These are my links for January 7th:

• Social Media Collective Wisdom | Who’s Blogging What (Special Edition) Jan 7, 2010 – Some expert thinking on five social media questions as we enter the first decade
• Facebook Just Got Its Own VitaminWater Flavor: “Connect”. Seriously. – Here’s a first. VitaminWater has just announced that its newest flavor will be called “Connect”, complete with a Facebook logo and a full paragraph description loaded with references to untagging, friend requests, and photo stalking. It’s black cherry-lime flavored, with caffeine and “eight key nutrients”. And it’s coming to stores nationwide in March.
• Ask Me, Ask Me: Tumblr Adds a New Query Feature – Good news for anyone who loves interacting with a particular Tumblr: The blogging platform has added an Ask feature that allows you to directly ask a blogger questions.
• Ford SYNC Will Soon Stream Pandora Radio – 2010 is shaping up to be the year Ford SYNC forever alters how we experience digital content in our vehicles. Today, the automotive company is breaking even more ground with the news that the next evolution of SYNC will support third-party mobile applications. Get ready to stream Pandora and tweet hands-free in your Ford.
• Have a Nexus One? Good, Now Tear it Down – Geeks can usually be divided into two categories: those who are perfectly happy with merely using their gadgets, and the more radical type, who simply have to tear them down to see what’s inside

These are my links for January 6th through January 7th:

• HootSuite Now Lets You Update Your WordPress Blog – HootSuite, the popular Twitter app geared towards businesses and power users, has just issued yet another update to their web-based client, featuring the ability to post to the WordPress.com blogging platform, URL and content previews, and trending topic explanations.
• iTunes Browser Previews Now With Actual Music – Back in November of 2009, Apple finally rolled out a web browser preview for music in the iTunes catalog. It let you view the albums page, see all the songs included on the album, their length, as well as price for individual tracks.
• Graphic.ly Creates the Digital Comic Book Store – During Microsoft’s keynote at CES 2010 this evening, Steve Ballmer showed off a very cool mobile and web application called Graphic.ly, a platform that aims to be the ultimate digital content delivery system for the publishing world.
• 2010 Census Turns to Facebook to Maximize Impact, Reach Young Adults – As the year 2010 gets underway, so does the federal Census in the United States — only this time around it has gone somewhat digital, incorporating Facebook and other digital media to spread the word about being counted.
• HOW TO: Erase Your Online Past [HUMOR] – These days, it’s getting tougher and tougher to keep a good name unbesmirched. Surveys indicate that as many as half of hiring managers use search engines to screen job applicants, and 1 in 10 have rejected potential employees because of damaging information on the web. Even if there’s no one out to get you, it’s likely that you’ve left your own e-trail of embarrassment: FacebookFacebookFacebook photos, blog comments, cached web pages, YouTubeYouTubeYouTube videos — all these things can provide the world with evidence of your previous poor judgement and wrongdoing.
• Echofon 3.0 Gets With the Twitter Times – You have plenty of options when it comes to using Twitter on your iPhone. But Echofon just made a big move for your attention by releasing version 3.0.
• Video: Google’s “F*ck You iPhone” Phone. The REAL Google Phone (Satire, NSFW) – As we’re all well aware, Google released the Nexus One yesterday, the first supposed “Google Phone.” But it’s hardly an iPhone killer. For that role, Google has something much more sinister in mind. Meet the “Fuck You iPhone” Phone.
• “Inspired” By Formspring, Tumblr Launches Nearly Identical “Ask Me” – Popular microblogging service Tumblr has just launched a new feature called “Ask Me."
• The Oscars of Twitter: Shorty Awards to Honor Creators of Short-Form, Real-Time Content – Last year, SawHorse Media, a Twitter aggregator that pioneered the concept of lists, put together the Shorty Awards. This contest and ceremony was intended to "honor the best producers of short, real-time content."
• 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice – ReadWriteStart – The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don't try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don't make God-jokes in Utah and you don't get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you're looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here's a list of five to get you started.

