How to deal with user privacy on social networks as they grow, mature and become more sophisticated has been a frequent topic of conversation at this year’s SXSW — and not just in researcher Danah Boyd’s keynote address that argued aggregating public information can be a privacy breach, and slammed Google and Facebook for their missteps with users’ expectations.

Is privacy just a technical problem? That’s what Google engineer Brett Slatkin, co-creator of the PubSubHubbub real-time syndication protocol, proposed on a Saturday morning panel. WebFinger, a cross-platform standard that conveys explicit privacy settings from one social network to another, could take care of understanding the relationships between users and the information they want to control, Slatkin said. He added that he felt that the reason users are confused about privacy is because of inconsistency among the social sites they use.

But Microsoft program manager Dare Obasanjo contended that for-profit social web companies’ interests will always be at odds with user privacy, because there’s too much value in harnessing the crowd for things like Twitter’s trending topics and search. He said he felt the industry needs to “clean up [its] act” on privacy, citing Netflix’s cancellation of its second Netflix Prize contest this week due to concerns that the dataset it provided competitors could be matched to its customers.

Obasanjo also argued that approaches like WebFinger might not work because asking users to specify privacy controls introduces friction into their use of your site.

Collecta co-founder Jack Moffitt disagreed with Google’s Slatkin, but for a different reason. “I don’t think the solution is purely technical,” he said. “I don’t think users will understand the repercussions of these decisions.”

Google’s approach to the social web, where it has fallen behind competitors like Facebook, is heavily focused around standards, and Slatkin described things like OStatus, DiSo, Activity Streams and AtomSource as the key to solving all sorts of usability problems, privacy included. But Slatkin is far from the only true believer in standards. Jon Phillips of Status.net, on a later panel that focused on whether tweets can be copyrighted, spoke about how interoperability can help pass along information as to who owns information and where it comes from. Both Slatkin and Phillips said they feel that if information can be properly sourced and transmitted, rather than replicated, it can be better owned by users.

More on SXSW

• SXSW 2010: All You Need to Know, Courtesy of the GigaOM Network Tech Insider
• SXSW: Boyd Calls Out Google and Facebook for Abusing Users’ Privacy Tech Insider
• Foursquare Turns 1 With Half a Million Users Tech Insider
• I Can’t Navigate My Location Friend Requests Tech Insider

Still, companies like Google and Facebook don’t have the luxury of being able to start with a clean slate of user expectations and privacy settings, because they’re evolving to adapt to the enormous growth of online sharing and the increasing influence of social sites on the rest of the web through things like real-time search. Kerfuffles like the ones Boyd highlighted in her keynote are the result of changing what information is private and public after people have come to expect something else.

In yet another discussion at the conference, Flickr head of product Matthew Rothenberg said that his team has had to deal with similar privacy issues concerning displaying publicly when a user has favorited a photo on the site (which has always defaulted images to public). “Our bet is that by enforcing public behavior we’re going to change the nature of what they’re doing,” he said. But “you have to properly educate people as to what you’re doing.”

So privacy, it seems, is indeed a technical problem, but also a cultural problem, an educational problem and a business problem. Not to mention endless conversation fodder.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

How Facebook Should Fix Its Privacy Problem

Here in Austin, I just finished introducing SparkHelp, the project Mashable has decided to support for the Pepsi Refresh SxSW Challenge. We’re competing against two other teams over the next few days to help get our idea $50,000 in funding, which will help make it a reality.

The Project

After lots of great submissions from our readers, we settled on SparkHelp’s simple and timely concept that we think stands to make a huge social impact with the resources of Pepsi and our support.

Here’s how SparkHelp explains their concept:

“SparkHelp’s idea is to encourage local communities to band together with a Foursquare meets Craigslist application. The idea is simple: anyone can place a call for help and anyone can answer that call. Help can be sought for anything: fence repair, car repair, computer work, dog walking, etc.”

With the increasing popularity of location-based apps on smartphones, think about being able to turn on SparkHelp when you have a couple hours free to find a project in your neighborhood – from the simple helping a neighbor in need to helping build a local playground. This makes getting involved simple, timely, and free of any long-term commitment.

We think this vision can be realized with a $50,000 grant from the Pepsi Refresh Project, allowing the team behind SparkHelp – lead by Brian Milner – to build its website as well as the apps for all of the major mobile platforms.

How to Support It

The winner will be chosen based on which project gets the most tweets that include its own unique hashtag. Our hashtag is #RefreshMashable – if you believe in the SparkHelp concept, be sure to include it on all of your tweets until voting ends on Monday, March 15th, at 11:59 CT. You can follow the voting in real-time on the Refresh SXSW Facebook Page.

Also, if you’re at SXSW, your registration bag includes a “VOTE” button with room to write in the project you’re supporting – you can add the #RefreshMashable tag there as well (find me if you need a sharpie!). The SparkHelp team has also setup a Twitter account where you can track progress and activities. Thanks for your support!

