‘Nets Big Thing

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Editor’s Note: Social networks are taking off in China. The following guest post by George Godula. David Li, and Richard Yu explores how Chinese social networks are pursuing different business models than their American counterparts, relying more on micropayments and the sale of virtual goods. George Godula is the founder of Web2Asia, an East Asian incubator and also a consultancy for Western startups trying to enter markets in China, Japan and Korea. David Li is a developer of social networking applications such as Growing Gifts, and he also was the developer of OnChat, an early in-browser graphical avatar chat system. Richard Yu is a Seattle native living in China, where he consults for Shanghai-based web startups while writing his blog.

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Despite China’s massively growing internet market, international giants like Google and Facebook are having trouble making gains with the 300 million Chinese online users. China’s netizens are on average very young – 66.7 % of them are younger than 29 years old and 35.2 % of them are teenagers—with social networking and entertainment applications being the most popular. Read the rest of this entry »

The default mode for Google Analytics and other Website tracking software often makes you wait an entire day to find out what is happening on your site. There is a 24-hour delay (although this can often be changed in settings). Speed up the feedback loop, and Websites in theory could become even more responsive to traffic and attention peaks or to unexpected sluggishness. Betaworks, John Borthwick’s startup holding company which has stakes in Twitter and Tweetdeck, and spun off bit.ly, has just launched Chartbeat.

Keeping with Betaworks’ focus on real-time data services, Chartbeat offers a dashboard for Website owners that monitors how many people are on their site at any given second, where they are coming from, which pages visitors are looking at the most, as well as conversations and links from Twitter. It also shows average load times, what percentage of current visitors are returning, how many are reading, how many are actively writing in comments or engaging with the site in some other way, and how many are simply idle. All it requires is one line of Javascript to be inserted on a site and then it pings Chartbeat every 10 seconds. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a company called Nomee is revealing a new software application for the purpose of aggregating all your social networking sites into a single desktop experience. In a way, this software is somewhat reminiscent of the web-based PeopleBrowsr in the sense that it’s attempting to pool all your networks and identities into one single window. However, unlike PeopleBrowsr, Nomee is not just aggregation software – it also functions as a social identity management tool, letting you control which identities are shared with which people. That makes Nomee more like a next-gen social address book than anything else. Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s do-it-yourself online world, self-publishing your own content can be accomplished in a plethora of ways. If, however, you’re looking to create and distribute a polished e-book made up of either text, photos, audio, and video, or a combination of all four, Myebook is a solution with a slick interface for creating and viewing e-books worth considering. Read the rest of this entry »

The past few days have seen the alleged leaks of a couple batches of Windows Mobile 7 screenshots, suggesting Microsoft’s already hard at work on the successor to 6.5 — something we’ve heard in the past, and given the state of 6.x, a rumor that isn’t difficult to believe. Read the rest of this entry »

People have been whispering about a new web application in development called Hunch. Today, Flickr co-founder and Hunch head honcho Caterina Fake divulged some more details about the new project on her blog.

The new project aims to become a site that can help anyone make a decision about anything. The way it will do this is through the application of decision trees that are created by contributing users. Using decision trees in expert systems is nothing new, but applying that idea to a crowdsourcing model might possibly be a stroke of genius. Think Aardvark meets Wikipedia and you start to get the idea. Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like Google is at it again!  Google is working on Google Street View in the UK and it’s getting quite the reaction.

Google Street View is Google Maps but up close, street level!

Many are seeing Google Street View as an invasion on privacy but Google defends itself and as gone as far as making videos to assure people that they can be removed from any Google Street View product through a process. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the few Google products that isn’t a perpetual beta, Google Chrome, has just gotten a beta branch, which lets users get a taste of things to come.

So, what does a Google Chrome beta bring? Speed, and lots of it. According to Google, it’s 25 percent faster than the stable build of Chrome, which is nothing short of amazing given that Chrome is already blazing fast.

Other new features are form autofill, full page zooming and autoscroll, as well as a way to get a side-by-side view by dragging out tabs to the side of the browser window, which you can see in the amazingly short video below.

You can get the Google Chrome beta here.

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Reviews: Chrome, Google, Google Chrome

Here at Nets Big Thing, we’ve compiled a list of the top Twitter user tools websites on the internet that will help you make better use of the massive social growth of Twitter!  These twitter tools will no doubt make your twitting life a whole lot easier!

1. Ever wonder who YOU are following you on twitter but don’t follow you back? Or do you ever wonder who is following YOU that you are not following back?  FriendorFollow will help you sort things out and save you tons of time.

2. Do you hate clicking on Twitter links and want a threaded Twitter timeline? Tweetree allows you to see your account in threaded mode which means you’ll be able to follow who replied to what you wrote and on top of that it will parse Youtube videos, Twitpic, flickr and other popular website media without you having to click on an external link.

twitter search – twitter search is a simple yet powerful tool for finding out who is tweeting about your interests.  Just type in a word or phrase you want to see and twitter search will show you a list of people who have tweeted.

Twittervision – twittervision is a website that simply displays a visual map of people who are tweeting.  Visual representation of things tend to give the viewer a better grasp of how things are and twittervision attempts to accomplish this.

Want to know the size of your twitter e-penis? you can check this site here