Step in, ladies and gen­tle­men — wel­come to the weekly Blogistan-round-up! It’s my duty to enter­tain you (and some­times maybe even piss you off), but who cares — it’s all in the blog, st00pid! From Google Wave to the slut­ti­est brides in 2008, the blo­gos­phere is here to cover your every infor­ma­tion need.

Google announces Wave

The buzz is on — Google has announced the release of their newest project called “Wave” later this year. The stakes are high, as Wave claims to rede­fine the way we com­mu­ni­cate and col­lab­o­rate on the web. E-Mail, con­tacts social net­works — Wave will tear down the bound­aries between doc­u­ments and dialogue:

A wave is equal parts con­ver­sa­tion and doc­u­ment. Peo­ple can com­mu­ni­cate and work together with richly for­mat­ted text, pho­tos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any par­tic­i­pant can reply any­where in the mes­sage, edit the con­tent and add par­tic­i­pants at any point in the process. Then play­back lets any­one rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live trans­mis­sion as you type, par­tic­i­pants on a wave can have faster con­ver­sa­tions, see edits and inter­act with exten­sions in real-time.

Google posted a cou­ple of screen­shots, future beta testers can sign up here. This in-depth pre­sen­ta­tion from Google I/O waters my mouth; and btw: Wave will be com­pletely Open Source.

So much for Twitter’s trend­ing topics

“But all good things, they say, never last”, sang prince. And now TechCrunch is say­ing the same about Twitter’s trend­ing topics:

Up until recently, Twitter’s trend­ing top­ics — which are promi­nently dis­played on their Search home­page and now also in the side­bar when you’re using the Twit­ter web­site — were an awe­some way to get a feel of what was buzzing on the Web, in a way that vir­tu­ally no other web ser­vice was able to do.

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But then came the pirates and Michael is really pissed!

Today, when you look at Twitter’s trend­ing top­ics, you’ll notice that the large major­ity of trends are memes started by a sin­gle user or a group of users, with the main goal offer­ing enter­tain­ment rather than spread­ing infor­ma­tion. That’s all fine and dandy — no harm in hav­ing fun — and I real­ize well that Twitter’s trend­ing top­ics are not nec­es­sar­ily required to be giv­ing you and me an overview of stuff that really mat­ters, but I can’t help but think it’s a pity that that list is start­ing to turn into the top 10 of chain let­ters peo­ple used to cir­cu­late through e-mail mes­sages in the late nineties.

Oh dear gosh, I wish more peo­ple would rec­og­nize that manip­u­lat­ing social media plat­forms is so much more fun than obey­ing their “laws”…

The real name problem

Many native Indi­ans have names like “Robin kills the Enemy”. Their name is in their pass­port, the same applies to peo­ple with exotic names like Lisa Straw­berry. But if your name sounds like made up (but actu­ally isn’t), you might have trou­ble keep­ing your Face­book account. An arti­cle on Spiegel Online [in Ger­man] reports that a cou­ple of users got deleted with­out any pre­vi­ous notice. Facebook’s pol­icy requires you to use your real name, and with the ongo­ing suc­cess of the plat­form a lot of users are run­ning mul­ti­ple fake pro­files with strange names. Remov­ing these might be a good idea for FB in terms of scal­a­bil­ity and reli­a­bil­ity, but the col­lat­eral dam­age has become so big that the group Face­book: don’t dis­crim­i­nate against Native sur­names!!! already has more than 4.000 mem­bers, among them the likes of Lin­nie Bird­chief, Carl Fourstar jr. and Sandy White Hawk. Face­book speaks per­son Barry Schmidt admit­ted mis­takes, and the said accounts have been reac­tived, but the wait­ing period is quite long as only 850 peo­ple are on the pay­roll of the world’s largest social network.

Russ­ian investors buy a share of Facebook

New York Times reports that Russ­ian inter­net invest­ment com­pany Dig­i­tal Sky Tech­nolo­gies acquired 1.96% of Face­book for the sum of $200 million:

Dig­i­tal Sky won because its founders Yuri Mil­ner and Gre­gory Fin­ger have strong expe­ri­ence run­ning Inter­net prop­er­ties in East­ern Europe and Rus­sia, and “a deep, advanced under­stand­ing” of social net­work­ing tech­nol­ogy, Zucker­berg said.

We all know that FB is burn­ing money at an amaz­ing rate, but Zucker­berg still plays it cool — after all, he is run­ning the largest social net­work in the world. Yet still num­bers have gone down: when Microsoft pur­chased 1.6% in 2007 they had to pay $240 mil­lion — dur­ing the last two years, the over­all value of the plat­form has decreased from $15 to $10 bil­lion despite the growth in user accounts.

Happy B-Day, Mr. Shoemoney!

Jeremy Shoe­maker turned 35 this week — con­grats, man! I love your blog and there you’re the per­son who taught me the most valu­able lessons about online mar­ket­ing and blog­ging — thx for your excel­lent posts and keep up the great work! You def­i­nitely got a fan in Vienna

This week’s href=“http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/29/friendshirtme-free-shirt-friday/”>T-Shirt of the week is also def­i­nitely worth a look: it was printed by Friendshirt.me. And the com­ments say it all… when I saw this app I instantly had to order mine!

What is a Micro-Scobble?

Robert Scob­ble is a tech evan­ge­list and twit­ter leg­end. Dis­qus blog pub­lished and inter­est­ing inter­view with man respon­si­ble for the tweet-frequency-unit “Micro-Scobble”:

I grew up in sil­i­con val­ley, I had no choice. My Dad was an engi­neer and I grew up in Cuper­tino about a mile from Apple Com­put­ers. I had an Apple Com­puter in 1977, in my junior high I was in the first com­puter club , and I got a tour of Apple when they were one lit­tle build­ing. So yeah, I’ve always been around tech.

My bride is not a slut. She just looks like one.

Judith sent me this great arti­cle — thx! Take a look at the Top 5 Slut­ti­est Wed­ding Dresses Spot­ted In 2009! Even though is nearly breaks my heart that Miss Carey is no longer sin­gle, I have to admit that with this elab­o­rate sense of taste she’d get a job in any brothel in the whole world:

The Mariah Car­rey slutty wed­ding dress cer­tainly doesn’t leave any­thing to the imag­i­na­tion. Fully equipped with garter belt, stock­ings, and a main fash­ion piece bet­ter off worn under the dress or on the wed­ding night, this dress starts us off with its mod­er­ately tame slutty fashion.

Video of the week

This one goes out to the Open Source Com­mu­nity — I usu­ally don’t pub­lish ads as the video of the week, but in this case Red­head has done a fan­tas­tic job — and with over 3 min­utes, in these short-clip times this is almost an online fea­ture movie. Con­grats to Peter Novak on this fan­tas­tic job!

Pic of the week

New to my weekly round-up: start­ing this week, I will pub­lish a “pic of the week” — no spe­cial top­ics what­so­ever. Since I started digi-SLR myself my appre­ci­a­tion for those per­fect shots has grown immensely. Choos­ing the proper pic wasn’t easy at all, but this Man­asquan Reser­voir by Joisey Showaa is one fan­tas­tic shot:

And that’s about it for this week — thx for vis­it­ing my blog, see you again next week!

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