Social Networking

In the English speaking world, the free blogging platforms that stand out from the crowd are Google's Blogger and Wordpress.com. While those services are also popular in Japan, a particularly strong homegrown contender is Ameba.jp., which is now looking to tap into a global audience by launching as a Facebook app. More than just a blog platform, Ameba is unique in the way it has socialized blogs via a virtual online community - Ameba Pigg. Yes, it's an odd name... But it is Japan after all. Read More

Ahhh, social network status updates. How would we know what breathtakingly exciting (or mind-numbingly boring) activities our friends and family are up to from one moment to the next without them? And if you sometimes find it’s a chore just reading these missives, spare a thought for those people writing them. But soon, by combining networking and messaging platforms with emerging ambient intelligence systems that use sensors and smart objects to create awareness of users’ whereabouts and activities, such status updates and other social information could be generated automatically. Read More

Toshiba’s JournE touch is a portable, wireless home multimedia tablet with a 7-inch (17.8cm) color touch screen display, which serves as a communication and infotainment center for every member of the household. Users can browse the Internet and download digital content anywhere in the house in a flash, because the device boots instantaneously. However, with its small size (only 14mm/0.5in thick) and great user-interface, we say families better get ready for a fight over who gets to use it. Read More

E-mail has been dawdling along in much the same form since the early days of the Internet. In fact, e-mail now feels like a pretty stodgy, clunky and formal style of online communication. But hold onto your seats, because Google is about to turn e-mail on its head with the release of a revolutionary new technology called Google Wave that's due to start trickling into users' hands this September. Wave combines the strengths of e-mail with the immediacy of instant messaging and the collaborative power of social networking - and wraps that all up into a killer web application that can then be embedded into any web page or used as a private communication system. Sound complicated? It is - but you'll understand it perfectly after watching this ten-minute video. Read More

If you’ve got nothing to hide there’s no need to read to any further. But if you’re worried about someone digging up something from your past – and we’re talking non-criminal here – which may influence or damage job prospects, relationships, your social or professional life, then good news is at hand. The University of Washington (UW) has developed Vanish – a prototype system that places a time limit on information uploaded to any web service through a web browser. Electronic communication sent using Vanish - such as e-mail, posts on social networking sites and chat messages - would have a brief lifetime and then self-destruct, becoming irretrievable from all websites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers. The University says that not even the sender could retrieve them. Read More

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment hopes to give BD Live – the feature that puts Blu-ray Disc (BD) players in touch with a web-load of online extras – a shot in the arm with the launch of movieIQ and CineChat – and one to its bottomline, as the blue-laser video platform begins to gain some traction, with US hardware sales ballooning 400 percent in first-quarter results. Read More

Most users have come to accept the new Twitter-style Facebook home page - but one thing continues to infuriate: all the annoying quiz and application updates in your news feed. But all is not lost if you are sick of learning "what Simpsons character" your friends are - here's a quick and easy way to make those annoying quizzes disappear from your news feed. Read More

Tapping the Internet – including personal Web searches, news reports, blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites – is fast becoming a way to get a complete, up-to-the-minute view of public health threats, say researchers from the Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHIP) in a Perspectives article published Online First by The New England Journal of Medicine on May 7, 2009. In an accompanying sidebar, they describe the use of HealthMap.org – a freely available Web site that aggregates, categorizes, filters and displays real-time information on emerging infectious diseases – in tracking the current H1N1 swine flu outbreak.


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Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are designed to make keeping in touch with friends and family easy, but as the list of such sites continues to grow, the task of keeping up to date with all that data can quickly lead to information overload. "Lifestreaming" applications designed to simplify the process by aggregating data from multiple sources are now emerging. AOL's Socialthing is the latest lifestreaming app to join the ranks of FriendFeed, Tumblr.com and the recently announced Vine from Microsoft. Read More