Tech Journal
TechJournal is a web log that profiles, documents, interviews and reviews the latest internet startup companies and the newest technologies and pretty much anything to do with the World wide web 2.0 and its users.
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Tags: andreessen, facebook, zuckerberg, netscape, browser, ning, social network, social graph
Remember Marc Andreessen? Well, if you don't or was not old enough to care back in the 1990's, he was the founder of Netscape (that browser of choice the Web1.0 generation used). Anyway, as you might have expected, Netscape went down when the bubble burst and was replaced by Internet Explorer from Microsoft and eventually Mozilla Firefox.
Anyway, that guy, Marc Andreessen has been on a low profile recently, maybe he made a few headlines when he co-founded the social network creator service Ning, but aside from that, he was mostly under the radar. Today, he's joining Facebook with a chair on the board of directors.
Despite the seeming conflict between Facebook and Ning, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, says that Andreessen's Ning is "a complementary platform to Facebook that allows people to ...more
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The battle is finally over between Facebook and ConnectU. No they did not just shake and make up but they were
compelledordered by the judge to stop the dispute naming Facebook the winner.We wrote about this a couple of months ago. ConnectU founders were accusing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the whole I dea of Facebook from them while they were Harvard undergrads.
Judge James Ware of Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., finally sided with Facebook and implemented the settlement the two companies discussed last February. ConnectU was disappointed that the settlement was not based on Facebook's $15 billion valuation (the same valuation Microsoft invested in a year prior). Without the $15B valuation, t...more
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Facebook has redesigned its users' profile page. The redesign aims to do what Facebook thinks is best for its users. According to the executives explaining the redesign to a select group of bloggers and web2.0 experts, the redesign is predicated on three things, a cleaner look and feel, more control and transparency, and finally emphasizing relevant content.
Others put the objectives of the redesign in the perspectvie of the users:
For users: Make profiles cleaner and simpler, give users more control over their profiles, and emphasize recent and relevant information
For developers: Create more meaningful engagement with users, offer new integration points in profiles, and provide distribution for engaging applicationsfrom the meeting called by Facebook, the preview of the...more
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Facebook has announced that they are building a Jabber/XMPP interface for their Facebook IM service.
The Facebook IM service allows users to instant message their friend who are currently online browsing through Facebook. The great thing is, everybody in your friends list is already your contact on Facebook IM which takes out the hassle of adding friends into an IM client.
There were some rumors about Facebook taking the chat service out of the browser sometime but now they announced that they definitely will. Users will be able to chat with their contacts on Facebook with a IM client on the desktop without the need to log into the social network in the browser. Think Google Talk IM client and the integrated Google Talk in Gmail.
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Tags: facebook
Facebook will soon be removing the 5000-friends-only-limit restriction on their social network.
There have always been rumors as to why the limit exists. Facebook claims that anybody would at least have a maximum of friends and 5000 "real" friends is actually pushing it. Meaning they did not expect any real person to actually know personally 5000 other individuals.
Also there's a problem of scaling if the scenario did reach the point where everyone on Facebook had had 5000 connections.
Sources say that the scaling issue has been resolved and that the limit will be taken out real soon.
According to Facebook as well, there are only less than 1000 users 5000 friends. Among the 1000 is tech blogger Robert Scoble who had his Facebook account suspended a couple of months ago after running a script that ...more
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Tags: microhoo, microsoft, yahoo, acquisition, facebook
Bill Gates is making his last waves in the industry. Scheduled for reitrement this coming june, Microsoft founder and chairman has commented on his company's latest fiasco with Yahoo.
After talks with Yahoo broke down, Microsoft withdrew from the dealing table and issued a statement and warcry that they were not interested in any other deals (so far) and that they will be pursuing an independent strategy. These statements were echoed by Bill Gates at a press conference in Tokyo last Monday.
"Now at this point Microsoft is focused on its independent strategy," Gates told reporters at a news conference in Tokyo.
That was last Monday. However, Kara Swisher of All Things Digital has a scoop that indicates Microsoft is planning to buy out (hostile if needed) Facebook.
Dubbed Project Granola, Microsoft's failure ...more
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Facebook has announced their upcoming IM service last month with no definite release date. Today however, the Facebook chat service has finally landed on user profiles and it's great.
The news comes not from any official press release or blog entry but from actual use. It wouldn't come as a surprise that users will start tinkering with the new service as soon as it went live and true enough, after leaving my PC on while out for dinner, I come back to a mess on the browser page where Facebook used to be.
Facebook chat it great! Interface is clean, response time is fast and it cuts the time down to check out the IM details of the friends you want to chat with. Moreover there is no need to launch the IM service because it actively resides at the bottom of the Faceboo...more
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Tags: facebook, social network, lawsuit
VS. 
This is the first time I'll write about this issue here. Facebook will be settling the lawsuit filed against them by ConnectU.
ConnectU, a social network made by Harvard students in 2003, is accusing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of pilfering their idea. Basically, Zuck was active in the development of ConnectU and used that experience to create Facebook.
Mashable reported back in 2007:
"Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, who employed Zuckerberg at their college social network ConnectU for a brief period in 2003, accuse him of stealing the source code and design of that site. The su...more
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Tags: facebook, IM, chat, social
Yesterday, AOL purchased the social network Bebo with plans to marry it with AIM. Today, it seems that social nwtork + IM is becoming the trend. Facebook is working on an instant messaging service that they will be integrating on their site (of course).
Basically, the IM service built into Facebook will allow users to chat with their friends without leaving Facebook or opening another application. This is not entirely new, Social IM already tried this as a cross platform service but has failed to penetrate the market probably because you still had to go to the Social IM website and configure your social network to work with it (not too hard to do but still an extra step). MySpace also has a similar service MySpaceIM.
The Facebook IM offers quite the same service as MySpace but...more
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Tags: investments, nokia, facebook
Nokia and Facebook are in talks to put the social network on the handsets of the Finnish company. According to paidContent , putting a Facebook button on Nokia handsets may be as prominent as the YouTube button on the iPhone. Basically that's the gist of the deal.
A senior officer at nokia said, "There is talk of a partnership in the works… it’s safe to say we’re testing the waters and things still have to be worked out."
However, the deal is in its very early stages. This deal, if it pushes through, will give...more
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