We put up a post earlier this week about the Digg exodus which ended in some speculation about whether all that traffic (a 26% drop after the site’s redesign) just disappeared into the ether or flowed its way on over to Reddit, one of the internet’s less well known (but no less loved) voting-based-content sites. The conclusion, based on some estimations from Hitwise, was that there isn’t much hard evidence for Reddit absorbing Digg’s homeless users, since their traffic had only increased 2.6% in the past month.

As big fans of Reddit we were excited to find out that, according to Reddit’s lead developer Christopher Slowe, Hitwise’s estimates were off by a factor of ten.

Today, at Wired‘s Disruptive by Design conference, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that, beginning July 1st, Starbucks will offer free WiFi internet access in every one of its American stores.  No time limit, no registration required.

Right now, patrons are only allowed to surf for two hours at a time, and have to have a Starbucks card in order to get access.  By this fall, Starbucks will also be rolling out The Starbucks Digital Network, offering free access to a number of for-pay-only sites to its customers.

Read on...

Sometimes, there’s a lot more to 140 characters than just 140 characters: Twitter API/platform developer Raffi Krikorian has created this fascinating diagram of just how much information is contained in a single Tweet, so much of it invisible to the casual user.

As ReadWriteWeb points out, this is just the beginning: Twitter is soon to add a new feature called “annotations” which will allow developers to attach additional metadata to Tweets.

“With annotations, Twitter could become a platform for sharing anything, not just 140 characters of text. What will developers do with that data? We can only imagine. Perhaps new apps will allow users to share media like photos, videos and music? Or they’ll add more details about a tweeted link? Will you tag your tweets? Share vCards? Create polls? These sorts of innovations will launch shortly and we expect to be surprised and delighted by what the developers come up with.”

Fully-sized metaTweet after the jump:

A ReadWriteWeb article on Facebook’s ambitions of becoming “your one true login” was the top Google search result for “Facebook login” for a while yesterday, possibly because Facebook’s constant redesigns caused it to take a hit with the search engines.

The result? Thousands of people Googling “facebook login” thought that ReadWriteWeb was, in fact, the new Facebook login page, and hundreds left comments using (what else) Facebook Connect.

Here are just a few:

Blocking 4chan is not a good idea, according to old Internet lore — think “kicking a beehive” – but Verizon Wireless appears to be doing just that.

Just weeks after rolling out new boards, 4chan administrator moot reports on 4chan’s status page that “After an hour and a half on the phone, we’ve received confirmation from Verizon’s Network Repair Bureau (NRB) that we are “explicitly blocked.”

Update, 11:10am: In a phone interview, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless says that it’s “nonsense that we blocked [4chan] for any other reason than some unusual activity,” and that the company is working through the situation right now. According to the spokesman, activity that “looked like spam” appeared to be originating from 4chan, and the block was a routine and temporary measure with no intent to specifically target 4chan; he said that Verizon Wireless had temporarily blocked other sites showing odd patterns of activity over the past several weeks.
Update3: Since a lot of people are coming here through Google due to the “moot TED Talk” tag, here’s the (admittedly lo-fi) video of his talk:

Here’s a trend we suppose was inevitable: web-equipped shoes. As mobile technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous and social media continues to Skynet our lives away, it was only a matter of time before our shoes — which, at one point, were a groundbreaking technology because they made it not hurt when we stepped on sharp rocks — became Internet beacons.

After the jump, five shoes that will ensure that you can never, ever escape the Internet, even when you are jogging or walking to the grocery store: