In November 2007, we listed 10 Semantic apps to watch and yesterday we published an update on what each had achieved over the past year. All of them are still alive and well - a couple are thriving, some are experimenting and a few are still finding their way. Now we're going to list 10 more Semantic apps to watch. These are all apps that have gotten onto our radar over 2008. We've reviewed all but one of them, so click through to the individual reviews for more detail. It should go without saying, but this is by no means...
Flickr’d How dumb are men, generally? A woman is set to divorce her husband after she discovered a photo of his genitals in his iPhone’s sent e-mails folder. The woman suspected that the guy was sending photos of himself to other women, but the guy had an excuse: it’s just a glitch, honey. Yeah, the iPhone has this weird habit of going into photo mode, unzipping your pants and sending proof of your awesomeness to strange women. The woman didn’t believe this “glitch” excuse and asked on the Apple discussion boards for advice. “I think your marriage has a...
On the Apple discussion boards, a woman from NJ asked other users if iPhone photos automatically attach themselves to email, after she "found a raunchy picture" her husband sent to a woman via his iPhone: "He admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch." Most users smell a rat ("this is not an issue with the iPhone so the glitch is probably with your husband.") and wonder about the...
As a co-host, I am hardly without bias, but I found this morning’s opening of the free Corporate Learning Trends event fantastic. In spite of some childish hacker-vandals and a few sound issues, each of the three sessions this morning worked. Despite the fact that Jane Hart and I work with one another on togetherLearn, I had never used — or even heard of — VoiceThread, nvu, or Yugma. The proliferation of free learning tools certainly comes at the right time. Robin Good ran a daring experiment, inviting the audience into MindMeister to collaborate on a living mind map...
Much like Google Video, Google Groups expanded its index from the Usenet discussion boards and the Google-hosted groups to almost all discussion boards from the web. The results show the same enhanced snippets that were added to the web search last month.It's interesting to notice that Google's help forums for different services are moving to a new platform initially created for a Yahoo Answers-like Q&A service. Some of the forums have already migrated (Google Talk, Chrome, AdSense) and the benefits are clear: the new forums clearly delimit answers from questions, answered questions from unanswered questions and they encourage people to...
Today, I spoke with Seth Kahan, who is a speaker, author, Fast Company blogger and extremely knowledgeable when it comes to building communities. I think this topic is extremely important because you can be very successful in today’s world if you own a community based on your area of expertise. It’s not enough just to have a traffic to a site anymore; you need to lead a tribe and have that tribe interact with each other AND you. This is just as important for a business, as it is for your personal brand. Seth, why is building community so important,...
A tip came in this weekend from someone with a fleet of new MacBooks. His complaint? Every 50 or so clicks and the trackpad butto freezes for 5 to 10 clicks and then wakes back up. The tipster writes: So we've bought about 10 of them, all of them have awful problems recognizing clicks. The trackpad has a bug where it does not click about 60% of the time. Anyone else having this issue? It seems posters at the Apple Discussion board are experiencing it fairly consistently....
I love Twitter. And Facebook. And my blog. And your blog. I love reading and writing and sharing and giggling with, well, complete strangers at the fascinating parallels in our lives. The internet is an important part of my life. And not just for email and all the funny videos and absurd opinions floating around out there. It's the community and the commiseration it offers. I thought about all of this as I Twittered the latest torture method my darling 15-month old daughter discovered. (Adjusting the gas on the stovetop burners as I try to cook) As I did,...
As more companies engage with consumers on Facebook and other forms of social media, opportunities for those interested in spreading misinformation or disparaging comments will inevitably increase. But how companies engage with and respond to these situations has just as much if not more impact on brand equity than the initial attacks themselves. Last week, Virgin Atlantic launched an investigation of several of its own crew members who allegedly criticized the airline’s safety standards on Facebook, BrandRepubic reports. A Virgin Atlantic spokesperson said in a subsequent statement, “The airline has started an immediate disciplinary investigation. Virgin Atlantic does not tolerate...
The World Series kicks off tomorrow, and whether you support the Phillies or the Rays, you can show your support through a pair of Facebook applications created by app development company Watercooler. Some key features of the team apps are discussion boards, scoreboard feeds, quizzes, and leaderboards. There is also a media-sharing option for posting related photos, and users can also see who else will be attending upcoming games, depending on the team application they’ve joined. Unlike some other game-like applications, which turn major sports events into prize-winning contests, Watercooler team apps just let you show your support and connect...
I was in Toronto to catch Jason Mraz live earlier this week, so needless to say “Jason Mraz” has been a much searched term for me on Google the past few days. Something that came up during one of the searches was a “Musician of the month” type post from Chapters Indigo (in Canada, Indigo is the equivalent to Borders or Barnes & Noble). Jason Mraz on Chapters Indigo So on this particular post, the author linked to a video to Mraz’s concert in Korea, which I coincidentally happened to be listening to. Obviously, that made me feel like commenting…....
If you're seriously considering a MacBook over a MacBook Pro, one of the major sniggles is the fact that it no longer has FireWire, an omission seemingly designed to stratify the more-alike-than-ever models. So, it's natural users would take to the Apple forums to talk it out (or, let's be real, bitch). But Apple isn't having any of that apparently: MacFixIt is reporting that Apple is yanking threads from its forums that talk about the lack of FireWire on the new MacBooks. Of course, there's the possibility that these threads just contain complaints and not actual discussion questions, and that's...
Google has been experimenting with displaying additional information for discussion boards in the search results and now the experiments are live. Below the title, Google lists automatically generated data about forum threads: the number of posts, the number of authors and the date of the last post.The additional information helps you decide if the search result is likely to be useful. If a thread has a single post or the last post is very old, you could ignore the result.This new feature shows that Google is able to automatically classify web pages and to extract relevant information. Once Google starts...
Last week I offered a solution for sorting in Apex in response to some discussions taking place on the discussion boards . As promised, I'm back to discuss one approach to addressing the business problem highlighted in a very detailed fashion in this thread. The relevant technical requirement outlined therein can be paraphrased as "How can I group, sum and order opportunity information in Apex?" And of course doing so with the minimal impact against the respective governor limits. The end result should look something like this: Let's address each of the goals in sequence. 1. Group A notable limitation...