These are my links for January 4th through January 6th:

• Keep All Those Resolutions You Just Made: Try mySomeday – So, this year, you've resolved to lose weight, take a class, learn a new language and buy a better mobile device. Good for you – but we all know how well most new year's resolutions go.
• Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots) – Adam D'Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company's first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D'Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself "A continually improving collection of questions and answers." In our very early testing it's a pleasure to use, but we're going to share screen shots with you tonight and write about it in depth after more extensive use tomorrow.
• Social Media Today | 8 Ways To Use Twitter Lists – We talked recently about the Twitter lists set up by My Creative Team. Are you using Twitter lists? Tell us about it.
• Social Media Today | 3 Helpful Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2010 – I read a lot of 2010 predictions to end up with 3 that I felt were truly helpful to a seasoned marketer from a major business. There are a lot of common clams out there from "this is the year of mobile marketing" to the many ways people guess that location-based marketing will take off (this ranges form the 'augmented reality' fans to the predictions that Four Square is a harbinger of major innovation).
• Social Media Today | 7 Tips for Writing Engaging Content –
• How Data Will Impact the Way We Do Business – Outliers like Factual, WolframAlpha, Daytum (Daytum), FlowingData, and InfoChimps have proven that painting our world in data (and metadata) is a rather valuable endeavor for any business.
• Facebook for iPhone 3.1 Adds Push Notifications, Address Book Syncing – Up until now, the Facebook iPhone app [iTunes link] had everything but push notifications. The launch of version 3.1, however, remedies that ill. The other 3.1 biggie is the ability to sync your Facebook friends with your phone’s address book contacts — photos and all.
• 28 Days Later: Say Goodbye to the Netflix New Release Rental – Today is sad day for Netflix customers. The online video rental supplier has just announced an agreement with Warner Bros. that will forever alter your online rental experience. Now should you wish to rent a Warner Bros. flick you’ll have to wait out a 28-day holding period after the film’s initial DVD release date.
• Analysis: Yawn, Google Introduces iPhone Clone | Epicenter | Wired.com – Congratulations, Google. You’ve spent untold millions of dollars to produce another iPhone — two years late. That about sums up the company’s Nexus One phone launch today.
• Exclusive: Apple to Buy Quattro Wireless for $275 Million | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD – Apple is set to announce that it has acquired Quattro Wireless for $275 million, several sources confirmed.

These are my links for January 4th:

• Make Video Encoding Easy and Affordable With Encoding.com – Encoding.com is the leading SaaS provider of studio-class video encoding services. It scales instantly and supports all popular media formats.
• Yahoo to Unload E-mail Provider Zimbra on VMWare – As Yahoo continues to refine and redefine itself, it’s been offloading and shuttering some services in an effort to slim down (RIP Geocities!). One of the divisions that’s been on the auction block since September is Zimbra, an open-source e-mail company Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350 million.
• 5 Superb Social Media Tools for Musicians – Musicians take notice
• Eric Schmidt: The Baddest Man On Twitter – Stop what you’re doing right now (reading this) and go look at Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s latest Twitter profile picture. Now look closer. Yes, it appears he’s wearing a flak jacket, also known as a bullet-proof vest.
• An Inside Look At A Twitter Style Guide: 140 Characters – We’ve all seen Twitter grow into the company that it is now, but what was it like when it first started — back when it was still called Odeo, and Twitter wasn’t in existence. As we know, Twitter was spun off from Evan William’s company Odeo, into what we know now as Twitter, the social networking service where you post short messages in 140 characters or less.
• Nothing to celebrate on Public Domain Day 2010 in the US – What child has not sat starry-eyed around the fire, dreaming of the goodies to come on January 1—Public Domain Day? The thought of new books and movies and music coming out from copyright is enough to send sugarplums dancing through heads, unless you live in the US in 2010. In which case, you have nothing to celebrate, since nothing is entering the public domain this year.
• Pearl Jam Gives A Song Away For A Tweet – Regular readers may know my affinity for Pearl Jam. The band, which released a new album, Backspacer, last year had a series of promotions with MySpace to promote the album. Now they’re turning to Twitter for some more.
• 4 Ways for Augmented Reality to Get Past the Hype – GigaOM – With 197 million augmented reality-capable smartphones set to be in the global market by 2012, up from nearly 91 million in 2010, the building blocks are falling into place for people to merge digital information with their view of the physical world. But while we’re just getting to the point that normal users can see the promise of augmented reality for themselves, there’s still a long way to go.
• If You Tweet, He Will Come: Mayor Cory Booker Shovels Snow for a NJ Resident – As the snow piled up on New Year’s Eve, Jersey resident Ravie Rave didn’t call a snow plow service to take care of her 65-year-old father’s walk — she tweeted at Newark Mayor Cory Booker.
• CES 2010: What to Expect [VIDEO] – What to expect from CES 2010. From the team at Mashable.com