Adam and Brian Do Oprah Radio

Brian and I also got a chance to appear on the Derrick Ashong Experience on Oprah Radio earlier today to talk about the project. Here’s a snapshot:

Tags: pepsi refresh, sxsw, sxswi

In order to be fully buzzword compliant, all conference type gatherings in this web 2.0 social media age now have a compulsory twitter tag and live twitter projected display. Oggcamp (which, I would just like to mention, The Open Learning Centre is sponsoring) is no exception to this rule, but being all about Free culture needs to incorporate identi.ca (or status.net) dents alongside the tweets. The best way to do this is to leverage (I have a buzzword for every situation) the existing technology and make Gwibber fit for the purpose of projecting a continuous stream following a hash tag at a conference. The first thing it needs is a full screen mode. I have hacked one in, but it needs a bit of improvement, some more bits really need to be hidden when in presentation mode. The next thing I wanted to do was give each of the various hashtag pipelines (or “hash pipes” as I like to call them) it’s own theme. This bit was tricky as the search query isn’t currently available to the theme engine. I asked the upstream developers for a bit of guidance at this point and within 15 minutes of me explaining what I wanted to do I was given a new patch by segphault that exposes the search query to the theme.

So now I have a nearly finished Oggcamp theme which adapts when it sees you searching for #oggcamp, #ubuntu, #lo, #shotofjaq or #uupc. If I missed out any interesting hashtags then do let me know. Screenshot below is it running fullscreen on my 2048×1152 monitor. In reality it would be tracking two of them on a 1024×768 projector, but this shows all the hash pipe themes together, click to go large.

I will be pushing up a bzr branch of all this so you can play with it in the comfort of your own home or your own conference. If you have further suggestions, or want to help tweak it a bit more, then give me a shout in the comments.

Tell Someone Else!

America’s largest mobile content community FunMobility announces today the launch of FunTweet, a web service which turns any Twitter stream into visual messages that are related to the text. FunTweet allows users to post their tweets, but also makes the most basic tweets inspring, hilarious and fun when the text turns into a matching image. (PRWeb Mar 13, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3720554.htm

Hooray for Hollywood! — the big winner this week in our roundup of the top 10 Twitter trends. From the Oscars to Alice in Wonderland (and of course, Justin Bieber), celebrity — whether be it music or film — dominated the Twitterverse.

The latest data, which comes from our friends at What the Trend, gives us a snapshot of what topics dominated Twitter. Given the topical nature of the list, hashtag memes and games have been excluded.

Tween-favorite Justin Bieber lost his spot at #1 to the Big Show — AKA the Oscars. The 82nd Academy Awards dominated Twitter on Sunday night and was the most discussed topic of the week as a whole. Don’t feel bad for Bieber though: he’s still number two on the list.

Now, who’s hot who not/Tell me who rock who sell out in the stores. Well, that would be B.I.G P-O, P-P-A, also know as the Notorious B.I.G. The legendary Brooklyn rapper, who was murdered 13 years ago this week, was #5 on this week’s list of trends. More than a decade after his tragic death, Biggie continues to be a larger than life figure.

Music continues to be a big topic of discussion on Twitter, with artists like Lady Gaga, Bieber and the Jonas Brothers all appearing on the list. We expect to see Lady Gaga next week too, given the camp-infused epic music video for “Telephone” that was released at the end of the week.

Looking forward, we predict Justin Bieber, the iPad and Twilight: Eclipse to all appear on the chart next week.

You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section as well as read more about this past week’s trends on What The Trend.

Top Twitter Trends for 3/7 – 3/13RankTopicTop Index This WeekChangeDescription#1Oscars 11The Academy Awards, or Oscars, are film awards given annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, California. The 82nd annual show aired in the USA on 3/7/2010. (Subtrends: Oscars, Sandra Bullock, Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker, Avatar, James Cameron, Academy Awards, Kathy Ireland, Red Carpet, Precious, Crazy Heart, Tyler Perry, Best Picture, Jeff Bridges, District 9, Molly Ringwald, Zac Efron, SJP, Best Supporting, Food Inc, Robert Downey Jr, Kristen Stewart, Farrah Fawcett, Mo’Nique, Best Director, George Clooney, Fisher Stevens, Amanda Seyfried, Meryl Streep, Barbara Walters, ABC, Sandy Powell, Tom Ford, Christoph Waltz, Best Documentary, Sarah Jessica Parker, Colin Firth, Penelope Cruz, Tina Fey, Tom Hanks, An Education, Matt Damon, James Taylor, Hattie McDaniel, Chris Pine, Cablevision, NPH, Ryan Bingham, Steve Martin, Congrats Monique, Frog, Sigourney Weaver, Miley’s, Best Animated, Anna Kendrick, Art Direction)
#2Justin Bieber
1Justin Bieber’s new album My World 2.0 comes out on March 23rd & his fans are excited. (Subtrends: Justin Bieber, My World 2, #weadorejustin, #BieberHasMyHeart, QVC, #KingstonFollows, #bieberismyidol, #ripmary, #InLoveWithBieber, Big News, AXns5tC-dgk, Eenie Meenie, #Biebershirtless, RICK, BBC1, Cmon, Let’s Dance, #OMJDByeah, #omgbiebertrue, NcvLuIHIo10)
#3Follow Friday
1Follow Friday is a tradition where people tweet people they believe are fun/interesting to follow (on Fridays).
#4 Alice In Wonderland
22Tim Burton’s eagerly anticipated movie, Alice in Wonderland, opened in cinemas worldwide March 5th and stars Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway. (Subtrends: Alice, Alice in Wonderland)
#5Notorious B.I.G.
1NEWThis week marks the 13th year of the death of the The Notorious B.I.G. The legendary rapper from Brooklyn, NY was murdered tragically 13 years ago on March 9th. (Subtrends: #ripbig, Biggie, Name Ya Top 5 Biggie, Happy BIG Day, Juicy, Christopher Wallace, #Biggie)
#6Lady GaGa
31
Lady Gaga’s new music video with Beyoncé, Telephone, premiered this week. (Subtrends: Lady GaGa, Telephone, Beyonce, #telephonevideo, GQ95z6ywcBY, #TelephoneThursday, Jonathan Ross, GaGa)
#7Jonas Brothers
1
NEW
The Jonas Brother announce a tour with Demi Lovato, discussed sweater colors, joked about the paparrazi, and Nick Jonas continues to act as a spokesman for diabetes. (Subtrends: #JonasAreBack, #JoeEatsFood, #YoureANileyFan, #itsagreysweater, Houston, #NickJonasDay, #WelcomeKevinJ, Everybody)

