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Stack Overflow Launches

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Joel Spolsky has recently announced the launch of Stack Overflow, a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers.

Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

The site looks like a mashup between Digg, Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia and developer forums, not only in appearance, but also in its purpose. Stack Overflow was conceptualized with the aim of helping programmers quickly find valid and reasonable answers to the most pressing development concerns.

Joel cited the concern of finding the best answers without having to wade through pages and pages of information that are either no longer valid (because of how software and development platforms evolve through time), incorrect, or simply not the best way of doing things.

Stack Overflow has been running in beta for a few weeks, and is now open to the public. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood also have a regular Stack Overflow podcast on software development.

Originally posted on September 16, 2008 @ 9:55 pm

Viddy Gets Major Update

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Viddy is quietly but also surely dominating the social video segment of the market with its easy to use app. It is on its way to becoming the Instagram equivalent for videos. Alongside its growing number of endorsers and influx of investor money, Viddy recently announced a major new update for the Viddy app.

The new update features a lot of new changes and additions to Viddy. One of the new features is an option to choose the thumbnail cover art for the videos you’ve captured. This makes the video thumbnail more beautiful to look, providing the thumbnails with an Instagram-like look because of your chosen image in place of the dull first frame of the video (which was the default thumbnail before). [Read more…]

Originally posted on May 30, 2012 @ 9:29 pm

Zynga Acquires Four Game Companies

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Zynga is very intent on strengthening its already secure position as the top provider of casual games in the world. The company, who makes highly popular games like Words With Friends, has announced that it has recently bought four different mobile game companies over the last few months.

The acquisitions Zynga made, as told to Reuters, include Gamedoctors, a German company and the maker of the hit game ZombieSmash. Zynga also said that it has bought Astro Ape Studios, a New York based company. [Read more…]

Originally posted on January 19, 2012 @ 12:02 pm

Report, More Internet Users are now Conversationalists in Social Networks

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Latest data from Forrester is showing that a new category of Internet users are now comprising 1/3 of the total Internet population.  This group called “conversationalist” are Internet users who post status updates on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, at least once a week. In addition, these conversationalists are mostly female, with 70% of them age 30 years old and above.

The report groups Internet users into the following categories:

Creators – are Internet users who create content either through their own blogs or websites, upload video and audio content as well as write articles and post them online. This group represents 24% of the total Internet population.

Critics – are Internet users who  post product reviews, comment on blogs, participate in online community forums, and contribute to wikis. They represent 37% of the Internet users.

Collectors – are those who tag photos, participate in online voting and use RSS feeds. This group represent 20% of Internet users.

Joiners – those maintain profiles in social networking sites and visit these sites often but don’t really join in the interaction. They represent 59% of the Internet users.

Spectators – comprising 70% of Internet users, this group read blogs, listent o podcasts and consumer online information but don’t really contribute.

Inactives – 17%

Conversationalists – this group is comprised of those who post updates on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter regularly, that is once a week.

The data was based on Forrester’s social technographics whereby social technology behavior were analyzed to construct those social profiles.

An interesting fact about this data that is worth noting is the fact that although more people are joing social networks, the number of those people who create content remains the same. Of course this is understandable since it is easier to maintain social networking profiles as well as participate in the communication compared to maintaing blogs, creating websites, uploading videos and other ways of creating online content.

So, which group of Internet users are you?

 

Originally posted on January 19, 2010 @ 7:05 pm

Friendster Rolls Out New Design, Prepping Up for Sell Out?

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Flashback to 2002, there were no Facebook or Twitter yet. Then came a social networking site called Friendster. In no time at all, Friendster became a big hit. Ask any Asian Facebook users today if they’ve used Friendster and they will most likely answer in unison – that Friendster was their first taste of social networking.

Today, Friendster has lost its luster, thanks to Facebook and Myspace. Probably more than half of Friendster accounts have already been closed or deleted and the users are all on Facebook now. Are all hopes lost for what used to be Asia’s top social network? Enter a new Friendster – sporting a new look and perhaps better features. [Read more…]

Originally posted on December 4, 2009 @ 2:41 am