Piwik: Open Source Google Analytics Alternative
From Read/WriteWeb, popular since 2 months
Google Analytics may be free, but it is still based on proprietary technology - which means you only ever get reports on the things that Google thinks are necessary and some of those reports are aimed at people using Google's other services (managing campaigns on AdWords, for example). Further, using Google Analytics means that you're tied to Google's TOS. Enter Piwik, which aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It is closely affiliated with OpenX, the open source ad server alternative to Google Ad Manager .While OpenX has been around a while and has good traction, Piwik is fairly new and under the radar. It surfaced [...]Go to site
While Twitter might be going through a rather rough time right now, a lot of developers are still banking on its success. There are already a lot of desktop clients available for Twitter, but besides some cosmetic differences, most of them look and act very much the same. TweetDeck, which was released today, takes a refreshingly different approach by not only integrating support for search through Summize, but also by adding groups and by displaying more than one column at a time.FeaturesTweetDeck is an AIR application and was first discovered by Louis Gray. The major difference between TweetDeck and other Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, Twitteriffic, and AlertThingy, is that it displays more than one column of information at a time. In TweetDeck, you can define columns for your replies, numerous searches in Summize, as well as groups. You can define up to 10 different columns.The developers seem keenly aware of Twitter's problems and provide you with a status message at the bottom right of the client. We have seen it alternate between "Pretty much okay" and "Rate limit exceeded'" today. There is also an indication for when the last tweets were received in the bottom left corner of the application.ColumnsThe column display can be rearranged according to taste - only the "All Tweets" column is fixed on the left side. Having all these columns open at the same time obviously means that TweetDeck occupies a lot more screen estate than other Twitter clients - however, the amount of information displayed is far greater as well. For some, this is a trade-off worth making, while it might be a deal-breaker for others.
GroupsThe groups function is very useful, especially for people who follow a lot of people, but still want to be able to quickly see what their closest friends (or competitors) are saying. Usually, these messages are easily drowned out in the mass of tweets that come in at any given time.Once a group is created, you can make changes to it by clicking on its name.Right now, when you create a group, TweetDeck doesn't display a list of all your friends right away. As TweetDeck becomes aware of more of your friends over time, this problem disappears as TweetDeck's internal database picks up on your friends, but this might be quite confusing and frustrating for first time users. PreferencesOne area where TweetDeck could use some more work is in its preferences - right now, there pretty much are none. You can't change the speed by which it checks for new tweets, there are no themes to chose from (why, by the way, do all AIR apps have to be so dark?), and there is no way to change the size of the fonts.VerdictTweetDeck is probably not for everyone, but especially with Twitter's track function still being offline for now, the ability to have a persistent Summize search right in the client is a great feature just by itself. Once the group function works a little bit better, I would venture to guess that a lot more people will start using it. But even in its current state, it is definitely worth a closer look. 
For users of the Windows Mobile platform, visiting Facebook while on the go meant loading up the mobile web page in their device's browser. Meanwhile, Blackberry users have had their own downloadable app since late 2007. But now, as of today, there is at long last a downloadable application just for Windows Mobile users, FriendMobilizer.Today Macrospecs, Inc. has launched FriendMobilizer, a new software application for Windows Mobile phones which gives you full access to your Facebook accounts. Unlike other Windows Mobile Facebook apps like Snap2Face, which only provides for photo uploads, FriendMobilizer gives Windows Mobile users an app that's comporable to the Blackberry version.With FriendMobilizer, you can view your friend's info, write on their walls, browse photo albums, approve friend requests, view group and event invites, read your new wall posts and messages, update your status, and more. 
The application is currently available for both Windows Mobile devices and Pocket PCs and is a free download from the web site www.faceofmobile.com. However, according to the company, the generic software platform developed for FriendMobilizer will soon be ported to other mobile OS's as well. In addition, the company plans to build mobile apps for other social networks in the future. 
What can the plan be with Microsoft's purchase of hot startup Powerset? The 3-year old company, founded by Dr Barney Pell, recently launched a semantic search experience for Wikipedia.It is doubtful that Microsoft bought the company just to enhance Live Search. Possibly the plan is to replicate the Wikipedia solution, then incorporate Powerset into Internet Explorer. In this post we look at what the thinking behind the acquisition might be.Most initial reviews found the Powerset product release underwhelming. Critics appreciated the innovative semantic UI and recognized its potential, but believed it didn't vastly improve Wikipedia. So in view of the lukewarm reviews, the acquisition by Microsoft was unexpected. The 100M price tag is around 5x the 12M Series A + 8M investment put into the company. Microsoft execs must believe Powerset can be a weapon in its battle with Google.What Powerset is todayGiven a set of unstructured information, Powerset applies Natural Language Processing techniques to extract concepts and the key semantic concepts out of the text. It then builds a semantic index (similar to Google's) as well as a conceptual graph of relationships between entities. This graph is typically expressed in RDF triples.
One of the Powerset innovations is surfacing of semantics to the user interface. The contextual gadget is overlaid to help navigate the unstructured information.Many thought Powerset to be a generic semantic search engine, but its first product is limited to Wikipedia. It is not trivial to scale the technology to the entire web.Why Powerset is PowerfulWhen the semantic technologies emerged a few years ago, people started talking about how semantic web and/or semantic search might be a Google killer. The talk was supported by logic that semantic search can deliver more relevant results because it "knows" the content.Industry realizes that isn't the case. Semantic search has no huge advantage over the statistical approach used by Google. We discussed this in the post Semantic Search - Myth and Reality.What is powerful about Powerset? Precisely that it doesn't try to search the web as a whole. Right now, the solution works on Wikipedia, but the infrastructure is generic, so any other site could also be enhanced. The contextual outline developed can be used to navigate any content.Instead of dealing with the whole web, the idea may be firstly to build solutions for specific sites.Head-on with Google?
