Over the past year or so, Facebook has made a number of moves, which bring more Twitter-like functionality to the social network. Some question why Facebook would want to become more like Twitter given that it is much more dominant in the social media space, but Facebook sees the growing-popularity of Twitter, and likely wants to make sure it offers everything users want, to keep them around for the long haul.

The latest Twitter-like feature to come to Facebook is the "share" button, which is pretty much Facebook's answer to Twitter's "retweet." The feature was rolled out over the weekend, and appears as a text link on posts in your news feed that stem from links ("share" is currently not an option for regular status updates, photo uploads, etc.).

Just click "share" and you are presented with a pop-up window that allows you to share the link, and says "Via username" (although you can remove this):

Just like that, you have passed the link on to your own friends, which may or may not include a variety of people who aren't friends of the original poster. This in effect makes Facebook an even more valuable tool for content publishers. It will help content go viral, spreading through new audienceses.

For some pros and cons of retweets, read this article. You can now apply some of these to Facebook's share feature, because it works ab/> [...]

Tue Jan 19, 2010 16:45 pm

Final exams are a thing of the past, your diploma is in hand and summer is in the air - what's the next logical step? Road trip, of course!

That's the case for three recent college grads, at least, who are embarking on their "GenJuice Gen Y Trendsetters Tour" later this month with the mission of connecting more than 1,300 "young go-getters" across the country.

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Starting on June 20 in San Francisco at the offices of Justin.tv, Arielle Scott, Virgilia Singh and Danielle Leslie will kick off a month and a half long tour of the country with the mission of bringing the supportive entrepreneurial environment they've found in San Francisco Bay Area to other areas of the country. The tour includes stops at 12 cities - many of which we covered in our Nevermind The Valley series - where the trio will hold a tweetup and unconference, bringing around 100 "Gen-Yers together to share their expertise and connect with other go-getters."

In their effort to "meet, interview and hang out with the coolest entrepreneurs in each city", the three women asking for people in each city to tweet the "names of inspiring young people and include the hashtag #GenJuice(theircity)".

The Eventbrite page for the kick-off in San Francisco describes the unconference as a democratically cr/> [...]

Wed Jun 02, 2010 13:45 pm

Earlier this spring, Twitter announced it would soon be adding location-based information to tweets.

Typical of what we like to think of as the company's "mysterious charm," the feature has been unveiled six months later with a brief post on the Twitter blog. The new geotagging capabilities can already be seen in certain third-party apps and might even come to the web interface sometime soon.

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To activate the new hotness, Twitter users must go to their Settings pages and click "Enable Geotagging." For obvious privacy reasons, the feature is not automatically enabled.

Apps such as Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro, and many others are already supporting location-based data for tweets.

"The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations," writes Twitter platform/API man Ryan Sarver in the blog post.

"Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community."

As are we! But we might hold out on enabling the geo-tastic feature just yet. We've still got a few stalkers to/> [...]

Thu Nov 19, 2009 15:45 pm

A year ago we polled you, the ReadWriteWeb community, on your favorite mobile apps. It's become an annual tradition to run this survey, so in this post we're collecting your top 5 lists for 2009. To get you inspired, the ReadWriteWeb team have listed their personal favorites below.

We first ran this poll in November 2007, before Apple's App Store opened on July 10, 2008 and when Android was but a twinkle in Google's eye. At that time, the 5 most mentioned mobile apps were the Gmail Java app, Google Maps, Opera Mini, Fring and Shozu. In November 2008 we began to see popular web services being mentioned as favorite mobile apps too: Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, FriendFeed. Also newer mobile-focused apps like Evernote and Brightkite. Read on for the 2009 edition of this reader survey...

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Note: ReadWriteWeb's iPhone app is coming soon! To be notified as soon as it becomes available, email notify@readwriteweb.com.

Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder and editor (iPhone user):

• Diamedic; diabetes data input and monitor/> [...]
  
  Wed Nov 25, 2009 13:35 pm

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