Clint Boulton

There is a somewhat interesting piece in the New York Times today that doesn’t dwell on Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, Android, OpenSocial or the pending 700MHz wireless spectrum auction. The story details an online prediction market Googlers are running and a study done by some economists on patterns regarding this fun gambling. Apparently, almost 1,500 […]

As expected, Wikia Jan. 7 is launching Wikia Search, a socially driven, open-source alternative to top-line search engines from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Wikia Search, forged from the floundering Grub distributed search project Wikia bought from LookSmart July 27, lets users filter sites and rank search results, and lets them see how the search results […]

Yahoo on Jan. 7 used the Consumer Electronics Show as the stage to launch a mobile software developer platform, its new mobile service platform for consumers and a redesigned home page for its Web site for mobile device users. Just as Facebook’s open development platform was created to help programmers write applications for social network […]

What bigger way to kick off a new year than by announcing that you are creating an open-source, socially driven alternative to search engines from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft? Apparently, that’s what Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales had it mind with Wikia Search, a new platform the Wikipedia creator launched Jan. 7. Built from Wikia’s July […]

Relax, and take a deep breath: Scoble is back on Facebook. Facebook on Jan. 3 reinstated Robert Scobles membership one day after banishing the high-tech blogger for testing a Plaxo tool that imports contact information from Facebook to the Plaxo Pulse service. Facebooks servers detected the automated script, which a representative told Scoble resembled the […]

When Facebook kicked blogger Robert Scoble off of Facebook Jan. 3, it revived the great debate over data portability. Who owns the data on a social network? You or the site? Scoble himself during a videocast admitted he broke Facebook’s terms of use agreement by using a Plaxo script to pull names and addresses from […]

This may be the year Google makes or breaks GAPE, the enterprise version of Google Apps that lets businesses license hosted e-mail, instant documents, spreadsheets and other applications for $50 per user per year. The numbers sound great on paper: 2,000 new businesses per day signing up for Google Apps. Then there are hearty testimonials […]

Attempts to buck the system and stick it to the digital “man” will rock the blogosphere every time, especially when the battleground is data portability and the adversaries are a celebrity blogger and an increasingly infamous social network. In the latest incident, Facebook disabled blogger Robert Scoble’s account after he ran a script on the […]

Ask.com and ChaCha Search on Jan. 3 introduced free search services to make it easier for users to find what theyre looking for from their mobile devices. Ask.com has added a voice activation utility called Click to Speak to its Ask.com Mobile Directions service. A first of its kind among search engines, Click to Speak […]

As much as e-mail, instant messages, blogs and their brethren technologies have helped knowledge workers better collaborate, interruptions and duplications derived from these forms of digital communication and content are overwhelming workers to the point of distraction. The result is an egregious lack of productivity that may cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year, […]

Despite the public relations setbacks, Google and Facebook should get credit for attempting to make forays into online realms that scare up all sorts of ethical issues and privacy concerns. A month after Facebook got pilloried for sharing users’ online activities with its network, Google is taking flak for its Reader aggregation application. For the […]

It seems trying to make the Web more social is tricky for even Google, which prides itself on exercising caution before implementing new features that affect users. Following a privacy stir that ranked a few notches below Facebook’s Beacon social advertising debacle, Google said it has no current plans to change a feature in its […]