These are my links for January 2nd through January 4th:

• More Smartphone Users Now Use Their Phones to Shop Online – Smartphone users are becoming increasingly comfortable with using their phones to shop online. According to new data from Compete, about 37% of smartphone users have purchased something with their handset in the last 6 months. Among the most popular items that these users bought are music, books, DVDs, video games and movie tickets. At the same time, though, Compete also found that smartphone users are very likely to abandon shopping sites that haven't been optimized for mobile usage. Almost 8% of smartphone owners who tried to buy something from their phone were simply unable to do so.
• Flixster Acquires Rotten Tomatoes – Flixster just announced that it has acquired Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie review site, from IGN Entertainment. IGN is a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Flixster is one of the world's most popular movie communities and currently features about 2.3 billion user ratings and reviews from its users. Rumors about this acquisition first surfaced in late December, when Kara Swisher first reported that a potential acquisition of Flixster by MySpace would hinge upon a merger of Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster.
• Twitter’s Psychologist Strikes Again: Analyze Your Lists – Dan Zarrella has long impressed us with his discourses on the science of retweets, as well as his psychoanalytic apps that scan and parse Twitter streams – one for general analysis and one for dreams.
• The 50 Most-Blogged Albums of 2009, Streaming Free: HypeMachine Zeitgeist Out Now – Hype Machine, the smart, long-running MP3 blog aggregator, has posted its annual collection of the most-blogged-about albums, songs and musical artists of the year. Once again, the project is a pleasure to consume and will unfold throughout the month of January. Top albums 50 through 41, Mumford and Sons through Monsters of Folk, are available now in full for streaming.
• Rock & Roll Will Never Die? It Might on Facebook – The graying of the Facebook population seems to have continued according to new stats released today by iStrategyLabs. And while one might expect more of the site's now nearly 10 million users over the age of 55 to be Neil Young fans, his "Rock N' Roll Will Never Die" refrain seems to be falling through. The listing of the term "rock and roll" as an interest is down over 60% among Facebook users in the past year.
• ComScore Ups the Ante in Mobile Analytics – ComScore, a leading Web statistics provider, has joined with Flurry Analytics to provide a more complete picture on the who, what, when, where and how of our use of mobile media. Founded just over a year ago, Flurry has grown immensely and this move will only serve to boost its popularity.
• Watching TV Together in Different Time Zones – NYTimes.com – Simple technology, including video chatting services like Skype, is making it possible for far-flung friends to watch shows together, even if they can’t share the same bowl of popcorn.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• George Washington’s Rules for Social Media « digiphile – The following “rules” are interpretation of his intent, not President Washington’s words.
• Why Twitter Will Endure – NYTimes.com – In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting, the verb, “to tweet” is even more embarrassing.

These are my links for January 1st:

• Guide to Twitter – The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter | Webdesigner Depot – Twitter isn’t just a cute way for keeping in instant touch with friends on mobile phones anymore. It has ramped up quickly to be the search engine of choice for some with its human driven results.
• At Foursquare Venues, The Mayor Eats For Free – Foursquare, the geo-location based check-in game, just announced its first venue that is combining badges and promotions. On Foursquare you get badges for checking into places. The person who checks into a place the most becomes the “Mayor.” You also get promotions from restaurants and bars nearby based on your location. Now those two elements are being tied together.
• Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use. –
• Twitter’s Most Influential Topics of 2009 – In 2009, influence emerged as a source of filtering and focus, especially when Twitter released its new “lists” feature to empower users to organize and follow custom streams by topic, personality, and themes.
• ShopSavvy Barcode Reader for Android: Now With QR Code Support – When Google’s Android platform first launched in late October of 2008, ShopSavvy from Big in Japan was easily one of the most impressive apps available for the platform. Using the phone’s built-in camera, ShopSavvy scans barcodes of any product and then uses the data connection to search the Internet for the best price. It’s one of those really genius mobile app ideas, and it is no surprise that ShopSavvy was one of the winners of Google’s Android Developer Challenge in 2008.
• Tweetup and Hashtag Make the List of Top 2009 Words – “Tweetup,” “hashtag,” “freemium,” “paywall,” “unfriend” and “tag cloud” all made the list, which was compiled by dictionary expert Susie Dent after poring over the two billion-word Oxford English Corpus database. One of the more “late to the party” terms included is “Slashdot effect,” which finally achieves its small measure of lexical legitimacy despite having already arguably had its heyday.

