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Web Technology news, reviews and analysis.
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Skype Turns Five
30 08 2008

While it can sometimes seem like Skype has been around forever, today only marks the 5th anniversary of the popular VOIP client. When it was first released, Skype marked a huge improvement in voice quality over any other VOIP client at the time. Just a few days after its release, Skype already had close to 10,000 users online at any time. Since then, the company has added plugins, video calls, voicemail, Skype to phone calls, and many other features. Most importantly, though, Skype has changed how we communicate with each other and allowed us to run small, virtual companies. The early days of Skype were quite exciting thanks to the novelty of the technology (and sometimes fraught with problems), but a good part of the reason for the original hype and success was that Skype's founders were also behind the notorious P2P file sharing application Kazaa, from which Skype inherited its P2P architecture.

Today, many a virtual business can only run thanks to Skype's ability to bypass the expensive phone networks. Here at RWW, we use Skype extensively throughout the day, and while other products like Gizmo might offer a similar feature set, nobody else ever got the market penetration that Skype got thanks to its early start.

EBay

But besides all the technical innovation, Skype's biggest news day came in September 2005, when it was acquired by eBay for a staggering $2.6 billion dollars. It doesn't seem as if anybody ever really understood why eBay decided to buy Skype and go ahead with this deal - or why they ever offered this much money in the first place. eBay never integrated Skype into the rest of its business and it was never quite clear how they would do that anyway, besides giving potential buyers an option to connect with sellers through it. In recent months, rumors have flared up repeatedly that eBay was trying to sell off Skype.

Skype 4

The user interface of Skype 4, which is publicly available, but still in beta, is a radical departure from the previous versions and hasn't exactly received many accolades for its new design yet. Skype is trying to put more emphasis on 'conversations,' but in doing so, the company has abandoned the typical horizontal IM layout for one large window with your contacts list and conversations all in one. This tends to take up a lot of space, though you can pop out chat or call windows. Overall, we are not big fans of the direction Skype is going in with this new version, but given that it is still in beta, hopefully some of the UI weirdnesses will have been addressed by the time it launches. In order to focus its business more, Skype also just announced that it will disable Skypecasts, Skype's ability to broadcast to a large group of listeners, effective September 1st. For the next five years, Skype's Josh Silverman says that he wants to see Skype move towards 'liquid communication,' where neither device nor place matters.

Statistics: Online Music Apps
30 08 2008

To complement the poll we ran this week about streaming music sites, we sourced data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. comScore's data shows that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. In contrast, our poll - the second annual time that we've run it - shows that last.fm and Pandora are the favorites of our readers. Is this a case of geek trends being at odds with mainstream? Or is it that the mainstream hasn't yet caught onto the cool music sites? Let's check out and analyze the stats from both comScore and our poll.... Here are the full stats that comScore provided us, for the year July 07 - July 08:

	Unique Visitors (000)
	Jul-07	Jul-08	% Change
Total Internet : Total Audience	180,078	189,134	5
Radio	47,392	61,458	30
AOL Music	15,284	23,884	56
Yahoo! Music	23,075	18,725	-19
Clear Channel Online	10,697	9,394	-12
PANDORA.COM	2,551	4,834	89
Interactive One	512	3,515	587
CBS Radio	3,469	3,240	-7
NPR.ORG	1,717	2,538	48
Citadel Broadcasting Corporation	1,373	1,885	37
BATANGA.COM	1,239	1,810	46
Disney Music	1,721	1,598	-7
Cumulus Media Inc.	N/A	1,058	N/A
Emmis Communications Corporation	1,269	1,044	-18
Entercom Communications Corporation	786	789	0
ONTHERADIO.NET	704	622	-12
LIVE365.COM	963	582	-40
MediaSpan Group Inc.	1,428	482	-66
RADIOTIME.COM	147	446	203
AMERICANPUBLICMEDIA.ORG	303	386	27
1CLUB.FM	205	384	88
Spanish Broadcasting System, Inc.	236	352	49

Note that last.fm isn't categorized as 'Internet Radio' by comScore and as far as we know, it isn't part of CBS Radio listed above. We asked CBS (which owns last.fm) to send us the comScore data they have on last.fm, and here it is for the same period:

Notable Trends

AOL Music, with 23.9 million unique visitors in July 08, is the strongest. It recorded a 56% increase over the past year, so its growth is very good. Yahoo Music is second with 18.7M uniques in July 08, however it has decreased 19% annually since July 07. Clear Channel Online, the largest operator of radio stations (amongst other things) in the US, is a clear third with 9.4M audience in July 08. As for the online streaming sites that began as startups, despite its continuing legal woes and the fact it can't be heard throughout much of the rest of the world, Pandora's US growth has been very impressive: an 89% increase from last year, to 4.8M unique visitors in July. Its competitor last.fm had just over 3M unique visitors in July 08, and 62% annual growth. We also checked Compete and their stats are fairly similar, in terms of the trends, to comScore's. Compete has Pandora at 81.8% annual growth, with last.fm at 72.6%:

So the overall trend here is that both Pandora and last.fm are showing strong growth. But AOL Music continues to set the pace. Yahoo Music must be worried about its decline.

