Link Post for May 8th through May 10th

This is the A2SM Link Post for May 8th through May 10th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • Skype to Introduce Ads? – As Skype prepares to roll out five-way video calling this week — an addition the company plans to charge for at a later date — it’s also thinking of monetizing the now free user-to-user web calling serving with advertisements.
  • WordPress 3.0: The 5 Most Important New Features – WordPress has long been known as a dedicated blogging platform, giving users the tools they need to publish their message and interact with readers. However, with the official release of version 3.0, set to drop this month, the platform will be much closer, if not well within the territory of a content management system (CMS).
  • Twitter Bug Lets You Control Who Follows You – Twitter has an embarrassing bug on its hands – one that allows users to make anyone follow them. Mashable reader Ozan Yılmaz emailed us the details this morning, writing “[tweet] accept [username]” then the [username] immediately starts following you.”
  • Facebook Roundup: Privacy Visualization, Topix, Unlikes, Parature and Oil – Visualizing Facebook’s Move Towards Openness — Whatever you think about Facebook’s relentless efforts to make its service more open and central to the web — and sneakily destroy user privacy, as some see it — you should be sure to check out this infographic of the company’s changes. Created by user interface developer Matt McKeon, it shows concentric circles of privacy, from your friends to the entire internet, segmented by feature type.
  • Facebook Looks for More DC Legal Help – Facebook’s most recent privacy-related changes have brought it new scrutiny from privacy groups, attorneys general and even some members of Congress. So the company has brought in a top anti-trust lawyer named Timothy Muris to help defend it to the federal government, according to the Financial Times.
  • Facebook Game Usage Drops Greatly Due to Notification Changes – Facebook has undergone a number of changes this year, but the one that's had the most serious effect on the gaming side of Facebook was the implementation of restrictions on notifications. Those notifications served as a major way of drawing people back into whatever game sent it; a user would go online to see if they had any messages and end up playing a game because of a notification that said their friend had fertilized their crops in FarmVille or gotten a better high score in Bejeweled Blitz. With those notifications banished from Facebook, quite a few games have seen significant drops in usage — 18 of the top 25 games (based upon monthly active users) lost users last month compared to the month prior, with 12 of those games losing at least 1 million users.
  • Visual Guide To Facebook’s Privacy Changes Over Time (PICTURES) – Facebook has been continually revamping its privacy policies, with the general trend being towards encouraging users to share more about themselves with more people.

Link Post for April 16th through April 18th

This is the A2SM Link Post for April 16th through April 18th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed.

  • 12 Chatroulette Clones You Should Try – Chatroulette has been giving journalists reporting fodder for slow news days for a few months now — enough time, apparently, to spawn a number of clones.
  • 5 Tips for Creating the Perfect Profile Pic – No matter how much quality information or witty repartee we send out into our social networks, first impressions are almost always visual. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the first thing we see when checking out a new Twitter (Twitter) follower, Facebook (Facebook) friend, or LinkedIn (LinkedIn) connection is a profile photo. And in a world of quick clicks and divergent attention, if the photo you present isn’t eye-catching, or illustrative of your personal brand, you may miss your shot at making a positive first impression.
  • HOW TO: Maximize Your Content’s Reach on the Social Web – We have all heard that “content is king” — Sumner Redstone deemed it so, then Rupert Murdoch upped the ante, calling it “emperor.” But how do we make sure content is delivered to the right places, at the right times? How can we measure the effectiveness of this content and its distribution?
  • Spam Suspect Uses Google Docs; FBI Happy | Threat Level | Wired.com – FBI agents targeting alleged criminal spammers last year obtained a trove of incriminating documents from a suspect’s Google Docs account, in what appears to be the first publicly acknowledged search warrant benefiting from a suspect’s reliance on cloud computing.
  • Study: Young adults do care about online privacy – Yahoo! News – But it's not quite true, a new study finds. Despite mounds of anecdotes about college students sharing booze-chugging party photos, posting raunchy messages and badmouthing potential employers online, young adults generally care as much about privacy as older Americans.
  • DOJ abandons warrantless attempt to read Yahoo e-mail | Politics and Law – CNET News – The U.S. Justice Department has abruptly abandoned what had become a high-profile court fight to read Yahoo users' e-mail messages without obtaining a search warrant first. (via Matt Cutts)
  • Good Enough For A Pulitzer, But Not Good Enough For Apple | Techdirt – Just as online content only begins to get some recognition as being Pulitzer worthy, it looks like those content creators still have a major hurdle to overcome: namely, Apple's incredibly screwed up application approval process. Cartoonist Mark Fiore made Internet and journalism history this week as the first online-only journalist to win a Pulitzer prize for his work over at the San Francisco Chronicle. Much more difficult? Getting his iPhone cartoon application past Apple's application store guardians. Fiore says his application was rejected last December because, as an Apple letter phrased it, his satirical cartoons "ridicule public figures," a violation of Apple's iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.

Link Post for March 29th

This is the A2SM Link Post for March 29th. To see more of the bookmarks we’ve found, check out our Delicious Feed

  • How Facebook May Save Elevation Partners – Things are not going great at Elevation Partners. Its initial $1.8 billion fund – that was met with great fanfare when it was raised by rockstar investor Roger McNamee, rockstar gaming executive John Riccitiello and actual rockstar Bono – is about 70% invested and the two biggest deals are duds. Elevation invested some $300 million in Forbes and a whopping $460 million in Palm—a company with a stock hovering around $4 per share, down some 75% since October.
  • Google Buzz Getting Smoked In The Sharing Race By A Dead Man – I’m reminded of this while looking over the traffic logs for TechCrunch, because it appears that someone else is losing to a dead rival: Google Buzz. According to our data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better, and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town.
  • Hulu Versus TV Everywhere: What Happens After The Comcast-NBC Merger Is Complete? – The pending $30 billion merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal is going to complicate things for Hulu, the second most popular online video site after YouTube. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, News Corp/Fox, and (since last year) Disney/ABC. It was created by the TV networks as a counterweight to YouTube, a safe place where they could run their full-length TV shows online with their own ads.
  • Don’t share anything important or of value via Linkedin … they will own it! « scalability.org
  • The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators – I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.
  • 10 Must-See Google Street View Sightings – While we brought you 15 amusing Google Street View sightings when the service launched back in 2007, in the last few years Google has expanded its coverage around the globe, which also means expanding the chances of humorous photo captures.

Link Post for January 9th through January 11th

This is the A2SM Link Post for January 9th through January 11th:

Link Post for December 6th

This is the A2SM Link Post for December 6th:

  • Web Community Photoshops a Happy Memory [PICS] – A Reddit Member’s mother died. The community comes together to help him out with a lasting memory.
  • Appvent Calendar: Free iPhone Game Every Day Till Christmas – Last week, we wrote about 24ways, an advent calendar for web geeks. Today we’ve found another cool advent calendar, this time aimed at iPhone app fans. iPhone developer Blacksmith Games is presenting the Appvent Calendar!
  • 10 iPhone Apps to Help You Survive the Holidays -
  • We know it’s not Photoshopped: Wrecking ball smashed van in New York City – but is it real? – Shiny Objects – Time to play “Guess the authenticity!” the latest soon-to-be viral video shows a van getting housed on a New York City corner. It wanders seemingly accidentally through a construction zone to meet the business end of a wrecking ball (can a ball have an end?).
  • Car Flipped By Wrecking Ball, Real or Fake? [Viral Videos] – A recent video on YouTube, which shows a car hit by a large wrecking ball, is fast approaching viral status on the site.
  • Ron Livingston Sues Wikipedia Detractor for Saying He’s Gay – Search Google for Ron Livingston, the man of Office Space (and Sex and the City) fame, and you’ll find IMDB links for information on his acting career. You’ll also come across a Wikipedia page on the movie and TV star, with inaccurate details on his personal life. And that’s the problem.Since May, Livingston has continually fallen victim to an anonymous Wikipedia (Wikipedia) detractor who continually edits the entry to read that the actor is in a gay relationship.
  • How To Find Those Red Balloons – This morning DARPA launched ten red balloons across the U.S. in a Network Challenge to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet. The first team to correctly locate all ten balloons will win a $40,000 prize.
  • TC50 DemoPit Startup LIFEmee Lets You Record And Share Your Entire Life Online – LIFEmee allows you to store, manage and share all significant aspects and events of your life: Your daily health condition, relationships, jobs, schools, possessions, hobbies, family members, pictures, notes etc. etc. The main idea is to give users a platform for organizing their lives online by collecting and structuring this kind of information for lifetime use. Users can not only review all data they fed into their “lifestream” (all data aligned along a time line) in retrospect but also lay out their plans for the future. The information can be shared or kept strictly private.
  • Favrd Shuts Down – Not Twitter’s Last Laugh (Thank you, Textism) – Favrd, a site which aggregated the most popular starred tweets, has closed down. The site was a favorite of Twitter humorists, people who use Twitter mainly to express their wit. Favrd was the first of its kind to repurpose Twitter favorites (stars) into an aggregation site, where users could see who had “faved” their tweets, view tweets with 3 or more faves as a real-time feed, and check the most faved tweets in a 24-hour period on the Leaderboard. It was kind of like the Techmeme of funny tweets.
  • Getting it right and getting it wrong with the new media – The internet (the blogosphere to be precise) is still a bit of a mystery to many in tech and entertainment. It’s weird to think that companies whose job it is to reach tech-savvy consumers aren’t using this tool correctly, but it’s also no secret that the biggest and most influential companies are often the slowest to adapt. At any rate, they’re learning, but some are learning faster than others. Here I chronicle just a few standout cases.