Information Architects have made a Subway map for: Web Trends of 2007. The most successful companies and websites, including a number of my favorite Web 2.0 solutions, are plotted, categorized with color-coding and rated by size and popularity with stars.
Personally I like the way that have portrayed the data, in a clear and familiar symbolic design.

For the interactive version of the map click here.

In addition the company has attempted to add Web generation numbers. Ie. Web 0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and even Web 2.5. According to the company Web 2.5 can describe the route that Facebook is taking. (Then I am guessing that would entail Facebook’s Applications feature.)

(Via TechCrunch)

For the past year friends of mine have subtly been hinting that I join the social-networking site Facebook. Earlier perceiving it as a myspace etc. clone, I resisted for months. But lately I have been receiving more invitations and on Friday I finally subsided. I though that this will eventually be a chance to practically test ProfileLinker (My post: ProfileLinker Simplifying Social Networking) with some of my other online profiles.

After registering and trying to figure out Facebook I have come across a large number of old friends and contacts. It has been overwhelming attempting to catch up with so many people at once. And somehow it all happened too quickly. But I look forward to revive old friendships with this new social-networking tool.
Some of my initial prejudice was not completely justified, as this does seem to be a good way to find and keep track of contacts. At the moment Facebook has given me a better impression than the rather heavy and complicated LinkedIn system.

If you have played in Apple’s terminal, or any other *NIX system the chances are there that you have done some piping with your commands. Remember: || … Now Yahoo! offers a service they have called Pipes: Allowing you to pipe various commands and services together. 

   
I really like the direction this service seems to be taking, and will be following its success. TechCrunch has more: Yahoo! Launches Pipes. Pipes worked well in FireFox, but almost choked up Internet Explorer completely.

Well, I have already backtracked to my article Web 2.0 running out of time to where? a couple of times. Now a blog entry by ZDNet’s Steve O’Hear titled Could 2007 be the year of social network fatigue? was just Slashdotted.

I recently mentioned ProfileLinker as one solution (ProfileLinker Simplifying Social Networking), but it also seems, through O’Hear’s article and previous post, that data portability from several networks is almost not present. (Also according to that post it must be noted that some networks do have the ability to export user data, ie. Flickr has an API for data export.)

However teen norms contradict a number of our expectations according to social networking sites, the opposing statement on the slashdot post also links to : Zephoria’sephemeral profiles. (Ephemeral – anything lasting but a day, or a brief time; an ephemeral plant, insect, etc. [1913 Webster]). So maybe starting anew, may be the solution for some, I don’t think it is a lasting solution. (Anoter related post of mine on networking teens, Nancy19 Your Future Leader?) Hence, it will definitely be interesting to follow these trends, and this is most likely only the first follow-up of more to come.

I found out about ProfileLinker the other day. ProfileLinker will let you maintain your different social networking profiles from the same place, on their site. Almost weekly I receive invites from my friends and contacts to some new social network, and I kindly ignore them in lack of time. So to be able to control several of my online profiles from the same place is just what I have been waiting for. (Web 2.0 Running Out of Time to Where?) From a quick glance some of the networks supported are: AIM Pages, BlackPlanet, Bolt, Hi5, Facebook, Friendster, MiGente, MySpace, Xanga, YouTube.

And I’m probably going to sound “out of it”, but I have not heard of a couple of those social networks. Though, perhaps as a new year goal, to be able to organize things more easily, this just might be up your alley.

Time magazine’s person of the year is you! The online communities that make a change in the world, are truly giving results. YouTube and mySpace are maybe the most known examples. Excerpt from Time.com: “The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”

So congratulations all my readers, bloggers, and other networking members out there. You are Time’s Person of the Year 2006.

Time’s story might have it’s hidden agenda, pointed out by Darren Rowse, as their webtraffic will skyrocket.

I will be migrating my RSS feeds to FeedBurner during the next few days. Considering the fact that stepheno.net is almost two weeks old, I thought it would be wiser to make the switch before too many more people subscribe. A big thank you to all of you who already do subscribe to my feed. The feed URL will be:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/stepheno

And my comments feed URL will be: http://feeds.feedburner.com/stephenocomments

I will change the feed url’s on my actual site during the next few days, to try and maintain a smooth transition.
For those of you who don’t know what a feed reader is: A feed reader is either an application or online service that lets you know, like your mail inbox, when there are new posts on somebody’s blog, or it could be a newspaper or any other type of website that supports RSS. Since I prefer most of my apps online I don’t have experience with any other “offline” apps. (Except Mac OS X’s RSS Screensaver, which does work nicely. But it’s your screensaver, so you might want to try another option.)

Some online services I have heard are good are:

Google Reader, FeedLounge, Bloglines and Rojo
(In addition there are a large amount of integrated feed readers in services like myYahoo)

And JamGlue actually works surprisingly well. I briefly tried it out, after they publicly launched yesterday (Dec. 15th). This past year I have actually learned some of ProTools. In that sense I’m kind of spoiled, with my first introduction to sound mixing with this professional application. However it still costs a lot of money, and you’ll want to go all the way with some external sound-engine or similar if you are going to get it. So for most of you, just wanting to get your feet wet, without swimming, JamGlue seems like a really nice application. Best of all its online, and works smoothly in both Firefox and Safari.

Another great advantage with JamGlue is that it is also a networking community. This means you can share your mixes, beats or music with the rest of the community. All the material is protected by Creative Commons. According to TechCrunch a similar alternative to JamGlue is SpliceMusic, and for more Creative Common beats check out ccMixter. I’ll definitly be checking all those out next time I’m going to mix some music for one of my projects.

Bruce Schneier at Wired analyzed 34,000 user names and passwords “spoils from a MySpace phishing attack” (This attack?). Schneier concludes that MySpace passwords aren’t so dumb. Less than four percent of the passwords were dictionary words, and the majority were alphanumeric. More interestingly, when Wired compared the password difficulty of MySpace passwords, to those of corporate research from November, they can conclude that MySpace passwords are better than the Corporate passwords.

Considering the fact the MySpace users are generally younger, this does show a positive trend, and is especially promising for “Nancy19″ your future leader.

I especially liked this quote from the article: ‘We used to quip that “password” is the most common password. Now it’s “password1.” Who said users haven’t learned anything about security?’ -Bruce Schneier, Wired.

According to one study, the typical person who participates in online communities, i.e. Nancy19, is your future leader.

Characterisitics of people who participate in online communities are:
*Fast followers
*More flexible
*Open communicators
*Aspire to greatness
*Looking for new, innovative ideas
They sum those characters up: In short – your future leaders.

(According to Attention Company, responsbile for the study)