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  • IFTF's Future Now draws on research and forecasting at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA think tank specializing in the future of technology, health, and organizational change. It began in September 2003.

Who is Future Now?

  • IFTF's Future Now is a group weblog, founded by Institute research director Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in September 2003. Its contributors include IFTF researchers interested in emerging technologies, the future of Asia, and the social and economic impacts on new technologies; IFTF corporate affiliates; academic partners; and members of the Innovation Lab, a Danish futures group with offices in Aarhus and Copenhagen. A complete list of contributors is available here.

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January 18, 2008

Carmun - Social Networking for Writing School Papers

The cheeky YouTube video that explains Carmun describes the service as "Wikipedia meets Facebook". But essentially its a social network for people who have to write term papers. There's lots of tools for asking peers questions, managing bibliographies, and some del.icio.us-esque tools for saving online sources.

This is one of a dozen or so micro-startups orbiting the Betaworks incubator in Manhattan. With all the attention focused on MySpace and Facebook, sometimes I feel that these lightweight sub-100,000 user social sites are the real Web 2.0 story. They take weeks to months to launch, are perfectly tailored to their audience, evolve in a sort of perpetual beta, and don't suffer from the "eveything but the kitchen sink" disease the big, broad sites do.

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