Dennis Howlett got the attention of the Enterprise 2.0 community today, with his continued skepticism about "social" technologies and their place in the business world. Here's a quote from his post entitled Enterprise 2.0 - the non-debate:
"Why am I not surprised? I've argued for years that the notion of anything that has 'social' attached to its moniker is about as welcome as breaking wind in a spacesuit."
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Finding specific online videos from TV networks and independent producers can often be a daunting challenge. Some TV shows are on Hulu, some can only be found as paid downloads on iTunes or Amazon and some are only available for streaming on the network's and producer's own sites.
Clicker wants to change this by making it easier to find shows from TV networks, music videos, and web videos from across the Internet. Clicker is currently in private beta and only available in the US. The company gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Read on to find out how you can get yours.
When you've got a global audience, maybe it's good to make sweeping, ambitious statements. Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, co-founder of Augmented Reality browser company Layar, was interviewed by CNN today and took the opportunity to claim that AR on phones is going to be so big in the future that only voice will be more popular.
Maybe. Many people in the Augmented Reality world are rolling their eyes at Layar's incredible media exposure. They worry that relatively simple implementations of this technology paradigm will create such a bubble of hype that software developed over decades will suffer as well, if public opinion crashes in a let-down from high expectations.
In 1906 John Philip Sousa criticized the gramophone saying, "These talking machines will ruin the artistic development of music in this country." Nevertheless, because Sousa did not forsee user-generated culture proliferating alongside "mechanical music" he could not have been further from the truth. Not only have machine technologies aided in musical development, but there are a variety of mediums to choose from. While audio engineers may scoff at the idea of making music on the iPhone, there's no denying that a number of options exist for the pocket DJ. Below are a few tools to get you started:
Seesmic just announced the launch of Twitter lists in its browser-based Seesmic Web Twitter client. Earlier this week, Seesmic released the first desktop Twitter client with support for lists. Despite Seesmic's best efforts, Brizzly managed to become the first company to release a web client with support for lists earlier today. Seesmic Web offers another first for web-based Twitter clients, however: support for Twitter's geolocation API.
We had almost forgotten about Orb, the media-sharing software that lets you stream video from your home computer to your iPhone or any other internet-connected device. In fact, the last time we had even looked at the application was November of 2008 when the company announced an update to their iPhone application which allowed you to stream live TV over the 3G network. At that time though, the desktop software portion of the Orb product was PC-only. As in Windows PC-only. Today, that has changed. Orb for Macintosh has finally been released so Mac OS X users can now stream their media over the net, too.
Some LinkedIn users will have noticed a change to the navigation and user interface of the LinkedIn.com website, announces a company blog post. The business-focused social network is in the process of rolling out an updated design that aims to improve and simplify site navigation while also offering a cleaner, less-cluttered look. Does the fresh coat of paint hit the mark?
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Remember what it was like to capture video off a computer screen before desktop recording software came along?
You'd mount a big, expensive camera on a tripod, point it at the screen and, unless you had tweaked a bunch of settings or loaded special software, you'd get black bars creeping up and down the screen because of a refresh rate mismatch. And once you solved that problem, you still needed to be well versed in editing tools, video-tape transfer and replication.
Microsoft will offer an application marketplace within Sharepoint 2010 that will integrate with third-party applications from its partner network. No date has been set for the marketplace lauch but it will evolve from "The Gallery" a feature that provides Sharepoint 2010 users access to templates.
The wildly popular nonprofit fundraising application Causes reportedly emailed users of its MySpace app on Tuesday to tell them that all Causes will be removed from MySpace on Friday morning, in three days. Causes was co-founded by Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, the Comcast-acquired Plaxo and Founding President of Facebook.
MySpace users of Causes were encouraged to post links on their MySpace profiles asking cause supporters to join the cause on Facebook instead. In abandoning MySpace, is Causes abandoning nonprofit groups organizing online with poorer users and people of color? Or are neither MySpace or Causes any big loss for social change organizations?
Finally, the powers that be are planning to put a stop to #liesboystell, #goodhead, and... well, all the other asinine, vulgar, and generally pointless trending topics one finds in the right column of the Twitter web interface.
Over the summer, we noticed that Twitter was submerging some adult-themed trending topics, and we noted the absolute need for more top-down policing of the trends list, which should be available for surfacing interesting and timely items to engage users. Today, Twitter has finally acknowledged the brokenness of the feature and has stated its intentions to fix the issue.