Social networking

It's always so galling when high enterprise is stifled by regulations.

So who could not feel a deep inhalation of sympathy for Jacob Walker? The 20-year-old from Gilbert, Ariz., stands accused, together with his friend of the same age, Joseph Velarde, of (gosh, no) trafficking marijuana on the Web.

Before you leap up on a large donkey, might I offer a few details to appeal to the better part of your judgment? According to AzFamily.com, Walker allegedly placed an ad on Craigslist in which he offered a trade which, to the objective eye, seems more than fair.

He … Read more

Cisco is debuting a trio of new and enhanced products that it believes will help people better collaborate and share content with each other, as more companies go virtual and more employees work remotely.

Announced on Friday, the company's new Quad, Prosumer Video, and updated WebEx Connect IM products each serve a specific niche, allowing business users to find and connect with the right people and share information within their organizations, said Cisco.

Cisco Quad is an enterprise collaboration tool that offers voice, video, and social networking in one application. Through Quad, people will be able to search their … Read more

Love is something that ought to be celebrated.

Yet it appears that Google Street View, the place where we have already seen passed-out drunks, vomiting Brits and even the same woman 43 times, has removed one of the more positive images ever found on its slightly snoopy pages.

You see, a young couple happened to be sitting on the grass in Wolverhampton, England--or just outside of the city, according to Google Maps--and fell into a loving embrace. It was, I am sure, a common occurrence on Common Road.

A Google Street View car was passing by during this amorous moment … Read more

Bing will now pull up the latest updates from Facebook and Twitter on your search terms.

On Wednesday, Microsoft's search engine officially launched its social site, which taps into public and shared updates from Facebook and the latest tweets from Twitter to display real-time results for your search topics.

The social search engine works just like Bing's regular search engine. Simply enter your keyword, and you'll see a list of current and recent posts from the two social networks. Each post offers a link to a Web site--anything from a static page to a YouTube video--where you … Read more

NEW YORK--Legendary businesswoman Martha Stewart wanted to post to her Twitter account from a panel discussion onstage on Wednesday, and she couldn't. A particularly nasty edition of one of Twitter's notorious service outages got in the way.

Stewart, along with Huffington Post founder and new-media figurehead Arianna Huffington, was participating in an onstage interview conducted by veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher at the "Digital Content NewFront," an annual event conducted by ad agency Digitas as part of Internet Week New York. Swisher commented on the fact that Stewart was toying with the iPad she was holding … Read more

San Francisco seems to currently enjoy more iPad posters than restaurants.

However, a group called Freedom from Porn believes that these posters don't accurately reflect the world as it sees it. So, its members sneaked around in the middle of the night and offered the laps featured in the posters something of a dance.

It seems the group was stimulated to act by Apple CEO Steve Jobs who has repeatedly declared that the iPad should be free from porn.

The group's Web site offers that its members--two of whom are seen in this footage, walking away, dressed in … Read more

Twitter has squeezed the way we communicate, and now it is putting the squeeze on Web links users share on the microblogging service.

Twitter is testing a new service--called t.co--to wrap and abbreviate all links shared on the site in the same way other URL-shortening services such as Bit.ly do. The move is designed to increase security on the site, as well as offering analytics and related services for the company's Promoted Tweets platform, Twitter spokesperson Sean Garrett wrote in the post announcing the move Tuesday afternoon.

To illustrate how URLs would appear after testing is complete, … Read more

Look at this and see if you can say: "Jeez, I don't like this."

Apple's excellent new ad for the iPhone 4 brings together the sheer warmth and humanity of Apple products that other brands crave. Yet it goes a little further: no more indie music. No more product demonstrations in the abstract.

When you're selling FaceTime, you go with the face. That way, you'll get straight through to the heart. Especially when you have Louis Armstrong crooning in the background, telling you that all is right with the world and, subliminally, that Apple … Read more

When you've gone and polluted so much that a lot of birds are ill, baby, ill, you really have to be careful with your words. However, BP seems to have fallen into the hands of those who defend wordsmithing politicians, rather than those whose emphasis might start with the potential reactions of real people, who use the Web to keep up with the world.

Having assigned itself to a political consulting company called Purple Strategies, BP wheeled out its CEO, a gentleman who claimed, perhaps injudiciously: "I'd like my life back."

In a TV spot that … Read more