to sign-up for one.

The person who invited you makes the initial profile for you (other users can change the look of your profile by default, unless you restrict them through privacy settings). Upon first login you can choose to continue with the profile or start a new one from scratch. As you can see it’s a two-column layout, the left being the wider content column, and the right narrower which is great for inserting modules. Pretty much similar to a standard two-column blog template. Each bounded box can be moved (drag and drop) around the page, but the drop location will be geometrically consistent with the layout. This is good because it preserves the neat look of the page, unlike MySpace where you can put stuff all over the place (which, I guess, has its advantages if you know what you are doing).

Easily enough, you click on the appropriate places and fill in content (text) that will be shown from then on. You can add a background image, and set colors for fonts, borders and modules. Then comes the more fun part of choosing and adding modules. this is at the bottom of the profile page. For now there is a choice between some ten modules, but I expect the number to rise significantly in the near future (this is Beta after all). By the way, you can create your own modules if you are able enough, but this won’t happen for a couple of months yet. You can integrate a box with latest post titles from a blog feed, for example your own.

In the coming months we’re going to open up our module development platform to 3rd party developers.

While redesigning the look and feel of the page you can click on the link “this is fugly” to revert to the default stripped down look, or back again by clicking on “show me shiny”. If you play around long enough you can actually build a quite nice profile page.

In Settings, you can control who can see your profile, who can edit your profile (you, friends, best friends, family, all friends, anyone - keep it to yourself in the beginning), who can post to your guest book. Pretty much the usual, except for the “edit your profile” part.

Looks good so far, and really is a mash-up of different things (MySpace, Facebook) but brings some interesting new things. I will definitely play with it for a while (I like the easiness of the process) to see how far this will go. I would have liked to see an option to send people a link towards my profile page that would be visible to others on the Internet, without having to be signed-in on Yahoo!, but that’s maybe something that will happen in the future. There is the Y! Mash blog for more info. There is only the one introductory post so far, but I will follow it for further developments. Wanna get your own Yahoo! Mash profile? Head on over to InviteShare and register for an invitation, and possibly participate in sharing invitations to this and other services if you can (that’s the idea).

Share This

And we have a first sign-up for the Google Lunar X Prize competition. It’s Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute! Red Whittaker, roboticist at the institute decided to enter the competition that is to be completed by 2012.

Planetary exploration is a dream we pursue and a technology we create…
We have spent decades building and testing robotic technologies for just this purpose.

Whittaker is assembling a Carnegie Mellon team that will work on the project for the competition. Although he advocated privately funded lunar landing for more than a decade, he views the task quite daunting.

It’s inevitable that someone will find a way to win it. Regardless of who takes home the cash, this achievement will enrich us all.

Well, good luck to them!

See in more detail in this press-release.

Share This

Google has announced it is going to fund the X Prize competition which invites competing companies to design and successfully land a robot on the Moon. The $30 million prize dubbed the X Prize will be awarded to the company that not only lands a rover robot on the Moon but also completes several mission objectives, including roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to Earth. Wow! Sounds like a handful. You can see more about this here and here. I decided to be different and show you the video which explains it all in an invigorating fashion reminding me of my teen dream of becoming an astronaut.

In case you are wondering “why the Moon?”, John Marburger (Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President) said the key element of the new vision for space is bringing the Solar System (starting with the Moon) into the economic sphere of the Earth.

Let’s hope our economic adventures on the Moon will produce less problems than they do daily on Earth.

Here are the competition guidelines.

Sounds pretty straight forward! Where do I sign up? Well, I didn’t find such an option, but as soon as I do I am signing up.

Share This

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to publish live video broadcast using only your own mobile phone? Now we can, or rather, we will be able to soon. A Finnish upstart Floobs has come up with an idea that will allow users to broadcast their live video footage over the Internet. The whole project is still in an early stage, so there’s nothing much to see on their site, except an announcement for the upcoming service.

Floobs has plans to offer a free TV channel for everyone enabling people to broadcast live shows (or pre-recorded material) for free. The service is scheduled to start later this year. They’ve opened a Finnish language test service this week, and are planning an English service site in November. The service will be targeting groups and communities that otherwise don’t get airtime on mainstream television channels. Floobs will charge for professional broadcasting tools and will offer advertisement options to advertisers.

This may be an interesting development in citizen journalism. Soon everyone will be able to broadcast live events from the spot using nothing more than their own mobile phone. If this service becomes popular over time, TV reporters may find themselves in a tight spot (by the time a TV network reporter gets to a location, someone will have streamed live footage over the Internet). Oh, and just think of the cash you could get for exclusive footage simply by being on the spot at the right time.

Share This

Amazon is launching AWS Start-Up Challenge, a competition that should entice developers to present their best applications that use Amazon’s Computing Services. The best application will win a $50K cash prize, plus another $50K in Amazon Web Services credits (developers get charged an amount every time their apps use AWS). There are also four second-place prizes in the amount of $5000 in cash. Apart from the prizes, the winner also gets investment capital from Amazon, under the condition that the company is US based with less than $10M in annual revenue. The investment is to be deemed as start-up aid for further development, not as acquisition.

If you are going to participate you have to sign-up and fill an application by October 28, 2007. Finalists will be announced in November. Amazon will produce a video of each finalist whcih will be posted on aws.amazon.com, where the community can vote for their favorite.

Amazon execs feel this to be a move in the right direction, judging applications based on AWS to be a significant source of income for the company in the coming times. The company aims to develop an environment of third-party tools, a model used already by more traditional companies using developer-tools.

So, do you feel lucky?

Share This

Pikiwiki is a new project bringing some very interesting advanced functionality. This is a self funded, Santa Clara (CA) based operation and it brings a new way to share your multimedia content as well as interesting content from other sources on the web. in short, you see something in your browser or on your desktop, do a drag and drop and it’s there, on a page you’re creating on Pikiwiki! You can insert audio, video, images, text, links from whatever source you’ve found. The interface allows you to quickly setup almost any usual page layout in seconds, and insert content created on the spot, such as text boxes and titles. Just watch the demo (click on the top right demo link on the homepage).

Sign-up is free so give PikiWiki a try.

Share This