ReadWriteWeb Poll: last.fm and Pandora Still Most Popular

Our poll asked: what are your favorite online music streaming services? We ran almost the same poll last year. The results have shown that there is more diversity this year in the number of online music services that our readers tune into. While Last.fm and Pandora once again came out a clear first and second (respectively), other apps made a strong showing. Last.fm got 19% and Pandora 15%. Last year last.fm was at 31% and Pandora 29%, although last year's poll wasn't multi-choice. Of the smaller services, Highnote, lala.com, Seeqpod all polled at the 8-9% range this year. Non-radio services such as Imeem and iTunes Music Service drew around 4-5%, while small but trendy services Hype Machine and Muxtape both came in at 4%. So last.fm and Pandora are still favorites among the early adopter and tech-savvy people that read our site. But it's great to see so much interest in the many new online music startups (some of whom we didn't manage to fit into our poll, it must be said). As a matter of interest, here are some Compete stats for a few of the well performing smaller sites in our poll:

Hype Machine is perhaps the one to watch here, with 177% growth annually and on an upward trend. It grew 10.2% last month alone.

Conclusion

So AOL and Yahoo still dominate music streaming in the US, but last.fm and Pandora are beloved by many of our readers, and are growing fast in comScore too. We asked our panelists in our podcast show this week (link below) which sites they think will be popular this time next year. We'd like to ask the same question here. Do you see any dark horses amongst the smaller services, that may even show up in next year's comScore charts? See also: Future of Online Music - Industry Players Discuss. This presents highlights from our podcast show earlier this week, in which senior representatives from Yahoo Music, Imeem and Rhapsody discussed online music trends.

10 Android Apps We Will Actually Use
30 08 2008

Yesterday, Google announced the winners of the Android Developer Challenge I, a contest that awarded cash prizes to the most innovative and promising applications designed for the upcoming mobile OS, Android. The ten top teams received $275,000 and 10 other teams received $100,000. The ADC Gallery lists all the winners as well as the finalists. Although Google has already named their winners, we decided to browse through the gallery to find the apps that we're most excited to use. Some of the apps, like for example, cab4me, may have been declared a winner, but we know not everyone lives in a major metropolitan area where hailing a taxi is a part of everyday life. Instead, we picked out some apps that have more universal appeal. They are as follows: The App That Backs Up Our Contacts: PhoneBook 2.0

An app that backs up your contacts for you to a remote server can give you piece of mind in case your phone is ever lost or stolen. However, the app isn't just a backup tool. PhoneBook 2.0 combines mobile social networking with your address book to let you share your mood, location, and photos with your friends.

The App That Keeps Us From Getting Lost: BreadCrumbz

Sure, sure, the phone has Google Maps, but BreadCrumbz is even better. Instead of getting directions, you get picture-based routes so you know to turn at that huge oak tree or the building with the blue awning. Your friends can make routes for you and record them with the camera and GPS.

The App(s) That Save Us Money: CompareEverywhere and GoCart

There are not one, but two, apps that basically do the same thing: compare prices and save us money. Using the camera, you can "scan" the barcode of an item by snapping a picture. The app will then comparison shop for you. You can read online reviews and even create price alerts if the price drops. CompareEverywhere also lets you use the GPS to find nearby stores and then call them directly.

The App That Lets Us Store Files in the Cloud: Teradesk e-Storage

This one wasn't a grand prize winner, but looks like a handy app to have around. With Teradesk, you can store files in the cloud with file transfers that allow for pause control, resume, and full recovery of broken transfers. You can share files with friends via Bluetooth and MMS and the app even integrates with Google Docs.

The App That Keeps Us Informed: Life360

There were several of these "alerting" apps, but only one that won the grand prize. Life360 is an app that sends you messages from your family and local community. You can be alerted to a danger in the community (rabid dog on the loose!), but you can also just receive messages from family, too (mom's running late today). This is a personalized alert system that displays only the messages you need to hear.

The App That Lets Us IM And Blog: Maverick

No Google phone would be complete without an app that lets us use GoogleTalk to IM our friends. Maverick lets you exchange messages, location, and multimedia content in the form of audio clips, photos and scribbles (drawings created on the mobile phone) with other Maverick clients, Gtalk users, or iChat users. You can also use the app to publish content to Blogger.

The App(s) For Social Music: TuneWiki or Diggin

Another case of having two great apps - this time, for music. TuneWiki won the grand prize with their social music maps that displays audio, video, and lyrics. You can also use the GPS to see what other people are playing nearby in real-time. Although only a finalist, Diggin looks interesting, too. This app lets you listen to thousands of streaming radio stations and downloads the album art for what you're listening to automatically.

The App That Lets Us Whiteboard With Colleagues: ShareYourBoard

Did your co-worker miss the meeting? Now you can get them up to speed with ShareYourBoard. Designed specifically to capture and enhance whiteboard images with edge detection, geometry transformations and image enhancement, ShareYourBoard takes great pics in any angle, any lighting, and with any type of whiteboard or markers used.

The App That Tells Our Phone How To Behave: Locale

Maybe you shouldn't have those rockin' ringtones turned on at the office...and perhaps that wallpaper is a bit inappropriate, too. Instead of having to adjust your profiles yourself, you can use an app that knows how to do so automatically. Using Android's built-in GPS, Locale will let you set up "Situations" (like At Work, At Home, In a Meeting, etc) which you can have automatically triggered by setting conditions like location (via the GPS), time, or other conditions which you add. The app can then adjust your ringtone, wallpaper, and other settings automatically.

The App That Scans Our Eyeball and Saves Our Passwords: BioWallet

Honestly we wouldn't care what this app did, but it happens to be a "safe wallet" that stores sensitive information (passwords, certificates, documents, conversations, notes, pictures, etc.). The info can only be accessed through iris or handwritten signature based authentication. Oh come on! It does retina scanning! We didn't get an Android phone to play space monkey games, now did we? This one delivers pure geek cred.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk Used for Fraudulent Activities
30 08 2008

Amazon's Mechanical Turk has fallen prey to social media spammers and it is now full of requests to spam bookmarking services for pennies per link. Although these HITs may stop short of being "fraud" in the legal sense of the word, they are certainly dishonest and unsavory. In addition to these spam bookmarking requests, we're also seeing HITs for Diggs, Stumbles, Slashdots, etc. of spammers' web pages and web sites. In case you're unfamiliar, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourced marketplace for tasks. A person needing work done can set up a HIT (human intelligence task) - the small job they need done. Others come along to perform the HITs, earning micro payments along the way. In this way, businesses, developers, and other individuals have access to an affordable, scalable workforce

The Dark Side to Mechanical Turk

Unfortunately, it appears that the convenience of the Turk marketplace has some appeal to social media spammers, who are now using the site to earn Diggs, bookmarks, and other social recommendations they do not deserve. Here's an example:

Photo courtesy of Brynn Evans Anyone who uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk has no doubt come across similar HITs posted by spammers. For example, this guy is requesting someone create 29 social bookmark accounts from 29 sites:

A search for "bookmark" on MT today displays 48 results (at the time of writing) where spammers are requesting social bookmarking of their web site. Search for "digg" and you'll find people paying for Diggs. Of course, whenever there is a system in place (like social media) that can help drive traffic to a web site, there will be those people who use it to generate traffic for their spam sites. But why are they able to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to do so? Shouldn't Amazon police the Turk to shut down these spam accounts?

Mechanical Turk Still Has Promise, Despite Spammers

However, this doesn't mean that Mechanical Turk doesn't hold any value - it's still an innovative and useful tool for many. In fact, members of the HCI community (Human Computer Interaction) have begun to use Turk for user research studies with great success. This work has inspired others like open source advocate, Chris Messina, to do the same. He plans to use Turk for usability studies on OpenID and OAuth. Since the HITs are spread out among many, the cost of performing these studies is greatly reduced. Being able to crowdsource research is a great way that MT can be used today, and one that will have a big impact on the future, too. Thanks to Brynn Evans, a graduate student in the Department of Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego for discovering this and thanks to open source advocate Chris Messina for sending it along to us.

Comcast Wants to Cap Downloads: Puts a Damper on Innovation
30 08 2008

Today, Comcast announced that it will amend its Acceptable Use Policy and add a clause to it that will establish a "monthly data use threshold" of 250 GB per month. This effectively puts a cap on the amount a Comcast user can download per month and codifies an informal policy Comcast was already enforcing. While 250GB is a large amount of data right now, it won't be once a large number users start watching HD streams which can easily take up numerous GB per hours.

That's a Lot of Data

Comcast's announcement tries to put this limit into context. According to Comcast, 250GB amount to:

50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
uploading 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

It's interesting that, judging from this, Comcast seems to add up uploads (photos) and downloads to get to these 250GB, making it an even smaller number - especially for those who upload large numbers of photos or videos, and, of course, for those who share a lot of files on Bittorrent. In Comcast's defense, the cap is agnostic to what service you use to burn up those gigabytes.

But Not if You Are a Power User

Comcast also cites that the median monthly usage be customer is 2-3GB a month. While some commentators have thought that this number is too low, we don't think it really is. For most broadband customers, broadband is simply always-on Internet. They don't necessarily make use of al the services available to them. The problem here, however, is that the more advanced users also tend to use an exponentially larger amount of data. A standard movie might clock in at 2GB, but an HD movie can take easily take up more than 10GB.

It's All About Video

Also, these kind of limits are bound to stifle innovation in the streaming video business - and not even necessarily because people will start running out of bandwidth, but because there will always be a little voice that will keep nagging Comcast's users that they might be hitting the data cap if they download that movie. We have to admit, though, that 250GB are a pretty high cap and, as Larry Dignan points out, it sure beats having metered Internet access. However, looking into the future, 250GB might be nothing once more people start using more data-intensive applications. Will it be the end of the Internet as we know it, especially once other ISPs start announcing similar caps? Probably not - but it might just put a damper on the Internet we had envisioned for the future. Flickr image courtesy of dmuth

How to Rock Flickr Like a Champ
30 08 2008

Yahoo's wildly popular photo sharing site Flickr is a lot of fun to use, but it really helps to take some time and learn how to use it well. We've recently engaged more seriously with Flickr and wanted to share some quick tips that we think will help you get more out of it, too. Some people want to know how to do marketing on Flickr or use Flickr in nonprofit organizations, but in this post we're going to talk about ways you can enjoy the Flickr more for any purpose.

