Web 2.0

This is a love story with a happy ending--and a little heartbreak along the way.

My love affair with Digg began in 2005, about a year after the site launched and roughly two years before I started working at CNET. At the time, I was printing out marketing materials for a tiny company about an hour outside of San Francisco that was on its way to certain doom.

Things there were bleak, and everybody knew it. My days were spent as an office drone, doing menial tasks with long breaks between the action--a workday that made Digg an appealing place. … Read more

Android users looking to upload photos and videos to Flickr now have a new way to do it. Today the company rolled out an enhanced version of its m.flickr.com mobile site that lets users upload within Android's browser.

This behavior should be familiar to desktop users of Flickr, though on mobile phones this process hasn't exactly been carried along for the ride. In this case, it's about as close as you can get to that same desktop experience, though you can only upload one photo or video at a time. Another big difference is that … Read more

"We just released an API!" are usually words that make my brain glaze over like a Krispy Kreme doughnut. But in the case of Tubemote, which now has its own API, there's some very neat stuff going on behind the scenes that turns the Web-based remote control service into a full-fledged remote control platform for other sites.

Tubemote's primary function is letting people utilize a cell phone or spare computer as a way to control YouTube video playback on another machine. The service acts as an intermediary, letting the person who's in control do a … Read more

Four-buck iPad app My Friends from social-aggregation company Sobees has a new trick up its sleeve as of this morning that makes browsing through your friends' Facebook Places check-ins a more eyeball-friendly experience.

The app, which acts as a dolled-up interface for Facebook, now lets you browse Places check-ins in chronological order, as well as see them on an integrated Google Map. The feature joins other familiar Facebook mainstays like photos, chat, and events--all of which My Friends has skinned to fit within the iPad's rectangular interface.

The Places browser in My Friends offers up the same general experience … Read more

Updated at 2:00 p.m. with additional information from Google.

Google has added a new option in the labs section of Gmail that lets users pump up the quality in video chats.

The new setting, dubbed "video chat enhancements," ups not only the size of the video chat window, but its resolution too. The difference in size between the old and the new is considerable, both in the window of the person you're talking to, and the preview of your Webcam that appears in the bottom right-hand corner.

Here's a before and after:

Here also … Read more

Correction: The headline of this story has been changed to address an inaccuracy with how many LinkedIn users were updating their profiles.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Any perceptions of LinkedIn being a place where people fill out their profile information then come back to it only when job hunting have been squashed by the company's CEO.

Responding to an audience member's statement that 99 percent of users who come on the service never come back to update during an on-stage interview at the Demo Fall conference, LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner responded by saying "thankfully, less than 99 percent … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--When it comes to bookmarks, most browsers use the same system for organization: folders and tags. A new Xerox-incubated company called Trailmeme is taking a different approach by putting Web pages in a nested hierarchy that can show how they're related. The goal is to create a browsing experience with context, and one that can be shared with others.

Trailmeme, which launches as part of the Demo conference taking place here this week, is not a replacement for your browser's bookmarking system though. It's more of a tool for creating self-guided trips of Web … Read more

Using Google's vast resources in ways that company did not intend is not a new thing, though rarely is it done right. A new service from the Philippines called Insync falls into that small category, while still managing to play by the rules.

Insync does one thing and does it well, which is to use your Google account as a storage locker. This in itself is not that big of a deal since Google has offered general file storage within Google Docs since January. What Insync does that's so special is turn that storage into a local folder … Read more

Instead of building fast with lots of servers, lots of customers, and hopes of revenue, many new start-ups--mindful of the recovering economy--are taking a downright old-fashioned approach: make money first, grow later.

Whether that will play out at the Demo conference, which begins in earnest Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif., is debatable. But in recent months, the buzz-worthy start-ups have had a decidedly more traditional view than Web 2.0 heavyweights like Facebook and Twitter, founded just a few years ago with the principle that you build your audience, then you make your money.

There is, in fact, a shift … Read more