I've been thinking about Andrew's post and MySpace a lot lately. Why is MySpace still so dominant? It's owned by NewsCorp, has a terrible UI, it's search doesn't work and there is enough glitter to drive you mad. Yet here we are, 2008 and MySpace still has a ton of users. What keeps MySpace going?

Read more: Structural Social Network Theory

Sto lavorando ad altri crawler in grado di effettuare altri tipi di ricerche “interessanti”: se Google Images Downloader incontrerà il vostro favore, sarà solo il primo di una serie di software di questo tipo che rilascerò sempre con questa modalità.

Read more: Google Images Downloader in regalo agli iscritti al feed RSS di Nothing2Hide

Haochi reports that he recently encountred, Google search result experiments of displaying optimized information about forum threads i.e. below the title, there’s a new line with the following format:

Read more: Google search result experiment: Optimized discussion board result

En épocas de MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, iChat, … parece un poco ridículo, pero yo lo considero muy interesante, especialmente para una videoconferencia puntual con alguien que no conocer y que no necesitas tener en tus contactos, o con un proveedor/cliente o con un amigo de un amigo…

Read more: Videoconferencias desde web

Cute little resource MSN has. You put in your zip code it tells you where the cheapest gas is. It says they update every night so it should be reasonably accurate.

Read more: Where to find cheap gas.

Friendster’s US market success was killed by its inability to stay up. Not because of MySpace’s innovation, not because people change social networks like underwear and not because of any other reason. Quite simply, people couldn’t login to the service and so were forced to go someplace else to express themselves.

Read more: Twitter and Friendster Parallels

The whole thing reminds me of GBase, google's effort to create a mass storage set. When it came out, folks were doing everything from predicting the end of Craigslist and Ebay to pointing out the dawn of a new digital age. How many services are you aware of that use GBase? (Tip: Google shopping does. If you want to list your data on Google shopping, you have to use GBase, so it's not really an optional element and may explain a reason why Google Shopping hasn't quite outpaced Amazon.

Read more: Gapps in Understanding

On the Saturday night we will be having the official Lugradio Live USA 2008 party at Jillian’s, and Google, our gracious and generous main sponsor will be providing a healthy bar tab to help the night get off to a cracking start.

Read more: LugRadio Live USA 2008 Evening Social Events

They say that a good bloggers work is never done and I tend to agree with them especially now that I’ve decided to host another two blogs. Although these will replace a couple of my blogs that died when the free blog sites they were hosted on went off line it still takes a fair bit of effort to start them from scratch. I als figured that at least if I host them myself I don’t have to rely on anyone else.

Read more: The Birth Of Two New Blogs

We’re not sure if this is the Niche body kit that gives the new Audi TT the look and the feel of an R8, but an Audi TT dressed up like the R8 has popped up on eBay Motors for those interested in mimicking.

Read more: Audi TT with R8 body kit for sale on eBay

So I follow a link to Ning, the platform on which W.A.S.T.E. was created, and I think, “Good grief! As if Facebook and MySpace didn’t take up enough time and energy, here’s yet another site that walls up users inside closed networks. Ning gives users the tools to create their own social networks. Walled gardens beget walled gardens.”

Read more: Wall-to-Wall Social Networks

Many interactive marketers and web strategists are unsure of what to do, either to create a campaign on existing social networks (like Facebook, MySpace or Bebo) or to create their own branded social network around or on their corporate website.

Read more: Forrester Report: Online Communities: Build Or Join? (The answer is ‘When’)

The Astana city administration has almost completed creation of the capital’s 3D model on Google Earth. But social service Second Astana is something more, the first spots (central block of the left-bank Astana from Bayterek to the Pyramid) of the Kazakh land in the popular virtual world of Second Life, with which the developers seem to be in the process of establishing cooperation.

Read more: Second-Life Astana

What the front end will look like, I don’t really know. What I do know is that the smarter backend will result in better applications, but just like most people don’t really know that Google Maps is powered by MapReduce or Yahoo Search is now powered by Hadoop, they don’t really know that the superior performance of their application in finding and presenting information is because the web is becoming a linked data web.

Read more: Semantic thoughts #2

The really sad thing is it looks like Phil’s friend actually had to add that graphic to his Hotmail signature himself. Microsoft provides instructions on how to add these “hardcore” graphics to your Hotmail Beta signature.

Read more: Microsoft: “Beta test Windows Live Hotmail, or we’ll pop a cap in yo’ ass!”