O'Reilly News & Commentary

Demoting Halder: A wild look at social tracking and sentiment analysis - You no longer have control over where a first impression occurs.

By Andy Oram
November 1, 2011

My short story, "Demoting Halder," was supposed to lay out an alternative reality where social tracking and sentiment analysis had taken over society. As the story evolved, I wondered if the reality in the story is something we're living right now.

HealthTap explores how big a community you need to crowdsource health information

By Andy Oram
April 22, 2011

How a company addresses the challenges of trust, motivation, outreach, and accuracy while creating doctor/patient connections.

Open Media Boston forum examines revolution and Internet use in Middle East

By Andy Oram
April 1, 2011

I came away convinced that Internet sites — Facebook in particular — were crucial to the spread of the revolutions.

Media old and new are mobilized for effective causes - Sasha Costanza-Chock on why old and new media will continue to co-exist.

By Andy Oram
March 2, 2011

Sasha Costanza-Chock explains why both conventional media and social networks are critical resources, and why social causes have just as much trouble as corporations using the latter effectively.

Active Facebook users by region: November, 2010

By Ben Lorica
November 16, 2010

With Facebook unveiling an integrated messaging system for its more than 500 million users, I decided to update a few charts that breakdown its users by region.

Four short links: 9 November 2010 - A Prototyping HowTo, Decolumning PDFs, Real World Social Networks, and App Search

By Nat Torkington
November 9, 2010

How to Prototype and Influence People (Aza Raskin) -- I'm fascinated lately by prototypes, mockups, tangible artifacts, and other design tools for conveying the essence and promise of something without having to build it all. This talk nails it. paper2ebook -- Utility to re-structure research papers published in US Letter or A4 format PDF files to remove the 2...

Which social gaming companies are hiring

By Ben Lorica
July 29, 2010

Disney's announced purchase of Mountain View gaming startup Playdom, follows on the heels of EA's purchase of London-based Playfish last November. Based on active users, Zynga remains by far the biggest online social gaming company. But what other independent companies are growing? To see which companies are expanding, I used our data warehouse of online job postings1 to detect recent...

Where Facebook's half a billion users reside

By Ben Lorica
July 21, 2010

Facebook announced that they now reach 500 million active users (just five and half years after launching). But where do these half a billion users reside? Refreshing my post from February, the share of users from Asia continues to rise and now stands at 17% of all Facebook users. Over the past 12 weeks, Facebook added over a million active users in fourteen countries, including 5 in Asia and all three members of NAFTA.

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