Set Up Publishing By Phone

The single biggest factor in changing our relationship with Flickr has been taking the time to set up publishing for photos taken by mobile phone. It's really quite easy. Just go to the email tab in your Flickr account and make note of the unique email address for you to post. Then pick up your phone, create a new contact named Flickr and enter that email for the contact. Now take a photo and send it by MMS (Multimedia Message Service) to your buddy Flickr. Like magic, that photo will be published to your Flickr account. The subject line of the email will be the title, any text in the body will be a description. Knock yourself out, it's super fun. I don't know why it took us so long to figure out how this works, but we're betting that many of you haven't yet either.

Turn on Creative Commons Licensing

It's easy to turn the default setting for new photos uploaded to Creative Commons Attribution (our favorite) by visiting the Privacy & Permissions tab in your account. Unfortunately there's not clear, working links from Flickr to an explanation of the different licenses. Here they are on the Creative Commons site. CC Attribution is a license that says other people can use it and change it, including in a commercial context, as long as they give you attribution as the creator. It greases the wheels for quick and easy media sharing. That's good and it would be nice if more quality media was licensed this way. We keep a link to the Creative Commons by Attribution search on Flickr in our browser toolbar and use it frequently for photos in posts. Those could be your photos we and others are using!

Video about the theory of Creative Commons

Take Even Better Photos

Attendees of the Gnomedex conference this year (which was a huge home run, by the way) were treated to an opening session with photographer Kris Krug about how to take better photos. That session isn't available yet in video, but Krug is a fun guy to pay attention to. Other popular photography bloggers worth checking out for inspiration and occasional instruction include Thomas Hawk (see his January post Top 10 Hacks on Flickr), Scott Beale (one of our 10 favorite sources for finding wonderful things), Epic Edits (see their post Five Fantastic Flickr Photographers), Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir and Jeremy Cowart. We're sure readers here can share some more good ones. Those folks are all fancy pants, though, and many of us just want to have fun posting photos from our phones. Check out this handy 5 minute video from VideoJug about how to take better mobile phone photos. Thanks go to Amit Agarwal again for posting this one last year. We're excited to try out some of these tips.

Share Screen Shots

Another way we've been using Flickr lately has been to share screen shots of interesting things we find online. Some of us here at RWW use Jing for this, others use the beautiful Mac app Skitch. People like interesting screen shots and these apps make it really easy to shoot them up to your Flickr account with just a click. The reigning king of this practice right now is Chris Messina, but you don't have to be a super-early adopter to make screen shots on Flickr useful. Skitch makes annotation easy as well and sharing annotated screen shots is a great way to explain things to people.

Video demonstration of Skitch.com.

Turn on Your Grease Monkey

We use a number of Grease Monkey scripts that enhance the Flickr experience. If you aren't familiar with Grease Monkey, you must learn about it because it's great. See our recent post How to Start Using GreaseMonkey in Under 5 Minutes. Specifically, we use:

FlickrPM puts links to viewing and profile options in all the right places, where they aren't right now on Flickr.

GreasedLightbox sets up real quick little image slide shows from almost any page. It can also be a pain to use when you're on Flickr, to tell the truth. It works better on Ffffound, which is another great site if you like imagery.

AutoPagerize lets you zip through page after page of Flickr photos with no clicking or page load delays.

What are your favorite GreaseMonkey scripts for Flickr?

Use a Bulk Uploader

Grabbing a whole bunch of photos from your computer and putting them on Flickr is easier than you might think. We think Flickr's own bulk uploader is fun to use. Thomas Hawk prefers JUploadr.

GeoTag Your Photos

Did you know you can open a drop-down menu in the Flickr search box and search by location? You can also go directly to http://flickr.com/map and search by location. Flickr, all of Yahoo really, does a great job understanding location data - but you've got to play to win, you know? Many people (ourselves, for example) have never found geotagging on Flickr very easy to do. Enter this awesome bookmarklet from startup Loc.alize.us. It makes geotagging your photos super easy, if not downright fun. You can increase your discoverability, participate in the geotagging scene and feel smarter by grabbing that bookmarklet, renaming it in your browser toolbar and then going to town. Which town? You'll be surprised by the sophistication of Flickr's comprehension of location information.

Follow the Flickr Blog To Keep Up to Date

Flickr has a really active community and thriving forums, but subscribing to the company blog is a good idea to stay up to date with new features. If you don't want to read all the entries there, and some of them are more important than others, then consider subscribing to just the highly discussed posts from the company.

Have Fun Off-site

It's not just on Flickr itself that you can have fun with your posted photos. Last week Flickr released a handy slide show tool for embedding slide shows of your or any photos on a blog or social network. There are lots of great ways to visualize Flickr photos by tag, but Tag Galaxy will probably knock your socks off if you haven't seen it before. Turning on Flickr sharing in FriendFeed is a great way to bring more of your friends into the photo part of your life. You can hook up with the RWW staff's personal FriendFeed accounts here if you'd like to see our photos and other activities.