#8Chuck Norris

2
NEW
Chuck Norris turned 70 years old this week, March 10. As a result, people are tweeting Chuck Norris facts. (Subtrends: Chuck Norris, #iheardchucknorris, #chucknorris)

#9Happy Women’s Day

1
NEW
International day to celebrate the economic, political and social achievements of women. It is celebrated in many different countries around the world on March 8th.

#10Corey Haim

1
NEW
Canadian actor Corey Haim, best remembered for roles in films ‘The Lost Boys’, ‘Lucas’, and ‘License To Drive’, was found dead March 10. It appears to have been a drug overdose. (Subtrends: Actor Corey Haim, Lost Boys, RIP Corey Haim, #RIPCoreyHaim, LAPD, Goonies, North Hollywood, Corey Haim, KNBC, Frank Albarren, Lucas)

Tags: top twitter trends, twitter, What The Trend

Seesmic a de nouveau ajouté de nouvelles fonctionnalités à son client Twitter. Il est dorénavant possible d’ajuster la largeur des colonnes, désactiver les mises à jour d’un utilisateur, obtenir des notifications sonores et afficher la miniature d’une photo et d’une vidéo.

Il s’agit de la deuxième mise à jour importante pour Seesmic Web au cours des dernières semaines. Cette application Web est maintenant assez performante pour être utilisé comme client Twitter principal. L’une des seules fonctionnalités qui manquent, c’est la prise en charge de plusieurs comptes Twitter.

Cette mise à jour vous permet donc de facilement modifier la largeur des colonnes tout simplement en glissant le curseur qui se trouve dans le coin inférieur gauche de la fenêtre. Vous pouvez aussi prévisualiser les photos et vidéos YouTube directement depuis un tweet (message).

Seesmic Web se rapproche de plus en plus d’un Gmail pour Twitter. Et vous, qu’elle est votre opinion sur cette application Web?
Benoit Descary

Lien: Seesmic Web

Networks — be they telecom, social, transportation or otherwise — are the fabric of modern society. They provide immense value to consumers and businesses alike, enhancing mutual relationships and enabling the distribution of goods, services and information. But does this value grow as the size of the networks grow? And if so, how much?

“Metcalfe’s Law” has long been accepted as characterizing the value — and value growth — of fully connected networks. It states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its nodes, which may take the form of devices — such as computers — or users, in which case a network connection is represented by a “friend” or “follower.” But there are times when the “law,” which has been used to explain network effects and justify mergers and acquisitions, appears to overstate a network’s value. And if that’s the case, what can service providers do about it?

While the number of possible connections in a network is indeed proportional to the square of the number of nodes, value is not necessarily equivalent to number. After all, I may have 10 bills in my wallet, but it matters a lot whether they are $1 or $10,000 denominations.

As I’ve previously observed (at Telecosm and via some math (PDF)), there are several reasons that Metcalfe’s Law can overestimate the value of a network. First, typically only a fraction of the possible connections have value. Second, there are natural limits to consumption of that value. And third, the value of the entire network may decline over time.

Convergent Value Distributions

The number of links in a fully connected network is certainly proportional to the square of the number of nodes. If each connection had the same value as any other, then Metcalfe’s Law would be correct. What would that mean in practice? It would mean that you would spend equal time on the phone with each of the nearly 7 billion people in the world, that they would all friend you or follow you, and you would reciprocate. But humans don’t behave that way.

In 1992, anthropologist Robin Dunbar posited that primates have neurobiologically-based limits to the size of their social networks. For humans, “Dunbar’s Number” is 150. This is exemplified by the fact that the most popular social networking site on the planet now has more than 400 million users, yet the average number of “friends” a person has is only 130 and only a small percentage of those “friends” actually communicate with one another. And although there are a variety of ways to slice the data, the largest microblogging site has close to 100 million users but the average number of followers is roughly 126. Even if we were to assume that tweets have the same “value” as intimate face-to-face interactions and that electronic media might expand Dunbar’s number in some way, there is still an upper bound to the number of relationships, or even weak ties, that can be maintained. If the total value of such social media is related to engagement, and engagement is related to the number of friends, such value would in these cases be linearly proportional to the size of the network, rather than the square of its size.

Intrinsic Limits of Consumption

Suppose you did have equal social interest in the nearly 7 billion people on the planet, or the more than 100 million shared video clips or even the more than 100,000 touchscreen phone apps out there. You then would run into intrinsic limits to your ability to benefit from all those relationships or consume all that content. Perhaps in the early days of TV it would have been possible for a single individual to consume all the content produced. Currently, however, nearly a day’s worth of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Assuming that all those clips did have equal value, even a multitasking insomniac couldn’t keep up. All networks have intrinsic upper limits of consumption, be they bandwidth or dollars or time or attention span.

Holistic Network Value Declines

Even if all nodes were of equal value, and there were no limits to consumption, well, people get jaded. Emotional rewards from novel stimuli are processed by dopamine receptors in the striatum, but the brain is designed to habituate, that is, not get so excited by repeated stimuli. What this means is that an entire social or content network may “grab” you at first, or even for a couple of years, but this infatuation may eventually wear off, and you’ll depart in search of the next new thing. Technological progress can also cause the value of the entire network to decay — consider what the web and email have done to the value of fax networks.

Strategies

There are ways to manage these three effects, however.

If the network node values follow a convergent distribution, ensure that whatever value is present can be extracted by reducing or eliminating core bottlenecks and enhancing the process of discovery. Specific approaches such as scalable non-blocking network infrastructure, content delivery networks, tagging, recommendation and search engines can help.

To extract maximum value when there are intrinsic limits of consumption, not only is removing access bottlenecks effective, but so are personalization, richness, context sensitivity and multitasking facilitation.

And to keep a given network exciting and the dopamine system revved up, new features, content or applications can help. Even if the core “network”— whether social site or app store — remains the same, using a platform for new content or apps can continue to trigger the pleasure receptors associated with novelty, maximizing value and engagement.

Overall, the behavior of real-world networks isn’t always as simple as what’s represented by Metcalfe’s Law. However, understanding their underlying characteristics can help users and service providers maximize their value as well as create new business opportunities.

VoxOx's claim on a robust feature set makes it a powerful, if slightly unstable, multi-protocol chat and VoIP client--now with free universal translation for all IMs and tweets.

Nokia‘s a veteran when it comes to mobile phones, but they were a bit late in joining the touchscreen parade, and even more so, launching a capacitive touchscreen of their own. Fortunately, however, they have their first capacitive touchscreen phone, the Nokia X6, out already and have begun rolling it out to different markets across the globe including the Philippines.

The Nokia X6 sports a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen, 5-megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash, WiFi, Bluetooth, TV-out functionality, and 16GB of internal memory. To further sweeten the deal, it’s bundled with a Universal Music voucher which allow buyers to download free copies of Rihanna’s (the celebrity endorser of the X6) songs from her latest album or any other artist for that matter.

It’s a bit pricey though retailing with a SRP of Php22,000.00, but if you’re resourceful enough, I’m sure you can find a reputable seller online offering the Nokia X6 for less than Php20K. Its now available at all Nokia stores and authorized retail outlets nationwide with the option to get it either in black or white/pink combo. Full press release after the break.

Digital Duets: Nokia and Rihanna

They both have sold millions globally and have made a mark in music. Now, these stellar stalwarts have come together for a groundbreaking project, which bridges the gap between the music and digital world.

For the release of her much-anticipated Rated R album, which contains the hits “Russian Roulette” and “Hard”, the Island Def Jam Music Group (IDJMG) and Universal Music Group International (UMGI) partnered with Nokia to bring her music via its latest music device, the Nokia X6. “Nokia is extremely excited to collaborate with a talented and renowned artist like Rihanna to truly redefine the connection between artists and fans and to deliver unique experience and content across the globe,” said Benoit Nalin, General Manager, Nokia Philippines. The move is seen as the latest in the many innovations designed for record labels to adapt to the modern digital lifestyle.

Come get everything Rihanna on the new Nokia X6 touch screen music phone. Get the Pop Diva’s latest hits “Russian Roulette”, “Wait Your Turn” and “Hole in My Head” FREE with the inbox Universal Music voucher. For more Rihanna news, tracks, videos, themes and photos, download the Come Get Rihanna application FREE on Ovi Store.

X marks the spot

The Nokia X6 is spot-on when it comes to providing applications for the fervent multi-tasker who leads an on-the-go lifestyle. What they get is a full blown entertainment experience and complete social entertainment centre. Manage your entertainment & social life directly from the homescreen using your Contacts bar and Media bar. The Contacts bar puts 20 of your friends and your favorite social networking sites directly on your home screen. Keep in touch with your Ovi Contacts — you can chat, share your status, location, and even what song you’re currently listening to through the Nokia X6. You can even tweet about your daily musings, follow your favorite blogs, and create your own social RSS feeds! And since it’s a music phone, you can release your inner DJ and create playlists on the phone—based on moods or even pre-selected songs.

Spend hours challenging yourself and your friends on three pre-installed games – Spore from EA, DJ Mix Tour and Asphalt 4 from Gameloft – and be able to enjoy it in crisp resolution on the Nokia X6’s 3.2” widescreen or plug it on your TV via TV-out cable. With the Ovi Store available in over 180 countries worldwide, you can easily download more games and apps on the Nokia X6.

A 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash tops the list of X-ceptional features of the Nokia X6. Shoot stunning images and wild videos, instantly making you a budding papp or MTV video director.

Get your Nokia X6 at all Nokia Stores and authorized retail shops nationwide at a suggested retail price of PhP22,000. Take your pick from black or white/pink combination.

Whether we like it or not, youth and beauty play a part in how we feel at work.

Last fall, I interviewed Pixar CTO/indie film producer Oren Jacob for a GigaOm Pro piece about using online data in the offline world. At the time, Jacob was considering the idea of putting his latest project, the Spellbound-esque documentary Ready Set Bag!, online in full for free, as a means of figuring out how to target audiences who might subsequently go to theaters to see the film again.

Since then, though, Jacob and his team have revised their strategy considerably, and today, at the Tweet House SXSW event, Jacob announced the launching of a new Blip channel for the purpose of spreading the word about Ready Set Bag!, enlisting an eclectic yet well-known team to create content about the film, including Auto-Tune the News creators the Gregory Brothers, mash-up artist Mike Relm, animation studio Jib-Jab and Pop17 founder Sarah Austin.

Ready Set Bag! tracks a large ensemble cast of grocery baggers training to win the title of Best Bagger in America at a national competition held every year in Vegas. Jacob is currently in process of negotiating a deal with a to-be-named distribution company and is aiming for a summertime release in 35-40 cities (to date, the movie played at film festivals and individual theaters, mostly in northern California).

Because the film was a documentary, there’s hours of footage directors Alex D. da Silva and Justine Jacob had to leave on the cutting room floor — and it’s that, plus the existing film, which will be made available to the Gregory Brothers, Relm, Austin and anyone else who wants to get involved with the channel, which launched today with the film’s trailer.

Each will experiment with the existing content in their own way — for example, JibJab will use animation techniques similar to their other photo-based series to introduce audiences to the film’s cast of intrepid grocery baggers. (If you need help guessing what the guys behind Auto-Tune the News might do, then I feel sorry for you.) In addition, excised storylines and deeper character pieces will be uploaded as well, giving audiences a broader look at the world of the film.

In order to get his starting line-up of channel contributors, Jacob relied on both old-school and new media networking, which included approaching Michael Gregory in the men’s room after seeing him speak at NewTeeVee Live last November. But with the channel’s launch, anyone will be allowed to submit ideas for their own remixes, spoofs or other contributions directly to Jacob, who called it “a wide-open casting call” when we spoke via phone.

Those involved committed for a number of reasons, ranging from altruistic — all ad revenue from the online content will be donated to food banks around the country — to more nerdy — Jacob showed them the film, and they liked it. Having been provided with a DVD of the film as well, I get why so many have gotten on board. Ready Set Bag! is an extremely kind, human story, and you also learn a lot about the challenges of grocery bagging — which might not seem super-exciting to you, but that’s just because you’ve never seen it done right. The challenge for a film like this is, of course, getting seen, but Ready Set Bag! might just be able to bring the eyeballs in.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): New Use For Web Stats: Finding Hot Markets, Offline

Twitter turned on its geolocation feature Thursday allowing you to tell share your location when you tweet.

Real-tme feed publishing startup Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service.

"If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets and we'll just push that through," he said. "If you don't do that but you Tweet about Austin, we will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML." In other words, developers building apps on top of Superfeedr's real-time feeds will now know programmatically what geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature? Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL.

Sponsor

Genestoux says he is using a number of 3rd party services to extract this data, including the Yahoo Placemaker API. Along with this location data, the service also offers automatic language identification and is working on entity extraction and sentiment analysis.

The prospect of subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL is an exciting one, though Genestoux says he's just beginning to develop it. Could that facilitate a location data stream that crosses and goes beyond the siloed location based social networks so widely discussed these days? We suspect that it could.

Superfeedr could be described as "FeedBurner 2.0" - for a more real-time and meta-data savvy web. The company was funded this Fall by real-time incubator Betaworks and media mogul Mark Cuban. Betaworks announced today that it has raised $20 million more to build out its portfolio of companies like Superfeedr, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Tumblr and more.

Discuss

Filed under: Finance, Freeware, Social Software

Stock traders are among the many groups of people who have taken up Twitter as a way to discuss their interests. They've even developed their own shorthand; a stock symbol is typically prefaced with a dollar sign, such as $MSFT, and tweets that discuss stocks often end with two dollar signs.

Stock Tweet App has taken these conventions and used them to build a custom interface for viewing Twitter with a scrolling live stream of all stock-related tweets. Alternatively, you can use the Custom Stock List option to type in the symbol for a few stocks you're interested in tracking, and only tweets concerning those stocks will be shown.

