Tag: ANALYSIS

What do you get when you take a gaggle of enthusiastic, early-adopting online marketers and introduce them to one of the world's largest directories of job-seeking college students? We're about to find out, now that Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed. The move should mean improved versions of the real-time status and conversation features that Facebook was already moving toward, but that's not all ...

Twitter, when used correctly, is the ultimate meritocracy. You can freely follow anyone you want, and just as freely unfollow them. For most users this means following people whose tweets they perceive they are gaining value from, and not following people who waste their time. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, particularly when it comes to so many of the self-professed "Social Media ...

Something feels a little wrong about having to rely on a company that defines itself as a social media analyst to discover fully 15% of the Twitter users that follow more than 2,000 accounts on the social network identify themselves as "social media marketers." that of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people compared to 0.3% of total Twitter users ...

I keep seeing a sensational story from Mashable flash across my radars today: "Bing Now Bigger Than Digg, Twitter and CNN." Golly, I guess millions in TV advertising really can make you win in this crazy marketplace, huh? Not so fast, bucko. Google isn't going anywhere, and digg, Twitter and CNN folks are likely not sweating this any more than I am. Why? First of all, let's consider the source. ...

Open-source software is everywhere, and developers use it to speed up their development on a regular basis. This is as it should be, for the most part, assuming the developers follow the licensing for whatever open-source software (OSS) they use. Along with licensing, the open-source community is, probably rightly so, very focused on attributing credit correctly. Considering that most OSS ...

We've looked at ways to visualize your disk usage before with apps like WinDirStat, JDiskReport and Xinorbis. Space Sniffer offers the same functionality with a little bit of a twist. Files and folders are displayed as boxes of various sizes which correspond to the file size. The color scheme is customizable, and Space Sniffer features subtle transition and hover effects. That doesn't make it ...

The latest version of Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle 2, has been attracting plenty of positive attention for its slimline form, style and functionality but has also drawn criticism from an unexpected quarter - from Authors Guild President and humorist, Roy Blount Jr, who isn't amused about the Kindle's new text to speech functionality. The Kindle 2 has a function that allows published works ...

If you're not familiar with it, the HeliOS project is an effort to get computers into the hands of kids who might not otherwise be able to afford them. To date this year, they've distributed over 300 machines. Apparently that's not enough to keep them from making an enemy. A middle school teacher named Karen observed one of her students demonstrating the abilities of his Linux-powered laptop to ...

I just can't take it any more. I don't understand how people actually use their computers like this, but they do. Just take a look at Kaspersky's figures for August 2008. I look after a lot of computers for friends and family, and a dozen machines at work - and none are infected. Then again, all of them are well-protected and used responsibly. Now, it's not my intent that anyone actually follow ...

I've decided once and for all that I'm going to make a serious effort to make Linux my primary operating system. Am I dissatisfied with Windows? No. In fact, I'm quite happy with it. It's just time for a change, that's all. This isn't my first attempt to switch. I've made several others before with various distros: Ubuntu, Mint, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, Fedora, Slax...There's always been something ...

Considering the Google brand in the popular vernacular and the launch of Chrome, I went to web marketing poster boy Seth Godin to get his perspective. Seth wasn't particularly loquacious (no doubt he's a bit busy) but here's the conversation: Me: Would you be willing to take about 10 minutes to talk to us about your take on Google Chrome? While the tech is neat and pretty and awesome, I think ...

Like most of the rest of the Internet, I jumped on the Google Chrome download as soon as it went live. So far, I'm not really blown away. Maybe I need to use it for more than a couple of hours. Maybe the blogosphere hype machine pushed my expectations to the point of being unrealistic. Sure, Chrome looks nice. It does render some pages a hair faster than Firefox - for example, Google Docs, ...

On Sunday we watched a short segment on CBS Sunday Morning about Google. The company, 10 years old this month, represents the best of what came out of the dot-com bubble in the 90's. Today they are madly profitable, focused on their core services and yet, still crazy after all these years. Massages, naps and gourmet food? Why, that's the kind of hubris that brought down dozens of companies in ...

OK, I'll admit I own an iPhone. Thing is, I refuse to pay AT&T's completely ridiculous rates. Why are iPhone data packets at a premium, exactly? Anyway, I use the thing as more of a PDA, and I like the mic, speakers and camera. Sure, my Palm has two of those, but that camera is great for sending shots while on the go (and within a wifi hotspot). If I had the dough I'd get a Nokia N95, however. ...

While you're busy flicking and pinching and shaking your iPhone, watching apps crash and getting a white screen of death, I've been busy editing Office docs and playing Insaniquarium. What, you can't do that on your precious touch-screen of joy? Pity. And yes, Palm OS 5.whatever, aka "Garnet" is pretty old. So what? Let's change the name to "Helen Mirren." See? Infinitely sexier. I wrote about my ...