Social Networks have been around since the inception of bulleting board systems in the mid 1980s, and each one of them seems, for a time at least, to be the radical new paradigm that establishes how people will interact with one another over the web. Certainly, this seems to be the case to those investors (whether individual or corporate) who pay surprisingly stiff premiums in order to be a part of the next big wave, yet in truth social networking sites have a surprisingly consistent "life-cycle" that seems to play out regardless of the "angle" that the sites have.
The global slowdown is beginning to take its toll on more exposed hardware and consulting companies. On Friday, July 10, Sun began sending out pink slips to more than 1000 employees, primarily in the marketing and sales areas as part...
Why are these people so scared of openness? This may seem a strange and provocative thing to say. Surely ODF is the open technology and OOXML is the proprietary technology? Surely we know this because "ISO" is the organization which is just the puppet of MicroSoft while OASIS is a bastion of community openness!
There has been an on again off again discussion behind the scenes at Radar about the nature of the enterprise vs. the web and how they are defined not just by their technologies, but by their frames of reference. For my part, I think the enterprise view is defined implicitly by a planning mindset and a perceived scope of control that ends at the enterprise boundary. Whereas the web is too large for effective control so it tends to be an environment more conducive to serendipity and emergent behaviors. The web and the enterprise also differ in obvious cultural ways. Web culture tends toward speed and "good enough" while enterprise culture is informed by enterprise concerns...
Behind the competing technologies for Internet application development--which impinge directly on the plans of Internet providers and dot-com businesses--lie some basic problems with Internet standards and protocols. Each technical problem is also a metaphor for difficulties in the way people interact, both online and off-line: we don't know how to handle many-to-many connections, we don't know what will happen next in time, and it's hard to split tasks between systems.
DNS is the fundamental human-friendly abstraction of the Internet. It maps
names such as oreilly.com to addresses computers can understand. Yet there
are flaws in the protocol, which mean that malicious users can redirect your
request for oreilly.com for their own nefarious purposes. Security
researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered this danger and convinced the major DNS
providers to work around the flaw. Here's how you can protect yourself and
your information.
Flock 2.0 (http://www.flock.com) is a comparatively new browser, based upon Mozilla Firefox, that was designed from the ground up as a Social Networking "application". Designed to cover the major domains within that field - blogging, media manipulation, search, syndication and social community interaction - Flock represents a novel approach of using the browser in a dedicated fashion as both the vehicle and the gateway for devotees of social networking services.
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