BlockChalk is an anonymous message board for your neighborhood. The company’s founders want to enable neighbors to interact with each other while protecting everybody’s privacy. At it’s core, BlockChalk feels a bit like an anonymous, location-based Twitter clone. BlockChalk just released its native iPhone ( iTunes link ) today and also offers an app for the Palm Pre and Pixi. Android users can access the service through a mobile website. Sponsor Anonymity Makes for an Easy Setup Given that BlockChalk is completely anonymous, you don’t have to sign up for the service or jump through any hoops before you can get started. Simply start up the app, allow the service to access your location data and you can see what others around you are saying. BlockChalk works worldwide and has active users in over 90 countries. Features BlockChalk keeps its feature set light and to the point. Besides posting your own messages, you can browse replies to your own posts and respond to messages publicly and in private. On the iPhone, BlockChalk also supports push notifications. By default, BlockChalk doesn’t reveal a user’s exact location. You can, however, force the service to do so by typing [here] in a post. One of the company’s co-founders, Stephen Hood, used to run the product team at del.icio.us and some of the same design aesthetics shows in BlockChalk. The design is simple, to the point and doesn’t get in the way of the product’s features. Anonymity: Good, Bad or Just the Best Way to Get People to Share? While using BlockChalk is a lot of fun, there is also something strange about the anonymity of the service. On the one hand, it will surely encourage those users who would otherwise be afraid to reveal their location to use the service. On the other hand, however, this could easily encourage vandalism. BlockChalk offers a profanity filter and the ability to ‘bury’ posts, but only time – or an attack by 4chan – will tell if this will be enough to discourage disruption. Discuss

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BlockChalk: An Anonymous Message Board for Your Neighborhood

In a blog post from 2006 titled, ” The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy ,” Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki wrote, “you cannot drive your competition crazy unless you understand their strengths and weaknesses.” Kawasaki undoubtedly knows what he’s talking about, and his advice – while almost 4 years old – still rings true today. If you’ve got a great idea for a startup, knowing as much about your potential competitors is invaluable, and the people behind Competitious know this as well as anyone. That’s why they created their handy application for keeping close tabs on the competition. Sponsor Developed by RivalSoft, the makers of RivalMap , Competitious is a free service that allows users to collaborate on numerous projects for tracking industry competitors. You and your team can gather and collect news clips, build feature comparison matrices and keep an eye on traffic trends with Alexa data. The comparison matrix feature is very useful and we here at ReadWriteWeb are even putting this feature to use in researching an upcoming report. However, entering in individual features for each company can become a bit tedious. It would have been nice to see Competitious offer a list of popular companies whose core features could be automatically placed into a matrix. Users would also benefit from suggested competiors for any given company based on what other users are comparing, but perhaps these features are on Competitious’ roadmap for the future. The traffic graphs can only be seen if your competitors are ranked in the top 100,000 on Alexa, which can be a problem for small business with equally small competition. Competitious does claim, however, that they are working on “a much more robust traffic system” for their post-beta release. In the meantime, free site analytics services like Compete and Quantcast can provide data for those hard-to-reach sites. Despite its early flaws, with the ability to easily compare any number of companies in a side-by-side fashion, Competitious is a convenient solution for researching that “competitors” slide in your startup’s pitch presentation. Discuss

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Know Thy Enemy: Competitious Helps You Stay Ahead

Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction. No one expects you to leave your house during the day. You’re allowed to spend the majority of your life in front of a glowing screen, and flipping out over WiFi issues is par for the course. And you’re never far from the Web, since your mobile is always in hand when you have to leave your laptop behind for some incomprehensible reason. But even with such a license in hand, I have to make a case for periodically disconnecting. What do you think? Sponsor More and more, I am trying to set aside unplugged hours and even days for Internet-free, mobile-free, “Luddite time.” Time for asking a stranger for directions, time for talking to the people you’re with rather than the people you “follow,” time for interacting with the world around you in ways that don’t include clicking, scrolling or downloading. Time that’s increasingly being destroyed by smart phones, “super” phones and what ever “super duper” devices are in the pipeline. Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can’t be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web – the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts – to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you’re making more connections between online entities and content, but you’re losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world. I’m not saying that the Internet makes you stupid. I am saying that, if left to run wild across the vast territories of the Web, your mind can turn into a laboratory hamster, frantically pulling levers and running in wheels while his environment remains essentially static and his motivations essentially artificial. Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you’re not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you’ve ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren’t you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so? And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble’s FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn’t trend on Twitter and hit Digg’s front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters. Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I’ve spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we’ve all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices. I personally want to spend many hours in 2010 offline and off my mobile. I want to do things like watch an old movie, go for a walk, have a dinner date or read an honest-to-god newspaper without checking in on Foursquare or posting an “overheard” on Twitter. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m aging. Many of my contemporaries say their sole offline time is sleeping. I’ve certainly lived that way, too, and I spend many days now online for 14-18 hours. But I don’t want every day to be like that. What about you, dear readers? Do you currently plan for and enforce offline hours for yourself, your significant other or your family? If so, how and when do you take your breaks? Or are you a tireless defender of the Internet junkie lifestyle? Most importantly, what do you see as the explicit benefits or detriments of being online around the clock – or of taking periodic furloughs? Let us know your opinions and best practices in the comments. Discuss

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Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

The most important component of a startup is the team. Not only do you need to hire the right people for the job, you also have to hire them at the right time. Polaris Venture Partners’ Mike Hirshland wrote a great post entitled, How to Kill a Startup: Hire Executives instead of Entrepreneurs . After investing in companies like Automattic and

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Are You Hiring the Right People at the Right Time?

