Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Remember October’s news of Comcast throttling Bit Torrent traffic? The debacle not only created a firestorm of bad press for the nation’s largest cable provider but also re-ignited the nationwide debate about Net Neutrality. We had numerous signs that Comcast was inhibiting our use of this legal and legitimate file transfer protocol, but to have the AP catch them red handed was icing on the cake.

To add to our pleasure, we learned today that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has finally taken notice of Comcast’s indiscretion as well. According to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a group of consumer suggests and legal scholars have asked the commission to look into Comcast discriminating against specific types of data (read: Bit Torrent). The groups have also requested the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 per affected subscribers. In case you were wondering, at last report, Comcast has 9.1 million subscribers.

We don’t really think Comcast will be forced to fork out the projected $1.77 trillion, but we do hope they get scraped through the mud on this one. They totally disregarded their entire customer base and should receive far more than just bad press as a result of this. If you are a company and you’re going to filter network traffic, be transparent and disclose it up front. If not, be ready to pay up to Mr. Martin.

[via Mashable]

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Fun, World wide web, Social Software, web 2.0

It’s not as if politics and Twitter are new to each other, but it probably hasn’t ever looked this nice. Politweets keeps pulse on where the buzz is in politics, specifically this year’s election and the candidates involved.

As tweets flit back and forth among the people of Twitter, Politweets scoops out the tweets that contain the name of candidates and throws them up: to the left for Democrats, to the right for Republicans. It then tallies the scores and stacks the candidates down the middle in order of who’s talked about the most. Obviously, it doesn’t value the tweets in regards to whether it talks of a candidate in a good or bad light - only if the name comes up at all.

Politweets is another nice example of what is possible with Twitter - and certainly more interesting than Foamee. Now if there was only a way to track custom terms on Twitter and have them ranked for you…

[via Mashable]

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Google, Social Software, web 2.0

In the wake of last week’s explosion of attention on data portability on social networks, (that is, being able to take your data from one social network to the other) there’s a massive development today. Google, Facebook, and Plaxo have all announced they’re joining DataPortability.org.

What does this mean? Well to quote the announcement directly, “Users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems”. Potentially it means social network widget and application creators will be able to write their widgets for use on any compatible social network.

Considering all these social networks are fighting for our attention, we are not sure how ‘open’ these social graphs will truly be. Will we be able to export our friends list from Facebook and take it over to MySpace and vice versa? Might we be able to take Facebook applications and use them in MySpace?

These are the types of questions that still need to be answered. Stay tuned to Download Squad for updates as they encounter the wire.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Cards, Debt

Last week at The Consumerist, a Chase customer service representative gave some insight into his job and how the bank views customers. I found out that I’m a bad customer for Chase, and I care about it that way. Here’s why I’m a bad customer….

Apparently only about 5% of credit card customers are considered the “best.” You get to be a ideal customer if you borrow lots of money from the bank for homes and vehicles, or if you’ve a high credit card balance and you’re paying them a lot of interest.

You get to be a “valuable” customer of Chase if you pay your credit card bill on time. Basically, you cause the bank no trouble, so they don’t mind keeping you. But you do have to still pay the bank some sort of interest charges.

And then there are the “non-profit” customers of Chase. They pay their bill in full each month, so no interest charges are generated. A small fee is earned by the bank each time you use your credit card, but the vast majority of the transaction fees are kept by Visa and Mastercard, so essentially Chase makes no money on your account. The non-profit customer always pays the bill on time, so there’s never a late fee and they don’t go over their credit limit, so no fees there either.

I’m proud to say I’m a non-profit customer for all the banks and credit card companies. They all keep sending me offers, begging me to be their customer anyway. The only way I ever carry a balance is if it’s a promotional rate near or at 0% with a very minor fee to transfer a balance for the cheap rate. If there’s no deal, I pay my balance off every month, like clockwork.

So the banks can hate me if they want, but I’ll continue to use their money wisely. I’m not interested in paying interest charges. I’d rather take the 0% rate for a year on a cash advance, invest it in the stock market, and pay them back on day 364 with a tidy tiny profit from investing that’s mine to keep!

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Bookkeeping, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

Share This

Share This

Primary Petroleum Appoints New CFO And VP Finance to Management Team - FOX News

Primary Petroleum Appoints New CFO And VP Finance to Management Team FOX News Share This Share This No Comments » 08 01 2008 Yahoo! Life: Yahoo! Mail is getting social Posted by: in Social Informant Filed under: World wide web, E-mail, Yahoo!, Social Software A few months ago, we heard a rumor that Yahoo! was developing a new social network platform based around the web portal’s popular email client. This week Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang gave a sneak peek at Yahoo! Life, or the service formerly known as Inbox 2.0. The email inbox is at the core of Yahoo! Life, and you can communicate with your email contacts in a number of ways. Yahoo! will put your incoming email messages in order based on its understanding of which contacts are the most important to you. You’ll be able to access other Yahoo! services including Yahoo! Maps and Messenger. The ultimate goal is to have Yahoo! service work together so that for example if you’ve receive an email asking for a good place to eat, you can drag it into a map to get suggestions. You’ll also be able to access third party applications and services like Evite and MySpace. [via TechCrunch] Read Share This Share This No Comments » 08 01 2008 Obama most popular with tech savvy voters Posted by: in Social Informant Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0 As you may know, the New Hampshire primary for the US 2008 Presidential election is today. Although web 2.0 itself has not been positioned as a major campaign issue, the power of the internet and social networks has played a huge role in not only individual candidate campaigns, but in the debate process itself. Additionally, with his victory in the Iowa caucus, Democratic candidate Barack Obama has become the first candidate leading in Internet metrics to pull off a major victory. So this begs the question, are Obama’s fans the most savvy and “connected” supporters? Well, in addition to having the most friends on MySpace and supporters on Facebook, Sen. Obama is also leading in the war of campaign widgets. According to Widgetbox, a major distributed widget marketplace, Obama has nearly double the number of widget impressions as his nearest opponent. In fact, he has nearly as many impressions as his two nearest competitors combined! These widgets are embedded on personal web pages, blogs and social networking sites. This certainly gives additional (if ancillary) credence to the idea that Obama is the most plugged-in candidate. Widget Impressions from Widgetbox Widgets What effect, if any will the candidates on the internet popularity have on the polls? Keep checking the news, and DownloadSquad, to find out! Read Share This Share This No Comments »

Search Subscribe Your email:   Subscribe Unsubscribe   Pages About Contact-us

RSS Feed   January 2008 M T W T F S S « Dec   Feb »   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31   Recent Posts Office Live Workspace to be out by year-end 10 essential web apps for bloggers BackType: keep track of your comments everywhere on the World wide web 10 Awesome BlackBerry apps ShoZu - EZ all in one mobile social networking Muse Wedding 2.0 keeps you organized M2: Ma.gnolia to go Open Source Fuelly - finally a gas mileage social network Flickr finally launches embeddable slideshow widget Zoho Share takes on Scribd, DocStoc document sharing services Categories Money General Talk Money Related Auctions Money Videos Raising Money Social Informant Today News Wall St Trading Strategies Archives September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007