blog before you think!

happy new year!

wow, this article on the cutting-edge physics of crumpled paper balls gives a whole new meaning to my next action balls system.

Quick tip for being a responsible citizen of Google Buzz: Buzz lets you specify groups of addressees for each site which is connected to your Buzz. So if you don’t want to bore your lolcat-loving mom with your latest ramblings on social media, all you have to do is to define who sees what:

• go to your buzz
• click connected sites
• in the list of connected sites click Edit for the source you want to refine
• in the pull-down box choose Private and then check the checkboxes of the contact groups you want your items to see (see the pic above)
• click Done

If you haven’t set up a proper set of contact groups yet, the most convenient way to do this is Google Contacts. It takes a while, but your friends and relations will love you even more.

What’s still missing in Buzz is a way for recepients to do the same. As is the sender is in control and if he likes to share a lot or consumes a non-healthy amount of your bandwidth your only option is to stop following him at all.

But if you could define which sources to see and which to hide on a per-user basis, Buzz suddenly would become less noisy and an interesting dashboard for many of your information needs. This also would solve the ubiquitous problem of redundancy. I’m following many of my friends on Buzz on Twitter already, and I’m subscribed to their blogs and shared items in Google Reader. I suspect you do the same. I neither need nor want to see these items in Buzz again. It would be awesome to hide a noisy or redundant Twitter- oder shared items stream while still being able to see the rest. Think FriendFeed’s ‘hide other items like this one’, but more transparent and better.

happy new year!

Mixing It Up at 795 Folsom St – Twitter acquires MixerLabs to pimp their GeoAPI. (23.12.2009)

The meaning of open – Google comes up with its own universal theory of openness. (21.12.2009)

Socializing your feed with Twitter – Google rolls out its own Twitterfeed. (14.12.2009)

Netvibes Wasabi Introduces a Whole New Way to Manage the Real-Time Web – Netvibes releases its Wasabi edition, which is worth a look. (14.12.2009)

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances – And Now How Much Would You Pay? – AWS provide a kind of marketplace for EC2 instances. (14.12.2009)

An Android dogfood diet for the holidays – Google gently hints towards its very own phone. (12.12.2009)

Google Chrome for the holidays: Mac, Linux and extensions in beta – Google Chrome finally comes to Linus and Macs. (08.12.2009)

Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories – Google introduces living stories, a cool aggregator for news. (08.12.2009)

Relevance meets the real-time web – Google introduces the Twitter intgration. Has room for improvement. (07.12.2009)

Five Years of Digg…and counting – digg turned five. (04.12.2009)

Introducing Google Public DNS – Google introduces a public DNS. (03.12.2009)

Introducing Feather: A Lighter Way to Browse Videos – YouTube provides a lightweight interface. (03.12.2009)

LinkedIn Platform: Open for Business – LinkedIn launches a platform. (23.11.2009)

Soup TV: Endless scrolling for videos – soup.io launches soup.tv. (21.11.2009)

What's Happening? – omg, Twitter changes its tagline to What’s Happening? (19.11.2009)

Burda Media new primary shareholder of XING AG – Burde acquires 25% shares of Xing. (18.11.2009)

Announcing TypePad Micro – TypePad launches a free Microblogging tool. (17.11.2009)

Evernote raises $10 million investment – Evernote gets a nice cash infusion. (16.11.2009)

Typekit is live – Typekit has launched. (10.11.2009)

Bing maps is Looking Good – bing improves its maps. (10.11.2009)

Transparency, choice and control – now complete with a Dashboard – Google provides a dashboard, which lists all data known about a user. (05.11.2009)

Create and Share custom News sections – Google News gets a bunch of features for personalization. (04.11.2009)

The App Garden – Flickr has launched a playground for apps. (03.11.2009)

Bookmark sync and more speed in the latest beta release – Google Chrome now lets you sync bookmarks between computers. (02.11.2009)

There's a List for That – Twitter launches the Twitter-Lists. (30.10.2009)

First 5,000 Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud – The New York Times teams up with freebase. (29.10.2009)

Introducing Google Social Search – Google launches a poorly implemented Social Search. (26.10.2009)

Introducing Raindrop – Mozilla introduces Raindrop, a project to filter input-streams. (22.10.2009)

Flickr! It’s made of people! – Flickr introduces People Tagging. (21.10.2009)

Tweets and updates and search, oh my! – Google hooks up with Twitter too. (21.10.2009)

Bing is Bringing Twitter Search to You – Bing hooks up with Twitter. (21.10.2009)

Introducing Ning Virtual Gifts! – Ning introduces gifts as virtual currency. (20.10.2009)

Delicious is now about Y!ou too – Delicious starts to switch to Yahoo-Logins. (19.10.2009)

The Wolfram|Alpha API Has Arrived – Wolfram|Alpha has released an API. (15.10.2009)

Aardvark launches Social Search on the Web – Aardvark has launched publicly. (14.10.2009)

Birthday #4 – Remember turns four. (13.10.2009)

Waving hello! – The hello world posting of Google Wave. (12.10.2009)

4,000,000,000 – Wow, flickr now has 4 billion photos. (12.10.2009)

Welcome To The New Technorati – Technorati relaunches and completeley loses its contact with the blogosphere. (08.10.2009)

Publicize: Twitter – Wordpress lets you automagically tweet new posts. (08.10.2009)

It’s here: Brightkite 2.0 – Brightkite relaunches as Brightkite 2.0. (06.10.2009)

What is a browser? – And Googles tries to explain the concept of a browser. (06.10.2009)

Choosing a smart password – Google provides some tips for choosing a smart password. (06.10.2009)

Announcing Custom Times Feeds – The New York Times launches Custom Times Feeds. (05.10.2009)

Introducing free Geistesblitz app for iPhone – MindMeister launches Geistesblitz for the iPhone. (05.10.2009)

nice, the various APIs of the NYT can be accessed via YQL now.

interesting: Ident Engine – a JavaScript library which builds lifestreams (via)

yay, google barcode doodle.

Social Mention: API monitoring for social sentiment and alerts – Apigee launches an API for tracking social sentiments. (02.10.2009)

Don't Forget: You Can Use Amazon SimpleDB For Free – Actually I forgot: You can keep up to 1 gigabyte of data in SimpleDB without paying any storage fees. (02.10.2009)

YUI 3.0.0: First GA Release of YUI’s Next-Generation Codeline – Yahoo finally has officially released the YUI 3.0.0. (29.09.2009)