Clint Boulton

Blogging software maker Six Apart Dec. 3 said it has sold social networking software maker LiveJournal to Russian online media company SUP for an undisclosed sum. SUP said in a statement it has launched the namesake LiveJournal service in San Francisco to help LiveJournal become a major worldwide brand. LiveJournal is credited with bringing friends […]

Now that Facebook has switched tack with its Beacon ad system, changing it from opt in to opt out, I wonder how well it will do. The rules of the road for Web sites generally say that opt in buttons are clicked far less than opt out. What does that say about us as a […]

Retailers Embrace the Social Network Model”> Amway is the place where social networks meet e-commerce. In any digital era prior to Web 2.0 this postulation may have seemed absurd, but it is true thanks to a new online entertainment store called Fanista. The site is the latest example of how retailers are employing social networking […]

Publishers are attempting to bringing copyright control back into their own hands, with the launch Nov. 29 of a framework that will give them more power to dictate what content search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN may make available online. The ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) framework, launched at The Associated Press headquarters […]

Caving to the pressure of a petition signed by 50,000 people who felt their privacy was being infringed, Facebook had made it easier for users to opt out of a new ad system that tracks users online activities and shares them with their friends. The changes, announced Nov. 29, will let Facebook users decide whether […]

Unhappy with the way Googles mobile search engine works on the Apple iPhone, enterprise search provider Exalead is launching a version of its Web search engine that is specifically tailored for the popular wireless device. Timed for the release of the iPhone in France Nov. 29, the new search engine enables searches for text-based content […]

Adobe Systems is joining the advertising revenue game, announcing Nov. 29 an agreement with Yahoo to serve ads in an opt-in service for publishers that want to generate new revenues through Adobes Portable Document Format. The free service, called Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo, works very much like typical online advertising models. When […]

The Merging of Virtual Reality, Social Computing”> Three-dimensional virtual reality worlds such as Second Life and social networks such as Facebook have been largely chugging along on parallel planes. Now some experts are claiming virtual reality will have a warm, sunny place in social networks for consumers and businesses. IBM Lotus programmers and engineers from […]

Google has introduced mapping software that uses the companys search algorithms to sift through information broadcast from cell towers and approximate a users location on a map through a mobile phone. Launched Nov. 28, Google Maps for Mobile software includes a beta version of Googles My Location technology, which lets a user type the number […]

Verizon Wireless, a phone carrier that doubled as the scourge of Google as recently as two months ago, loosened up in a major way today by proclaiming that customers will have the option of connecting hardware and software not sold by the company to its network. Verizon Wireless next year will publish technical standards for […]

Sometimes being the first mover in an emerging market is not always the best thing. InsideView on Nov. 27 agreed to purchase TrueAdvantage in a merger of rivals in the on-demand sales intelligence software sector. An offshoot of business intelligence software, sales intelligence applications use aggregation and analytics technologies to help sales and marketing executives […]

Rumors of a virtual hard drive from Google may not have been exaggerated after all. In an effort to move more user data into the Internet “cloud,” Google is close to releasing a storage service that would let users move their digital data onto Googles servers, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal […]