Author: Jolie O’Dell

Quora, the super stealthy startup that was started by Facebook’s first CTO Adam D’Angelo and that is now in private beta, is beginning to crack its doors open for press, and the ReadWriteWeb crew is impressed and already mildly addicted.

It’s a user-generated Q&A with real-time elements. It’s useful and fascinating, with similarities to apps such as Google Wave, Aardvark, FormSpring.me – but it’s beautifully built and easy to use off the bat. Read on for details on how to get your invitation for this still-private site.

Sponsor

Topic experts in all areas of technology, design, startups and other areas are quickly populating the site. Users follow topics and other users, then get to participate in conversations around those topics or with those people. One of our favorite aspects of the site so far is that you can ask and answer provocative questions anonymously.

To get an idea of how the site works and what it looks like, check out these screenshots:

Since the invite process is a lot like Google Wave (each user gets a small number of invitations to email to friends), we’ve decided to pool our invitations and give them to our Facebook friends. So, if you go to the ReadWriteWeb Facebook page (and if you’re a fan, please add us and leave us a comment so we know who you are!), you’ll see a short screencast from Marshall Kirkpatrick with the email address for your to request your Quora invitation.

We’ve got 100 invites to give away. The first 100 folks who email the address Marshall gives in our Facebook video will get them. Good luck, and thanks for reading and watching!

UPDATE: Invites are gone, folks! If you didn’t see one, check your spam folder. If you don’t see one, try asking around Twitter or in the comments here.

If you got your invite and are now inside Quora, leave us a comment and let us know what you think! We’ll be posting an in-depth analysis of the site later today, and we’d love to know what you think.

Discuss

The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December’s stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption.

In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests while stats for HTC Magic devices remained static and those for HTC’s Dream model actually decreased. In terms of consumer use of the network and acceleration of device popularity, it seems we have a winner.

Sponsor

Having been compared extensively with the iPhone, the Droid stands up solidly even under extensive scrutiny. And in terms of 3G network access, we’ve personally seen fewer issues than with any other mobile carrier we’ve tried to date. (Note: I’m a Droid owner and a former iPhone user. I’ve also suffered through my share of BlackBerries, Palms and their ilk.) If any device is to become the iPhone killer, it will be the Droid or something very close to it (here’s looking at you, Nexus One).

AdMob’s numbers show that requests from all Android-driven devices increased by 97 percent between October to December in 2009, totaling more than 1 billion requests in December alone.

The open platform has also seen a refreshing diversity of devices and manufacturers. AdMob shows that in December, 56 percent of requests were from HTC devices, 39 percent were from Motorola devices and 5 percent were manufactured by from Samsung. And in December, seven devices generated more than three percent of requests each: the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid Eris and the Samsung Moment. This stat represents a significant increase from just three devices in October (HTC Dream, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero).

Already, the Motorola Droid is the leading Android device on AdMob’s radar, generating a third of all the network’s requests in December. Released just under two months ago, it’s already the top-selling Android device on the market, a title it’s held since a scant fortnight after its launch.

Granted, AdMob’s metrics show a small slice of mobile device usage. But they’ve consistently been reliable in showing what mobile users use and need and in predicting trends. We are internally excited about what Android-powered devices will do in the market in the months to come, and I am personally quite optimistic about Droid adoption specifically.

Let us know what you think in the comments, particularly if you’re a fanboy or fangirl of a particular device!

Discuss

FormSpring.com is a data collection and management system with a particular emphasis in online forms, registrations and surveys. An enterprise-level system, FormSpring.com might seem rather dry to anyone but an online retailer or event coordinator.

FormSpring.me, on the other hand, has tapped the very essence of what makes the social web so addictive. This new application, a free and social-side project, nearly has all the requisite puzzle pieces to go completely viral.
It’s fun, engaging and slightly game-like, and it encourages the behaviors users love to indulge. It’s only missing one critical element:

Sponsor

A stable back end. But more about that in a moment. First, let me tell you what makes FormSpring.me so infinitely entertaining.

First, the site is user-to-user Q&A. This is the kind of formula that has populated the Web with masses of UGC on sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers. It’s also the basic formula behind such highly praised startups as Aardvark, which allows users to ping one another across networks to get answers about specific topics. Q&A between end users is a growing trend on the web, without a doubt.

Second, the site allows one user to anonymously ask questions of another user. Anonymity has bred some of the most interesting and varied experiments of the social web. Very often, a lack of links to users’ true identities leads to bathroom-wall-of-the-Internet content such as 4chan or YouTube comments. But while anonymity breeds trollism and is actually a dying phenomenon online, having a thin veil between the asker and the answerer of a question can act as a confessional booth in a way, allowing for more frank communication or the posing of some very interesting, controversial questions that might otherwise be considered impolite or risky.

Finally, one of the most enduring trends of the social web, from its inception to the present day, is our deep and insatiable love of self-reference. The provocative beginning question for the site is, “Ask me anything,” which users then tweet or post to Facebook. Answering questions all about you, your preferences, your past, your thoughts, your wishes and hopes, your regrets, what you eat and where you live – nothing is more intoxicating to the average social media user. From our first LiveJournal entries to mid-2000s MySpace chain surveys to our latest tweets, we clearly love talking about ourselves. The way that FormSpring.me caters to this inherently human attribute is by giving us the impression or illusion that someone, somewhere actually cares about what we think and do enough to ask us and expect an answer.

So, when you combine the power of a Q&A site with the magic of an anonymous commenting system and the addictive qualities of navel-gazing with the expectation of being noticed, you basically have on your hands the social web app of the year just waiting to happen.

And if it weren’t for back end – which is likely built on Ruby on Rails, according to a few sources we’ve consulted today – FormSpring would have not only a money-making enterprise app but also a blockbuster social app. [Note: Some commenters say the site is likely not built on Rails. If you’ve got programming experience, take a look at FormSpring.me and let us know what you think in the comments.]

Although the concept is fascinating, the implementation is transparently shoddy. It seems like a hastily put-together weekend project along the lines of a Startup Weekend or Rails Rumble one-off. In fact, several developers we consulted said the site bears all the marks of a Ruby on Rails product, including rampant database scalability errors. ActiveRecord is a Rails class for accessing databases, and it’s been shown in past applications to be unscalable. Concurrency issues mean that a small group of geeks or judges can have a grand time with your app, but the second it catches on with the social media crowd and then – god help you – general Internet users, the app’s database is unable to handle that volume of traffic over a period of seconds, and end users start seeing error messages and abandon ship like so many faithless rats.

And since FormSpring.me is in all likelihood a side project from a single staffer or a couple employees (the company blog doesn’t even mention the offshoot), it might not get the executive attention for further development or resource allocation. After all, without a revenue model, why would an enterprise-focused company waste time and energy on a social application?

Speculation aside, FormSpring.com support tech Ryan Dillman writes, “Eventually, we plan to rewrite the FormSpring.me code from the ground up using the same type of database as sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., so that we can handle the load. In the meantime, the millions of calls to the database cause frequent issues during peak times.”

Many parts of Twitter are built on Scala, and Facebook’s database abstraction layer was developed in-house. If that kind of userbase – millions upon millions of users accessing the site around the clock – is what FormSpring is preparing for, they’re going to need a much more robust solution that’s much closer to bare metal than whatever they’re currently running.

And we do suggest they find one. FormSpring should consider monetizing and quickly scaling such an addictive little application before someone else does it next and better.

So, to take the site’s “Ask me anything” query and pose it to the site’s creators, do you plan to seriously devote resources to create a stunning and addictive social app, or is this experiment destined for the digital dustbin?

Ask us anything – or give us your frank opinions – in the comments.

Discuss

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.

His latest project, TweetPsych for lists, is an enlightening and often amusing look at what your lists are talking about, how they view the world, what turns them on (or off), and more. Depending on how you group your Twitter friends, you can make interesting generalizations or conjectures about society as a whole. What do the denizens of L.A. or San Francisco tweet about most? What about women – what’s got them buzzing? Read on for more on precisely that cross-section of the Twittersphere.

Sponsor

My “I Heart L.A.” list, a curation of tweets from the L.A. tech scene, shows a hilarious preoccupation with sex and a lack of tweeting about work, for example.

And my lengthy list of San Francisco/Bay Area people on Twitter gave evidence of a complete lack of interest in celebrities and a preoccupation with self, the future and control.

But when I looked at my “Southern Comfort” list of geeks south of the Mason-Dixon line, I got a very different picture. These folks are using the social web to tweet about their emotions, the passage of time, themselves, and dreams of unconscious thoughts, while they tweet less than others about celebrities, sex and money.

When I looked at results for the list of women I follow, I saw they tweet a lot about sex, themselves, the past, anxiety and negative emotions, in that order. It was like watching an episode of Sex and the City flash before my eyes. They tweeted very little about money, learning, control (including self-control) and constructive behavior. Keep in mind, this isn’t a generalization about the state of womanhood on the Internet; I follow a very limited and eclectic group of ladies, all of whom I find very charming in their own fashion.

Of course, I had to check out the stats on the ReadWriteWeb crew. We seem to tweet a lot about leisure and activities other than work. Uh, don’t tell the boss? However, tweets about work finished a close third, right behind tweets about ourselves. As a group, we don’t tend to tweet about personal things, such as money, sex or emotions.

Other interesting hypotheses can be drawn when examining “social media” and “technology” lists. Many geek-centric lists I examined were shockingly devoid of tweets about leisure, positive or other emotions or physical sensations and dominated by tweets about learning, the self and control. Perhaps this is due to our realization that the personal and professional are quickly merging and our perceived need to present a reasonably consistent face and least objectionable programming-type content.

At any rate, Zarrella’s given us another insightful peek into how Twitter reveals interesting snippets of information about various demographics and sociological segments.

Give the new lists function a spin, and let us know your findings in the comments!

Discuss

It’s no secret that we at ReadWriteWeb have a lot of love for startups that make their homes outside Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.

Over the last year, we decided to make a few videos spotlighting some unique, unexpected locations where startups thrive, where tech scenes are vibrant, where cooperation outstrips competition, and where creativity runs rampant. One of the first cities we’d like to introduce you to is home to between 150 and 170 startups as well as a thriving entrepreneurial and creative community. Welcome to Boulder, Colorado.

Sponsor

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

With the startup accelerator program at TechStars acting as a lightning rod, this area has grown from an earthy university town to a true hotbed of innovation. In certain parts of downtown, you can’t throw a rock without hitting some startup’s offices, and I could barely walk three blocks without bumping into at least one entrepreneur, developer, or designer working at a company such as Threadless or AOL.

We interviewed a couple of local startup advisors and one startup team about the culture and community in Boulder. Watch and listen to what they have to say; there are more than a few reasons tech-minded residents love this gorgeous mountain town.

Discuss

It’s been a long and winding road for serial volunteer and social media philanthropist Sloane Berrent.

Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media.

Sponsor

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

RWW: “Social media for social good” has become the catchphrase du jour, it seems. What does it actually mean; how much can social media users affect social change, and how?

I am a strong believer in the idea that the things you do online are meant to facilitate your offline interactions. People are so fast to click a button, and that can be great. Retweeting, forwarding, and Facebook walls are great engagements. But what’s more difficult is the donate button. That’s the big hurdle and disconnect. I’m trying to provide these inspirational opportunities in time-boxed campaigns. Social media is slowly catching on, but there’s a lot of noise. Standing out is hard; it’s important to have an offline component.

Berrent was visibly disturbed by what she witnessed at this Manila trash dump, where she saw shoeless children running through piles of debris.

RWW: Tell me about your experiences with Kiva borrowers. What kinds of people and enterprises have you seen? In your opinion, does microlending have a measurable impact on struggling local economies?

Kiva is really unique. It has a lot of power users – more than any nonprofit I’ve ever seen. One man has made a thousand loans. It’s individual stories, and people really connect. You get updates on that person, and people say it’s their favorite email of the month. As a microlending company, Kiva is one spoke in the larger wheel of microfinance. On a global scale, it has a very big impact.

Typically, when you go to a village or province, certain industries are prevalent. In a fishing community, maybe the borrower bought a fishnet or a fishing boat. In an area with a lot of bamboo, it’s going to be crafts. I worked in eleven branch offices. I met over 40 different female borrowers individually and over 250 in my time there.

I can see that the money Kiva provides makes a difference. Microfinance is a very slow process, and there are gems and sparks of people who break through the poverty cycle. When you see villages changing, it’s really something. It’s like watching grass grow, but it’s really beautiful grass.

This woman is a pig farmer and a recipient of funds from a Kiva-affiliated organization.

RWW: Now you’re working on a seven-day, seven-city tour to raise awareness and funds for malaria prevention through bed nets. Where did this idea come from?

It’s a city-by-city competition on who can raise the most money for malaria nets, but also an opportunity for anyone to donate who wants to get involved. The tour starts this Saturday night in New York City and continues for the next seven days in Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and ends in Los Angeles on Friday…

I’d just finished Kiva training, and I was going to the Philippines for three months. And all I could think was, “When I come back, I’m going to be thirty.” I’ve honed in a lot on my direction – using the Internet to help people. And what if I could use this opportunity to give back, involving people in different parts of the country – something really ambitious?

I wanted it to be about saving lives. I wanted to say, “I saved this many lives on my birthday.” I’ve done a lot of work in HIV and AIDS; I looked into that and polio and malaria, and that’s what stuck with me. The campaign has no administrative fees. One hundred percent of the funds go to malaria… in rural northern Ghana. Providing malaria nets will really be a part of saving lives there.

Berrent met this monk in Burma and spent the afternoon pagoda-hopping with him.

RWW: What needs or gaps do you see in philanthropic efforts online?

I think it’s not having a strategy to begin with, not knowing the tools in your toolbox before you start. There’s a lot to be said for jumping in and having fun, but nonprofits don’t have the resources to play around online. They think it’s about getting interns and getting followers and fans without figuring out why a medium is important and how to make it successful for them.

RWW: What’s one surprise – good or bad – that you’ve come across since you started working with Kiva? What did you not expect from this experience, and what did you learn?

I learned that it’s much more complicated than the website makes it seem. There’s an entire division devoted to foreign exchange currency. The operational cost analysis, the challenges of technology in the developing world, the processes of remittance – it’s incredibly complex. There are regional specialists. On the site, you can make a loan in five clicks, but a lot of machinery comes together to make it that way.

RWW: What’s next for you? Is there more globe-trotting in your immediate future? How do you think the web will continue to be part of your life and career?

One of the best parts of this past year has been that I’ve gone through long periods where I didn’t have Internet access. That’s brought me a heightened and renewed sense of my purpose in the world and my authentic desire to make the world a better place. I’d like to be able to continue to support campaigns – even for-profit ventures – that I believe in, and I think social business is a wonderful intersection of the two.

I want to explore avenues with online and offline components, while continuing to blog and tell stories I’m passionate about.

Follow Berrent’s next adventures on Twitter or at her blog.

And all this is just the tip of the iceburg that is Sloane Berrent’s fascinating story. For a fuller look at her travels and timeline, check out this list of her nine favorite posts on her blog, The Causemopolitan, covering humanitarianism, her work in New Orleans, the phenomenon of serendipity in international travel, and much more.

Many thanks to Sloane Berrent for the use of her videos and images as well as for sharing her story with us and our readers.

Discuss

Forget losing weight or finding the perfect life partner: All we want to do is make 2010 the biggest geek-out year ever.

The ReadWriteWeb crew have collectively planned to take over the world next year by honing our nerd super-powers. From programming in Python to building AI houses, we’ve resolved to be smarter, more curious, more technical and way geekier than we were last year. Read our resolutions, and definitely let us know what you plan to do to be the best geek you can be in 2010.

Sponsor

The editor-in-chief himself, Mr. Richard MacManus, is known for his fascination with machine-to-machine communication via the Internet of Things. This year promises to be an interesting one at the MacManus residence if Richard’s resolutions hold true.

“One of my goals for 2010,” he said, “is to experiment with Internet of Things in my own house and life, using tools like Pachube and sensors. We’ll see how that goes…”

We wish you lots of luck, boss! If all goes well, you’ll be a prime candidate for the first episode of Geek Cribs, and we’ll all be very, very jealous.

Our own ReadWriteStart warrior, Dana Oshiro, is going to be a busy bee this year.

“I’m finding that the coolest ideas come out of academic institutions and enthusiast groups before they’re ever thought of as business-related products. In 2010 I plan on attending more hackathons, dev camps and emerging tech conferences like SIGGRAPH.”

In addition to all that conference-hopping, Dana’s going to be doing some web work of her own. “Honestly, I need to revamp my personal website Villagers With Pitchforks. I haven’t changed the design in years.”

Alex Williams, our resident enterprise expert, is also known in certain circles as an experienced podcasting pro. His resolution is something the ReadWriteWeb team would all love to see happen.

He told us that he wants to use 2010 to “make an informative and entertaining podcast for ReadWriteWeb Enterprise that is lively, smart and fun.”

What do our friendly readers think? Would you like to listen to awesome news about what companies and people are moving and shaking in the world of enterprise technology? What folks do you most want Alex to talk to, and what topics would you find most interesting? And where would you be most likely to listen to a RWW podcast? At your laptop, in your car, while walking your dogs? Let us know in the comments!

Our newest startup blogger, Chris Cameron, said he wants to use 2010 to press the flesh and put faces with names, so to speak.

“Since I’m the new kid on the block and fresh out of J-school with my M.M.C., my new year’s resolution is to get acquainted with as many people as possible in the web/tech/startup industry and develop a healthy amount of sources.”

As seasoned journos, it’s our sworn duty to protect cub reporters from no-account rabble rousers, so we asked Chris who he specifically wanted to meet this year. He replied, “I’d love to develop some contacts from the bastions of the Web (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Digg, etc.).”

You’re in good company, kid. We’d like to meet those guys, too. Just kidding! As a RWW blogger, you’re sure to have Kevin Rose and Biz Stone on speed dial in no time. We wish you luck.

Another ReadWriteNoob is Abraham Hyatt, our intrepid Production Editor. He’s got a full slate of resolutions this year.

He told us he wants to have more one-on-one time with “the bloggers I read every day, the people whose tweets I look forward to, the friends who surprise me with what they post.”

He also said he’s going to start paying attention to things outside the tech sphere and his geographical scene. “I want to change the fact that I have no idea what’s changing in journalism in China.”

And finally, Abraham let us in on how he’s keeping his finger on the pulse of technology. “I want to learn from my 5-year-old niece as she begins using the Web. I just hooked her up with her first kids browser and the way she interacts with the Web will be a hint of what’s to come for all of us online in the next decade.”

Add in learning how to code and blogging more, two of his other resolutions, and Abraham’s got a full dance card for the rest of the year!

As for me, I plan to learn Python this year. I’ve realized in 2009 that it’s harder to be a tech writer when you don’t have a hacker-esque depth of understanding about APIs and web apps. After talking to Leah Culver, Mark Jeffrey and a bunch of other really smart programmers, I think Python is a great place to start learning about programming languages. So this year, I’m tackling a 900-page O’Reilly book, and I’m not giving up until I have a working web app of my own! Next up, Haskell.

Via Twitter, we heard from a few of our friends, including entrepreneur Renato Valdés Olmos, who pointed us to this pretty web app for those without resolutions who yearn to start small. And everyone’s favorite O.G (that’s “original geek” in these parts), Chris Pirillo, just couldn’t resist the opportunity to get sassy. “My geekiest new year’s resolution,” he said, “is 2560×1600.”

So, what great and glorious plans have you got for 2010? Will you be hacking your way to entrepreneurial greatness by starting your own web company? Will you be building hardware? Are you resolving to start a new career path, go to a new conference or meet a lifelong tech hero?

Let us know your resolutions in the comments!

Discuss

Although the daily trends on Twitter over the past year have often been silly or even obscene, hindsight has proven to be much more interesting.

WhatTheTrend has compiled a great overview of Twitter hashtags and trending topics. Their Twitter Zeitgeist 2009 gives us food for thought as we move into a new, hopefully less gaming-prone era of examining and measuring what real users are really talking about on the social web. Now, let’s talk about Twilight and Michael Jackson. Or, in the choose-your-own-adventure model of blog posts, you can skip to the part where we talk about tech-related trending topics instead.

Sponsor

One of the most notable uses of any social network to date was the role of Twitter in the Iranian election/debacle/bloodbath. The U.S. State Department even made a call when Twitter was scheduled for maintenance downtime during the pursuant protests because the messaging service had proven so vital to the democratic process in that country. The worldwide buzz – and the sudden surge of green-tinted user icons and locations changed to “Tehran” – make #iranelection the number one Twitter trend of 2009.

In an interesting convergence between mainstream Internet use and high-tech geekery that only Google could engineer, Wave appears in the number four spot for top Twitter trends. And we have a pretty good idea that Twitter users’ out-and-out begging for an invite provided the bulk of that talk. As our loyal readers know, the ReadWriteWeb team is divided on whether Wave is a win or a fail so far, but there’s no doubt that this tech launch was one of the hottest this year.

In a stunning and welcome upset, #musicmonday pulled ahead of #followfriday, besting the well-known but spam-heavy hashtag by four places (Monday landed in the second position, Friday in the sixth). Is Follow Friday, a charming concept created with the most harmless intentions by our dear friend Micah Baldwin, simply a trend that has seen its day? Or is there something about taste-making and multimedia content curation that draws users to simply participate more?

Also, there are the films. New Moon, the second in the Twilight franchise, earned a number five spot in the rankings. We are grateful that our sole experience of these tweets are a brilliant collection of snarks from professional lampooner, newly minted TV pretty boy and TheOnion.com web editor Baratunde Thurston. Also-rans are Paranormal Activity, a horror flick that turned a $15,000 budget into around $80 million in box office receipts, and the latest Harry Potter movie. Finally, as a longtime Trekkie, I am happy to report that the new Star Trek film beat out Bruno by around 20 places in these rankings.

Both the Palm Pre and BlackBerry were mentioned in the top 100 trends, and one of our top ten international apps, Spotify, earned a number 63 spot on the list for consistent chatter and news throughout the year. Bing and Google Voice each earned a spot lower on the list, coming in at 81 and 100 respectively.

Finally, to nod graciously in the direction of our good-natured rivals at Mashable, their Open Web Awards were the 27th most talked-about thing on Twitter this year. For a topic that didn’t appear until mid-October (and for a topic generated by a tech blog, no less), this is a great measure of success for which Pete Cashmore and his team are to be congratulated.

To get the full list, send an email to the folks at WhatTheTrend.

Discuss

Facebook’s getting its own movie, Ashton Kutcher is the social web’s unpaid spokesman and now NBC is launching a show dedicated to mobile apps.

What’s the world coming to? Call me old fashioned, but where I come from, a geek is a geek and a mainstream actor with an iPhone is still just a mainstream actor with an iPhone. The Oprahtization of technology is at least a bit demeaning, from my point of view. Sure, this trend brings exposure to our heroic exploits, but it’s often done through stereotypes about geeks and an air of naïveté about how technology really works. What do you think? Am I being a curmudgeon? Is all this mainstream-tech integration really a good thing?

Sponsor

Granted, we all have to discover technology at some point. None of us were born nerds. But there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that is unique to geeks: a melange of smarts, social pickiness, a willingness to be different, insatiable curiosity, a desire to learn and create new and amazing things, and frequently, a very necessary shell to protect oneself from the rejections of the larger world around us. As a people accustomed to being ostracized for speaking in terms too technical, having a bizarre sense of humor or caring more about bandwidth than baseball, we have generally existed far outside the cool kids’ club.

Not to frame my entire argument in a high school analogy, but we have mostly been useful for one thing: Doing other people’s homework. When they – the non-technical of this world – want an application, device, website or feature, we built it and teach them how to use it. This has been the geek’s role for eons: Doing the jocks’ dirty work and then skipping prom. Can you imagine Einstein hobnobbing with Marlene Deitrich? Or a young Steve Jobs on an early ’80s red carpet with a young Harrison Ford? Yet we are seeing more and more crossover between mainstream media and our little world of technology to the point that you can’t tell the tech from the tinsel.

Perhaps it’s just disconcerting to see those two worlds meshing for the first time. Perhaps all my angst is simply discomfort. Yet when I see and hear innovators and geeks referred to as ugly, graceless basement-dwellers, even in jest, by mainstream talking heads, it still gets to me.

But what gets to me more is the new set of faux geeks – folks who know just enough about tech to send a misspelled Twitter update from their mobiles but who thrive on the attention and revenue they gain from this scene. They wouldn’t know an API from a IP; the red carpet is more likely their natural habitat; yet they incessantly appear in blog posts, pictures and videos until the real geeks don’t even remember how they got there. It happens on a small scale (every tech scene has its skill-free new media douchebag), and it’s starting to happen on a larger scale, as well (why is Olivia Munn a geek, again?).

Call me bitter, call me jealous, call me cynical – but let me know what you think, too. Some of our friends on Twitter told us they didn’t like mainstream media’s encroachment onto geek territory, but others who responded to our query see this exposure as a good thing, and we want to hear this point of view, as well. After all, I was excited the first time I heard Twitter mentioned in a news report, too.

Give us your opinions in the comments, and don’t hold back! We love a good, long-winded discourse at ReadWriteWeb.

Note: Lest you throw stones at the writer for not being geeky enough herself, she was building LANs and playing the first version of King’s Quest when you were still in diapers.

Discuss

Ever since two friends and I staged a two-week jaunt around the Midwest to attend a great new conference earlier this year, I’ve been more and more aware of a growing trend: the social media road trip.

While on the road this year, I’ve come upon long-term social media road warriors such as Mark Simonds of the Twitter Road Trip, brand ambassadors such as Sara Lopez and conference-hoppers such as Dave Delaney. I think we’ve all heard about Tara Hunt’s widely publicized karaoke/book promo tour. There’s even a SxSWi session about the phenomenon this spring. For folks intent on packing up the hardware and hitting the road, here are ten tips for success.

Sponsor

These road trips are great for making new connections with interesting people and forming mutually beneficial relationships, as my RoadTwip gang did in Nashville. They’re great for finally meeting up with longtime (or not so longtime) online friends in real life, as we did in Toledo. They can give a person some perspective on tech “scenes,” especially in terms of engendering respect for non-Silicon Valley communities.

Even better, it’s great for brands, as our friend Sara Lopez has learned this year while tripping around for soymilk company 8th Continent. Ford recognized the public’s fascination with road trip-related media with its highly successful Fiesta campaign this year, which involved mini-trips and missions documented on YouTube. These trips capture a great audience, both regionally with one-on-one interactions in communities and internationally as curious and amused Internet users stumble upon and share related content. More on that later.

As promised, here are ten must-haves for planning and executing a successful social media road trip.

1. Get sponsorship.

Remember the part where I told you that social media road trips are great for brands? These days, brands are often more than willing to help a geek out with gas money, hardware, goods and services in exchange for a little light plugging now and then. If there’s a good fit between your trip and a brand, from soft drinks to software, don’t hesitate to ask for a partnership.

2. Plan for WiFi.

This might be your biggest challenge. Whether you’re using Bluetooth, a MiFi device, a USB-connected wireless modem or simply tethering to your mobile phone, make sure your preferred method works and that you have a backup. We also recommend downloading WeFi in case your plans fail and you need to find emergency coffee house WiFi in a strange place.

3. Have a mission and destination.

One great piece of advice my road team got from NorthStar Manifesto founder Duke Stump was to define our purpose before our itinerary. Another important part of these trips can be a geographical highlight, such as a conference, a hometown or a tech hub. It’ll solidify your position and help you focus your content.

4. Meet everyone and go everywhere.

Part of the excitement of a social media road trip is accepting unexpected invitations and discovering friends in strangers. Entering into situations with an open mind is the best way to use your trip as a learning experience. While on the road, I met up with just about everyone I could, and I got to see amazing new hardware, apps, innovators and entrepreneurs as a result.

5. Plan for power.

Power is up there with WiFi as one of the primary pain points of being on the road. We recommend packing extra battery units and chargers (you lose them at home, and you’ll most certainly lose them on the road). Definitely invest in a 12V adapter so you can charge devices while mobile, but know that one adapter may only charge a certain number or type of device. E.g., mine can handle a laptop, an iPod, and a curling iron, but on two laptops, it blows a fuse. And yes, you’ll want to pick up a pack of fuses for your 12V adapter, too.

More tech and media tips coming right up on page two.

We’ve been keeping an eye on real-time search company Collecta for a while now, and we’ve been consistently impressed with their product.

The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resulting utility is part pulse check, part search engine, and all fun. It also serves as an automatically refreshing reminder that this social network is far from dead yet, especially where entertainment properties are concerned.

Sponsor

The new product is based on Collecta’s site search platform and MySpace’s real-time API. For search results on everything from weather to celebrities to trending keywords, it returns a filterable, streaming gallery of a collection of comments, photos, links and videos posted to MySpace by users.

Based on IM protocols, Collecta’s search platform pushes out content in real time as it’s published. Each result also includes the poster’s “mood,” which also serves as a built-in mechanism for sentiment analysis.

“Collecta brings the size and richness of the MySpace community to light,” said MySpace COO Mike Jones.

“Its instantaneous results provide insight into our users’ moods and activities. It’s great to see how quickly Collecta has used the MySpace Real-Time Stream API to deliver new value to people on the web.”

Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell also called MySpace one of the most vibrant web properties, saying, “MySpace users are actively sharing an amazing volume of pictures and media, as well as expressing their thoughts on a very emotional and raw level. Our search platform cuts right into the center of all this activity. It reveals a slice of humanity that you couldn’t see otherwise. Even a search for a basic term like ‘happy’ is incredibly fascinating.”

In addition to showing results for search terms, the new product also shows a brief overview of three top trends currently on MySpace.

Collecta’s general search function currently aggregates data from a slew of news and social sites and will soon incorporate publicly available data from MySpace, as well.

MySpace’s partnership shows an interesting use of Collecta’s site search, but it’s far from the only application. The platform can be used to show activity, trends and perspectives on just about any website.

Discuss

It’s one thing to have resolutions for the new year. I, for example, plan to lose weight, learn Python and design the perfect handbag. But since nothing satisfies like the quick achievement of a short-term goal, here are eight things every good nerd needs to to before the ball drops later this week.

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.

Sponsor

1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships.

Facebook’s maelstrom-causing privacy changes have given quite a few of us a head-scratching good time trying to figure out just how much of our private lives are to be made public. Before the new year begins, take a look at your settings on sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal and any other places you might be sharing personal content to make sure what you display is consistent with the public image you want to project. As more recruiters and employers hit the web in search of info on individuals, it’s becoming ever more important to monitor and control our own identities. If you look back to the origin dates of some of your accounts, you might be surprised at what you thought was appropriate to share online in 2005.

Also, while considering what’s private and public, take time to evaluate what a “friend,” “contact” or “follower” means to you and what types of information you share with different groups.

2. Change your passwords.

Safety first, friends. Social web security threats in 2009 were sweeping and surprised more than a few users with spam DMs, hacked accounts and malware of all kinds. Check out the password management tools recommended by a recently high-profile hacker (scroll to the last few paragraphs); for free or cheap, they’ll help you generate strong, random passwords and manage them from your computer.

3. Own your name.

I’ve conducted many a web search on many a professional geek this year, and I’ve been disappointed by how few of us have staked a meaningful claim to our online identities. If you haven’t already, buy a URL – preferably one that relates to the name you use professionally – and make friends with Google. If you don’t show up in the first results when you search for your name, get a crash course in SEO and ask friends to link to you. It’s good for your social life and your career if you seize the opportunity to tell the searching world about yourself rather than relegating that responsibility to LinkedIn, Facebook or some weirdo with the same name as you.

4. Prune your feeds.

When going through your RSS feeds, do you find yourself impatiently scrolling more than you’re intently skimming? Is your list of unread items becoming unmanagable? The end of the year is a perfect time to get rid of the content you’re not reading and group the stuff you are. Take some time this week to organize, delete and add feeds, thereby optimizing your feed-reading experience. Try tools such as NetNewsWire’s “dinosaurs” and “least attenion” features that weed out unread or dormant feeds, and consider implementing tools such as Lazyfeed or Guzzle.it that can bring relevant results from fresh sources. And make sure the feeds you own are easy for others to find, too.

5. Find a better mobile.

If you don’t have a smartphone already, chances are you’ll desperately need one next year. And if you already have one, think long and hard about whether you’re happy with your service, network and interface.

While you might not be able to run out and buy your dream device before 2010 rolls around, visit a few retailers, read some reviews and have your eye on a good mobile to purchase next year. Mobile tech keeps on booming, and you’ll want to ensure a frustration-free year as new apps and OSes roll out.

6. Update copyright notices on your website.

Here’s a simple, obvious and necessary reminder. Does your website currently claim a copyright year of 2007? While it doesn’t put you on the foul side of the law, it does look a bit silly as we head into a new decade. The Next Web has a good bit of dynamic code for site owners.

7. Revisit your blog.

That poor, neglected old beast might be long overdue for a design facelift, a blogroll refresh or even just a few new posts. While you’re at it, why not set automatic reminders to periodically bug you about posting in the new year? On a more mission-critical note, you’ll also want to make sure you’re using the most updated version of your CMS; not doing so can can lead to problems from broken plugins to getting hacked. And while you’re at it, the year’s end might also be a good time to consider switching up your CMS service altogether.

8. Back up your data.

Hacks and hardware failures happen. Before 2010, make sure as much of your data as possible is protected. From calendars and contacts to blog posts and work projects, more and more of us are relying on networks of servers and startups to keep us running. So, now might be a good time to download and back up files of LinkedIn contacts and WordPress posts – anything that’s valuable to you and portable. Think of it this way: You – or at least parts of you – live in the Internet. If the Internet caught on fire, what would you grab to carry with you out of the blaze?

We hope this list helps you all get a few housekeeping items squared away in time for a great New Year’s Eve filled with peace of mind and a smug sense of superiority over your fellow nerds. If you can think of any must-do year-end tasks, please let us know in the comments!

Discuss

Did you just get cut off? Is a professional driver behaving badly? Was your car towed? Or better, did you see a cute driver (or a really cool car) in the next lane?

CarPong is a fun an innovative idea that allows users to send messages to other drivers by using their car’s license plate number. Like blog commenting for vehicles, this service lets drivers write messages to other drivers, read what others have said about them and search for notes about other drivers. It’s an interesting way to make our cars – and the people in them – a lot more connected in real life, and it just might work.

Sponsor

Car-to-car communiques remain one of the last frontiers for messaging services and one of the few environments where people are still inside isolationist social bubbles. On the Internet, we’ve mostly shed the goofy pseudonyms and nondescript avatars of the You’ve Got Mail era in exchange for real connections between real people.

CarPong is exciting because it turns the highways and byways into a sort of chat room.

One user called out a license plate of a European spec Ford Fiesta – which might be one of Ford’s special social media fleet. Another sends a helpful hint to a fellow driver to invest in some new tires quickly.

By and large, the site is so far a litany of complaints about others’ bad driving habits. Still, by removing the anonymity of the road, this kind of messaging might encourage more human, more mindful and even kinder driver behavior.

Founder Tony Mastrorio wrote us to say, “I am working on getting towing companies to notify car owners when their car has been towed, where they can pick it up and the associated fee. This aspect alone would make the service very useful for many people.”

He’d also like the site to work a bit like the “How’s My Driving” signs we see on commercial vehicles. An enterprise-level CRM platform might also provide a good revenue stream.

Currently, the site lacks the national or regional userbase of millions it would need to be truly useful. But I can see this idea spreading like wildfire if drivers like the idea of having a virtual complaints/comments box for those with whom they share the road.

On the other hand, there’s something about the encoded and regulated nature of license plates that lead one to a certain expectation of privacy. As with linking our real names, identities, careers, birth dates and even home addresses to our online personas, there may be some initial resistance to adding our license plates to that mix. Currently on the site, plates and profiles are not linked, but users can see all comments associated with other users and any reported license plate.

How do you feel: Would this kind of transparency about who we are on the road lead to better and more personal communication between drivers? Or are our vehicles and driving records best left to principalities more private than the Internet? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Discuss

According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we’re just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet’s first boom cycle.

At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.

Sponsor

Over a five-day period, the Pew Center interviewed 1,504 American adults and asked them to weigh their feelings about culture and technology over time. The respondents’ answers are enlightening.

While positive feelings outweigh negative ones for almost every cultural epoch from 1960 until 1999, our feelings about the 2000s are predominantly unhappy. Fully 50 percent of respondents have an overall negative impression of the past decade, while only 27 percent said they felt positively about these years.

However, almost across the board, technological advances in basic online and mobile communication tools have been a bright spot in our shared perception of this decade’s progressions and events.

Cell phones, email and the Internet were viewed very favorably among all types of Americans, and online shopping and smartphones evoked positive reactions from a majority of respondents, as well. Blogs and the social web, however, earned a solid “meh” from those surveyed.

It is worth noting that the greater a respondent’s age, the less likely he or she was to view these technological changes positively. For example, 45 percent of folks between the ages of 18 and 49 – a huge demographic – saw social networking websites as having positive effects on our society. But after the 50-years-old mark, that percentage lowered significantly to between 25 and 21 percent.

It’s also interesting to note that the dot-com crash hasn’t effected our late-nineties optimism about where the Internet would take us. Most of us still feel, as we did in 1999, that the Internet is having an overall positive effect on Americans.

Again, these responses were subject to age. Around three-quarters of younger respondents saw the web as a positive change, but only 42 percent of people age 65 and older felt the same way. But these older Americans didn’t seem to think the Internet was necessarily negative, either. Their responses indicated that they were unsure of its impact or thought its influence was negligible. Another correlation in this opinion was between a positive view of the Internet and a college education. A full 82 percent of folks with a college degree said the web is doing good things for America.

For more details, read the full study, and do let us know in the comments what you think of the 2000s and where the Internet will take us in the 2010s.

Discuss

The new “artists” are curators of other people’s created content, if sites such as Tumblr, Ffffound, WeHeartIt and newcomer Awsm.fm are any kind of zeitgeist.

Awsm.fm is a digital multimedia scrapbooking app that regards copyright issues with a gleeful abandon, allowing users to pick images and group them with text, tags and uploaded songs. But, licensing aside, the app does allow users to display their lovely and deeply sensitive tastes in pop music and evocative photography.

Sponsor

The Awsm.fm user interface borrows liberally and haphazardly from a few sites we know and love, notably Vimeo. It’s a very new product and is still buggy with a UX that’s less than intuitive and occasionally frustrating.

Although there is an attempt to attribute the uploaded songs by incorporating existing track information and letting users edit the artist and track title, there is no standardized way to link back to the music creator or ensure any work on the site is licensed for this kind of sharing. Images do link back to their original source, which may but will not always satisfy the copyright holder.

Here’s an example of an Awsm.fm post, featuring an image, some text, a few tags, a comment box and a song I uploaded:

You can check out this profile page to see more Awsm.fm posts we created.

As I’ve written in the past, users have been given more and more tools for grabbing, spreading and remixing content over the past 10 years since Napster’s birth. Most of those tools have been free or nearly so, and many of them border on piracy or explicitly enable it.

The founder of Awsm.fm, who introduced himself to us as “Wan,” wrote that he is “sad by the lost of imeem, muxtape” and “frustrated at not being able to listen to lala.com.” A self-proclaimed indie music fan and programmer, Wan has created a tool that does something to help distribute independent music to listeners but nothing to help independent musicians track and profit from their music.

However, as legendary rock music producer Steve Albini wrote in a comment on the above-linked post, “Internet file sharing is profoundly beneficial to bands in that it serves to promote them to a worldwide audience at no cost… I saw it in action myself last year when my band conducted hugely profitable tours of both South America and Eastern Europe, including places like Croatia, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Turkey, where our music has virtually no formal distribution. People came to our shows, knew our music and bought anything we had to sell them. They were familiar with us because the Internet allowed them to hear our music for free, and they developed a taste for it.”

While independent musicians may receive some ancillary benefit from users’ getting to hear and distribute their music free of charge, other copyright-holding songwriters hold opinions very different from Albini’s. We read about lawsuits over this kind of issue every year, and as a musician myself, I certainly wouldn’t want a stranger scattering my songs to the four winds without my being able to track and monetize those listens, likes, shares and web traffic. There is, after all, something to be said for putting Ramen on the table of every starving artist.

Note: For demo purposes, I’ve uploaded images that belong to me and close friends and music from bands I support and/or went to college with. Because I’m using their content and they deserve the plug, check out Chris Merritt if you’re into indie-type pop rock and Year Long Disaster if you’re of a more head-banging persuasion.

For revenue, the site seems to plan on sponsored posts and advertising. If Wan has any idea about the cost of hosting and playing copyrighted music, he might consult imeem (sold at a huge loss because licensing fees were overwhelming the company) or Pandora (just now beginning to see profitability as a possibility), he must have some radically profitable alternatives up his sleeve.

What do our musician/music startup friends have to say about Awsm.fm? Is it, as the name would imply, simply and clearly awesome – both for users and for the musicians they want to promote or share? Or is it just more 2.0 content theft? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Discuss

If you’re reading this, you already know you’re screwed.

Someone, somewhere has been forgotten on your gift list, and you’re scrambling. As per usual, we at RWW have got your back. Here are five ideas that will not only save you from certain disgrace but just might make you look a little more with it and wired than your loved ones expected.

Sponsor

1) Of-The-Month Clubs

Flowers, beers, books, even dog treats – for every hobby, there’s a club membership that will bring the recipient monthly or even weekly gifts. With this kind of gift, you’ll be the hero all year round – in fact it’ll give you and the lucky recipient added incentive to communicate more often if you don’t now.

2) Netflix Membership

For the movie buff or couch potato in your life, this gift says you condone and embrace the cinematic lifestyle. Memberships are tiered, so you can be as budget-conscious (or as generous) as you like.

3) Pro Apps or Paid Features

For all the free web apps we use and enjoy, there are often pro versions with special benefits. I’ve personally enjoyed a pro Flickr account for ages, and the RWW gang love the speedy, unlimited-HD goodness of our pro Vimeo account. If you have new parents in your life, try a kid-centric subscription model web service such as LilGrams.

