Social networking

I understand there's been something of a kerfuffle over a lost iPhone prototype that might even have been a stolen iPhone prototype. Or not.

However, I could not decide whether this was news until America's foremost newscaster, Jon Stewart, offered an opinion on this pressing matter of state.

On Wednesday, Stewart declared that this was, indeed, a topic worthy of comment. On his Comedy Central show, Intelligent America's barometer seemed somewhat disturbed at the plight of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen.

Moreover, he seemed concerned that Apple, once the underdog, had become something of an overbearing hound. The … Read more

When Winston Churchill decided to make a stand against tyranny, he spoke these famous words: "we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

The world has moved on a little since Churchill's day. So perhaps you, too, will experience a curious motion in your surroundings when I tell you of a report that Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, has decided to fight the scourge of terrorism with similarly grand determination.

For Bloomberg is reporting … Read more

Did you renew your driver's license or pay your last parking ticket online? If so, you're part of a growing number of people in the U.S. taking advantage of government services on the Internet.

A poll of more then 2,000 American adults late last year found that 82 percent of Internet users, or 61 percent of all U.S. adults, looked up information or made a transaction on a government Web site in the past year. The results of the poll, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and released Tuesday, also discovered that … Read more

LONDON--Thanks to the volcanic ash pouring out of Iceland, I had some extra time in London last week, giving me an opportunity to try my hand at shuttle diplomacy between Facebook and a British police agency called the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center, or CEOP.

I came to London en route to a tech conference in Spain that was canceled due to the air travel issues and also to give a talk at a Family Online Safety Institute conference in Bahrain that starts Tuesday.

As I wrote recently, CEOP is pressuring Facebook to add a reporting button (some call … Read more

As acolytes sat in nodding wonderment listening to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg tell them how the world really is (not very private at all) and how it's going to be (even less private), the people behind Gawker Media were enduring (or perhaps even enjoying) sometimes nasty critiques. They had, after all, revealed something terribly private about one of the world's great personalities, the iPhone.

Many lawyers have opined on the legality of Gawker's actions. I am sure that they are all right. Lawyers always are. At least that's what they tell me. I just wish some … Read more

One of the world's foremost concert pianists has taken the iPad to a place it has surely never been. Yes, away from the thighs, where the device so often rests.

A few days ago, wandering onto the stage to perform his first encore at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, China's Lang Lang, one of the world's most dazzling piano players, proved the product's astounding versatility. The audience was clearly surprised he emerged clutching an iPad. They could be sure he wasn't going to use it to take a shot of the audience. But perhaps … Read more

It's almost become a joke: Facebook makes a change to its privacy settings that opts you in to a bunch of scary stuff, the entire Internet flips out about it, it rolls back the change, and then a few months or years later, it makes the same or a very similar update, opting you in to it again. It would be funny, if it weren't getting so damned insulting.

Here's the latest. In the wake of its F8 conference the other day, Facebook rolled out a slew of changes aimed at transforming the Web into one giant … Read more

While Mark Zuckerberg this week focused on finding ways that people could use Facebook to share every article of journalism and, who knows, maybe even clothing with their Facebook friends, a mayor in New England used the site to share much more.

April Capone Almon, mayor of East Haven, Ct., seems to be a woman who truly dedicates herself to her constituents, and, indeed, to her Facebook friends. And when I say "herself," I really mean "her self."

Almon has more than 1,600 Facebook friends, but as she waded through her friends' status updates, she … Read more

Web forums may seem like an unexciting idea given the increasingly public and real-time nature of Web discourse. But the aging medium still has some tricks up its sleeve.

One recent entrant to the Web forums game is Lefora, which launched around this time last year. This week, the company is introducing its follow-up to that, called Talki.

Unlike Lefora, Talki is not a forum system designed to be integrated into just your site. Instead, it's a distributed chatter box that can be placed in on a single page or post, as well as on the site of anyone else who embeds it. In other words, the discussion is not limited to one community or content creator.

"With Talki we're targeting a different demographic," Talki's co-founder Paul Bragiel told CNET on Thursday. "We're not going after super hard-core forum users that want to mod the hell out of everything. It's for the 'hey I have a blog, and it's a very big audience, and I'd like to have my users talking to each other,' or 'hey I'm a large media entity and I want to have a couple big sites and put them up very quickly.'"

Bragiel says the company was contemplating creating a "lite" version of Lefora but what came out of development was too different of a product to have in the same brand or category. "Working on Lefora we realized that there are these two types of users that want forums. These hard-core users who wanted to tweak every single option...and then we saw these people who have Web sites or commerce sites and who wanted something clean and simple, but not necessarily with all those features."

The result is a stripped-down version of a forum that's still quite similar to Lefora but one that requires less set-up. For instance, Talki can be set to automatically detect the look of your site and change its coloring to match. And on the user end, people don't even need a Lefora account--they can use Facebook or Twitter to log-in instead.

The one challenge it faces though is competing with existing commenting systems, something Bragiel said he thinks Talki can peacefully coexist with. "Comments still thrive off of a stub--the main page. Somebody reads an article and it's always the editor of a site. And then comments kind of come off it," Bragiel said. "Here, this is a purely main-to-main discussion. So anyone can go out there and create their own discussion...and everyone has control to do this."

As for the moderation of these discussions, that's still something needs to be managed by the creator of the Talki widget--at least for now. Bragiel said that Lefora users and customers have been asking the company to offer a moderation service, especially on the enterprise side. "We've thought about it," Bragiel said, "I've never been a big enterprise guy myself. Every single company I've done has been consumer-oriented."

On the business side of things, Talki is free to use but caps off the number of forum topics that can be created, as well as how many recent topics can be seen. Forum creators can pay for one of several premium service tiers that allow for unlimited topics and replies, as well as things like custom branding and live customer service.

Update at 10:25 p.m. PST: I've removed the embedded Talki widget from this post, as it was causing some users to experience problems reading the post. If you want to give it a spin, you can tool around with one of the company's example forums here.

Update at 10:50 a.m. PST on April 25: The embedded widget is back and after the page jump. It wasn't playing nice with one of the widgets on our site, but it works now.

See also: Tangler which has been kicking around since 2006.… Read more