Dave Winer's FlickrFan is a screen saver slide show of Flickr photos from you, your friends and some important international news agencies. It can be a little tricky to set up but it's a lot of fun to use. If you're coocoo for cocoa puffs over these kinds of tools in general, check out this long, long list of Flickr tools from QuickOnlineTips.com.

How do You Like to Use Flickr?

These are some of our favorite tips for using Flickr but we're sure many of our readers can suggest even more. Flickr is a canonical service in the Web 2.0 world. It's really worth spending some more time with. With less time than it took you to read this whole article, we think you can set up some systems that will make Flickr a much more enjoyable part of your life.

Sweetcron: Your Lifestream on Your Server
30 08 2008

We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. Today, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don't necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

Installation

Sweetcron is a self-hosted service, so you will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL running on it. After downloading the code, the install is pretty typical for that of self-hosted application. It's a bit more complicated than installing Wordpress or OpenTape, because you have to enter your data in numerous places and you have to edit your .htaccess when you want to install Sweetcron in a sub-directory.However, if you just follow the steps in the documentation, you should be able to install Sweetcron in less than 10 minutes. After this, you just start adding your RSS feeds, and you are ready to go.

Final Result

The lifestream itself looks and works just like you would expect it, with a number of little surprises. One of the nicest features of Sweetcron is that it can format every new entry according to where it came from. A digg item, for example, gets a blue background, a Flickr items shows the photo on a green background with the caption underneath, and Twitter posts show in a blue box with your avatar in the top left corner (as long as you uploaded your avatar into the right spot in Sweetcron's directory structure). By default, Sweetcron updates your stream every 30 minutes, but you can also set the cron service on your server to update more frequently. You can write your own posts in Sweetcron as well, but the editor doesn't handle anything else but pure text and HTML code.

Bring Your Own Services

As of now, Sweetcron only creates your lifestream - if you want to add comments, Sweetcron recommends you install Disqus, and if you want to have a contact form on your site, it recommends you head over to wufoo to create one. The two default themes are nice, especially the "Boxy but Good" one you can see in the screenshots here. Over time, others will surely start developing more themes and hacking the existing themes doesn't seem too hard.

Verdict

Sweetcron does exactly what it promises to do. It is important to note, though, that this is not a Friendfeed-in-a-box type service. Your lifestream stands completely separate from every other Sweetcron service (though you could create a master feed for a group by patching all the RSS feeds together and running them through another Sweetcron installation). For those who just want to have a lifestream on their blog, for example, Sweetcron is a great solution, especially if you don't mind hacking Sweetcron to fit your own needs. There are, of course, various other self-hosted applications that have a similar feature set (see Mark Krysnky's list here), and many of them come as Wordpress plugins, making their installation very easy. Few, though, give you the flexibility of Sweetcron.

Online Dating: SpeedDate.com Raises $6 Million
30 08 2008

If you think regular online dating is still too slow and inconvenient, SpeedDate.com might just be the thing for you. The San Mateo based online dating service just raised $6 million in a Series B round from Menlo Ventures after raising a Series A round for the same amount in January 2007. SpeedDate.com sets itself apart from its competitors by allowing its users to quickly set up short webcam conversations. According to SpeedDate.com, it hosts over 100,000 online speed dates a day. Part of this growth is surely due to the fact that SpeedDate.com is also a very popular application on MySpace, Beebo, and Facebook (though it was banned there for a while in July). Because of this, it is hard to track exactly how popular the site is, but according to Google Trends for Websites, the site is indeed growing at a rapid clip and a lot of its growth seems to come from outside of the United States.

While the press release doesn't go into any detail, it seems safe to assume that the company needed a new infusion of money to sustain its rapid growth. While a lot of its competitors are for-pay, SpeedDate has adopted a free model, though it is considering the addition of a premium as well. Online dating is a competitive field, where large entities like Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo Personals seem to dominate, but at the same time, other sites like Randomate, WooMe, or OmniDate have been able to carve out a niche for themselves by putting different twists on the online dating model. SpeedDate.com, though, with its instant webcam conversations, looks like it stands a good chance to continue growing in this competitive field.

SpeedDate company profile provided by TradeVibes

Jaiku Returns With Unlimited Invites
28 08 2008

When Google acquired the microblogging service Jaiku in October of last year, many people had high hopes for Jaiku's future. Would a Google-flavored Twitter soon show up everywhere from iGoogle to the upcoming Android handset, we wondered? Instead, news from the company slowed to a trickle and the doors stayed locked to newcomers - signs that many took to mean Google had essentially abandoned the service. But today, things are happening at Jaiku once again - most notably, unlimited invites are now available. Is Jaiku poised to make a comeback? At the time of the acquisition by Google, Jaiku was a promising competitor to Twitter. This was before presidential debates were taking place via tweets or the Mars Phoenix Lander was announcing the discovery of ice on Mars. In fact, in many ways, Jaiku was thought to be the superior service, considering its features like threaded conversations, easy group creation, and RSS import. But once Google got its hands on the service, a whole lot of nothing seemed to happen. Now, we're tentatively raising our hopes once again. As VentureBeat reports, Jaiku is back after several days spent offline in a move to Google's datacenters as they continue their move to Google's App Engine service, the Google answer to Amazon's web services stack. In addition, there is now a brand-new TOS that existing users must accept upon login, which brings the original up to Google standards, presumably. However, what's most exciting is that users now have unlimited invites to share with their friends, a step we hope is just the first of many in Jaiku's rebirth. Yet, as exciting as a Google Twitter-like service is, so much time has passed that Twitter has the market share and mindshare of those that want to participate in a micro-blogging community. Jaiku has a long battle ahead if they truly want to compete now.

