Software

Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, is becoming known for buying up some of the most creative WordPress hacks out there. They’ve already snapped up the global avatar service, Gravatar, and added a handful of quality themes by Chris Pearson to their selection of default templates. Now Automattic is taking WordPress into the arena of social networking by hiring designer Andy Peatling and acquiring his BuddyPress plugins.

There’s a placeholder page at BuddyPress.com right now, with the Automattic logo and a simple description of what BuddyPress does: transforming “a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform.” For an example of what that might look like, you can check out Peatling’s work on chickspeak.com, built on BuddyPress. If you’re a designer who likes the power and flexibility of WordPress, but you need to get outside the basic blog and put together a full-on social network, user profiles and all, this could be a great solution.

Tired of visiting tons of sites to keep tabs on your friends (or vice versa)? Sign up for a Profilactic profile and link over 140 social sites (like Facebook, Flickr, Digg, etc.) and let your friends view the Profilactic mashup of your web activity.

Your Profilactic profile also has links to the specific social sites you use, so your friends can get quick access to your Dugg stories at Digg.com for instance. The mashup section can be searched or filtered by social site.

Social-site aggregation is a welcome concept as the number of sites we join seems to increase on a daily basis (private betas anyone?). Being able to go to one profile to view Twitter posts, Dugg stories, Flickr photos, and blog posts can make your web surfing more efficient.

Presidential elections are tough. It’s a long process fraught with uncertainty, pitfalls and heartbreak; just ask Ross Perot. In this last push towards the Democratic convention, and with a race that many are saying is too close to call, we figured it was perfect time to put some crowdsourcing to work and see how accurate it might be.

So, what do the Interwebs tell us about Tuesday’s primary to end all primaries? Frankly, a lot. The first place we decided to hit on our prognostication panoply pursuit was prediction purveyor Intrade.

Intrade is like the stock market, only instead of trading shares of companies, participants trade shares of the future. (cue ominous music here) Intrade shares trade between 0 and 100 points, with 100 representing perceived certainty and 0 representing “totally not gonna happen, no way, no how.” The idea is to have people put money where their mouth is, buying and selling a chunk of the future. The difference between the outcome (100 or 0) and your purchase point is the spread, the amount of money you walk away with if you’re right — or lose if you’re wrong.

The pundits will tell you that in order for Hillary to stay alive, she must win two crucial states, Texas and Ohio. According to Intrade, she’s got a pretty fair shot of winning Ohio. Texas on the other hand isn’t looking so hot. With Intrade reporting a 71% chance of Obama taking the Texas primary, “the market” seems to have spoken in respect to how Tuesday will shake out.

Overall, Intrade users seem pretty confident that Barack will take home the nomination. Shares in Hillary’s chance have tanked in recent trading, with a resulting spike in Obama contracts. Currently Intrade gives an 86 percent chance of an Obama win.

How accurate is this Intrade thing? — you’re probably asking yourself. It’s certainly not 100% but, as far as political predictions go, it’s pretty solid. In the lead up to Super Tuesday when all the major news organizations were back and forth over Romney vs. McCain in Florida, Romney shares tanked two days before the polls opened. When the smoke cleared, McCain won, Romney lost and the iron haired Reagan-a-like took his lumps and dropped out of the race.

Memes on teh intarwebs

Elekshun cat sez the memes pointz toes Obamuh. Memes and the internet go hand in hand, and election season is ample fuel for the fire. We’ve noticed a distinct trend of our own over the last several weeks. Every Obama meme we’ve seen is positive, while the Hillary memes are mostly negative. Take these, for example.

We’d prefer not to get into whether this Flickr image is offensive — a random sampling among members of my house hold got mixed reviews, some hated it while others really hated it. We’ll let the image stand on it’s own merit, or lack thereof. There’s plenty more meme-a-licious election stuff to go around.

Hillary is Mom Jeans

A few of these have cropped up over recent weeks. There’s Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, Hillary Clintion is Mom Jeans, along with “new bicycle” versions for McCain and Hillary. You can deduct points for the “new bicycle” group, as they don’t allow public contributions.

Hillary Clinton is Mom Jeans does allow you to add phrases, and again the collective will of the Internet generation just doesn’t find Hillary very cool. She didn’t listen to your mixtape, she wants you to make a quick change to that PDF, and she even loves that James Blunt song.

Need more? Of course you do. These are highly subjective — and entertaining. While Obama has great YouTube fan videos like Will.I.Am’s “Yes We Can”, and has even been edited into an East Indian dancing rockstar in “Barack Obollywood”. On the other hand, searching YouTube for positive Hillary videos is like looking for a decent meal in Nicole Ritche’s kitchen, at best you come away with scraps. Go ahead, try it. The closest thing we could come up with was this little homage to Jack Nicholson’s ego.

Enough with the funny business

Any roundup of Internet future-gazing couldn’t be complete without Google Trends. We’re afraid the trends aren’t looking so good for the Hillary supporters either. After taking a beating in the future market, and being passed over for all manner of entertaining memes, she’s also losing the search wars.

When we take a look at search statistics for Ohio and Texas and compare the two candidates, Obama is showing consistent strength among Google searchers.

