Brokekid.net

Facebook Sharecounts

Twitter, Digg, Reddit and a number of other services allow you to share links on those services directly from your website through an embeddable widget. Each time you share, vote or bookmark a link, the widget updates that count. Facebook now offers a site widget that you can use to promote your content back Facebook and updates the count. You can read more about the widget on the Facebook developer blog.

Website helps you meet your office neighbors

Stackd is a new website that helps you meet the people in your office building, whether for “business or beers.” The service (currently only focused on Manhattan and Brooklyn), which is free, encourages office dwellers to add their locations and search through existing listings to develop “to hook up and expand their social network locally.”

Google Wave Use Cases

Google Wave is all the rage these days but if you don’t have a handle on it (or an invite, you can sign up for an invite here), it can be hard to describe. It’s sort of like a wiki/IM/email/embeddable app…yeah, confusing (and if you have 80 minutes, you can watch the original demo here.)

So, what are some uses for Google Wave? Besides the obvious like IM, email and creating a wiki? Lifehacker has a great list -

• Education: Increasing Interactivity and Collaborative Learning
• Healthcare: Getting the H1N1 Vaccine Out Faster
• Transportation: Controlling Air Traffic
• Journalism: More Complete and Collaborative News Reporting
• Saving Babies: Protecting and Helping Children
• Creative Pursuits: Collaborative Storytelling
• Family Life: Updating Loved Ones on Health Issues
• Research: Getting Results Faster from Around the World
• Disaster Relief: Saving People Stuck on Rooftops

Readwriteweb.com also goes into detail on using Google Wave in the arts and education.

If you haven’t signed up for an account, you should definitely look into it, Google Wave is an incredible innovation.

Did you know?

You can quickly download a copy of all your Google Docs for archiving, editing, sharing, etc.

Open your Google Docs and select all the files you’d like to export. Click the “More actions” button in your navigation to export the files.

Select the format you’d like to download each file type as and continue. Your files will be on your desktop in minutes.

You can download it here!

Google announces social search

Google's Marissa Mayer announced an upcoming opt-in feature for Google search that will return social network related results from people in your contact list. Part of this will include Twitter integration, which was reported earlier this week. How might this look?

This move is directed at countering Facebook's dominance in social search. The idea is that users want more relevant related search results and that means reading about thoughts and experiences from influencers in your social network, not necessarily anonymous results which Google is great at.

Salmon Protocol proposed

Conversations on the web often take place in a silo, never making it back to the source of the content. For example, if I post an article on Idealist and other users repost the link to their blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other sites, comments left on those networks stay on those networks. If I want to know more about what people are thinking about the story, I have to look for their responses. A proposal called Salmon Protocol, authored by John Panzer of Blogger, aims to change that.

The idea is to "unify the conversations in all places, both upstream and downstream…The proposed Salmon Protocol would similarly watch both source and destination sites for comments, and upon discovering new comments, it would send the new comments to the site which is lacking the full conversation. If multiple downstream destinations are designated, the Salmon Protocol will also populate these multiple sites."

This could cause some confusion and take a bit of getting used to, but ultimately it will take the conversation out of the silos and onto the greater web, promoting dialogue and discovery.

Flickr adds people tagging

You can now tag the people in your photos by either adding them from your Flickr contact list or by adding their email address.

When you’re tagged in a photo, it will show up in your recent activity stream. And Flickr has revamped users’ profiles to show pictures you’re tagged in.

Did you know?

Google Tasks, which can be found in Gmail, Google Calendar and as an iGoogle widget, doesn’t currently have a stand-alone application. There is however a canvas view for Tasks that you can bookmark and use as a stand-alone app.

(h/t googlesystem.blogspot.com)

Did you know?

We email a number of documents back and forth using Gmail and Google Docs, but often we forget the context of the document and have to open it up to remind ourselves.

Starting today, you can preview the contents of a Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation right in your Gmail inbox…To enable Google Docs previews, go to the Labs tab under Settings. Let us know what you think and what else you’d like to see while viewing docs in Gmail.

Wikileak helping to shield journalists

Wikileaks, the site known for analyzing and publishing highly confidentional and secretive documents, is working to set up a system that helps to shield journalists from revealing their sources.

This system will be a place where “a source can leak information directly to a journalist for a period of time, before Wikileaks goes public with the info. But, either way, Wikileaks promises to protect the source, keeping the journalist separate from the source.”

Part of this system will include an embeddable widget for websites where whistleblowers can “upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks.”

The world will be a bit more leakier and transparent.

Neighborhood Problem Solving

Leveraging their web app, an iPhone application, Twitter and 1-800 numbers, SeeClickFix aims to maker non-emergency reporting of neighborhood problems much simpler.

When a user reports an issue, other users or “fixers” can volunteer to fix the issue if possible or work to get the issue addressed. Blogs and websites can also post widgets and feeds on their sites reflecting current issues.

Community groups and the media are encouraged to keep tabs on issues and utilities and government agencies can sign up to receive alerts and manage service requests.

This service is currently only available in select cities.

iPhone App helping refugees with jobs

Samasource, a nonprofit and CrowdFlower, start-up out of San Francisco, have teamed up to create an application for the iPhone that allows you to help Kenyan refugees earn a living.

The application, Give Work (link to iTunes store), works like this –

1. A U.S. company submits an online job to CrowdFlower to be completed by a refugee in Dadaab, Kenya.
2. The refugee at Samasource completes the task immediately.
3. An iPhone user in the U.S. donates their time to double check the work.
4. The company that requested the work receives quick results, that are double checked for accuracy. The refugee worker is paid for their work and is able to improve their quality of life.

For more information about Give Work, check out this video.

Did you know?

An incredibly cool development to come from Google yesterday is their new Building Maker tool.

There is a layer on Google earth where you can view buildings at scale, offering a more realistic city view, granting users wider context to neighborhoods and surroundings. To help populate this layer with more buildings, Google is crowdsourcing building creation using this new tool.

We like to think of Building Maker as a cross between Google Maps and a gigantic bin of building blocks. Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – both of which we provide. When you’re done, we take a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn’t already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. You can make a whole building in a few minutes.

Creating new buildings is incredibly simple, for more information on how to do it check out the video.