"Facebook Helped Me Win," Claims Politician
28 08 2008

In Tampa, Florida, one of the cities that comprises the megalopolis known as the Tampa Bay area, home to Busch Gardens, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and only minutes from beautiful beaches on the Gulf Coast of Florida (oh, and this author's stomping grounds, too), a local politician is giving credit to Facebook for his recent win in the primaries for the local County Commission. On Facebook, the crowd is still very young, with an average age of 22.96 as of this February. Typically, the youth vote, although coveted, could not be counted on thanks to low turnout of young voters at the polls. However, this small time local election may prove to be one of the first examples of the huge impact Gen Y can have on the political process. Now that many members of Gen Y are of voting age, their sheer numbers can no longer be ignored by politicians. The biggest generation since the baby boomers, Gen Y has been poorly characterized by some as lazy, unfocused, and self-centered - a generation that would just as soon stay home with mom and dad than go out and climb the corporate ladder. While it may be true that Gen Y has the good financial sense to maximize their time in rent-free accommodations, they are certainly proving themselves the opposite of lazy when it comes to involvement, be it social involvement, community involvement, or political involvement. Considering this recent "Facebook-powered" win, it could be that this generation is all talk and all action, too. According to Rearden Killion Communications, the St. Petersburg advertising firm that handled the campaign of Kevin Beckner in the District Six democratic primary for the Hillsborough County Commission, the Facebook effort comprised of content, video production, and media buying valued at around $7000. There was also a Facebook app which let supporters put a campaign button on their own pages and provided a link to Beckner's page. The overall effort increased Beckner's Facebook group membership by 50 percent. In this local election of this County Commissioner, you have to wonder if this is a hint of things to come in the upcoming presidential election here in the U.S. The Obama campaign has defined themselves by the way they have embraced technology. From blogs to social networks to even SMS text messages announcing the VP, the campaign is "a revolutionary shift in our country's political media ecology," says Andrew Rasiej over on techPresident. Although it has yet to be seen whether or not the use of technology will propel Obama into the Oval Office, the results of this local election prove that there is merit to targeting the online crowd and asking for their vote. (Image credit: Zappowbang)

Google Moves to Mainstream RSS With A Simple Name Change
28 08 2008

For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction. What can be done to make RSS more mainstream? Google plans to roll out a small but simple feature that could go a long way. We wouldn't be surprised to see every blog publishing service follow suit. "Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they'll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company's RSS reader. It's a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

What it Will Look Like

As this new feature is rolled out over the coming weeks, it appears that users will be brought to three key screens. Blogger users will now see a mini version of Google Reader in their dashboards.

Apologies for the blurry pic, that's what Google posted. Google Reader users will get a new folder for "blogs I'm following," and new users will apparently be shown Common Craft's fabulous 1 minute introduction to Google Reader.

Why It Matters

RSS is life and work changing technology. It's what makes an ecosystem of blogs possible by lowering the investment required by readers to follow and support a larger number of blogs than they would visit manually. It's what keeps those podcasts coming after you might have forgotten to download episode after episode. It makes search an ongoing practice instead of a one-off shot in the dark. RSS is huge, but the name alone intimidates many people who ought to be diving into it. Surveys over the years have offered a wide range of estimates of the extent of mainstream RSS adoption. We know, though, that many many people do not ever use the technology. "Follow" is clear language that we expect to go over well. It aims at the long held goal of getting people to use RSS without asking them to embrace the acronym. Update: Several people have argued since we posted this that "follow" will be far more clear to young users of social media sites like Facebook than to older users. Do you think "follow" is still too unclear? We think it's pretty good, but let us know in comments or the poll on the right. We expect that Blogger.com blogs will see a big increase in subscribers following this change and we would not be at all surprised if other blogging platforms, Wordpress in particular, roll out "follow" language and links soon if the Google move is well received.

Speed Up RSS? FriendFeed's Going to Try
28 08 2008

RSS is the backbone for most things Web 2.0 but these days, it's not always fast enough. Politeness limits ping times to every 15 minutes at best in most cases, string a couple of applications together and information will sometimes not arrive where you're waiting for it for up to an hour. A number of people are trying to speed up the feeds but today sees the first public mention of a new effort lead by the guys at popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed. FriendFeed is working on an open source add-on to RSS and Atom that will make it easier to discover when a feed has been updated. This could be a big deal.

What it Is

The FriendFeed crew is working on something called a Simple Update Protocol. It was first reported on by venture publication The Deal and subsequently by Venture Beat, leading us to believe the PR push is an effort to for the company to raise some more money. In response to our questions, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit told us the following:

RWW: How will it work? Buchheit: SUP is just a very simple extension to RSS and Atom that makes it easier to discover when a feed has been updated.

RWW: Where is this relative to XMPP? Buchheit: It's unrelated to XMPP.

