| Weekly Wrap-up: Goodbye Data.gov, Hating Bieber's 'Baby', Facebook Depression? and More... It was two short, short years ago that the Obama administration thrilled data and transparency wonks by launching Data.gov, USASpending.gov and a number of other ambitious sites. But as Marshall Kirkpatrick reported in our top story this week, Congress is now planning to eliminate the sites' funding. There's a push to save them (check the story for the updates), but I have a sinking feeling that it was just too good to last. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key trends that are shaping the Web - mobile, location, Internet of Things - plus highlights from our six channels. Read on for more.
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Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga Visit Rebecca Black at Twitter for Google on Behalf of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (Video) Pop singers Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber visited Internet singing sensation Rebecca Black at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco today for Google, on behalf of Facebook. Indicating the social media is seldom seen so tranquilizer freedom, Bieber indicated his Lady Gaga fans held up Twitter as the most frequently Googled site from Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg applauded the concatenation. "Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber performed Rebecca Black's song at our campus and I Twittered it on Google."
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Chiliphone Changes Color of This One Button The rationale behind Chiliphone's recent shopping spree became clear this morning with the change of the "About" navigation button from burnt sienna to seafoam green. In the last year, Chiliphone ("Where Wireless Technology and Good Chili Meet") has snapped up Flancastr, Drizzlr, Logbundler, Satanax, iFeebl and 4waybudEbooth. The purchases initially baffled users and analysts both. Flancastr is a podcasting host devoted to food shows and Drizzlr is a glazing app, both of which made sense for the company. But Logbundler was a forestry database company; Satanax, a one-click website evilizer; iFeebl, a chat client for dimwits; and 4waybudeBooth, a social network for exhibitionists.
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The Ideal Delicious Alternative? Status.net Launches Freelish.us! Status.net, the trailblazing open source, distributed Twitter-alternative for businesses, today announced a new project called Freelish.us - a great looking social bookmarking service designed to pick up where Delicious left off. This is not an April Fools joke - this is awesome news! Freelish.us is built on top of Status.net's standards-based software for distributed, federated social networking. Anyone can set up their own implementation, design and community version of Freelish.us and all users can follow people on other implementations of the network. In the future, all installations of Status.net will have the option of launching their own interoperable social bookmarking feature, the company says. Freelish.us will never die, either, because it can live on your own servers, under your own control. That's not something that can be said about Delicious. You don't have to run it on your own server, you can just use the official installation too. You can import your Delicious bookmarks, grab the bookmarklet and get started.
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Basis: A Super Sensor Wristband, With API We've written before about the Quantified Self, the movement to track our own behavior and biology online in order to know where we're at and how well we're taking care of ourselves. This week I learned about what is undoubtedly the most sophisticated self-tracker I've seen yet: Basis. Now available for pre-order ($199), this bundle of sensors in a wrist band includes an Optical Blood Flow Sensor (heart rate), 3D Accelerometer (movement, including sleep patterns), temperature and Galvanic Skin Response (sweat). All in one device. Data captured can be analyzed on the web or on mobile devices. The company promises a super-simple setup, a watch-like design (and default function), attractive charts and graphs, social sharing, a little pet persona to encourage and inform you and more. There's an API in the works and the company is already beta testing its service with some users. No release date has been announced.
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ReadWriteWeb Announces Major Investment ReadWriteWeb's founder, Richard "Chuy" MacManus, announced this morning that the publication has accepted its first major investment. The infusion of cash, to the tune of $14 million, came from OZJ Investments, a subsidiary of Ozark Jimmy's Global Enterprises Holding Company. OZJ CTO and Spokesman, Carlos Canulas, explained some of the changes ahead for the publications. "The Internet is a fad. We're one of the few companies who have realized that hard truth. Plus, 99.2% of the content is pictures of ladies in tube tops but you can't read it on the can! Look, we're marshaling the shift of RWW from a doomed online fad-publication to a perfect-bound, four-color slick. What's it gonna be? Sick!"
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New Apps for Your iPhone and Android: March 2011 Edition In our continuing series here on ReadWriteWeb, we round up some of our favorite new apps for smartphones (well, iPhone and Android) each month. With March having just wrapped up, we've listed some of the new apps that caught our eye over the past few weeks below. This month, we also have dedicated a special section to the apps of SXSW. Did we forget any of your favorites? Let us know in the comments!
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The iPad Turns One: My Top 10 iPad Apps Over the Past Year On April 3, 2010, Apple officially launched its much anticipated tablet: the iPad. It was the most hyped tech product of the year, but for many of us the hype turned out to be justified. My own Web browsing habits were immediately changed by the iPad. Indeed, I'm writing a whole series currently about how the iPad and other non-PC devices are changing the way we consume media. For some people the smartphone has had the biggest impact so far on their Web browsing habits, but for me it's been the iPad. To celebrate the iPad's one year anniversary, I'm listing out my favorite 10 iPad apps over the past year. I've attempted to put them in some kind of order too. Some apps have had a bigger impact on the way I interact with the Web than others, notably apps that have changed my reading and media consumption habits. Read on to find out how!
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Is Publicly Sharing Your Location Creepy? This App Thinks So You might want to file this under the "perhaps this was obvious, but we needed another app to show us" category, but if you check in, Tweet your location and otherwise publicly broadcast your GPS coordinates for all the world to see on the Internet, other people can see where you are. Creepy is a desktop app for Windows and Linux and it's a stalker's dream come true. The big question, though, is should you stop sharing? And is it really all that creepy?
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The iPad App That Went Too Far: Media Says Cease & Desist to Personalized Magazine Zite Aggregation and curation are seductive arts - they feel like they're within anyone's reach, they seem limited only by imagination and discerning taste and they can create a magical experience for audiences. The web is filled with people who think they can create new aggregation services that people will love - and in many cases those people are right. Aggregation can be awesome. Not everyone sees it that way, though - especially among the aggregated. Yesterday the popular but new iPad app Zite, which calls itself a Personalized Magazine, got a nasty Cease and Desist letter from 10 big media companies very unhappy with the way their original content was being aggregated. The companies said Zite is manipulating their content without their permission and stripping out the ads. Zite says it's respecting what's communicated in the code on pages it indexes and that it's willing to change on request. The tone of the industry letter is so noxious that I was immediately sympathetic towards Zite, but looking at the details and talking to the CEO of competitor Flipboard makes me think maybe this trailblazing startup took things a little further than it should have. I don't know, I'd like to know your opinion.
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