These are my links for December 30th through December 31st:

• Digg Takes a Dip In Traffic, Half The Size Of Twitter – But its latest growth spurt stopped in September, 2009 when it peaked at 32 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore. In November, its worldwide visitors were down 15 percent to 27 million, which is about half the number of people who visit Twitter.com. Digg was passed by Twitter back in March (see chart below).
• In 2009, Social Media Overtook Web 2.0 [GRAPHS] – While its definition is not yet etched in stone, most believe it describes a new type of media and communication that creates a world conversation and dialogue. Instead of being fed news (a one-to-many dissemination approach), everyone is welcomed to be a content creator and to generate a debate around that content. While its focus is the web, it goes beyond it as well.
• Digg to aggregate what’s trending on Twitter and Facebook – Holy Kaw! – Looks like Kevin Rose may have found a way to steer the Digg ship back on course with a site overhaul that rumors say will include an aggregation of what’s hot on Twitter and Facebook.
• FCC Chairman’s Facebook Account Compromised – The New York Times’ Bits blog is reporting that FCC head honcho Julius Genachowsi — the man in the middle of the net neutrality initiatives and the Google-Apple disputes — has fallen victim to the fraudulent activity of scammers on Facebook.
• Facebook: 5 Predictions for 2010 – Facebook has been around for more than five years, but it hit critical mass and exploded in 2009. As the new decade begins, the fallout is blowing over the entire web. Facebook Connect is everywhere, in case you hadn’t heard. We’re talking 60 million users on 80,000 web sites
• Facebook App’s Password Data Breach Turns into Lawsuit – Facebook and MySpace app maker and advertising network RockYou isn’t having a great December. Earlier this month, 32 million passwords were compromised by a hacker going by the alias of “igigi.” That’s more than half of RockYou’s monthly active users.
• The Androidification of Everything – GigaOM – A few days ago, Antonio Rodriguez, a Boston-based entrepreneur and founder of Tabblo, emailed to let me know that he was leaving Hewlett-Packard to go do something new. Rodriguez sold Tabblo to HP in 2007 and had been working on some cool stuff at HP, but now he’s decided that it’s time for him to head back to the startup ecosystem. We met when he was trying to get traction for Tabblo, but we have stayed in touch since, musing over the future of devices and user experiences. (Antonio chronicles many of his thoughts over on his blog.)

These are my links for December 30th:

• Zynga CEO Mark Pincus On Charlie Rose – Charlie Rose welcomed Zynga CEO Mark Pincus on his show last night for a 15 minute interview. Pincus says 60-70 million people a day are playing social games on Facebook and MySpace, and 1%-2% are willing to shell out actual cash to enhance gameplay. Mobile social gaming is still small, just 5 million – 6 million/ day, he says. But mobile is a fast growing platform.
• Evernote Reaches Two Million Lifeloggers, Half Of Them Are On The iPhone – The idea of a life recorder that captures every moments of your life on video is still a bit of a tech fantasy, but an early version of the life recorder already exists. It is called Evernote, the popular iPhone (and now Android) app which lets you record your memories by snapping geo-tagged photos, making voice notes, or just text notes and making it easy to search through them. Evernote does not yet support video recording other than as an attachment (for premium subscribers), but when that becomes more practical it will.
• 10 Things You Need for Your Social Media Road Trip –
• Palm Pre and Palm Pixi Headed to Verizon? – The Palm Pre is headed to Verizon sometime in early 2010, but now BGR is reporting that the Palm Pixi will be coming to Verizon, too.
• Hot PCB – Printed Circuit Board Design, Fabrication, and Assembly Industry Blog » Blog Archive » When a Tweeter becomes a Twiddler – We have all experienced that moment where we open our email again even though we just minimized it and there was nothing new. Or we have refreshed our facebook/twitter to see if anything new has popped up. Or we’ve closed a browser and out of habit opened it up again even though there is no need. Or you end up staring aimlessly at your monitor wondering “what can I do?”
• SEOmoz Decision Making Flowchart – SEOmoz caused a stir this week by publishing a “study” that allegedly showed NoFollow tags were still effective in sculpting the flow of PageRank.

  This of course flies in the face of what Matt Cutts has said on the issue, and the data in the study doesn’t seem to actually be all that solid. But hey, why let that get in the way of a good link bait post, right?

