Blog Networks is a social networking application that esentially turns Facebook into a massive database of blogs not unsimilar to Yahoo’s MyBlogLog.  The idea is to encourage reading by the casual reader.  I just signed up GosDot and Appfrica which you can check out by clicking the links.

Posted in Blog ~

I promise there will be some regular updates to this space soon. Due to my increased level of work with Appfrica I’ve been neglecting this blog but don’t worry updates are coming soon.  I recently started blogging/writing for a pretty big magazine out of the UK so I expect to focus the direction of this site on two areas: Graphic Design and Web Development/Design

All my social media discussion can be found at the Appfrica blog as it relates to work there..

So if you’re confused, where can you find Jon Gos on the WWW these days?

Appfrica.org
Smashing Magazine
Imaginepublishing.co.uk
Developertutorials.com
weworkforfree.net

I never expected to be a professional blogger but with the increasing amount of gigs I’m getting, that might just be possible.

Posted in Blog ~

I’ve been very much preoccupied with my web conference, Appfrica, so I haven’t blogged much lately but there’s been some really big shakeups this week in the Web sector.

The biggest is the announcement that Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have decided to leave the company they sold to Yahoo! in 2005!  This is big, not only because they’ve been pretty adamant about staying involved with their pet project but because Yahoo! is in the middle of formulating new strategies to appease angry shareholers after that much publicized Microsoft acquisition failed.  They’re also under increased pressure to breathe life back into their stock which has also suffered in the wake of that same deal.

Technorati announced some new funding, no doubt related to the longtail business model they just unveiled.  Technorati essentially plans to allow bloggers and publishers of all levels of popularity to sell ads.

The Huffington Post is also making a major step towards becoming an even bigger news media outlet.  They intend to compete in localized news markets initially offering a Chicago, Illinois portal and eventually expanding to include other regions of the country. This is apparently part of a larger strategy to move beyond solely political blogging, which has obviously been critical in this election year.

“We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news [sic], not just the political blogging the way we began,” Huffington said.

I’m almost certain this will either lead to acquisition offers by the major media news outlets who are (or should be) afraid of Huffington’s growing dominance on the web.

Lastly, Facebook surpassed Myspace to become the most popular social network worldwide. Considering it was valued by analysts at over a billion dollars only a few months ago, this adds more validity to speculation that Facebook will file for an IPO and go public soon.

Posted in Blog ~

The waters ahead just got a little more Turbulent for Twitter, Google may be prepping the retun of Jaiku…

Jaiku is joining Google. While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.

But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.

Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders

In the past few weeks Twitter has faced confusion and what some might call a mass exodus of users because of the fact that it was unprepared for such heavy traffic from users. The combination of high traffic, too many calls to the API and the strain of Instant mesaging has brought the Twitter servers to their knees more than once. Now it appears Google is kicking the service while it’s down by purchasing Jaiku, Twitter’s nearest competitor. Now it appears Google may be prepping a big relaunch of the service it purchased last year, Jaiku. Meanwhile new competitor Plurk and FreindFeed continue to experience rapid booms in growth from former Twitter users who seem to be debating on weather or not they want to stick with the ailing service.

Note: This post has been corrected due to an error on my part. I left the original erroneous text but struck it out to avoid confusion.

Posted in Blog, wordpress ~

From what I’ve heard, working at Google as a programmer is all about exploring exploring your unrequited love for web applications and new ideas. It’s no surprise, then, that the Gmail team is rolling out a javascript applet that allows customers to try out these new features.

It’s the new beta test model, where the actual testing and bug reporting is essential crowd sourced, allowing those diehard, bleeding edge, early-adopter users to feel more nerdy while helping Google work out the kinks. They’ve also opened up channels for sending feed back directly to engineers. Here’s somewhat of a GLabs manifesto from Product Manager Kieth Coleman.

People often ask how we decide what to build next. It’s usually a mix of factors, like how many users are asking for it (think delete button, vacation responder, and IMAP, among others), how useful we think it will be (think chat, conversation view, etc.) or how much fun it will be to work on (this is actually really important). We have all sorts of debates about each option, we weigh the pros and cons, and then some of the time we probably make the wrong decision.

Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn’t normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they’re good or not. When you sign in, you’ll see a new page in Settings called Labs. It has a list of experimental new features, and you can enable or disable each one. Some of the popular ones will become core parts of the product, and we’ll eventually retire the ones that don’t get much use. We’ve put feedback links in there, too, so you can discuss a feature with other users and the engineer(s) who wrote it.

Posted in Blog ~