Powerset as it is today is no Google killer. At this point only something with huge traction and momentum would stand a chance.In the search market, Google has a strong hold - potentially stronger if the Yahoo deal goes through. People are conditioned to Google: it's simple and, yes, imperfect, but it's good enough and the results are still better than Live Search.If Microsoft bought Powerset with the goal to incorporate it into Live Search, then it's likely to be another acquisition to make little impact on the bottom line. In fact, the announcement on the Live Search blog states just that. The number one reason is acquiring talent; the second is the belief that NLP and semantic algorithms will be able to patch holes in today's search.Today Powerset brings only interesting technology; it doesn't bring traction. So what were they thinking up in Redmond? There may be more subtle play, leveraging the fact Powerset works well on knowledge sets like Wikipedia.
Possibly Microsoft plans to deploy Powerset across its own sites, then perhaps incorporate Powerset into Internet Explorer.Imagine going to Wikipedia and having a semantic overlay on each page. Now imagine scaling this experience across major information sources around the web. Providing contextual, semantic experience allows Microsoft to retain eyes longer, shaving off the time people spend searching Google.This is an important point because Google doesn't make money on search - it makes money on advertising.Can Microsoft ever beat Google in Advertising?
The real problem Microsoft is seeking to solve is advertising. Until now the web has figured out two fundamentals for advertising - portals and search.Portals show ads on each page; the more people browse the content, the more ads are shown and the more money is made. The search model emerged as an alternative, now more successful, path to advertising dollars.With Powerset and other semantic technologies, there's another model: contextual information exploration overlaid on existing content.If Microsoft can figure how to keep eyes off Google's home page, the game will shift dramatically. The browser is one of Microsoft's most powerful tools - and the default box is Live Search.If Microsoft wants to win over advertisers, it might just do more with the browser. Incorporating aspects of Powerset's semantic navigator into the browser by default could be a game changer. This is not a straightforward play. A large company with bureaucracy and execution problems is unlikely to be able to merge semantics into the browser quickly and elegantly.ConclusionThe Powerset acquisition is an interesting move by Microsoft. This hot semantic startup was on everyone's radar.What can the plan be? It is doubtful that Microsoft bought the company just to enhance Live Search. Possibly the plan is to replicate the Wikipedia solution, then incorporate Powerset into Internet Explorer.That is a bold play requiring exact execution - not the kind Redmond has shown lately.What do you think Microsoft is going to do with Powerset? What are the other applications of this technology that you can think of? 
Posterous is such a simple microblogging platform, it almost makes Tumblr look overly complicated. The Y Combinator funded startup is a bit of a mix between a blogging and lifestreaming service, with a little dose of Twitter thrown in for good measure. To start using it, users only have to send an email to post AT posterous.com and, within a few minutes, posterous will respond with the address for the new blog.Posterous was founded in May of this year with about $15000 in seed capital, but it has already attracted a fair amount of users and has been adding new features at a steady clip. Posterous is currently free and plans to start selling premium features in the future.SetupPosterous' setup process takes minimalism to the extreme - you don't even have to register. Instead, after sending your first email to post AT posterous.com, you will receive an email with your new blog's address. Those addresses, however, don't always look too pretty (think chris-hr12.posterous.com). While this is not necessary, it's probably best to actually create a login at posterous and register an email address with them. Thankfully, once you register your email address and chose your own URL, all your posts will be transferred over to your new one automatically. Registration is dead simple as well - just enter your email address and a password.
Posting to Posterous When posting to posterous from the site itself, you are presented with a rich text editor, not unlike the editor in Tumblr or Wordpress. The best way to post to posterous, though, is through email, especially because the web interface can't handle uploads (yet?), while email attachments are handled quite beautifully. Posterous accepts pdf, doc, ppt, jpg, gif, png, and mp3 files. If you send an mp3 file, posterous will create a flash player for it in the post. If you send more than one photo, posterous will automatically create a gallery for you (see screenshot). This works especially well when sending pictures right out of a photo application like Google's Picasa. Documents are displayed through Scribd's flash interface. Posterous can also handle most HTML tags and when sending a YouTube URL, it immediately embeds the video in the post.Networking Still Needs Some WorkPosterous has some social networking functions, with user profiles and the ability to follow other users. There is nothing revolutionary here. However, it isn't possible to search for users, making the ability to follow quite a bit less useful. Posterous will recommend you some users to subscribe to, but without the ability to search for your friends or even just for keywords, this part of the application clearly needs a bit more work.
SecurityThe email interface, while posterous' strongest point in terms of usability, is also its weakest point in terms of security. Email addresses are easily spoofed. While posterous claims that they are able to filter out messages not send by you and will notify you if they suspect a security breach, there is probably a good chance that a nefarious user could send potentially incriminating posts to your blog.VerdictSecurity issues aside, posterous is a very cool new service. The ease of posting to it is going to make it very attractive to even novice users. While most blogging platforms always allowed for posting by email either directly or through a third-party service, few bloggers ever made much use of it, as the email addresses were always cryptic and the process often simply didn't work.Posterous would also work very well for those who want to send quick updates from their mobile devices. There is, after all, no need to install any apps - simply send an email and be done.While the microblogging/lifestreaming field is quite crowded, with Pownce, Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku, and too many others to name, posterous might just be different and simple enough to set itself apart from the rest. 
