If you thought yesterday’s Facebook changes were dramatic, you’d better sit down before you see what’s coming next. Today at F8, Mark Zuckerberg led off by showing off Timeline: it’s the future of Facebook, and it’s a tectonic shift. Timeline Zuck calls the new Timeline “all the stories, all your apps, a new way to express who you are.” The story of your life. Your entire Facebook life has been condensed into a wider one-page destination. Taking a page from the About.me site, the page-wide Cover photo is your new splash photo on your profile page. The large photo does…more»

Photoshop brushes can be powerful Web design tools, both enhancing a graphic artist’s work and enabling design projects to be completed faster. The more brushes a designer has in his or her collection, the more flexibility they will have with their designs. Fortunately, several websites have emerged over the past few years to provide designers with a multitude of options when it comes to brushes. Below are just some of the top sites that provide attractive, easy-to-use and free downloadable Photoshop brushes. Brusheezy Founded in 2006 by a designer who grew frustrated by the lack of options for easily searchable…more»

Payvment, a Facebook e-commerce platform, is launching a developer platform for social commerce called Open Payvment. Open Payvment allows application developers and service providers to join their offerings with Payvment. Companies can integrate Payvment into their products and services, build new apps and gain exposure to more than 100,000 Facebook sellers that are already using the Payvment social commerce platform. “Payvment is the first foray into e-commerce for many new sellers — as their businesses grow, they are frequently looking for additional solutions that are compatible with their Payvment store, such as web-based e-commerce or mobile commerce solutions,” says Christian…more»

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a piece of legislation designed to ensure that differently-abled people are properly equipped to navigate the same things that everyone else enjoys. Just as you wouldn’t build a shopping center without an alternative to stairs, so ADA standards require that websites are configured in such a way that someone who is hearing-impaired, or sight-impaired, etc., is not summarily excluded from using a public website. Building a website so that it conforms to ADA standards is largely a matter of putting yourself in that other person’s place and anticipating what they’re going to need,…more»

The former whipping boy of algorithm-based search engines in Ask.com has reinvented itself – and it’s better than ever – if you’re a believer in user generated content in the form of questions and answers. Ask.com remains the fourth largest site in the US for unique searches according to May 2011 comScore data, with 63 million domestic monthly unique monthly users. That alone, make Ask.com relevant. The company, a brand of IAC, has struggled for years which may change as it completes its transition for pure Web search to a question and answer site and mobile service. “Ask’s approach to…more»

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) decision to approve the creation of generic top-level domain (TLD) names has been rife with controversy, but recent opposition from the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) and the adult entertainment industry has reignited the debate. The first statement came from the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a trade association of the adult entertainment industry, advocating adult trademark holders to attempt to protect their brands from being sold on .XXX domains to third parties. The concern of the group is that the expansion of the .XXX domain extension is going to blackball…more»

NuCaptcha Inc., the “Human-Friendly” Captcha, is urging users to “Make the Switch” with their new campaign. While the implementation of Captchas has certainly been a good thing for website users and owners looking for both security online and a way to reduce or eliminate spam, its flaws can, at times, be very apparent. In most cases, Captchas pose little to no problems, unless you’re a bot. However, there are several instances when Captchas prove to be more of a hindrance than a help, whether it is because of a design issue or a user-related one. For example, a user with…more»

The wildly popular blogging platform and CMS WordPress is the host to dozens of affiliate marketing sites and blogs, but for some marketers, there is a desire to take their business to the next level by making it membership or subscription based, which means finding the WordPress membership plugin that is right for them. While there isn’t a huge market for WordPress membership plugins, there are a few that really standout as far as their capabilities and features go. Below is a list of ten of the top WordPress membership plugins available, and they range in price from totally free…more»

Google product manager Christian Oestlien wrote a Google+ blog post on Thursday night indicating that the new social media platform has slightly accelerated the timeframe for business profiles and promises “to have an initial version of business profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months.” Presently, a “tiny handful” of business profiles exist on Google+ “solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers.” The Ford Motor Company is one such account that Google+ selected from tens of thousands of businesses applying to take part in the test. Accelerating the process of getting business profiles…more»

Google has announced in a blog post that the company has acquired the g.co domain as its new URL shortener for official Google products and services. The move was made to create URLs that are easier for users to remember and more easily distributed across the social Web. Google’s vice president of consumer marketing Gary Briggs writes in the post: In the world of URLs, bigger is not always better. In 2009, we helped shrink up long, unwieldy URLs by launching our public URL shortener, goo.gl. Today, we’re announcing a new URL shortcut that will only link to official Google…more»