4) Multimedia Gifts

Piracy is a dying art, so for the music, movie and game aficionados on your gift list, look around the web for legitimate sources of multimedia content. Gamers will love Microsoft Points for XBox Live or similar goodies for Wii and PS3. And for the youngsters and musicians, you can’t go wrong with an eMusic or similar subscription.

5) Know Thy Geek: Fonts, Domains, and Software

I’ve been lusting after a particular domain name for a few months now. If someone knew me well enough to buy it, that lady or dude would be the most awesome Santa to date. And I won some brownie points myself for buying a special person a very special font he’d been wanting for quite some time. Likewise, if you’ve heard a hobbyist or nerd enthusing about a software update that might qualify as a bit of a splurge, the holiday is the perfect time to surprise him or her with a shiny, new email notification or ZIP file.

These kinds of gifts show that you know the person well enough to understand and support his or her need to geek out. And what better gift is there, after all?

Discuss

Back in the fall, we told you about NYC’s BigApps competition, which encouraged technological innovation to benefit government and civic engagement. Public voting for the submitted applications opened this week.

One of the submissions to come out of this competition is Blocks and Lots, an interesting app and API that essentially expose all the property records – more than 5 million records, total – for New York City. For site owners, there’s a customizable widget that can be embedded in just about any kind of site.

Sponsor

Blocks and Lots’ API allows developers to integrate detailed property information into any web or mobile application. Sample code is available in PHP and JavaScript.

Blocks and Lots comes from BlankSlate, an NYC startup offering a web platform and set of read/write APIs for making, sharing, monetizing, and monitoring web apps. The company provides capabilities such as data, file, user and payment management through REST APIs.

Using the same platform, BlankSlate was able to gather the city’s data files from 45 file sources from three different city agencies, import them and instantly export APIs. This process took just a few days.

For example, you can use the Blocks and Lots widget to dig into the property valuation for Ellis Island, which is apparently worth about as much as Zynga these days.

In the near future, Blocks and Lots will add location-aware iPhone and Android apps (i.e., the user’s mobile device will automatically retrieve property data depending on where the user it), and enabling the writable APIs to add user-generated content to the city’s data (e.g., photos, documents or text).

To vote for Blocks and Lots – or any of the other apps submitted in the BigApps competition – check out the app gallery and voting rules.

Discuss

Almost in the immediate wake of Google’s announcing short URLs (goo.gl) and Facebook experimenting with fb.me links, YouTube has made a gesture toward shorter web addresses, as well.

Today, the video site announced it’s launching youtu.be links. They’re not as short as the super-brief URLs users might see from bit.ly or is.gd because each one contains a unique ID for the video it links to. But this extra bit of information makes the URLs more useful for developers, too.

Sponsor

While the resulting URLs aren’t significantly shorter than a regular YouTube link, users will have the added benefit of knowing exactly what kind of content they’re being redirected to, which isn’t always the case with many shortened URLs.

Also, with the video ID as part of the short URL, writes YouTube Engineering Manager Vijay Karunamurthy, “developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly or track how a video is spreading in real time.”

End users can shorten links manually simply by putting the video ID (the part of the YouTube URL that comes after the equals sign and before the ampersand, if there is one) after http://youtu.be/. For example, “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1acVM7_rWw4” is the regular URL of an interview we did over the summer with a great startup advisor in Boulder, CO. The short version of that link would be “http://youtu.be/1acVM7_rWw4“.

Or, for those copy-and-paste-averse folks among us, links will be automatically shortened when broadcast thought the site’s sharing mechanisms.

Discuss

Ford is making a serious bid for geeks’ business. Scott Monty, the auto company’s Internet-famous social media head, wrote to us tonight with some of the most exciting car-related news an Internet-dependent nerd could wish for.

The next generation of Ford’s SYNC-enabled vehicles will not only be rolling communications and entertainment systems. They’ll also be rolling WiFi hotspots. Passengers will be able to connect to the Internet anywhere, anytime. Our crystal ball is showing a lot more Ford-enabled conference roadtrips.

Sponsor

The way it works is a lot like many devices available from wireless networks. For example, Sprint’s MiFi, which we tested earlier this year, allows for multiple devices to connect to the Internet from a small, card-shaped device without a physical connection to any hardware. Other devices we’ve tested allow for single- and multi-device connections via USB.

Ford’s solution is allowing for USB modems connecting to the vehicle’s SYNC system and enabling Internet connectivity for multiple devices. These vehicles can also connect to other USB devices. In essence, the user’s vehicle becomes one with the user’s hardware.

The WiFi signal is broadcast throughout the vehicle, and password protection will guard against piggybacking.

Currently, SYNC vehicles feature hands-free calling, navigation systems, emergency assistance, music searches, news and weather feeds, business search, traffic data and audible text messages.

Without built-in hardware, it’s a lot like many other devices we’ve seen. Users will have to work with their carriers to get the hardware and network coverage to make the magic happen.

Nevertheless, Internet connectivity in a moving vehicle is something we’ve waited a long time to see, and we’re glad to see Ford recognizing that need.

Discuss

Just over a year ago, we were excited to report on a new website for programmers. StackOverflow was the brainchild of coders/rockstars Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, and it was a social Q&A channel that promised to give programmers solutions for even the most obscure bugs.

Apparently, that approach to developer support was a solid one. These days, the site gets well over half a million unique visitors a month and has served as a prototype for white-label Q&A sites for companies, too. The site’s latest merit badge is an official nod from the Android team, which has announced StackOverflow as the official home of Android developer Q&A support.

Sponsor

Android rep Roman Nurik wrote in a blog post, “We’re working with StackOverflow to improve developer support, especially for developers new to Android. In essence, the Android tag on Stack Overflow will become an official Android app development Q&A medium.”

Nurik further noted that StackOverflow’s format was particularly helpful for beginners new to the Android platform. However, he did state, “It’s also important to point out that we don’t plan to change the android-developers group, so intermediate and expert users should still feel free to post there.”

The StackOverflow “Digg for developers” model has worked well for all kinds of programmers, clearly. The models has also been successfully applied to such diverse topics as mathematics, parenting and even World of Warcraft – all built on the company’s StackExchange white-label platform.

Discuss