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Sunday, August 27, 2006
New in social networking
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Some updates in the social networking space, starting up again after a too-long hiatus. We start with mobile social networking on a music player.
— Word came out last week that Microsoft plans to have Toshiba manufacture its new Zune music player, its challenge to the mighty Apple iPod. Also, reports said a Zune owner will be able to be a DJ, streaming music to as many as four nearby friends or, even, strangers. Same with photos. Cnet News headlines: “Microsoft’s Zune aims to be social butterfly.” We’ll see on this one.
— Next “social browsing” and the aggregating of same. Fanpop describes itself as a network of “social portals” they call spots that are created by fans for fans. It borrows heavily from many of the current “Web 2.0” faves. “We’re a little bit of Digg, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, del.icio.us and Yelp all mixed into one,” they boast. While it lacks the videos and music of the major social networking giants like MySpace and YouTube, there are some cool features worth exploring, taking others’ good ideas and making them a little bit better.
— While RSS feeds keep me abreast of news and personal interests, I sometimes feel I’m missing something somewhere. The blogosphere has been abuzz in recent days with two sites that take a lot of the heavy lifting out of creating RSS feeds. Original Signal aggregates the 15 most popular blogs on the online industry. Popurls calls itself “the dashboard for the latest web-buzz.” You can sample everything from content from news and social networking sites to viral video. Popurls even plans to give space to former Rocketboom phenom Amanda Cogburn, who you may recall from this post.
Nothing beats creating your own mix of RSS feeds, but these sites can certainly save Web-savvy users some time.
Next on Ne(x)t: What the heck is Web 3.0?
