Micro-blogging

While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn't sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they've also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here's the weird thing: It's […]

Today at SXSWi, keynote speaker Danah Boyd took the stage to talk about privacy and publicity, and how they intertwine online. Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and has studied this space extensively for years. It was a compelling talk that challenged the notion that personal information is on a binary spectrum of public o […]

The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.Two months ago, Google threatened to shut down its China search engine over censorship. Yet until today, its China search engine has stayed up with results still censored. Now the search company is f […]

Here in Austin, I just finished introducing SparkHelp, the project Mashable has decided to support for the Pepsi Refresh SxSW Challenge. We’re competing against two other teams over the next few days to help get our idea $50,000 in funding, which will help make it a reality.The ProjectAfter lots of great submissions from our readers, we settled on SparkHel […]

If you chose to tweet with a place, but not to share your exact coordinates, Twitter still needs to use your coordinates to determine your Place. In order to improve the accuracy of our geolocation systems (for example, the way we define neighborhoods and places), Twitter will temporarily store those coordinates for 6 months. Because how could anything go w […]

You'd never think it from the right-wing media hysteria around the administration's health care initiatives, but some of the best thinking about minimal government intervention is happening right now in healthcare. In my advocacy around Government 2.0, I've been focused on the idea that government should act like a platform provider rather th […]

A group of stock investors who hang out at the members only AAPL Sanity Board forum got together to guesstimate how many iPad tablet computers Apple had sold on Friday. The group compared their own order numbers from the Apple Store, then extrapolated from the timestamps and confirmation serial numbers for 48 orders of 54 iPads. They calculate that Apple sol […]

Here’s our roundup of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories published in the last seven days: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 announces Stimulus Package for Xbox Live — Activision announced during the Game Developers Conference that “the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package will strike worldwide on March 30.” The name […]

Buzz, Google's controversial attempt to unseat Facebook as the most mainstream of social activity stream readers, just made some much-needed changes that Facebook could learn from as well. Buzz users now have more granular control over what social interactions with content trigger an email sent to their email inboxes and explicit explanations for why e […]

Meet Andrey Ternovskiy, who built the voyeur/chat site everyone loves to talk about. He's too young for AdWords, but old enough to play hard to get with investors. […]

Now "99.9 percent" certain that it will close its Chinese search engine amid conflict over censorship, Google has detailed plans to do so, according to a Financial Times source. […]

Twitter.  Digg.  Facebook.  37Signals.  These are companies known on every continent.  They are not publicly traded and don’t have huge offices or development… […]