Open source blogging platform WordPress may have won most peoples' hearts as the best blogging platform in town, but that doesn't mean its core developers are resting on their laurels. The company made two statements last night about moves its users are sure to love. WordPress announced last night on the company blog that WordPress.com users have a new blogging option called "Turbo," which uses Google Gears to speed up the service's admin functionality. Just an hour earlier, WP founder Matt Mullenweg indicated that users should look for OAuth support in future versions of the software.GearsThe new WP.com Turbo feature uses Google Gears to download more than 200 files to users' local computers so they can be run without accessing the web. Though many of the most high-profile Gears implementations elsewhere are focused on providing off-line functionality, it's not clear whether that's the case here or if Gears is just being used to speed up blogging. Either way, this is good news. With the new feature, WordPress.com effectively offers what is called a Rich Internet Application (RIA), combining local actions on the desktop with the connectivity of the web. RIAs are already shaping up to be a powerful part of the web. Local storage and user interaction with at least some data fleshes out the possibilities offered by the celebrated migration towards web applications.This is probably only the beginning for WP support of Gears. We wonder whether the WP developer community will build extensions that leverage WP support of Gears, perhaps even incorporating Gears support for mobile devices. Oh, the possibilities are a thrill to consider. The draft version of WordPress.org, scheduled to be released in final form within the next two weeks, already includes support for Gears as well.OAuthOAuth is a user authentication protocol that is quickly becoming a standard. It's all about making mashups fast, easy, secure and thus more common. When Google rolled out OAuth support for all its data APIs earlier this week, we said it was only a matter of time until almost every one else did so as well. WP's Matt Mullenweg told Chris Messina, a leader in the OAuth community, that he wants to see OAuth support in WP but wouldn't be able to include it in the next version. Can we expect to see it in the next version then? We certainly hope so.What might OAuth support in WordPress look like? There are a number of directions it could go. By supporting inbound OAuth authentication, WordPress could do things like allow you to post to your blog through 3rd party applications without giving them your password. It could also allow blog commenters to associate their accounts on other OAuth supporting services with their WP comments, again without giving up their passwords.There are probably far more possibilities than we can imagine, but that's what makes WordPress so exciting. There's a huge world of plug-in developers that extend the service in ways that none of us could imagine. With OAuth support those developers would be able to leverage a whole new class of options based on secure user data. That means WP blogs could tie in programmatically with any of your Google accounts, your Photobucket account or any other service that supports OAuth in one direction or the other. That's exciting to imagine and it sounds like it should be coming soon.We're excited to see that WordPress isn't just relying on its developer community to keep it fresh and hip with the times. These new core developments will serve as a foundation for those developers to improve even further on the WordPress user experience. 
Human history is one of progressive improvement in communication. From the 20th century mail was a fundamental form of communication. The invention of electronic mail (email) changed two things. It became cheap to send short mail, and delivery was instant. Email became favored for both corporate and personal communication.But email faces increasing competition. Chat, text messages, Twitter, social networks and even lifestreaming tools are chipping away at email usage. In this post we take a look at what's happening and assess if email is in danger. The Twitter Problem
Twitter was invented because there was a gap in public broadcast communication. Doing Twitter over email would be clunky, if not impossible. The ability to post your personal statuses, decoupled from the ability to subscribe to people you're interested in, put Twitter on the map. People are sending direct messages via Twitter instead of sending an email.Email is perceived as work, while Twitter is still thought of as fun. Twitter messages are short, use is casual, and Twitter is a cute piece of technology loved by the earlier adopter crowd. People send Tweets complaining their Inbox is full.The Twitter experience is lighter because of the user interface. With Twitter, we're presented with a scrollable list of messages.With email we need to select the message and drill into it. Traditionally email clients show only the subject line, so even if the message is short, the user needs to click. And all these clicks add up.The Outlook Problem
Email is a workhorse. Microsoft realised that business people want one tool to do it all, so email was enhanced with calendar, to do lists and other features.The problem: all this was slammed on top of email, which became the entry point into a black hole known as My Inbox. Short and long messages, business and personal emails, tasks, events - all stacked on top of each other.Outlook is a powerful piece of software that lets you organise and sort, but you have to drive it. For many, email is hard work and a mess that needs to be dealt with.Simpler email clients, like Gmail, focus on how to be a better email client instead of being a hammer for all problems. An innovation like aggregating conversations has huge impact on productivity.In the years Microsoft was adding more buttons to the toolbar, they should have invested more on the core innovation around email and productivity. Wiring in NLP and semantics to extract things like People, Events and Places would be a good start. Designing emails around use cases like "this is a meeting, this is a project, this is a friend" would go a long way towards helping avoid the Inbox clutter.Breaking Down EmailSince email was the first killer app for the web, it's used for everything. We're now observing a fragmentation cycle where we're discovering better ways of passing around information and getting things done.Email is fundamentally great at substantial person-to-person communication. The following diagram illustrates why email is facing competition. It cannot effectively support broadcast (except for spam) and it's still poor at helping with tasks and projects.
Tools like Basecamp and Highrise from 37Signals are showing there's a way to better project management and CRM while leveraging information in emails. If the Twitter service stabilises it's likely to win over people permanently because of its simplicity and playfulness.Social networks incorporate direct messaging and chats, making it easy for people to talk directly, bypassing email. These communications are easier than email; they're integrated into the flow and more accessible. To be fair, they're aimed for brief messages.The increasing speed of our lives and global connectivity reduces the need for lengthy emails. If we're in touch more often, then we reveal less every time we talk. Shorter, more frequent exchanges are replacing the lengthier communication of the past.Corporate Safe Heaven?
Even if consumers shift away from email, it is difficult to see how enterprises could. Microsoft has done a wonderful job winning that market and ensuring companies would not function without an Exchange server. A typical proprietary bloatware, Exchange and Outlook handle it all. It doesn't seem feasible for companies to shift away from email anytime soon.Likely we will see two trends. Google will continue to champion its solution, which, if successful, will bring much needed simplicity to email.The second trend is simpler project management tools to reduce the functions needing to be done with email. The challenge is that they need to be seamlessly integrated with the email, ideally leveraging its content and automatically generating tasks, events, contacts, etc.ConclusionEmail has been the blockbuster and the Internet killer app for the past few decades, but it doesn't have a monopoly. New more contextual ways to communicate are emerging and slicing pieces of the email pie, particularly in the consumer market.We're likely to see a consumer shift from email towards more compact forms of communication, but in the enterprise the email hold is strong and unlikely to be replaced any time soon.What do you think about the future of email? How have your communication patterns been evolving? What communication tools do you prefer to email? 