Ohio

Texas

The Round-up. What does this all mean?

While looking at all these things is interesting, all bets are off once the polls open on Tuesday. No one can predict the future. The one thing we can predict? If you live in one of these hotly contested states, you’re needed at the polls. The one thing that can change the future is you, using your vote and your voice to participate in the process.

Feisty young social news site Netscape.com, raised from the ashes of the old Netscape portal about 10 weeks ago, gained its 50,000th member today. (Disclosure: Download Squad and Netscape.com are both AOL properties, and I’m one of Netscape’s Navigators.) The 50,000th member goes by the name of zvyozd, which frankly sounds like an alias to me. Though some people would argue that arbitrary milestones like this are meaningless, I do love seeing all those zeros lined up. My back-of-the-envelope calculations say that equates to about 5,000 new members per week (duh), and more than 700 per day. Congrats C.K., Jason, zvyozd, and all of the hard-working Netscape developers, anchors, navigators, and members. In case you’re into such things, you can watch the new members, stories, votes, and comments roll in on the Netscape Tracker.

Both NBC and Disney’s ABC Family Channel are adding social aspects to their websites. Disney plans to test a new “watch and chat” feature that will let viewers watch video on the ABC Family Channel website while chatting with other viewers.

On Monday night, users will be able to watch the season finale of Wildfire about an hour after the program broadcasts on the ABC Family Channel. Up to 10 people can share a chat room and write about the show as it’s being watched. Members of the chat room can pause, rewind, and fast-forward the video.

NBC, on the other hand is going social in another way, by letting users create profiles, find friends who like the same shows, upload photos and videos etc. We’re going to assume they won’t look to kindly on users who upload copyrighted video content.

[via The Disney Blog]

Universal Music is the first, but undoubtedly not the last, record company to go after video-sharing sites whose users share their music videos without permission. Yesterday Universal sued Grouper and Bolt.com and is seeking up to $150,000 for each instance of infringement plus court costs. Grouper was acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment back in August and Bolt.com, whose market share has been rising fast, is privately held. Wwhy Universal didn’t go after slightly bigger fish like Metacafe and Dailymotion isn’t apparent. YouTube and its new parent Google were spared, of course, because of YouTube’s recent deal with Universal and other record labels. This is undoubtedly just the first in many suits by record companies against video-sharing sites, whose uses not only post copyrighted music vidoes but also use copyrighted songs liberally in their own videos.

According to comScore Media Metrix, MySpace users are starting to look a bit long in the tooth. Despite the common conception of MySpace as a teenybopper mecca, comScore says that half of all MySpace users are 35 or older, and the under-25 set makes up only 30 percent of its population. comScore has never been accused of incredible accuracy, but GigaOM’s Liz Gannes called Fox Interactive whose spokesperson, Ann Burkart, confirmed the numbers’ accuracy. According to Burkart, the 35 demographic is growing fast on MySpace, having made up only 39.5 of MySpace’s users a year ago.

Social networking juggernaut MySpace is experiencing some post-acquisition woes in the form of complaints by former shareholders. Among them is MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan, who says that MySpace parent company Intermix Media knowingly sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for far less than its true value and locked out other bidders including Viacom. Greenspan has released a nine-chapter report at FreeMySpace.com that he says presents proof of Intermix executives’ wrongdoing. News Corp. has released a statement saying, “It’s unfortunate that Mr. Greenspan continues to issue press releases complaining about a deal that many industry experts initially believed was a risk for News Corp. to take. We’ve strategically built this business since the acquisition and are just now beginning to realize real financial value. This is simply a case of sour grapes making for loud complaints.” Other former MySpace investors are up in arms as well, though, filing lawsuits for a variety of allegations backed by big guns like Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, the firm that won billions for the Enron plaintiffs.

Another one bites the dust folks, well not yet. Morpheus, the p2p file sharing network owned by StreamCast, lost its case in court. The network, like many others is now in danger of being shut down because of copyright infringement charges. LimeWire was similarly sued by the RIAA in August, as well as Grokster, Napster, Kazaa, and many others. Some of these networks have been shut-down, had to shut-down, or have regrouped and come back reborn like Napster. Morpheus still holds out hope for some sort of appeal to work in their favor, but at this point the prospects don’t look too good, at least from my small corner of the great and powerful blogosphere. Where Morpheus ends up remains to be seen, and despite their court loss, there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel at least for consumers, with a few studios and companies starting to see that DRM-less music may be the way to boost sales.

Google Notebook, the Ajaxy bookmarking app I praised when it launched back in May, has taken a cue from Writely and Google Spreadsheets and added collaboration features. Whereas previously sharing was limited to letting others view your Notebook, it is now possible to invite other people to add to and modify your Notebook. This could be ideal for group research projects, trip planning–basically any situation in which several people are all collecting information online for a single purpose.

In addition to collaboration, Google Notebook has a couple other minor new features, including improved drag and drop support, Trash and undo (so when you accidentally delete something, it’s not actually gone), and a Notebook gadget for Google Personalized Home. As always, I’m relieved to see Google is still developing this project instead of leaving it to gather dust.

[Via Lifehacker]