RWW: Gnip? (See our coverage of Gnip, a startup that appears to be aiming to do what SUP will do and more.) Buchheit: We're talking with several companies about supporting SUP, but aren't ready to announce anything.

RWW: Open source? Buchheit: Yes, absolutely Open Source.

Not a whole lot of information is available about SUP, but we hope the above helps. We're real excited to see what FriendFeed has under its hat. The company has done more interesting things with popular use of RSS than anyone else has in awhile. The Simple Update Protocol is due to be released next month. We look forward to checking it out. Soggy feeds put a damper on our day far too often. Update: FriendFeed has posted details about this on their blog. Interested in FriendFeed? Take a tour of the RWW writers' activities on the site here. See also our months-old podcast interview with the founders of FriendFeed, still one of the best sources of in depth information available about this important service.

The Case for an Apple iNetwork: Welcome to the Social
28 08 2008

There has been a lot of speculation recently about an impending update to iTunes. Version 8.0, among other things, is supposed to finally bring a recommendation engine to the digital media player application. While that's interesting from a music discovery perspective, it is even more interesting to consider what this could mean in terms of an iTunes iPhone based social networking experience. iTunes (launched 2001) and the iTunes music store (launched 2003) have come a long way since they were first launched. The application has gone through various iterations, gaining significant features such as podcasts (2005), videos (2007), games, and applications (2008) along the way. In the process, selling billions of songs, millions of movies, and over 10 million applications in the first week of the app store's launch. Needless to say Apple has built an experience that with all it's parts combined is unparalleled in both its features and the breadth of its catalog of content.

The Software Side

While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other... because they can't. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0. He says, '... the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it's gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.' In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven't bought/listened to. If you're a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you're probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn't come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn't introduced 2-3 years ago). While this feature itself isn't social and can be implemented entirely on the back end, the implementation required for that functionality is so close to a networked experience (monitoring of habits and correlation across users) that they might as well take a small next step and add a visible social layer with which those users can interact. In fact, if you look at the results from a 2006 iTunes survey, you will see the people want to be able to see what people with similar interests and tastes (i.e. friends) are purchasing and consuming, so they can experiment with and pick from the same selection. More specifically, consumers want:

The ability to view a friend's wish list, with permission.
The ability to view what a friend is currently listening to, with permission.
The ability to view a friend's playlist, with permission.
The ability to view a friend's recent purchases, with permission.
The ability to view a friend's favorite artists, with permission

What's also interesting about this approach is that it reaches the exact opposite conclusions of EMR's UK social networking study [PDF]. The study implies that social networks will be the content distribution channels of tomorrow, but the relationship may actually work better in the other direction. With the addition of networking and recommendation features to iTunes, the application could become the most efficient, most engaging, stickiest (always-on), and most profitable social network almost overnight. But Apple's social networking potential doesn't end there. Remember Microsoft's 'welcome to the social' campaign that centered around the launch of its Zune digital media player? If you don't, you're not alone. The goal behind the campaign, 'to create a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers and will inspire discovery of new music and artists,' was actually a formidable one. Unfortunately an inferior device, coupled with disasterous software integration made the campaign a $100 million failure. Enter Apple.

The Hardware Side

With a formidable install base, great hardware and one of the most versatile mobile operating systems around, the iPhone is ready to herald in the future of mobile social networking. Furthermore, with 3G/EDGE/WiFi/GPS capabilities, the iPhone is a great tool for both networking as well as wirelessly sharing digital media like the Zune promised (but failed miserably at). Not only does the device work seamlessly with the iTunes software, but Apple's DRM is more consistent and perhaps more forgiving that Microsoft's (which was partly responsible for crippling the Zune's ambitions).

The Cloud

With a firm grasp on the software side with iTunes and on the hardware side with the iPhone, Apple is in good shape. Their killer app, however, could end up being the cloud. Apple already operates MobileMe (previously .Mac) which faciliates the management of contacts, calendars (events), email, photos, and any other files or digital media. Admittedly the service has been an utter failure since launch, but Apple has acknowledge the failure and is on the path to fix its shortcomings. The previously discussed iTunes social networking and collaborative filtering (recommendations) system, coupled with the iPhone's versatile wireless communication and media sharing capabilities, topped off with media and information management (and sharing) in the cloud, the combo is no doubt ready to be our digital life (and relationship) manager. The only limitation of the network, however, (and it will be a deal breaker for many) is that unlike every other social network today, the experience will come at a steep cost. Knowing Apple though, I have no doubt it will be an experience worth the cost (especially considering what they had to deal with at the MobileMe launch). This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

Zeep Mobile: Free SMS Gateway For Developers
28 08 2008

While SMS has already become one of the most important forms of communication in many parts of the world, the U.S. is only catching up to this trend slowly. Part of the reason for this is the high cost of using SMS, not just for users, but also for developers who want to use SMS for their applications. In contrast to other SMS service providers, Zeep Mobile offers developers a free SMS API without volume restrictions, though in order to monetize the service, it will insert ads into the SMS messages.