A new study from the University of Illinois confirms what many of us may have suspected privately: "personalized" marketing communication online can often make us actively dislike the message's sender. "People bristle at personalization just for the sake of personalization," said Tiffany Barnett White, the professor who headed the research. Barnett White found that relevance was one important factor in increasing recipient interest, but ultimately it was the actual value being offered that made the lion's share of the difference in peoples' reaction. At a time when information overload is often being responded to by varying degrees of personalization, we believe this study is worthy of consideration.The University of Illinois study focused on emails sent to college students that were personalized based on information that the students voluntarily submitted. "Even when someone has volunteered their personal information, they still have preferences about how firms use it. They don't want to be bombarded with a mountain of facts about themselves unless they perceive a very good benefit," White said.What This MeansWe would argue that this behavior is probably common in online communication in general. If your service is personalizing its messages to users for anything but a very good reason, it's probably a bad idea. Flickr's "welcome " in various languages around the world is cool - but other forms of fake personalization are not. Now we've got the numbers to prove it.We've written here about how we want to get RSS feeds from PR agencies, not just emails - but the pseudo personalized emails are pretty obnoxious. The most obnoxious are emails personalized with our competitors' names! (This happens at least once a week.) We also receive any number of other emails from online training services, conferences and others that include some personal information. Especially when this personalization tricks us into opening the email, then we really get angry at whoever sent us that email.We are interested to know whether you, , feel the same way - or if you are someone who uses this kind of personalization in your online communication and have seen different results.Image from Beth Kanter 
Ping, ping, ping! That's the sound made day and night by the new social media technologies rapidly proliferating around the web... and the machines are getting tired. Polling for updates to user data streams, wishing they spoke the same language and dreaming they knew which accounts belonged to the same people across different services.Sounds like a great opportunity for an infrastructure provider, doesn't it? Enter the sexiest infrastructure provider we've seen in a long time: Gnip. Venture funded and built by exited MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier, Gnip wants to serve as the grand central station and universal translation service for the new social web.What Gnip Does NowThe primary service that Gnip offers at launch today is to capture user data updates from any web application and then serve up the very latest information to anyone else who requests it. Your application doesn't have to ping Flickr, YouTube, etc. etc. every few minutes and ask "have any of our users done anything on your individual service?" Now with Gnip, Flickr (a launch partner in fact) can report user data updates to Gnip, which can then pass that data along to consuming parties, along with data from all the other social media services of interest.It's about scalability and decreasing latency to near zero. It sounds like a great idea.What Gnip Says it Will Do Within 90 DaysThe sexiest features are still in the works. Here are just a few plans that the company has disclosed so far.Protocal switching You want to communicate instantly with an application using the IM protocol XMPP/Jabber but it only publishes and consumes RSS feeds? Gnip will stand in the middle and translate so each end of the transaction can send and recieve data in the format it wants. Hot!Standardized metadata Different services publish user data with different titles for the various fields sometimes. That makes it hard for the robots to know what exactly is being said. Gnip is working with visionary developer Chris Messina to create a meta data standardization process, for social bookmarking activities in particular. Gnip will consume feeds from user bookmarks on any service, then make publicly available those same feeds appended with another version of the same data but in a standardized format. That's a really big deal because it makes interoperability possible.Identity discovery Right now it's hard for services and for users to tie multiple social media accounts together from around the web. Gnip will let users provide usernames or emails and then check to see where else those identifiers are being used. That's a solid sounding idea.All of this will be free, none of it will be public-facing. Application developers will tie into Gnip and there may be premium services available eventually, like translation of data into a particular vendor's proprietary template.Is This Too Centralized?Gnip's Eric Marcoullier acknowledges that the centralization here is worth questioning. Two primary concerns come up: scalability and privacy.As far as scalability is concerned, that's the name of the game here. If Gnip can't scale with fantastic uptime then there's no service. The company has been working with Pivotal Labs, the strike force hired to fix Twitter, since Gnip started work.When we asked Marcoullier about privacy, he emphasized that Gnip is only working with publicly available data right now. The company might venture into user authentication and private data, but that's "a whole other can of worms," he said.No doubt Google is already indexing most of the information that Gnip will be transmitting, but we can't help but think that Gnip will be in a uniquely powerful position to do some mining of anonymized user data and social graphs. That could lead to very big money but it could also raise some concerns on the parts of users. Gnip says they aren't worried about monetization right now, they just want to build out their service and add value to the market place. That may be the case, but we think that Gnip has a whole lot of potential to deliver huge value to the applications leveraging it, to the backers financing it and ultimately to all the users of the emerging class of social web applications. We love this kind of stuff. 
For years the big problem with Flash-based websites is that they could not be properly indexed by search engines. Flash websites have been favored by marketers and advertisers for a long time, because of the ability to create rich, interactive Web experiences. However for most other businesses, particularly those with a lot of information on their website (let's face it, that's everyone except marketers and advertisers), Flash has been nearly an automatic 'no' for website development. That may be about to change.Adobe announced today that it is teaming up with major search engines - notably Google and Yahoo - to "dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs)." In a press statement, Adobe said that it is "providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines." Adobe claims that it will provide more relevant search results and rankings for RIA content. In a separate blog post, Google announced that it has launched a "Flash indexing algorithm", which will result in better search results.Adobe admitted in its statement that up till now RIAs have been "generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states". In other words, up till now Flash has been mostly invisible to search engines. So this news today will truly be welcomed by web developers and designers. It may even get the approval of ornery old anti-web 2.0 guru Jakob Nielsen!There's much to admire about Adobe's web technology initiatives over the past year or so. Recent highlights include Adobe AIR (allowing developers to take web applications to the desktop and store data offline), a host of excellent third party AIR apps, an online Office Suite and new Flash-enabled Acrobat 9, a Flash API for Google Maps, publishing the Flash File Format Specs, releasing Flash 10 Beta. And now making Flash searchable.A little while ago I would've said that browser-based web apps had a big user experience advantage over Rich Internet Apps. But now that they've achieved an (almost) holy grail in searchable Flash, that gap has lessened some more. 
