Yesterday a select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the “Facebook issue.” The meeting was so secret that all attendees had to sign…

Big trend coming out of TechCrunch40: data normalization services like Mint, Cake, TripIt, and Clickable. DMS is a new category (I think I just named it) in which companies pull in data from 3rd parties, normalize (clean) it, and then leverage it. In Cake's case they suck in people's trading…

There's been a lot of chatter about the entire concept of social graphing. I have no idea if there is validity here or not. And certainly people smarter than I am are talking about the potential viability of the entire concept. However, what I do know is that a lot of us are increasingly…

Google Blogscoped got their hands on an internal video created by the Google Reader team where they discuss future plans for their popular service.There’s a pile of interesting information; highlights include Google developing a new way for publishers to notify Google of updates, plans to…

This week I want to try something a little different and attempt a debate here at ProBlogger. The idea is simple - I’ve chosen two people who I think have experience around a debated blogging topic to argue the case for either side of it. These two opinions will act as the first speaker for…

There's been a lot of chatter about the entire concept of social graphing. I have no idea if there is validity here or not. And certainly people smarter than I am are talking about the potential viability of the entire concept. However, what I do know is that a lot of us are increasingly…

Google has just quietly launched a new social link sharing service called Google Shared Stuff.According to this help file, you can add links to your “shared stuff page” by adding a bookmarklet to your web browser’s “Links” or “Bookmarks” bar or by clicking…

Walking barefoot over a cobblestone path is possible, and no step in particular will injure your feet. But the overall experience isn’t nice. It’s the same when a website has minor usability problems piling up: none of the issues taken on its own is disastrous at all, but taken together,…

Social networking is twice as popular with young women as young men, but adult men are more likely to use social networks than adult women. Young women use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, share pictures and communicate. Adult men tend use it to network and communicate professionally. But…

On Friday evening I wrote a piece about integrating images, audio and perhaps other types with Twitter. There's been a bit of reaction, not too much, I think because most of the people who are adversarial about this kind of stuff either don't use Twitter, or because it's the weekend. Most of the…

Back in 2001, I wrote a document called Payloads for RSS that explained how you could attach something to a RSS item. I didn't explain how a RSS app would display or play one of these things, that would come later.Today, we may be at a similar place with Twitter. Sometimes I want to answer Twitter's…

TechMeme really likes Friday evening's Monkey piece, it's been #1 for almost 24 hours. Even if people still use the Social Graph term, it may have done some good by asking the question -- what's the difference between a network and a graph? In math there is no difference, a network is a graph and…

Hmmm, I used the words “social graph” in this interview with Randi Zuckerberg, director of business development at Facebook. Dave Winer, yesterday, said that anyone who uses that term sounds like a monkey. She gave her definition of Social Graph at about 14:39. Everyone who is…

I tried to ignore the term "social graph" when it first started popping up a few weeks ago. For one thing, it sounded like some sort of embarrassing disease; for another, the idea of having to figure out some arcane new Web 2.0 term was depressing. But the term - or is it a meme? - kept on…

A few weeks ago a well-respected developer wrote a blog post about something he called the "social graph." A graph, to most people, is a diagram like the one on the right, which plots the value of a stock over time. For 99.99 percent of the people this is what a graph is. For a very small…

Time might have nominated you as the Person of the Year, but Gawker Media, the publisher of such popular blogs as Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and Kotaku, is savvier: The company is making you into a contributor -- if you're a commenter, that is. Gawker owner Nick Denton stopped by the Wired News offices…