morningbuzz

Meetup, Good Docs, Microsoft, More: Friday Morning Buzz, November 7th, 2014

Yesterday was not a good day. I am getting impatient because all kinds of stuff is happening that I didn’t plan and I want to know what happens next.

The Google Maps app is getting an update.

Facebook has open-sourced Proxygen. “Facebook today announced that it is open sourcing Proxygen, the C++ HTTP libraries — including an HTTP server — that it uses internally. The company has open-sourced quite a bit of its code in recent months, much of it focused on mobile developers. In many ways, today’s launch is more interesting, though, as it’s likely to reach a far wider number of developers.”

Meetup is getting a crowdfunding feature called “Contributions”. “The new feature allows Meetup group members to fund various projects managed by group organizers in order to pay for things the group needs – like meeting space, supplies, equipment, drinks and snacks and more.”

Postplanner rounds up the top 10 social monitoring tools for businesses on a budget. (Businesses or institutions, groups, etc.)

So this guy has built a tool to play back the keystrokes of any Google Doc. “If you’ve ever typed anything into a Google Doc, you can now play it back as if it were a movie — like traveling through time to look over your own shoulder as you write.”

The British Library has added 40 new documents to its Greek digitization project.

Microsoft Office for iPad, iPhone, and Android is now free.

More Microsoft: it is providing tools to fight Ebola. “Microsoft Corp will provide free cloud-computing and research applications to qualified medical researchers working on the Ebola virus, the software company’s chief executive said on Monday.”

Ancestry.com is making its military records free for Veterans Day. You got until the end of the day Tuesday.

There is a new way to report gender-based harassment on Twitter. “A new online form, created by WAM, asks for information such as what type of harassment a user is experiencing (outright threats, doxxing, hate speech, etc), whether it’s being done by a single person or a group, and whether it’s happening elsewhere online. WAM says it will investigate each claim and then send confirmed reports to Twitter.” Less clear is what Twitter may actually do about it.

Facebook is “bundling” page posts. Gah. Good morning, Internet…

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Categories: morningbuzz

2 replies »

  1. I know it’s frustrating, but that’s actually one of the best things about NaNoWriMo (and similar routines). It jazzes your muse. (I never did NaNo but after forcing myself to write EVERY MORNING at the same time, I eventually realized I couldn’t NOT keep going — my head would explode.)

  2. Forgot to mention that Meetup’s new service takes $0.50 plus 7.5% for every transaction, so any member looking to give $5 will see 17.5% go into the coffers of Meetup and its partners, then $0.30 + 2.9% of what’s left going to PayPal once WePay transfers it.

    This is in addition to the $144 a year you pay to be a meetup organizer. So the “service” is a new revenue enhancer for Meetup. It’s just a one time version of its optional member dues service.

    This is compared to Indiegogo taking 4% + Amazon’s processing or Kickstarter taking 5% + Amazon’s processing. So it’s cheaper to use either of those.

    This is one of the many ways Meetup tries to screw its organizers and why Seattle CoderDojo won’t be renewing our Meetup membership in January.

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