Recently I had the great pleasure to hear the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, give the keynote at the Tetherless World Conference organized by Rensellaer Polytechnique Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY (see RWW's live blogging of the event). He is such an entertaining and thought-provoking speaker that it is hard to isolate one nugget, but after a few weeks I am still thinking about one comment he made about start-up entrepreneurs conducting social science experiments.This was in the context of Rensellaer launching the Tetherless World Research Constellation, described by them as follows:"The World Wide Web changed the ways people work, play, communicate, collaborate, and educate. But without new research aimed at understanding the current, evolving and potential Web, we may miss or delay opportunities for new and revolutionary capabilities.To model the Web, to understand the architectural principles that have provided for its growth, and to ensure it supports the basic social values of trustworthiness, personal control over information, and respect for social boundaries, then we must pursue a research agenda that targets the Web and its use as a primary focus of attention."Rensselaer's Tetherless World Constellation addresses this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and its future use.Faculty in the constellation explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and develop new technologies and languages to expand the capabilities of the Web.We use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information-centric views. We aim to make the next generation Web natural to use while responsive to a growing variety of policy and social needs."The point is that we study Computer Science but the Web is a lot more than the application of Computer Science. It is the social dimension that makes it interesting and nobody has been systematically studying that. For scientists this is marvelous unexplored territory. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, being a scientist, looks at all the wild, apparently chaotic Web 2.0 innovation in the same way a scientist looks at experiments. In that context, entrepreneurs run experiments by launching something onto the Web. If it "catches fire", the investors clamor to get on board and people make a lot of money. If it fails in the market, people lose money. But to a scientist, both results are equally useful, providing additional data points from which theories can be deduced.
It is personally exciting for me to have Rensellaer take such a leadership position in this emerging science as they are close to where I live in what has historically been the "sleepy government town of Albany". All the tech action was either south to New York City or east to Boston. There have been attempts for some time to create a Tech Valley high tech zone in the area. But this new drive by Rensellaer will make a difference. Rensellaer have brought in some real academic leaders to drive this initiative, including Jim Hendler and Deborah McGuiness:Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science. He is a Fellow of both the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the British Computer Society.He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded the US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002. He is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. Deborah McGuinness is of the creators of the Web language that is ushering in the next generation of the World Wide Web -- the OWL Web Ontology Language -- Deborah McGuinness is widely known in her field.McGuinness comes to Rensselaer from Stanford University where she last led the Knowledge Systems Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.McGuinness has published more than 100 papers on knowledge-based systems, ontology environments, configuration, search technology and intelligent applications and holds five patents. Prior to joining Stanford, McGuiness worked for Bell Laboratories (later AT&T) were she co-developed a predecessor language to today's ontology Web language.She is CEO and president of her own consulting firm and is on the board of the Semantic Web Science Foundation as well as a number of startup companies. She is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.Rensellaer is clearly staking a position in the elite technology world usually reserved for Stanford and MIT. This will create some new technology. I caught an early glimpse of some of the web technology coming out of the Rensellaer labs and it looked very exciting. I intend to go back to there and report on that in a future post.Combine this with a good quality of life and lower cost of living (compared to say New York City or Silicon Valley) and you get a fertile environment for start-ups. 
The launch of the 3G iPhone is a little over a week away. With all the promotion that Apple and AT&T are getting, other carriers and mobile handset developers have been releasing touchscreen phones like crazy. From Blackberry to LG, there are tons of touchscreen handsets that will hit the market this year in order to take ground from the iPhone. However, they're missing something very important. It's not about the touchscreen guys, it's mainly about the mobile apps.The Biggest Selling Point of the iPhoneThe iPhone has a ton of selling points. It sports an user interface that goes beyond anything ever seen on the Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Palm OS'. The performance is fast! The interface is intuitive and it sports an iPod. How many people have phones with music playback capabilities, yet don't transfer any songs to play on their phone? I'm one of those users and if you're one too, you know you'd use the iPod that's integrated with the iPhone with no hesitation. All in all, the iPhone is sleek, beautiful, and performs adequately. The biggest selling point though, is not necessarily the Safari browser, but the applications that have been developed to take advantage of Safari's functionality on the iPhone.Why the Apps Make A BIG DifferenceTouchscreen phones are being snapped up left and right. More than enough are already available including the LG Voyager (Verizon), Samsung Instinct (Sprint), HTC Touch (Verizon, Sprint), LG Vu (AT&T), and Samsung Glyde (Verizon). While this is great for those who may want to go against the rising tide of the iPhone, these phones will not break the iPhone's stronghold. Why? Their browsers suck!The biggest reason most people would like an iPhone is because of the Safari browser. However, it's not just the browser. It's the mobile applications that are accessible via the browser. Have you seen the user interfaces for mobile apps made for the iPhone? The functionality is splendid. The design is flawless just like the iPhone. Execution these applications is in strict accordance with Apple-like standards. There are tons of mobile applications already available that don't require you to download them. And after the WWDC, there are tons more on the way.Reaching For Something BetterWhile it's nice to see more touchscreens on the market and phones that pick up where the iPhone natively slacks, meaning you don't need to "jailbreak" them just to do something, they just don't compare to what's available for the iPhone. Sure there are more Windows Mobile applications floating around than iPhone apps, but take a look at the design and execution difference. When it comes to mobile apps, it doesn't get any better than what the iPhone has at this point. However, I hope that mobile handset makers and carriers are striving for something better to break what is surely a monopoly that the iPhone will eventually hold on the mobile web. 
I used to be annoyed by people who commented on my Twitter messages (tweets) in FriendFeed, rather than replying directly to me in Twitter (the platform I was using). However with the introductions of 'Rooms', FriendFeed is no longer a lifestream aggregator anymore - it is the perfect platform for sharing and discussing content with groups focused on a specific topic.Up till that moment of conversion, my problem with Friendfeed was that it fragmented conversations. Socialthing! on the other hand, is similar to FriendFeed in aggregating lifestreams, but when you reply to someone using Socialthing!, you're not replying within Socialthing!, rather your reply goes back to the original platform.On May 22nd FriendFeed announced a new feature - rooms.The concept isn't new. Forums and Google Groups are supposed to serve the same purpose. FriendFeed's implementation, however, is simple and easy to use, and robust at the same time. And overnight, my opinion of FriendFeed changed completely, largely because the function of FriendFeed changed for me. And I'm not alone, there has been a huge influx of new users, as well as increased activity from old users, just because of Rooms. I still ignore people's comments on my general lifestream, but I have created a social media room and everything I share there, along with everything the 800+ other members share there is up for debate and conversation.FriendFeed is not a lifestream aggregator anymore (at least to me and hundreds of others), it is the perfect platform for sharing and discussing content with groups focused on a specific topic. It is Forums 2.0, if you will and it is precisely what the social web, even with gods like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, and Flickr, are severely lacking. FriendFeed solves problems by scaling conversations between large groups of people and allowing people to control those conversations. You can automatically seed rooms with content using feeds, the community can share and re-share content, and you can search specific topics you're interested in. You can also assign multiple administrators to moderate the conversation and remove spam (sound familiar?)This experience from hating FriendFeed to evangelizing FriendFeed was an interesting one because it shows the power that a single feature has to push your product over the edge and into the mainstream (or at least much larger acceptance). As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his books, The Tipping Point, little changes sometimes have big effects. It seems that FriendFeed made the right little change. They didn't stop there either.Two weeks after announcing rooms, they added personalized recommendations. This new feature allows you to log into your FriendFeed network and sort everything that anyone from your circle of friends has shared in order of popularity over a day, week, or month. Some people have argued that this feature will decrease the incentive to hunt for hidden gems and people will migrate to conversations made popular by other users. The reality is that every social or collaborative community will have a core membership that shares and comments, and then have a passive community that just sorts by popularity and consumes. This new system just rewards the people who share good content by making it more accessible and makes it easier for passive users to find this good content and if they wish, participate in the conversation with just one clickWhat the past 3 months have shown is that FriendFeed is evolving. This is a good thing because it differentiates it from other services that do virtually everything FriendFeed did at its core. It is also a good thing because the service has morphed into something truly useful and the community is responding appropriately. The new features have almost made FriendFeed a better Digg. One that doesn't judge content by vote popularity, but on the basis of conversation and actual sharing of the content. Finally, it shows that it's not the sheer number of features and tools you have (i.e. Digg with all its useless visualization tools), rather it is what nuanced changes you make and the small features you add that enhance the user experience - and FriendFeed seems to understand that nuance very well.EDITOR'S NOTE: Earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb integrated FriendFeed comments into our own RWW comments. So you can now comment on one of our posts in FriendFeed and it will show up here on RWW! But wait, there's more... you can also push your RWW comments into FriendFeed. So this is a two-way process. (Richard) 
Signal Patterns, makers of scientific-based social web apps, have just released a Facebook app whose goal is to help you find new friends based on an in-depth personality assessment algorithm. This app matches people based on their unique personality traits - not just "rough" personality types. If that sounds a lot like some dating web sites you've heard of...well, you're right. Signal Patters is essentially offering eHarmony for Facebook except instead of love connections, they hope to offer you a better way to find friends. The question is, is that something we need? To be fair, the Signal Patterns app isn't just a way to find new friends - you can compare the results of their personality matching tools to your friends as well. However, if you do compare the results with other users of the app who are not your friends, when the app emerges from beta, you'll be able to "friend" those people from within the app.Your Signal Patterns Results:
But Isn't Facebook Is For "Real" Connections?
While it's true that a certain segment of the online population loves quizzes, the question still remains - are you interested in finding new friends like this? 
YouTube's huge lead in market share over other online video sites continues to get bigger, even as the over all video viewing market continues a decline. According to traffic analysts Hitwise, YouTube now sees 75.43% of traffic to the online video category; that's up 26% from it's May 2007 marketshare of 59.95%. The nearest competitor is still MySpaceTV, which was down a whopping 44% to 9% marketshare. (Full chart of top 5 sites below.)In April we reported that YouTube's dominance in online video was bigger than Google's dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us. QuestionsHitwise reports that overall video viewership in May of this year fell 9% compared to May of last year, but times on site grew 6%. That's strange. We've asked whether the rapidly growing Hulu is included in this batch of numbers and will update this post when we get a reply. (Update: Hitwise says that Hulu is now the 13th most watched video site and is seeing consistent growth each month.) Could it be that last year saw a large number of people checking out online video for the first time, only a certain percentage of them found that they liked it but those people are now watching more than before? If readers have any theories why the video market is declining in absolute number of viewers, we'd love to hear them.YouTube's huge dominance over a market that includes a wide variety of different video sites, each with different communities and feature sets, probably does not bode very well for innovation in the sector. We'd love to see more people checking out innovative services like Metacafe, Blip.tv and others. We wrote about the top video content producers in the world yesterday, many of which are bigger in places other than YouTube. Smaller up and comers outside of YouTube deserve some attention, too.
