We recently wrote about OneRiot’s foray into the advertising word, RiotWise, which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search and getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot believes in the strong potential of serving relevant ads beside results. Today, the realtime search engine is launching RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web.
RiotWise will match Trending Ads display ads that are highly relevant to the same trending topics within an application. OneRiot says says the ?realtime relevance? result in a higher click through rate on the ads. The system is enabled by OneRiot?s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm.
iPhone customers using O2 in the UK are three days into connectivity issues, according to Sky News. Many have been seeing the error message, “could not activate cellular data network.” It’s bound to happen once and a while, but such widespread outages … and for so long … have users rather cranky.
Today it seems that O2 has identified the issue and is working on a fix: “We are aware of an issue currently impacting data access for some of our customers,” they told Sky News Online. “We have identified a fault with the allocation of IP addresses and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. We apologise to any affected customers.”
Quick, which company was founded first: Facebook or Youtube? What year did Apple launch the Jesus phone? Can you name three of the biggest financial calamities of the past decade? The three-minute video above from WatchMojo recaps the decade in business and technology.
The video strangely alternates between the fraud and financial crises of the general business world (Enron, the housing bubble, Bernie Madoff) and all the change and innovation of the tech world (Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the iPhone). It’s as though it is talking about two different worlds or two different eras. If the next decade is going to be anything like the last one, I’ll stay in the tech world.
Whether Twitter is at some point going to launch (or buy) a desktop client is subject to speculation, but it’s clear that their web and mobile clients garner a lot of the startup’s attention right now. A new hire reflects that.
Overseeing Twitter’s products, and primarily its web service, will henceforth be the task of Kevin Cheng, formerly Director of Product Strategy at Raptr, a social network for gamers. Cheng previously worked at Yahoo!?s Brickhouse incubator where he designed Yahoo Pipes and Bravonation, and at Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Local, Adaptive Path, and Trilogy.
How a phone given to thousands of employees still manages to be nothing more than an occasional blip on the internets continues to boggle our mind. This latest Nexus One / “Google Phone” sighting comes care of two Twitter chatters — @djrobrob and the less protected account of @phillm. It’s the clearest shot of the interface we’ve gotten, and given our previous go-to videos have been subsequently pulled, the best “motion picture” interpretation we’ve got — take a look for yourself after the break.
Gallery: More Google Nexus shots
Looks like Google is really going full steam ahead with its shortened URLs. Only a week after the search giant launched its own Goo.gl short URLs, its subsidiary YouTube is launching its own short URL service: youtu.be.
In a blog post announcing the new feature, YouTube writes that the short URL will be used exclusively for YouTube videos (which means it isn’t as useful to spammers for misdirection). The post also notes that because all youtu.be shortlinks include the YouTube video ID, developers can use that information to surface thumbnails and track how a video is spreading.
When Facebook bought FriendFeed a few months ago, no one was really sure what would happen to the service. The acquisition was mainly for FriendFeed’s talent, so there was much concern that FriendFeed would wither. And to an extent it has. But, as it’s proving today, it still can serve some purpose for Facebook: A testing ground for new technology.
As Facebook’s David Recordon writes today on the Developer Blog, the development team has implemented a prototype version of the new OAuth WRAP specification on FriendFeed. One of FriendFeed’s co-founders, Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook’s Director of Product Management for Platform, also writes at length about it on his own blog. The basic gist is that Facebook decided to test out implementing it in FriendFeed so that they could get feedback from the developer community who want to try it out.
Facebook has just released its list of top status updates for the year, and they’re pretty interesting. This is a new feature that Facebook plans to release yearly called “Memology,” the study of how memes are spreading on Facebook. Specifically, the Facebook Data Team looked at status updates in the U.S. for this year’s list.
For this list, Facebook grouped together similar items to make it a more comprehensive one. As such, the first item on the list should be a surprise to no one: “Facebook Applications.” The specific words that Facebook grouped together here include Farmville, Farm Town, and Social Living, they note. The fact that Farmville has 72 million month active users who update their statuses with info from the game was probably enough to give Faceboook Applications the top spot.
Facebook has just released its list of top status updates for the year, and they’re pretty interesting. This is a new feature that Facebook plans to release yearly called “Memology,” the study of how memes are spreading on Facebook. Specifically, the Facebook Data Team looked at status updates in the U.S. for this year’s list.
For this list, Facebook grouped together similar items to make it a more comprehensive one. As such, the first item on the list should be a surprise to no one: “Facebook Applications.” The specific words that Facebook grouped together here include Farmville, Farm Town, and Social Living, they note. The fact that Farmville has 72 million month active users who update their statuses with info from the game was probably enough to give Faceboook Applications the top spot.
Twitter Search is great ? except when 99.9% of the results are from people you could care less about. While Twitter has been working on relevancy, one easy fix that should have been in place a while ago is just a way to search the tweets of the people you follow. Before FriendFeed more or less died post-Facebook sale, it offered such a feature with its search. Now a new service, Flocking.me, brings the same thing to Twitter.
Flocking.me works exactly as you’d expect. Once you authenticate yourself via OAuth, you’re taken to your customized Flocking.me screen where the tweets of the people you follow are displayed. Front and center is a big search box where you can search and yes, it will return results of just the people you follow. Better still, you can change the view of the results from straight stream, to stacks of tweets to fit more on the screen. And you can even turn on a map view to see where those tweets originated from. You can also filter search further using your Twitter Lists.