We've previously covered StockTwits in this space, and while they cover the same ground functionally, the styles of the two sites are very different. Of the two, I prefer Stock Tweet App, but there's a sneak peek of a new beta version of StockTwits available which is worth checking out.

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Stock Tweet App makes tracking Twitter stock discussions easy originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter - StockTwits - Download Squad - Stock - Online Communities

Well if you’ve never heard about Twiangulate, you’ve definitely missed something, Twitter success is not to be proven anymore with its +50 millions users that broke the 10 billions tweets posted gap a few days ago. But the ransom of such success is how to be able to find out new awesome and amazing people to follow? It’s [...]

We’ve written about FunMobility’s nifty picture messaging app for the iPhone and Android, called FunMail, that allows users to blasts their text into the application, which then breaks down whatever the user typed for context and places fun graphics with your original text. Now, FunMobility has caught the Twitter bug and is launching FunTweet, a web service which turns any Twitter stream into visual messages that are related to the text.

Similar to FunMail, FunTweet will turn text in Tweets into a matching image. On FunTweet’s site, you sign in with your Twitter credentials and the service will draw your Tweets from your Twitter homepage feed and display each tweet as a FunMail image on FunTweet. Users can also enter a @UserName, a HashTag or a Subject as well to the images. If you like the image FunTweet picked, you can publish the Tweet to your Twitter account. If you don’t like the image, click “Try Again” and you can choose from other images. For example, if you tweet about writing a story or reading a book, then FunTweet will come up with images that match “story” – a book, a magazine, a typewriter, or a pen.

FunMobility is hoping FunTweet can be a display tool for parties, conferences and other gatherings where live stream messages may be projected. I find myself wishing I could include my own pictures into my FunTweets so I’m hoping the site will soon include that functionality.

FunMail for the iPhone has gained a bit of traction in a short amount of time with 100,000 downloads since its launch in November. So FunTweet could gain a loyal following a fun tool to spice up Tweets. TwitSig and SayTweet also allow you to make images from Tweets.

CrunchBase InformationFunMobilityInformation provided by CrunchBase

If you take just a couple of minutes to think about it, matching Twitter with the stock market is a combination that seems almost preordained. It equals coupling an entity that changes by the second with a tool that can communicate information instantly, and the information in question is always valuable. That is, a tweet that reports on a stock market movement is never going to be redundant like a tweet sent out by Jack to let the world and his wife know that he has finished eating a delicious hot dog in Central Park.

Read more

Learn more about StockTweetApp.com in Dataopedia.com

Find out how much StockTweetApp.com is worth with Stimator.com

If you've been paying attention to the official GDC Twitter feed over the past few days, you will have noticed a couple of intriguing, if out of place messages.

The first one, posted on Wednesday, simply said: 'Non semper ea sunt quae videntur'. Those looking around on the Internet will have noticed a WikiQuote page sourcing the quote to 'Phaedrus'. Apparently, he was "a Roman fabulist, by birth a Macedonian and lived in the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius and Claudius."

The English translation of that Latin quote is 'Things are not always what they seem', and if you've been following other Twitter discussion of Game Developers Conference, you'll know that writer/designer Ian Bogost recently Tweeted: "Does anyone know, what is this GDC talk with no description: "Metaphysics of Games" by "Phaedrus"? Lurid."

And indeed, a new Official GDC Tweet directs interested parties to a previously programmed talk scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday at 3pm, in Room 134 of North Hall at the Moscone - the last talk slot of the entire event.

It's called 'Metaphysics of Game Design', it's by 'Phaedrus', and that's all the info we've got. There's some other Twitter rumblings about whether the Roman fabulist is back from 2000 years of exile. Or whether it might be something or someone else entirely. Guess there's only one way to find out...

Turns out, March Madness isn’t the only major sporting event starting this weekend: Cricket fans all over the world have been feverishly awaiting today’s start of the Indian Premiere League Cricket Season. In fact, the first game is already underway while I’m writing this story, with the Deccan Chargers facing off against the Kolkata Knight Riders, and the audience is going crazy on Twitter, posting tweets faster than a Cricket fan’s heartbeat.

So where do you turn to watch the Indian Premiere League Cricket Season? No, not ESPN or Fox Sports. U.S. broadcasters tend to ignore the event, but cricket fans can turn to YouTube instead, where the complete season — with all of its 60 matches will be broadcasted in real time almost all over the world. Missed a match? No worries, the IPL’s YouTube channel will also offer past games on demand.

The Indian Premiere Leage has only been around for three seasons, but it’s already been called “the world’s hottest sports league” by Forbes. The 2008 semifinals and final were watched by 62 million TV viewers in India, which comes to about eleven percent of the country’s cable audience. YouTube signed a deal with the league in January, which marks the first time the site was able to secure the online rights for a sports event of this scale.

YouTube will broadcast the Indian Premiere League games worldwide in real time, with one big exception: U.S. viewers will get to see the games 15 minutes after they have ended. That may be a concession to conflicting pay TV rights, but it should actually help many of us to follow the league: Today’s game between the Deccan Chargers and the Kolkata Knight Riders started at 8pm local time in Mumbai, which is 6.30am PST, and some games will go underway even earlier. Cricket fans can find the complete schedule for the season here.