Two popular inbox plugins have been updated recently: Xobni and Xoopit. Earlier this year, we covered the launch of Xobni, an inbox add-on for Microsoft Outlook. This application is designed to tap into the hidden social network everyone uses: their inbox. More recently, another inbox addon called Xoopit came onto the scene. This one is for your Gmail inbox and provides a way to find files, photos, videos...and people, although that feature is not as obvious. Both of these applications are extending the possibilities of the inbox while turning them into hubs for for our real-life social connections. Xobni 
Xobni, a company obviously catering to business users, have, as of today, launched a new version of their Outlook plugin. Needless to say, the Xobni team really knows their audience because this new version is offering built-in support for LinkedIn, the social network designed for business use. With the new LinkedIn integration, Xobni now automatically shows a contact's current employer, job title, link to their LinkedIn profile, and contact photo in the app's sidebar. This is especially helpful for those who receive a lot of email from new contacts or have a hard time putting a face to name. Along with the LinkedIn support, Xobni still offers their core features - fast people and attachment search, threaded conversations, and automatic contact profiles. Download Xobni Xoopit 
Depending on how comfortable you are handling over your email login information, you may find Xoopit either a major security risk or one of the more useful web applications you've seen in a long time. Marshall has argued that Xoopit is proof that Gmail needs a better API, but I decided to throw caution to the wind and use Xoopit anyway because...well...finding attachments is hard. The service, which came out of private beta just last week, offers a Gmail plugin that lets you search your inbox for photos, videos, and files - all of which are accessible with one click from the new toolbar added to the top of your Gmail inbox. You can also use the addon to find photos, videos, or files sent you by a specific person, and, as you type their name in the box provided, Xoopit helpfully auto-completes the entry. On the Xoopit homepage, things get a little more interesting. Here, the latest items from your email display in a familiar lifestream-like view that practically has you looking for the "like" button. To the side of the screen, the people who send you the most items are listed and linked to - and those results may surprise you, bringing new insight into what's really going on in your inbox. (Forwarders of chain emails be warned - you've been identified!) At the time of launch, the Xoopit addon, which is available as a Firefox plugin, did not support Firefox 3, but over the weekend, the Xoopit team added that support, which now makes it worth a download...at least for those who aren't too security conscious. Download Xoopit For a demo of Xoopit, you can check out this video:
Upgrading the Inbox Considering how much of our days, if not our lives, are spent dealing with the non-stop influx of email, it's nice to see some applications that are helping us make our inboxes more efficient while also mining them for important data. Microsoft Outlook, due to its nature of being desktop software, has always lent itself to the addition of plugins - even social ones like OutSync (facebook/Outlook sync) - but the idea of adding plugins to our web inboxes is still relatively new territory. 
Because so many people use Gmail, we've seen the innovation begin there. First there was Gina Trapani's Better Gmail Firefox plugin, which arose from a collection of Greasemonkey scripts. Then even Google's Gmail team got in on the act earlier this month with their launch of Gmail Labs, the experimental features you can enable from your "Settings" page. Although some of those features are certainly less useful than others, the fact that Google is also hopping into the inbox addon game means there is definitely growing interest in this area (and say what you want - those "superstars" are really helpful). Hopefully, the growth in this area will continue and we'll find soon find that Google Labs, Xobni, and Xoopit were just the forerunners of the upgraded inbox trend. 
Have you every wanted to run your own magazine, but never had enough money or a large enough audience to make it worthwhile? Well, if there's one thing that the self-publishing industry can cater to, it's the long tail. Now, thanks to a startup called MagCloud, even the smallest of ventures can produce their own, professional, full-color magazine and without the costs normally associated with hiring traditional publishing companies.About MagCloud
MagCloud is another project to emerge from HP Labs. Earlier this year, HP Labs launched BookPrep, a print-on-demand service for out-of-print books. Now, they're delivering MagCloud, a project devoted to providing small independent publishers the ability to publish digitized magazines as well as economically print on demand. Using HP's Indigo technology, the magazines are printed when ordered in full color on 80 lb paper with saddle-stitched covers. How To Use MagCloudTo get started with creating a custom magazine, you must first create a PDF of your content using a tool that outputs high-resolution PDFs, like Adobe InDesign. You'll also need to have a PayPal account in order to sell the magazines with the markup you choose. Since the service is in beta at the moment, orders must be sent to a U.S. shipping address. Publishers can request an invitation here.
Browsing the MagCloud SelectionsFor those just interested in reading the MagCloud produced zines, you can create an account and then browse the selections of magazines available or subscribe to receive email notifications from the publisher as to when new issues are available. You can also choose to subscribe via RSS, but the feed does not contain the magazine's content as posts, only notifications when new issues are released.There are already tons of magazines to browse through in diverse categories ranging from Art to Food to Literature to Finance and so much more. For example, RWW readers might be interested in the soon-to-launch magazine "The Rubyist" (for Rubyists, by Rubyists), which will focus on technical content and happenings in the world of Ruby, Rails, and Merb. Or for the more business-minded, the magazine "Professionally Speaking" may appeal, which gives tips on public speaking, giving presentations, etc. Another great thing about a self-published magazine is that you can just purchase the issues you're interested in - the same as buying from the newsstand. You don't have to commit to a full subscription. 
Previewing a MagCloud MagazineA Great Addition To The POD WorldAs we noted earlier this year, the print-on-demand industry has really been heating up. Amazon launched CreateSpace and another Lulu-esque service called Wordclay began offering paperback publishing. Even casual publishing outfits like CafePress and Blurb have continued to offer options for less serious writers. Now, MagCloud seems to be a perfect addition to join the POD space. If you want to join MagCloud yourself, the signup page is here. 