Advertising

While having random ads inserted into their messages might not work for some developers, having access to a free SMS gateway is a very seductive proposition, especially for small developers who don't have the resources to either establish relationships with the big mobile carriers, or who simply don't have the money to pay a commercial provider for access to their SMS gateway. We asked Zeep Mobile if it had any plans to share revenue from these SMS ads with developers or if it was going to give developers any influence over which ads it would display. However, as of now, Zeep Mobile is not planning anything in this direction, though it would seem reasonable to assume that they might start sharing revenue with developers at some point in the future.

API

Besides the standard web API, Zeep Mobile has also developed Python and Ruby libraries, which developers can use free of charge. As far as we can see, this API is pretty straightforward and well documented.

Still in Beta

It is important to note, though, that the service is still in beta right now and that developers are limited to sending out messages to no more than 10 recipients at a time. Also, while Zeep Mobile has plans to expand beyond the U.S. in the future, the service can only send messages within the U.S. for now and is also limited to a select number of carriers. Overall, though, this seems like a service worth looking into for developers who wants to start adding some SMS functionality to their applications without having to pay some of Zeep Mobile's competitors like SMS Everywhere, Clickatell, or Celltrust.

Everything You Thought You Knew About the Business of YouTube Was Wrong
28 08 2008

Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you've made that argument in conversation before (and we now many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you'd be wrong. The official Google Blog made a post this morning following up on a New York Times story last week where the company claimed that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own when they find it using YouTube's new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.

Argument: Content ID is Next to Impossible

Many have argued that YouTube wasn't capable of finding all the pirated content uploaded to its site - that it's been an arms race pitting human monitors and shoddy ID technology against a sea of users uploading content. Video maverick Mark Cuban has argued that YouTube's claim it can't identify content was refuted by the fact that it manages to keep porn off the site and thus that the company couldn't plead ignorance about copyright either. Right: We don't know if there's some direct financial overlap between Katy Perry's publishers and the ringtone site advertising on this video of hers, but at 600K views we're pretty sure the video's rights holders have seen it and chosen to let it remain on the site. Is that "what good girls do?" Now it appears that YouTube's newest content ID technology is doing quite a good job of finding copyrighted content. That alone is a game changer.

Argument: Media Companies Don't Want Low Quality Versions of Their Content on 3rd Party Sites

It's also been argued that many media companies are unwilling to have their content appear online in any form other than high quality files on their own webistes. That way they can maximize ad revenue and protect their brands. YouTube's claim that 90% of content owners who find their work on YouTube are running ads on the site instead of demanding it be removed indicates a sea change in big copyright holder attitudes. Scarcity is no longer a tenable strategy in a world of digital content and file quality is clearly not as important to consumers as many content producers believed it would be. Imagine what the web would be like if music producers took a similar strategy with mp3 files on other sites. Those same parties are undoubtedly among the participants in YouTube's new program, using the ID technology to find songs being used along with user created video. Unfortunately, the music industry may be too greedy to support this same kind of model throughout a whole ecosystem of websites. Witness the plight of Pandora, a wildly popular service that's trying to play by the rules.

Argument: YouTube Wouldn't Be What it Is Without Pirated Content

One of the most commonly made critiques of YouTube is that it was only able to ramp up fast because it caught copyright holders by surprise; that it was born of illigitimate uploads of pirated TV shows and movie clips. The latest turn of events leads us to wonder whether this question was turned around the wrong way. Couldn't we just as well assert that YouTube was lucky to survive before a time when copyright holders understood that they had options with content that they owned rights to on the site? Had copyright holders come down hard and fast in the earliest days, as they did in later months surrounding the Google acquisition, then YouTube wouldn't still be pushing the envelope and opening new doors for distribution and monetization today. There's a world of possibilities beyond even what's being done today by the most open minded copyright owners. The Times article mentions Electronic Arts, for example, who encourages users to upload Spore related content and then uses YouTube's ID technology to find it and highlight the best stuff. Any number of other campaigns have tried to get people to use a common tag in their metadata or upload through a dedicated portal powered by the YouTube API. YouTube is a chaotic place, though - companies may get the greatest connection with their fans by letting those fans upload how they like and using YouTube's ID tech to find them afterword.

This is Big

This isn't just about copyright and advertising, this is about a new paradigm that big copyright holders may be catching up with. From video to user data, it's not about scarcity and silos anymore. It's about keeping your users and fans through better service and compelling value-ads. Let's hope this YouTube experience is more than just a flash in the pan and that the industry is genuinely moving in this direction.

Back to School: 10 Great Web Apps for College Students
28 08 2008

For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students. But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Taking Notes

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. If you are in a lecture, for example, you can also take a picture of the blackboard with your phone, upload it to the Evernote server, and thanks to Evernote's clever OCR algorithms, even pictures of handwritten notes become instantly searchable. You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. Best of all, you can use a web app, a Windows or Mac desktop app, or a Windows Mobile and iPhone app, all of which seamlessly synch with each other, so that your notes are always up to date.

2) Google Notebook

The Google Notebook is one of Google's lesser know products, but, thanks to a very well designed Firefox extension, it's a great tool for when you do most of your work in a browser already. If you do some of your research in Google Books and Google Scholar, you can also easily clip excerpts from books and articles into your Google Notebook. One additional nice feature is that you can invite collaborators to work on a notebook with you. If you are doing a resea