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This strange app is a touchscreen interface that connects people, places, and things using “clouds” of items and people. It basically makes Venn diagrams of your contacts and allows you to share and explore content and messages.

This looks way too weird for the average user but clearly someone out there may want to move Sven and Nikola to a timeline and figure out which emails came from each person and which emails overlap.

The text input system is actually quite cool, however, because it predicts the words you’re about to type. Pop over to 4 minutes in to see how that system works.

Video after the jump.

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Now that Twitter did away with its monolithic Suggested User List, everyone can fight for followers on a more equal footing. Tweetmeme wants to help you gain followers with a new Follow Button you can place on your blog or Website. It looks very much like Tweetmeme’s ReTweet button, which is on 100,000 sites and registering 7 billion monthly impressions across the web, except it says “Follow” instead of “Retweet.” When you click on the Follow button, a window pops open that lets you sign into Twitter and follow the account tied to the button (usually the person or publication of the site the button is on).

The Follow button comes in different shapes and sizes, shows how many followers you have, and is tied into analytics services such as TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer, and TwitterGrader. The data from the Follow button should also appear in Tweetmeme’s own analytics.

Follow buttons are nothing new, but Tweetmeme has a lot of distribution muscle with its Retweet buttons. The question is, how many buttons are you going to gunk up your site with? Should we add a follow button to every post?

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Earlier today, word spread about some popular music blogs that were recently removed from Blogger. While we make it a policy to not publicly discuss individual users or their accounts, we wanted to clarify a few things about how and when Blogger enforces its Terms of Service as they relate to our DMCA policy.

Last summer, we updated our enforcement of the DMCA. Our current policy is that when we receive a DMCA complaint, we:

• Notify the blogger about the complaint by e-mail and on the Blogger dashboard.
• Reset the offending post to ‘draft’ status, allowing the blogger to remove the offending content.
• Send a copy of the complaint to ChillingEffects.org.

When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorized manner, we will remove the blog.

Inevitably, we occasionally receive DMCA complaints even though the blogger does have the legal right to link to the music in question. Whether this is the result of miscommunication by staff at the record label, or confusion over which MP3s are “official,” it happens. If this happens to you, it is imperative that you file a DMCA counter-claim so we know you have the right to the music in question. Otherwise, if we receive multiple DMCA complaints for your blog, this could very well constitute repeat offenses, compelling us to take action.

Update: Should have linked directly to the instructions for filing a counter-notification.

Update 2/11/10:  We looked into this issue further and identified one case where a blogger did not receive notification of any DMCA complaints before their blog was removed. We’re sorry about this.

We’ve contacted the blog owner and restored their blog, effective immediately, and we fixed the bug that caused the termination without prior notification. We’re also looking into additional preventative protections. We know the DMCA process can be difficult to navigate, and we’re working on ways to make this process as smooth as possible.

View full post on Blogger Buzz