Ypulse Tech Round Up: KOL & Red No More, Widgets, Online Confessionals

The big news from over the weekend was that AOL is no longer supporting its kids and teens sites, KOL and Red (Paid Content). To me this signifies how far AOL has fallen from the giant it once was — it used to be number one with kids and teens, and its mom-base loved the KOL parental controls…In other internet giant news, Yahoo! is going after the Facebook crowd with a new social network called Kickstart designed to connect students with prospective employers — I smell Hot Jobs synergy somewhere (Tech Crunch).

Widgets, widgets. They're everywhere. The San Francisco Chronicle recently discovered them. And widget-leader Rock You did something pretty interesting with its slideshow widget — at least on their site. According to Tech Crunch, "This weekend photo widget startup RockYou started to integrate Like.com results into slide shows shown on the RockYou site. For now, results are limited to showing shirts on sale that are similar to the ones being worn by people in the photographs. Viewers can click through and purchase a shirt that look similar to the one their friend is wearing in the photos." Contextual shopping based on what your friends are wearing – feels like science fiction.

And just in case you belong to so many social networking sites, you can't keep them straight, there are now companies like 8hands to help, although any application you have to download onto your desktop gives me pause with this audience.

Confession may be good for the soul, but it also makes for some pretty juicy reading. If the church can't get people to confess at church, why not get them to confess online…anonymously, for the world to see and read. That's the gist of IveScrewedUp.com where you can "confess now." This is definitely following on the Post Secret, True Mom Confessions trend.

Adverblog reports that MTV UK launched a new game that's supposed to help teens learn to make smart choices. I tried playing it…must not be so smart. I just clicked and clicked…

And finally, according to new research, our dependence on gadgets is making us more shy, so much so, that we must relearn the art of face-to-face conversation.

Categorized under: Web

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.