• Twitter API Is Becoming Far More than Just an API for Twitter – Webmonkey – Twitter’s API has spawned hundreds of mashups and third party software apps, but now it’s growing even further — outside sites have begun mimicking an API to piggyback on Twitter clients.
• Web Designer – Defining the internet through beautiful design » Blog Archive » What has blogging done for the quality of writing on the web? – IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to read much of the IT press these days without coming across an article about Twitter, how it’s going to save the world, and how it isn’t. I don’t want to add to that discussion here (except maybe I already have) but its soaring popularity got me thinking about how easy it is to get one’s voice heard on the web these days. Twitter is a special case – technically it’s micro-blogging – and it is typically used to provide short updates on what people are doing there and then. But it is a form of blogging, micro or not, and it is blogging in general I think I have a problem with. Wikipedia defines a blog as “A type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
• Is Social Media Killing Your Business? | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing – Social media for the small business is a catalyst, a tool, a way to create awareness and deeper engagement – it’s not a way to take orders.
• 10 Questions for Brian Williams – TIME – Brian Williams doesn't get Twitter. Calls it a time suck and a waste of time. He misses the point completely and it's really sad.

These are my links for December 29th through December 30th:

• LEAKED: New Details and the Price of Google’s Nexus One – The Nexus One, also known as the Google Phone, has been causing a stir this month after details began to emerge about the project. Earlier today, we learned that the phone will likely be revealed on January 5 at a Google press conference (which we will be covering).
• The Complete National Geographic Collection on a Hard Drive – National Geographic, the legendary yellow magazine that’s been an important part of many a young nerd’s childhood, has been around since 1888. Even if you have a very large room dedicated to storing the magazine, that’s a lot of issues.
• Facebook to Seppukoo: Die! – Remember Seppukoo, that nifty little service that lets you kill your Facebook identity? Well, Facebook doesn’t appreciate the idea.
• Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Journalists – Navigating the journalistic seas this past year has been a particularly challenging/exciting task. As many a publication foundered in the economic benthos, others rode the wave of new technology into previously uncharted waters.
• Comedy Duo Hopes Social Media Power Will Secure Slot on Showtime – Undoubtedly, social media is a powerful force. It can be used as a way to spread breaking news, organize political protests or energize campaigns, and, of course, to promote various brands and individuals. But can social media help a TV pilot ascend from reject bin to series pickup? Jessica Chaffin and Jamie Denbo — the stars and creators of Ronna and Beverly — sure hope so.
• Weather Channel Marriage Proposal: Touching With a Chance of Viral Status [VIDEO] – First Twitter, then Foursquare, now the Weather Channel? People are broadcasting their wedding proposals all over the place these days.
• LinkedIn’s New iPhone App: The 3 Worst Things About It – Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.
• Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features – One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible.
• Google’s 2009: A Glimpse of the Web’s Next Decade – In 2009 the web as we knew it changed dramatically. Twitter graduated to become a media darling and a mainstream communication staple. Facebook became the most significant social network of this day and age. And Google changed the way we search.
• 10 Things to Do Before the New Year – Whether you work for someone or yourself, things tend to slow down for many of us in the final two weeks of the old year. What better time to do a little business sprucing? Here are ten things to do before the New Year to feel invigorated and ready to whatever comes your way.

These are my links for December 29th:

• 8 Things Every Geek Needs to Do Before 2010 – These tasks comprise a quick to-do list that will leave you feeling competent and prepared for the decade that approaches. Also, you can play the condescension chip and start chiding friends who haven't checked off these items yet.
• Facebook Redesigns Help Center, Gives Unique URLs to Help Topics – Facebook yesterday announced they’ve redesigned their help center, making it more accessible and easier to use.
• Best Job Application Ever: “Twitter Genius” – With its 140 character limit, Twitter is all about brevity. But if you think the same shouldn’t apply for a job application, well then, “you’re done.”
• Conservative Link Shortener GOP.am Aims to Prank the Pranksters | Epicenter | Wired.com – Pranksters riddled a new Republican-branded URL-shortening service this week with unwelcome links juxtaposing the GOP brand with ironic web pages, such as one featuring a sex toy in the likeness of Barack Obama. The pranks forced the party’s web consultant, Political Media, to block certain URLs manually and work on implementing an automatic filtering system.
• Wurld Map: A Geopolitical Guide to Short-URL Services | Epicenter | Wired.com – Domain hacks aren’t exactly new, but with a bumper crop of URL shortening services doing business under two-letter country domains these days, we wanted to know: Where exactly is that? And is the government over there any good?