A few days ago, Hilary Mason, a data-mining engineer at N.Y.-based, URL shortening service, Bit.ly,  made news for her attempts at creating a smarter email inbox that kept the important and urgent messages ahead of what are messages of less importance. Some of us eager for Ms. Mason’s creation might have a near-term solution to handling the backbreaking load of email, thanks to Google and the engineers behind the Gmail team. The company today... 

If there’s one issue that unites major Internet giants like Google and Facebook, it’s privacy. Google tries to offer a new service with Buzz, and triggers a series of privacy land mines ; Facebook tries to offer new services and runs afoul of privacy concerns as well, then it changes its privacy settings and (according to some) makes the problem worse instead of better . Why is privacy so hard? Sociologist Danah Boyd, who specializes... 

Hard-core Digg users and fans of the link-sharing site — the so-called “Digg Nation” — spend a lot of their time trying to push their favorite links to the front page, competing with each other for the number of “diggs” their links get, and debating why certain links made it and others didn’t. Now, a 17-year-old programmer has come up with an algorithm he says can predict which links will make it to... 

Most website users still prefer logging in with a Google account, but Facebook is a close second, according to new data from Janrain , a Portland startup whose software plugin makes it easy for websites to offer multiple login methods. The company’s latest survey looked at statistics from more than 250,000 websites and services that use its software, and found that close to 40 percent of users prefer to sign in with a Google…  Read More →

Back in November 2007, I remember sitting in my office one evening and reading then-Senator Obama’s Technology and Innovation Platform for the first time. I was genuinely excited about this PDF . I was particularly taken by a paragraph that appeared right up front: . . . Because most Americans only have a choice of only one or two broadband carriers, carriers are tempted to impose a toll charge on content and services, discriminating against... 

Thirty-four percent of U.S. cell phone users surveyed in May said they use their phone for recording video, according to a study released today by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That’s up from 19 percent the year before, and while uploading video and watching it online may be less common today, that’s about to change…  Read More →

In another groundbreaking move, The Guardian newspaper in Britain has launched a plugin for the popular blog-publishing tool WordPress (see disclosure below) that allows web sites to embed the full text of Guardian news stories and other content for free. The plugin comes with a catch though: Sites also have to embed the newspaper’s advertising. The new tool is part of an ambitious program of opening the paper up to the web — a move... 

It’s all good to talk about the big-picture goals for Twitter (as we did earlier this morning ), but the company is still having problems keeping its service alive in the face of rising usage. Today, after the Netherlands upset Brazil in the World Cup, Twitter admitted to “a period of high unavailability” that appeared to last at least an hour. Just before 9 a.m. PT, the…  Read More →

It didn’t get as much attention as some of the other things that Facebook rolled out during the F8 conference in April , but one of the changes the social network made was to link user profiles to “community pages” — in effect, a kind of wiki-style page about a topic or an issue, but one created by an algorithm rather than individual contributions. If your profile states that you’re a fan of a specific movie or... 

It's too early to cheer for TAG. Major Internet service providers along with Microsoft, Intel and Google have created a broadband technical advisory group to offer an engineering perspective on issues associated with broadband networks. Dale Hatfield, an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a former FCC employee, will head up the effort, which has been dubbed the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG... 

By now we are quite aware of cable companies’ plans to offer 100 Mbps connections to their customers, thanks to DOCSIS 3.0 technologies. Our friend Dave Burstein of DSL Prime reports that cable companies are considering drastically boosting upstream speeds in coming years. Comcast, Cox and Liberty Global have all done trials that have produced shared upstream speeds of about 75 Mbps. U.S. cable companies expect that by 2015, nearly 100... 

Interested in finding out what information Facebook is sharing about you through the company’s new open-graph API? Developer Ka-Ping Yee has come up with a simple tool that shows you everything the social network sends to anyone whose app or service decides to plug in to the new feature — all it requires is a user ID or user name. You can find out what information you’re sharing via your public profile by looking at your settings... 

Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Salesforce.com, AOL, Intel, Loopt and numerous advocacy groups are asking the U.S. Congress to update its electronic privacy legislation in order to address new forms of surveillance and data collecting. The so-called Digital Due Process coalition members say they want to defend themselves and their users from forced sharing of their email, hosted documents and mobile location tracking. The law in question is the... 

While social sites drive an increasing portion of traffic to content publishers compared to long-time referral giant Google, one sharing service reminds us today that email is still a major source of shared links and clickthroughs. Email — the original social network — is responsible for 70 percent of total shares and 48 percent of visits generated by shares, according to data collected by link tracker Tynt . Source: Tynt Widget... 

Though it’s fun to talk about the digital habits of kids as if they were a separate, SMS-crazed species, what happens when teens hit 20? Do they turn the page on their youth and assimilate into adult Internet use? Maybe not. It’s starting to look like online teens may actually have a lot in common with young adults. In two recent surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, many categories of usage saw a high…  Read More →