Archive

Virtual worlds, despite all the press attention of late, are still in the early stages of development. Virtual worlds came into existence several years before YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, but their adoption rates pale in comparison to these services. Only 7 percent of Internet gamers ages 13 and o...

The recent Facebook rumors have come true -- the social networking company is making much of its third-party application development platform open source. The company announced the change one year after it launched Facebook Platform. "On the anniversary of our platform launch, we want to give back t...

Facebook has come up with a new plan to fight off its competitors: open sourcing its application platform. Citing multiple sources, TechCrunch reports that Facebook is planning to form an open source community around its API, which it launched just a year ago. We can expect that the four pillars of ...

Second Life is no place for kids, a Republican congressman declared Monday. U.S. Representative Mark Kirk has sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting a consumer alert warning about the dangers of Second Life, which he charges could expose kids to child predators and registered sex o...

The ideas blend together so well. Open source has been around for a long time and is built on the concept of developers working together and sharing software. Social networking has broken into the headlines as a new generation uses MySpace and Facebook as a whole new means of sharing their life expe...

Google has opened up a new sandbox for developers designed to entice them into building richer social networking gadgets for iGoogle. iGoogle is basically a customizable home page for individuals that uses Web-based "gadgets" to deliver content to the page. The new sandbox will let developers contin...

It must be tough to be 34 and already see your children overshadow you. That's what's happened to "Dungeons & Dragons," the roleplaying game that for decades has drawn geeks to roll dice and pretend to be elves, sorcerers and other fantasy heroes. It has never quite become mainstream entertainme...

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and twelve media groups are asking a federal court to lift an injunction against the global whistleblower Web site Wikileaks.org. Two weeks ago, in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, J...

Vox populi vox dei -- the voice of the people is the voice of God -- was supposed to represent democracy in action. Until now, however, the true state of democracy was perhaps best expressed by the saying "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." The Internet and associated technologies a...

Virtual worlds such as Second Life are making an impact on how companies conduct employee recruiting and workforce management activities. According to an ever-growing group of experts and companies in the employment business, that impact has the potential to be profound and far-reaching. Not everyon...

It's a dream scenario: A candidate aspiring to a pivotal job in the culinary arts field enters the virtual world Second Life, having never been an online gamer before. He attends an online job fair held by recruiting company TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications, and is interviewed by major...

Users of Wikipedia trust that anonymous contributors will only add true and accurate knowledge to the free online encyclopedia. However, not everyone is trustworthy. Contributors have made mistakes, of course, and then there's the widely-reported inconsistencies and outright vandalism of entries. So...

For the first time ever, Wikipedia last month cracked into comScore's top 10 hottest properties on the Web, largely due to the exposure the online encyclopedia receives from search engines like Google. During January, comScore reported that Wikipedia and its affiliated sites garnered 42.9 million un...

Fulfilling the predictions of many security experts, hackers have invaded a "social networking" Web site. The German version of the popular Wikipedia encyclopedia was used to post Web links that could spread malicious code. Security software vendor Sophos reported Friday that links purporting to off...

The programming tool Ajax has proven integral to the latest popular Internet destinations and is winning the favor of corporate supporters, including IBM and Google, as well as developers. However, there are some security issues that may accompany this cutting-edge technology tool. Among them are th...