King  Gary 

Looks like Friendster is back in the game, with a 40% increase in traffic in the last month, according to ComScore statistics and as mentioned by VentureBeat.

TechCrunch mentions that being a member of a social network is thought to be mutually exclusive, meaning that there can only be one major growth leader in the world of social networks. With Facebook booming as much as it has been lately, one would assume that other networks such as MySpace and Friendster would slow down in growth, but that is not the case. I somewhat agree on this.

The one thing that I do completely agree on with VentureBeat is that social networks are finding new markets in places where there previously were no real reigning social network to begin with. Places like the Philippines and Malaysia have people that are attracted to Friendster, which is probably partially fueled by the fact that Friendster is already one of the social networks of choice in China, whereas Facebook is not nearly as popular as it is in the United States.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Looks like Dave Winer of Scripting.com fame is going to be releasing the ‘Twitter for audio’ soon, called TwitterGram. It’s basically like Twitter, but instead of sending short quips of text, you’re sending audio files that are 200 kb or smaller in size.

This isn’t going to be nearly as big as Twitter; not even a quarter of the popularity. Audio is just not as easy to glance over than text.

Podcasting, for example, has gotten relatively big, but blogs are still massive compared to podcasting, which is partially why podcasting startups such as Odeo didn’t do nearly as well as they would have hoped for. I would imagine that podcasts take up less than 5% of all existing blogs. The same will go for TwitterGram.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Looks like LinkedIn is finally beginning to open up their vast amount of content to developers through an API of sorts over the next few months.

People have been saying that this is in response to Facebook, but in my opinion, if done properly, an application could be developed that would merge the best of both worlds from Facebook and LinkedIn to create a hybrid of sorts. Now THAT could be potentially a very useful application to many people, including myself!

Popularity: 7% [?]

We’ve all heard of all the great news about Facebook Platform, but are there any major issues that come along with it? Well, indeed there are.

When you’ve got the audience that Facebook has (20 million unique users each and every month, and counting) and you give them all access to your application, which is hosted on your own servers, then something has got to give if your application becomes even mildly popular.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

My latest post at Blog Herald involves futureproofing your WordPress admin page’s CSS changes so that if you modify it, it does not get replaced by any upgrades that you make to your blog.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

I’ve written a few posts in the past on Blog Herald, showing how you can make different changes for your WordPress admin by modifying the CSS file for it.

Being able to modify the CSS file to make quick design changes to your WordPress admin is very useful indeed, but the problem is when you upgrade your version of WordPress, the wp-admin.css file is replaced with the newer version because it’s not considered a file that should be modified by users.

Here’s where a new plugin that I came across comes in. It’s called the WordPress admin themer plugin, and what it does is simple. It allows you to create a separate wp-admin.css file that does not require modifying the default wp-admin.css file.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I’m curious, how does Technorati define what a blog is and is not?

If you do a search on pretty much any website at Technorati, you’ll see that they have it listed there. Examples include Google, Yahoo!, and MSN – all of them ranked 0, because they are not considered blogs by Technorati. How does it discern the difference?

If anyone has any ideas, then feel free to post them in the comments!

Popularity: 8% [?]

A week ago, Apple released Safari on the Windows platform with great results.

As a web developer, one thing that I’ve been curious about is whether or not Safari also brings with it special Mac fonts and improved graphics to Windows users, and it turns out that it does, as CNET points out at Safari ushers in better browser colors.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Jon Udell has called out to Facebook, asking them to add a new relationship choice when adding a new friend. The current choices are:

He wants them to add “Through the web” as another choice.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

When you look at Facebook‘s Application Directory, you see that next to “All”, it notes “307″, suggesting that there are a total of 307 Facebook Applications in all.

This is not true. 307 simply states the number of Applications that Facebook deems is allowed to be in the Directory, meaning that these are high-quality applications that they believe gives value to most Facebook users. Facebook Application developers can still create Applications, but they are not listed in the Directory unless approved by Facebook.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

As TechCrunch points out, the long tail is getting fatter. This basically means that the average internet user is beginning to adopt sites that we label ‘web 2.0‘ as a website that they commonly visit.

The article gives examples such as iLike’s Facebook application, with over 6 million registered users, and Safari, which has had over 1 million downloads since its launch a few days ago.

This basically makes a point that most internet users don’t care if something is web 2.0 or not; they will use it as long as it’s useful to them.

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Popularity: 11% [?]