Related GigaOm Pro content: Are You Ready for the TV Widget Revolution? (subscription required)

It’s Apple iPad day, and every early adopter worth their salt is pre-ordering one of the soon to be ubiquitous little devices and counting the days until they get their hands on it on April 3. You’ve been waiting on this thing since December 2008, after all.

We know you’ve already bought two for yourselves, the limit, because that’s how TechCrunch readers roll. We know this because we’ve told our advertisers that every single one of our 9.2 million monthly readers is a high disposable income influencer in technology and media that just loves to try out new things that they see advertised on TechCrunch. And since those advertisers believe us, we have the means to buy an extra iPad and give it to you. Even though you’ll then have three of them. Because you, dear reader, are a high disposable income influencer.

Anyhow back to the iPad. This isn’ the 3G version, which comes later in April. This is the 16GB Wifi iPad, a $499 retail device, that we’ll give away to one lucky reader chosen at random who comments below or retweets this post. Just do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. The contest ends at noon California time on Saturday. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages (our Nexus One winner lives in Romania). And we’ll throw in a TechCrunch tshirt.

CrunchBase InformationiPadInformation provided by CrunchBase

A Japanese website called Ameba Now is one of the first signs of micro-blogging website Twitter’s vulnerability to competition. The rival has reached 1m visitors in the three months since its launch

If Hideo Kojima's Twitter feed has you looking for more high-profile Japanese game designers to follow, two other notable figures joined the microblogging service last week: Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami and Grasshopper Manufacture CEO/No More Heroes director Goichi "Suda51" Suda.

Unlike with Kojima's feed, however, Mikami and Suda51 don't have a team of translating their tweets into English text. Suda51 has at least put up some machine translated updates: "With Babel Fish in the midst of translation. As for me natural bone three day monk. twitter third day and thrust. Tomorrow is climax."

Mikami's tweets, though, are all in Japanese, which is a shame as there are some curious updates in there, according to Andriasang's translations: "Actually, this month I started a new company," and "I'm eating ice cream."

If you chose to tweet with a place, but not to share your exact coordinates, Twitter still needs to use your coordinates to determine your Place. In order to improve the accuracy of our geolocation systems (for example, the way we define neighborhoods and places), Twitter will temporarily store those coordinates for 6 months. Because how could anything go wrong if there's a database containing 6 months of my precise locations stored on the Internet even when I've chosen not to share my precise location? This and more in today's Four Short Links.

A few days ago, we spotted Twitter’s initial roll out of a geolocation feature on its Website. It appeared that Twitter was testing the feature because it quickly turned it off. Last night, the feature went back on, and Twitter co-founder and CEO Biz Stone officially announced it.

While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, this is the first time Twitter has enabled geolocation on its site. To start Tweeting with your location attached, you need to enable the feature in your Twitter Account Settings. Once you’ve opted-in, you will be able to add your location information to all your Tweets or choose to add them to individual Tweets as you compose them. You can choose to share your exact location (your coordinates) or your neighborhood or town.

Currently, the feature only works with Firefox 3.5 and Chrome for Windows. If you decide you want to send a Tweet without your location, you can simply click the “x” next to your location to disable it. Interestingly, if you Tweet with your geolocation on Twitter, the location doesn’t seem to show up in TweetDeck, Seesmic or presumably other third-party clients. And It doesn’t work from Twitter’s mobile site, at least not on the iPhone, where it would make more sense.

As we wrote in our earlier coverage, the timing of this move by Twitter is purposeful. With the SXSW conference in Austin starting today, the location wars are heating up. Earlier in the week, the New York Times reported that Facebook would unveil its answer to location next month at its f8 conference. Google, meanwhile, is in the game with Latitude and to some extent Buzz (but could have been in it a lot more). And of course, Foursquare, Gowalla and a host of other location-based apps are rolling out additional functionality. As we previously noted, many of these apps use Twitter’s geolocation API to pass the data back to Twitter, so it makes sense that this would be a good time to turn the functionality on for the website.

CrunchBase InformationTwitterInformation provided by CrunchBase

It's interesting to look at trending topics on Twitter to see what's new and has captured public interest but Twitter is a big place with millions of tweets flying around. Trendsmap drills down through the data to see local trends. More »

It's interesting to look at trending topics on Twitter to see what's new and has captured public interest but Twitter is a big place with millions of tweets flying around. Trendsmap drills down through the data to see local trends. More »

[SXSW] J'ai vu Sobees pour la première fois à DEMO 09, c'est un aggrégateur de réseaux de sites sociaux qui a l'air pas mal du tout quand j'ai vu la démo. Il offrait un modèle de monétisation via le sponsor des marques. Aujourd'hui, la firme a lancé Sobees pour SXW et MIX10: les applications Sobees évènement regroupe le stream photo Flickr, Google news, recherche Twitter en temps réel, le RSS feed officiel depuis l'évènement, les messages Twitter officiels depuis l'évènement, vos comptes Twitter et Facebook personnels. Sobees est en partenariat avec Salsadev.com pour fournir des mots de passe à chaque conférence, vous permettant d'affiner les recherches et trouver les news, les photos et les tweets relatifs aux sujets tendances pour SXSW et MIX10.