Facebook’s getting its own movie , Ashton Kutcher is the social web’s unpaid spokesman and now NBC is launching a show dedicated to mobile apps. What’s the world coming to? Call me old fashioned, but where I come from, a geek is a geek and a mainstream actor with an iPhone is still just a mainstream actor with an iPhone. The Oprahtization of technology is at least a bit demeaning, from my point of view. Sure, this trend brings exposure to our heroic exploits, but it’s often done through stereotypes about geeks and an air of naïveté about how technology really works. What do you think? Am I being a curmudgeon? Is all this mainstream-tech integration really a good thing? Sponsor Granted, we all have to discover technology at some point. None of us were born nerds. But there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that is unique to geeks: a melange of smarts, social pickiness, a willingness to be different, insatiable curiosity, a desire to learn and create new and amazing things, and frequently, a very necessary shell to protect oneself from the rejections of the larger world around us. As a people accustomed to being ostracized for speaking in terms too technical, having a bizarre sense of humor or caring more about bandwidth than baseball, we have generally existed far outside the cool kids’ club. Not to frame my entire argument in a high school analogy, but we have mostly been useful for one thing: Doing other people’s homework. When they – the non-technical of this world – want an application, device, website or feature, we built it and teach them how to use it. This has been the geek’s role for eons: Doing the jocks’ dirty work and then skipping prom. Can you imagine Einstein hobnobbing with Marlene Deitrich? Or a young Steve Jobs on an early ’80s red carpet with a young Harrison Ford? Yet we are seeing more and more crossover between mainstream media and our little world of technology to the point that you can’t tell the tech from the tinsel. Perhaps it’s just disconcerting to see those two worlds meshing for the first time. Perhaps all my angst is simply discomfort. Yet when I see and hear innovators and geeks referred to as ugly, graceless basement-dwellers, even in jest, by mainstream talking heads, it still gets to me. But what gets to me more is the new set of faux geeks – folks who know just enough about tech to send a misspelled Twitter update from their mobiles but who thrive on the attention and revenue they gain from this scene. They wouldn’t know an API from a IP; the red carpet is more likely their natural habitat; yet they incessantly appear in blog posts, pictures and videos until the real geeks don’t even remember how they got there. It happens on a small scale (every tech scene has its skill-free new media douchebag), and it’s starting to happen on a larger scale, as well (why is Olivia Munn a geek, again?). Call me bitter, call me jealous, call me cynical – but let me know what you think, too. Some of our friends on Twitter told us they didn’t like mainstream media’s encroachment onto geek territory, but others who responded to our query see this exposure as a good thing, and we want to hear this point of view, as well. After all, I was excited the first time I heard Twitter mentioned in a news report, too. Give us your opinions in the comments, and don’t hold back! We love a good, long-winded discourse at ReadWriteWeb. Note: Lest you throw stones at the writer for not being geeky enough herself, she was building LANs and playing the first version of King’s Quest when you were still in diapers. Discuss

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Open Thread: Mainstream Media Discovers Geekery, Is This a Good Thing?

OpenID, the open standard for federated user identity across multiple websites, is led by the OpenID Foundation . That organization announced the election of its newest Board members today. These are the people who will be moving and shaking OpenID on a policy and standards level. While systems like Facebook Connect and Twitter Auth are making fast progress in offering website users easy access to their primary identity, social and activity data when visiting sites all around the web – OpenID technology is making progress as well. Here are the three new leaders elected to help advance that agenda. Sponsor The OpenID Foundation has both Community and Corporate members. There is always one more community member than there is corporate members. You can see the as yet un-updated list of all the members here . Below are the three newly elected members. Marc Frons , CTO for New York Times digital operations At LinkedIn (Past gigs include Dow Jones, AOL and SmartMoney.com) On Twitter (Joined April, 2009) On Times People , the NYT link sharing network Daniel Jacobson , Director of Application Development at NPR On LinkedIn . On Twitter . Joined July, 2008, communicates with @nprtechteam , @magicmerl , @acarvin and @khopper . John Bradley , engineer On LiveJournal . Works on OpenID for government . Discuss

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Meet the New OpenID Foundation Board Members

App downloads on the iPhone and iPod Touch saw a huge spike this Christmas , especially on the Touch. I know I downloaded more games this weekend than I’ve ever used in my life, just to entertain kids I was visiting. With all this app downloading going on, though, which apps will prove to have staying power? What can you download today and expect to keep using throughout the next year? Below is my collection of the downloaded apps I used the most in 2009. I’d love to compare lists, so let me know in comments about any hidden gems that you’ve come back to again and again throughout the year. Sponsor RSS readers may be unable to view the embedded display in javascript but can click through to the full article to check out this collection. Those are the apps I kept coming back to all year, what about you? The app sharing widget above is from AppsFire , my favorite way to share single or groups of apps with other people by widget or email, and one of 5 app recommendation services we compared feature-by-feature last month . Discuss

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My Most-Used iPhone Apps of 2009