The family “social network” and browser, Glubble, went into open beta today. The Glubble.com service is a home page for families. On it, parents and kids can leave each other messages, coordinate calendars, and share photos. The Glubble Firefox extension converts the browser into a locked-down system that monitors which sites the user views and where he or she searches, and that can only visit sites that are on the parents’ approved list.

The nannybrowser component isn’t bad–I’ll get to it in a second–but the “social network” component is weak. You get, basically, a Web page with a calendar that’s only a list of events (no grid view, no way to tag events to people), and a photo library with a painful picture-by-picture upload function.

The Glubble Web site is useful for monitoring your kid’s browsing.

The Web page’s real function is to control the nannybrowser. It’s on the Glubble site where you can whitelist or block Web pages that your kid requests access to, or deny access to any of the pre-set pages that have been marked as safe for kids.

The extension turns Firefox into a locked-down browser that can only visit approved sites.

To convert your instance of Firefox into a kid-friendly browser, you just press the kid button on your toolbar, and the browser takes on a whole new full-screen look, with the exit button password-protected.

There’s a list of favorite sites kids can access, or they can type in a domain, but when they try to go to a site that’s not on the approved list, they get a message saying that access to it is pending approval. If a parent is logged in to the Glubble site on another machine, they’ll get a message about the access request and can then approve or deny it. If the parent is right there, he or she can just put in the password to unlock the site on the spot.

The Glubble-ized version of Firefox also tracks every site that is visited and reports it on the Glubble family page.

Glubble CEO Willem-Jan Schutte pitches the browser not as “100 percent safe, but trying to include the family.” That’s a fair characterization, since busting the protection is easy: just press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up the task manager, kill Firefox, and open up the version of Internet Explorer that’s installed on every Windows PC. It won’t take many 8-year-olds too long to figure that out.

Some sites just aren’t fit for kids these days.

For the parent who is present when the kid is online, and the kid who can tolerate safety wheels on the browser, though, Glubble is a safer experience.

See also: Netnanny, Cyberpatrol, Cybersitter, and many other child safety apps. For a functional family homepage, see Cozi.

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The good news for Facebook, according to new statistics from Hitwise, is that its traffic is up 50 percent in the U.S. since last August. The not-so-good news for Zuckerberg & pals? The same numbers say that News Corp.’s MySpace still owns a whopping 67.5 percent of the social-networking market in the U.S.

Hitwise gathered its data from an analysis of traffic to 56 different social-networking sites, and concluded that Facebook has gone from a market share of under 14 percent to slightly over 20 percent in the past year. MySpace, meanwhile, has seen a 10 percent decline in visits, which has pulled its share of the sector down from over 75 percent last year. These numbers, however, were tabulated well before this week’s launch of MySpace’s music service, which may well boost its traffic.

Behind Facebook and MySpace, Hitwise found that the third, fourth, and fifth most popular social networks in the U.S. are MyYearbook, Tagged, and the AOL-owned Bebo. None of them, however, has yet to bring in more than 2 percent of the U.S. market share.

Facebook vs. MySpace traffic comparisons are popular among data firms these days, withComScore announcing in June that Facebook had passed MySpace in traffic for the first time. But much of Facebook’s growth is overseas, and everyone seems to be in agreement that MySpace is still the top social network in the U.S.

But Hitwise had some more news that might not be so good for either MySpace or Facebook: Visits to social networks overall were down 17 percent from August 2007 to August 2008.

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Yotify just launched its Web content monitoring service. You tell it what you’re looking for, and it will monitor specific sites looking for your query to return results. Then it will send you an e-mail telling you.

It’s a useful service if you’re looking for a particular item, for example, on Craigslist (but nowhere else), or a review of a new Web app on Webware (but nowhere else). The problem is that you cannot easily create a search agent (Yotify calls them “Scouts”) that scans multiple sites at once, like Google Alerts does. However, Google doesn’t allow for data-aware searches: you can’t easily encode a search for 1- or 2-bedroom apartments in Russian Hill (with parking) at $3,500 a month or less. And Google also doesn’t give you a preview of your results. Yotify allows you to refine your Scout until you have it right, and only then starts to run it around the clock on your behalf.

There is one Scout that seems to be more Google-like: the vanity search. If you ask Yotify to set up a Scout for your name, it appears to scan against the entire Web.

Yotify has some social broadcast features as well: It will send queries to your Facebook or FriendFeed networks, and then collect the results for you.

The upshot: I’d give this utility a grade of B- or B. It would be far more useful if its Scouts were multiple-site.

Yotify will find apartments from Craigslist, but finding lodging elsewhere requires setting up separate filters.

(Credit: Yotify)

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When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, many of the panelists and speakers invited the audience to ask them questions by submitting Twitter messages. A Google engineer named Taliver Heath has gone one step further by creating Google Moderator, an application that lets the audiences at lectures and discussions submit questions and vote on the ones they’d like to hear answered.

Google Moderator, earlier named “Dory” after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. It was originally intended for the audiences at Google’s “Tech Talks” series, then was extended to company all-hands meetings and other lectures at the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

“There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn’t clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked,” Heath wrote in a blog post. “And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate.”

After a few requests, Google has now released Moderator to the general public as part of its Google App Engine platform, and it’s now available for free use. I’ll start by asking a question about Moderator: What if audiences are too busy reading and voting on question submissions to actually listen?

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On most days, I put my hands on two to five new Web 2.0 products. I write up some of them, but pretty much forget about all of them by the time I wake up the next day. A few things do stick with me, though. Here’s a list of products I am actually still using, weeks or months after the initial review:

Chrome

Google’s new browser. Who needs it? If you have to ask, you haven’t used it. (See all our Chrome coverage.)

Why I like it: Very fast. Very stable.

Areas for improvement: Extension support! I would use Chrome full time if I could import my favorite plug-ins, especially the password keeper Roboform. Also, Mac and Linux versions.

Evernote

This note-taking app has finally and completely replaced OneNote for me (it was a slow transition). It’s a great place to store all your thoughts. It has a good search feature and it’s good with photos–it even OCRs them in the background. Cool new feature: iPhone notes are now geo-encoded, and you can filter your display of notes by location. (Read the review from March.)

Why I like it: Fast, reliable, and synchronizes across my PCs, my iPhone, and the Web.

Areas for improvement: I would like it if the text editor were keystroke-compatible with Microsoft Word. Shortcut keys I’m used to don’t work in Evernote. It slows me down.

OtherInBox

Alternate in-box for bacn–the e-mail status updates you get from social services and commerce sites. (Read launch review from September 8.)

Why I like it: Can set up a new filter (actually a unique e-mail address) for a new service on the fly. Really does decrease load on my main in-box.

Areas for improvement: It’s still in private beta, and the features aren’t all built-out yet (like receipt tracking). Could be faster.

Bonus: I just got 500 new invitations to the OtherInBox private beta for Webware readers. Get yours.

TripIt

A good place to collate all the planning data that goes into a vacation or business trip. I use it to create a printed itinerary before each of my trips, and I e-mail a copy to my family too, so they know where I am. Nothing that can’t be done with a calendar app or word processor, but it’s much faster with TripIt. (Read first take from September 2007.)

Why I like it: Makes organizing trip info easier. Saves time.

Areas for improvement: Needs an iPhone app. (The mobile Web site is nice, but isn’t fast enough when you need trip info ASAP.) Also, could do better at parsing e-mail confirmations you get from non-mainstream sources,

Twhirl

Best desktop Twitter and Friendfeed client from the company that’s behind Seesmic, which I never use. Updated frequently with new features. (Read initial review from March.)

Why I like it: I use multiple nanoblog accounts, and Twhirl does a great job of letting me see and write to all of them separately. Good support for photo uploads.

Areas for improvement: I would like the promised option for single-pane view of everything. Also a Ping.fm-like feature to post to multiple nanoblogs at once.

Extra: Dead to me

There are some products I used to love, but have (or want to) stop using. These apps, for example, are in the process of becoming dead to me:

NetVibes. A useful single-page aggregator, but it’s slow to load and the log-in screen is a pain to get through whenever your browser forgets your identity. I’m seriously thinking of switching over to iGoogle.

Trillian. The instant-messaging aggregation app still works, but it loads up almost as slowly as Outlook. No excuse for that. I’m in the process of switching over to Pidgin.

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Join Scott Guthrie as he discusses Microsoft’s commitment to web standards development, Rich Internet Applications and how Microsoft is contributing to help move the web forward. Watch as Guthrie showcases the absolutely free version of Visual Studio that supports standard semantic markup, CSS, JavaScript ,and 3rd party AJAX framework support. Follow along as he introduces ASP.NET MVC and its focus in building light-weight standard web solutions. Learn about Microsoft how Silverlight, AJAX and media enable a whole new generation of Rich Internet Applications

read more

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With nearly 1,000,000 posts a day, the blogosphere is overflowing with content and now fully established as a mainstream rather than fringe phenomenon. Traditional media have adopted blogs as a complementary form of content to the traditional news and feature stories. According to Techhnorati’s latest report on the state of the blogosphere, many bloggers are making money. Technorati surveyed a sample of about 1,000 bloggers and found that the mean annual revenue for advertising is $6,000, but sites with 100,000 or more unique visitors are generating more than $75,000 in revenue.

(Credit: Technorati)

None of these results is surprising. Blogs started as a means of personal expression, and now offer more than a billion people the tools to self-publish. Traditional publishers and an armada of new, innovative publishers, as well as millions of readers, have embraced the blog format and ethos. Marketers, readers, publishers, politicians, and most people on the planet with access to the Internet understand the diversity of voices, as well as the cacophony, that blogs allow. The more savvy bloggers are getting sophisticated about search engine optimization, developing a niche, and making money. Technorati will dribble out more results from its survey this week, illuminating the what, why, and how of blogging.

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