Vous pouvez essayer les applications ici (Silverlight 3 fonctionnent sur Macs et PCs pour la plupart des navigateurs):

• http://sxsw.sobees.com<
• http://mix10.sobees.com

Permalink: Sobees pour SXSW et MIX10 d'Ubergizmo FR. Aussi en Anglais

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams believes social networks will be the fundamental way the public communicates with government.

Maybe Thomson Reuters was feeling nostalgic about the flurry of negative attention that both the New York Times and the Washington Post got last year when they came out with policies on the use of social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook. For whatever reason, the wire service recently issued new guidelines for its staff, and they suffer from many of the same problems that both the NYT and WaPo policies did. All of these flaws boil down to one thing: A desire to control something that fundamentally can’t be controlled, and a fear of what happens when that control is lost. Without even bothering to enumerate the positive aspects of social-media use, the policy starts in with the warnings right away:

We want to encourage you to use social media approaches in your journalism but we also need to make sure that you are fully aware of the risks — especially those that threaten our hard-earned reputation for independence and freedom from bias or our brand.

The risks, of course, are everywhere — someone might say something embarrassing, or post a tweet that others could twist to disparage Reuters:

The advent of social media does not change your relationship with the company that employs you — do not use social media to embarrass or disparage Thomson Reuters. Our company’s brands are important; so, too, is your personal brand. Think carefully about how what you do reflects upon you as a professional and upon us as an employer of professionals.

The overwhelming message is that, while social media is great and useful for many things (although none of those things are ever mentioned), it is a minefield of potential dangers and even a potential threat to the company’s traditional media business:

We’re in a competitive business and while the spirit of social media is collaborative we need to take care not to undermine the commercial basis of our company.

The policy says that “where practical, you should ask someone to check content of Twitter posts,” even as it admits that this is frequently impossible, and warns that supervisors will be monitoring those tweets to see if they cross any lines. It even says that “when using Twitter or social media in a professional capacity, you should aim to be personable but not to include irrelevant material about your personal life.” Why not? No reason is given, but the obvious implication is that it’s “unprofessional” or might “damage the brand.”

I happen to think the opposite is true (within reason, of course). I enjoy it when journalists I know — like Reuters reporter @bobbymacreports, for example — post things that indicate they are human beings. And I don’t think any less of a media brand when one of its employees posts something that turns out not to be true, because I know that they are doing their best, and will correct what needs to be corrected.

More on Social Networks

• I Can’t Navigate My Location Friend Requests Tech Insider
• Facebook Search Queries Jump 10% in February Tech Insider
• Google, Facebook Sued Over Mobile Sign-up Patent Tech Insider
• Get Satisfaction Now Customer Support Tool for Brands Using Facebook, Google Tech Insider

Right at the end of the new policy, Reuters says something that cuts to the heart of all the difficulties with social-media guidelines. The policy baldly states: “Don’t scoop the wire.” So I mentioned on Twitter that Reuters’ own editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger, did exactly that himself when he was Twittering from Davos last year and posting about a number of newsworthy events. Schlesinger then responded that “some stuff belongs on the wire first. some stuff belongs on tweets. some stuff you can’t always tell immediately.”

That phrase could just as easily be applied to all of the other potential negative outcomes that Reuters is trying to avoid with its policy. Some things are bad to say on Twitter, and some things are not — and some stuff you can’t always tell immediately. Obviously, you probably shouldn’t chew out a source publicly on Twitter using abusive language. But that’s a little like putting a warning sign on a chainsaw saying “Do not stop chain with hand.” If your employees need to be told that kind of thing, they are probably too stupid to be on your payroll and should be sent to work for your competitors instead.

If you trust your writers and editors, whom you presumably hired and continue to employ because they are smart and capable, then let them use social media for what it was meant for: engaging with readers in as many ways as possible. Don’t get consumed with fear about a loss of control over them — embrace it.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Why NewNet Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user LunaDiRimmel.

The rumor at SXSW is that attendance for Interactive badges is up by 40% from last year, which is pretty amazing when you consider that the 2009 attendance was 10,741. So the amount of people decending on Austin, TX to see the next Twitter or Foursquare make an appearance is around 15,000. It’s crazy to think that Foursquare just debuted last year and now it is the most talked about product so far at this year’s event (granted, things are just getting started.) Speaking of Foursquare, we’ll be covering their SXSW news, as well as that of what we consider to be their main competitor, Gowalla, in the next few days.

It also looks like some of the big names we’ve seen in the past are back in 2010 to take part in the festivities. I saw that Pepsi, Microsoft and Aol were still building their booths this morning.

Braden Young is covering SxSW 2010 for Gear Live. You can follow him on Twitter at @bradeny. Hit him with a tweet if there are any events or sessions you’d like him to hit up and cover!

Tags: austin texas, foursquare, gowalla, sxsw, sxsw 2010, sxsw interactive, sxswi,

SxSW 2010: Austin is now the Thunderdome originally appeared on Gear Live on Fri, March 12, 2010 - 12:36:32