Tech Week in Review 1-15-2010
Facebook by Email
Millions of people, prevented from accessing Facebook at work, can now rejoice as Facebook now lets you reply to comments via email. Honestly, I have no earthly idea what took them so long. As much as Facebook spams your inbox with notifications, one wonders why they’re just now turning this feature on. Remember to turn on notifications by email if you want to play with this feature.
Twendly Makes Finding “Experts” Easier
A common theme in the social media world is finding experts or authorities on specific subjects. Even finding average people that share your interests can be difficult. With Twendly, you can find the people tweeting the most about the stuff you are interested in. My only concern here is the actual relevancy of the results. Typical spam marketing techniques involve positioning yourself as an expert by tweeting about a specific topic relentlessly and amassing a huge follower count (which is super easy if all you want is inflated numbers). I’m not sure that Twendly has any method for filtering out these fake experts. 
Haiti
A major earthquake caused devastation across the impoverished island of Haiti. They seriously need help to get through this and social media has played a big part in not only educating people about what happened, but allowing them to easily donate to the cause. For more details on what happened and how you can help, check out our coverage here. Mashable and RWW have a bunch of ways to help now and stay informed.
T-mobile has decided to lend their support by waiving all call charges to and from Haiti. They are also waiving any fees associated with donating to Haiti via text, even if you don’t have SMS on your plan. Read the full press release for more details. (props to @nukirk for the heads up)
“Our company and our employees care deeply for our customers, and we know that many customers have been directly impacted by the disaster in Haiti,” said Robert Dotson, president and CEO, T-Mobile USA. “While our thoughts go out to those in Haiti who are suffering so greatly at this time, our promise is to help people connect with those who matter most. I can think of no better time to demonstrate this commitment.”
Google Pulls Out of China
In response to recent attacks against their network that appeared to be targeting the accounts of human rights activists, Google is basically shutting down Google.cn. They have been tolerating the Chinese government’s strict policies on content, trying to work with them, but it seems that this last attack will be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Google usually likes things free, unfiltered, and uncensored. It’s doubtful the Chinese will be willing to yield on these points.
Category: News | Tags: china, email, facebook, google, Haiti, twendly
About the Author Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
See all posts by rahsheen.
Thanks for the link to Twendly. As one of the developers, one of our key concerns very early on was the issues of spam. Currently, before we update the index we actually delete about 1/6th of the tweets we've pulled in as spam based on a number of factors (we've collected around 300M tweets and only kept about 250M of them).
The current implementation of Twendly is really more a proof-of-concept around what we think is possible, the new engine which is now entering test has its own search indexer and a number of different factors built into the core of the engine which will make it even harder to spam the results.
Bear in mind that we don't claim you won't find spammers (you will), but just thought you'd like to know that we are well aware of the issue and working to ensure even more accurate results as we move forwards.