Webware

Spot the Facebook sharing button on Cracked.com

(Credit: Facebook/Cracked)

Web publishers and blog owners have a new toy to play with: Facebook announced Monday that it has launched new "share" buttons with counters, much in the manner of Digg's iconic buttons and the third-party TweetMeme app for Twitter sharing.

Plus, there's more: Publishers installing Facebook share buttons can also get data back related to how many times that link has been shared, how many users have hit the thumbs-up "like" button or commented on shared versions of the story on Facebook, and how many people have clicked back to it through Facebook.

These Facebook "share" buttons had existed before, and the company said that more than 2 billion pieces of content are shared per week. But this is the first time that the counter and analytics have been available.

A post on the Facebook developer blog explains: "Anyone can add the Share button to their website with little to no technical experience, and style the button from a variety of options." Accessing the analytics however, requires a bit more coding know-how.

This could spell bad news for Digg, as Facebook's significantly bigger and more mainstream audience could make it a far more appealing choice for site owners that would prefer to display one prominent sharing button rather than two. As for Twitter, it doesn't actually own the app that powers the "retweet" buttons. A move like this from Facebook, however, could push it to think a bit harder about a partnership or acquisition--or hasten progress on that "retweet API" it has in the works.

Related speculation: When are we going to see a "most-shared" ranking from Facebook? That's when Digg's execs would really have to start sweating.

Are you the next Stephen King? There's no way to tell, unless you write a page-turner. But writing that book can be difficult. So, you might be looking for some help publishing it, or you just might want some advice. In either case, the Web is a great place to find some help.

Write that book

DoXtop DoXtop allows you to upload documents (including books) that can be embedded into sites across the Web.

Uploading content to DoXtop is quick and easy. Simply pick the file you want to upload, choose your desired format, and you're all set. What I like most about DoXtop is its many community features. You can discuss your content with readers, ask them to rate your book, or respond to surveys. It builds a readership around your content. It also helps you determine what readers are looking for. If you're trying to deliver your manuscript to readers without printing a book, DoXtop is a fine solution.

doXtop lets you publish your content for all to see.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

iUniverse iUniverse is a self-publishing platform that goes one step further than simply allowing you to see your book in print. Unlike some competitors, it's a supported self-publishing service, which means that you can have your manuscript edited, ask iUniverse to acquire an ISBN for you, and more.

iUniverse offers a variety of plans for you to pick. You can get the basic plan, which costs $599. That gives you access to the service's one-on-one author support. You'll also get a custom cover, but you won't be able to receive all the extras you'll find in its Premier package ($2,099).

That plan includes the ability to choose a hardcover and the option to have your book previewed by buyers. It's a hefty price to pay, but it might be worth it, if you're serious about selling your book. iUniverse even gives you the option of publishing your book in Amazon.com Kindle or Sony Reader versions. It's a neat service.

iUniverse boasts several options for you.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

New features in Google's Reader product make it easier for users to share, manage, and discover content. Reader users can now pick certain sites they want to share to. It's very much like the drop-down sharing tool we have here at CNET, although Google is giving users the option to pick which ones they want to see from the drop down, as well as add their own. This may seem like an extra step, but for people who are really going to use the feature, it cuts down on both how fast the menu appears, and how much of your screen it takes up--two things Google obsesses about.

Google has also implemented a more granular system for clicking the "mark all as read" button, which would originally just restart your read count back to zero. The new system lets you pick to mark everything as read for items older than a day, week, or month. This means you can go without using the service while you're on vacation, and still begin catching up on items without disturbing the flow, and feel of using it on a daily basis.

Reader now pulls up your friend's personal feeds, as long as they've filled out their Google profiles.

(Credit: CNET)

Though what may be more important than both these features, is the way Google Reader now finds feeds from people you're friends with on the service, and lets you subscribe to them one at a time. Previously it just showed you what items they were sharing.

When I tried this new system out on my CNET colleague Rafe Needleman, one of his feeds was FriendFeed, which meant I only needed to subscribe to that one since all of his other feeds were wrapped up into it. I could also just grab his personal blog, Twitter account, or Delicious bookmarks. One thing to note though, is that Google is using its own profiles system to do this, which means you'll only see these extra feeds if that user has filled out their profiles there.

These changes have not been carried over to the mobile version of Reader, however mobile Reader users can now choose to open up directly to their feeds list, which has quick links to items from friends and items they've shared. It's likely some, like the new "mark as read" and sharing options will be added soon.

A 17-year-old from Michigan has filed a lawsuit against e-commerce powerhouse Amazon after it deleted a book he had purchased for his Kindle device.

The high school student, Justin D. Gawronski, filed suit in a Seattle court along with California resident Antoine J. Bruguier, and they are seeking class action status.

Amazon forcibly (and ironically) recalled copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" earlier this month after it was revealed that they were unauthorized. Justin Gawronski's complaint alleges that he was reading "1984" as summer reading for an advanced-placement class and had to turn in "reflections" on each hundred pages. With the loss of the digital book, Gawronski claims his page count was thrown off and his notes were "rendered useless because they no longer referenced the relevant parts of the book."

Amazon has declined to comment on the lawsuit, which appears was first reported late Thursday by The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog.

While buyers received refunds for the recalled copies of the Orwell books, the fact that no advance notice was given threw many customers off and created an uproar against Amazon. The lawsuit, for one, alleges that Amazon did not make it clear enough to customers that remote book deletions were a possibility. It also alleges, as do critics, that the company violated its own terms of use.

"The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have," the lawsuit quoted Slate's Farhad Manjoo as saying in an opinion piece following the book deletions.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos put out a public apology shortly after the fiasco unfolded, but it's not clear how the company's policies will (or won't) change in the future.

(Credit: Doubleday)

This one sure snuck up on us: "The Accidental Billionaires," author Ben Mezrich's presumably tawdry take on Facebook's origins, is hitting bookshelves on July 14.

Last we'd heard, it was getting released this fall.

You probably know the plot by now: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, along with Harvard classmate Eduardo Saverin ( a co-founder who is no longer affiliated with Facebook and has had some legal beef with Zuckerberg over the years) allegedly started the site to meet women. In due time, they got rich and out of control. Or at least that's how Mezrich, famed for his tales of wild, young success at elite universities, writes it. A leaked book proposal last year showed some signs of inaccuracies.

A columnist at The Daily Beast has already named it one of her "13 Hottest Summer Reads." And actor Kevin Spacey, who produced and starred in "21," the film adaptation of Mezrich's book "Bringing Down The House," wrote a blurb for Amazon.com about it.

"'The Accidental Billionaires' is the perfect pairing of author and subject," Spacey summarized. "It's pure summer fun--a juicy, fast-paced, unputdownable Mezrich tale that adds to his canon of lad lit."

I'm taking "lad lit" to mean "chick lit for dudes." And it sure looks like a salacious read: the description on the cover reads "The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal." The artwork features two martini glasses--one full, with olives, the other partially smashed with a Harvard-logo cocktail stirrer lying beside it--and a red, lacy brassiere.

Apparently, it'll all get even juicier soon. Facebook reportedly isn't too pleased about the book's debut, and Hollywood veteran Aaron Sorkin has been tapped to handle the film adaptation.

UPDATE (10:36 a.m. PT): This probably goes without saying, but Facebook representatives have declined comment on the topic of "The Accidental Billionaires."

A day after the editor of The Wall Street Journal referred to online news aggregators--particularly Google and its Google News product--as "parasites or tech tapeworms," and the chairman of the Associated Press announced an initiative to protect print media content from infringing use online, Google has fired back in a blog.

The gist of Tuesday's blog post, penned by Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray: don't point fingers at us.

"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," he wrote. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index--all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards."

As for the AP, Macgillivray noted that Google already pays the wire service to reprint its articles and photographs. A dispute several years ago led to this agreement.

Of course, Google News is far from the only aggregator out there. Digg, Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post are also big players. But Google is unquestionably at the top.

For the past few years, as many mainstream media outlets (particularly on the print side) began to lose revenue, influence, and readership, some of them had a pretty clear message: blame Google. At the same time, Viacom still has a billion-dollar lawsuit against Google's YouTube over pirated video content. And much of the publishing industry is far from signing on to Google's book digitization initiative.

With struggling newspapers in a panic over whether offering content online for free might not have been such a good idea in the first place, Google--the ultimate source of free content--is an even easier target.

But Google says it's part of the solution, not the problem, and insists that its search and aggregation products only serve to help drive traffic to online news sites.

"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month," Macgillivray said in his post. "These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international--day and night."

Photobucket has enhanced the way its users can publish photos and videos from its site to others, an activity its users use to post to more than 2.4 million different sites a day. Users now have the option to first resize a photo, then post it to 15 different social networks and blogging tools without leaving the sharing page. Authorizations to each site are now made in a pop-up window that is powered by Gigya.

Along with the sharing update, user slide shows have been tweaked to automatically update when new content is added to the source album. Previously, users would have to republish, and update the embed code, which was a bit of a hassle. The company has also updated its Facebook application to let users insert one of these directly into their Facebook profile.

With updates to its core site, Photobucket has also relaunched a new mobile version of its site for WAP phones that stretches and resizes images to match the handset's resolution. Each mobile photo page now shows any user comments and ratings. The mobile-friendly front page has also been reworked to displays more streams of information in a smaller amount of space, like the most viewed and highest rated images.

Although unrelated to today's news, I'm told HD video is well on its way to coming to Photobucket. As mentioned in a previous post, Photobucket-owned TinyPic, which serves as a testbed for experimental social and content features that trickle up to Photobucket introduced streaming HD video in late February. If it comes to Photobucket, expect it to be a feature aimed at the service's paying Pro users.

The new sharing options let you post to other social networks without leaving the page, using technology from Gigya.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

CopyTaste is a new service that lets you very quickly post text, photos, and videos to an anonymously hosted page. Think of it like blogging, but without a destination page, or any breadcrumbs that lead back to your identity.

The service features a WYSIWYG text editor, along with the option to insert videos and pictures into your post, the latter of which can be hosted on CopyTaste's servers. Heavy users can install a Firefox extension that lets you rip down the content from any page you're on and squirrel it away for viewing and sharing later on.

What makes CopyTaste really interesting is that you can in fact associate one or more of your posts with an existing profile. In this case it's your OpenID profile, where any posts you've made will be listed. You can also go and look at what other people have shared, which puts it in line with services like ClipMarks, Jeteye, Diigo, and others.

Still in need of some work are the social features though. You can see other users' CopyTaste posts if they'd made them public, but there's no way to follow that user or get in touch with them.

CopyTaste gives you a registration-free means of publishing blog posts or dumping text for sharing elsewhere.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Twhirl (download) and AlertThingy, two social-publishing tools that run exclusively on Adobe's AIR, have been freshly updated to support more services and come with some cool (and useful) new features:

As we blogged about a few weeks back, Twhirl was working on giving Seesmic users a way to record videos, not just view them. The new version lets you do that and also adds Ping.fm support across the board, letting you cross post to other accounts you may have.

Other new goodies include a spell checker, Bit.ly link shortener, and an option to have any search pop up with real-time results as they update. This is especially useful for Twitter since you can keep an eye on the velocity of a heavily tweeted event or keyword as it's happening.

AlertThingy (coverage), which launched its third version early Tuesday now includes support for Basecamp, Huddle, Ping.fm, TwitPic, Twitter's search engine, and Yammer. Three of those: Basebamp, Huddle, and Yammer, mark a decidedly business-centric movement of the app. Instead of open and public social networks, these three are for small (or large) teams or private organizations who are working on something. For those using one or more of these services, this update makes the tool a little more attractive.

Another change from the previous version is a new view that like Tweetdeck, lets you stretch out Twitter feeds into separate compartments. This lets you keep an eye on replies and private messages at the same time as you've got your main feed up.