In April, Umair Haque posted a manifesto on his blog on the Harvard Business Publishing web site where he called for today's investors and start-ups to start building applications to "change the world" instead of just making apps that make money. He challenged Silicon Valley to find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and then pledged that he would help by providing free consulting. Recently, he revisited this topic which he was due to speak on at this year's Supernova conference.The Manifesto
In this latest post, a summary of the speech Haque had planned for the conference, he claimed that 21st century capitalism needs a revolution. As businesses focus solely on profits, large part's of the world's population still fight extreme poverty. And our wealth, he says, isn't even sustainable: We're richer, but that wealth doesn't reflect durable, authentic economic value - which is hitting fast diminishing returns. The growth that we're pursuing is neither sustainable - nor is it, in many ways, real growth at all.This manifesto for change comes at an important time, when a recent, but growing trend of Web 2.0 ennui is beginning to strike the citizens of the social media landscape. Even VC Fred Wilson was recently caught wondering if he was "bored with Web 2.0," saying: But I am a bit jealous of friends who are working on finding and funding alternative energy or biomedical technologies that have the potential to address the serious problems facing the world. At times it seems that helping the web become more social, intelligent, mobile, and playful is not as impactful.Looking For Meaning
Our recent obsessions of late with all the latest new shiny objects, while fun, often leave us with an emptiness that comes from participating in what's ultimately inconsequential behavior in a world that's filled with turmoil. Thanks to the non-stop information flow coming in from all areas of the web, we're acutely aware of the suffering that's going on in countries with political turmoil, of how the latest natural disaster has torn apart people's lives, and even what challenges the disadvantaged populations from within our own borders face. While a healthy dose of social media is fun and informative, it rarely taps into our desire to feel as if what we're doing has meaning or purpose. Being "social" online tends to be a casual activity where you make friends or share news, and not one where you're fighting to solve the world's problems. (Although we did discover a few ways to use social media for social good not too long ago, they're often few and far between). Web 2.0 is is like Internet candy (well, maybe not as sweet as lolcats and YouTube), but it's definitely not, for the most part, a satisfying meal.Maybe that's as it should be - there's nothing wrong with having fun - but perhaps it's time for a shift. Web 2.0 is supposedly not making any money anyway, so why not use our knowledge to build tools to better the world instead? Ideas Exist, But Where's the Money?
The ideas are already out there. Take for example, this post by Paul Lamb on MediaShift Idea Lab. He envisions a mobile app that could empower poor communities through the power of technology. The fictional app called LOCOBEAT makes social media and collaboration a real tool for change for empowerment. The app, designed for use by the overlooked, low income segments of the U.S. population would map the neighborhood to provide users with safe routes to work and school, send alerts which post to the map when new job openings are available, the social network of the apps users keeps them connected so as to communicate to each other about possible job postings, like a mobile LinkedIn, the app's music sharing service lets users rate music which is used by the community to promote local artists, text messages from the grocer are sent to alert users when items go on sale, among many other things.Alexander Vanelas also reminded us about Muhammed Yunus's idea for Microcredits, small loans to help poor gain employment.Those are just a couple of ideas, and LOCOBEAT only lacks the people willing to fund and develop it. But where are the rest? Time To ChangeIn a post on SeedWatcher, Marc Hustvedt responds to Haque's article and ponders "how can we use Twitter to fight global hunger?" However, the real question may be "can we use Twitter to fight global hunger?" Will the tools of change really be the Twitters and Facebooks of today, or will we need to embrace a whole new paradigm designed just for the purpose of change? isn't about time we put our money where our mouth is and find out?Image Credits: Boredom: ArSiSa7; Shift: emilyd10; Money: TWCollins 
Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. Tonight they announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and set up the Symbian Foundation. What's more they will make the platform open source. The plan is clearly to challenge the open source mobile operating system of Google, Android. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says that Nokia wants to create "the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications".According to Techcraver, Symbian is "found on many phones including Nokia, Sony Ericcson, Panasonic, and a few others." Techcraver noted:"Application developers will hopefully be able to help Symbian continue its mobile OS dominance as Symbian currently enjoys a favorable market share. Now, app developers will have two major open source operating systems to chose from when developing their mobile offerings."Earlier today we reported on setbacks to Google's Android, so this move by Nokia will put some pressure on Google. Nokia is a huge brand in mobile and if anyone can challenge Google for open mobile OS dominance, it's the Finnish company. 
The highly anticipated "memory augmentation" service Evernote opens to the public Tuesday and you'll probably want to check this service out just to see what it tries to do. We may change our minds after more lengthy testing, but so far this combination of a bookmarking, note taking and photo cataloging service with apps for the desktop, web and mobile - not to mention the Optical Character Recognition powered search - adds up to a whole lot of potential ... and frustration.It's worth a try, and your workflow might work better with Evernote than ours has so far. It's probably not going to change your life as much as it says it will, though. Fact is it just doesn't work that well.FeaturesThe basic premise of Evernote is that you can throw all kinds of files at it and then search for particular words in those files later. Full or partial screenshots are easy to add as are photos emailed from your phone and text entered directly into the application. The company says you can take photos of signs on the street and labels on bottles of wine, then search for text in those images to recall them later. There's all kinds of other features like annotation, sharing, a widget etc.Storage space is limited and Evernote is now announcing a premium account at $5 per month for 500MB per month of uploading, free users get 40MB each month. That 40MB will go fast if you're uploading full screenshots.There are a number of services similar to Evernote, but few are as lightweight, inexpensive and multi-platform as it is. Last100 writer Dan Langendorf is excited about Evernote and says it compares well in terms of features to more heavyweight competing services like Yojimbo, Soho Notes and DevonThink. Another marginally related service is Iterasi (disclosure: a consulting client of mine) though that service and Evernote are not as similar as I suspected.Evernote has a whole lot of promise that's well articulated in the company's demo video. Check it out and then read on to learn about the problems we had in trying to use the service.The ProblemsThe OCR search in Evernote is far enough from perfect that it's a real disappointment. False positives are annoying, but missing what should be readable text means that Evernote fails to recall documents that it promised to find. We saw a high percentage of false positives and too many cases of failure to capture text even on screen captures of web pages. The webcam capture wasn't good for much as small images are too fuzzy, but we're told by other users that a good point and shoot camera can get business cards into the system recognizably.
Evernote thought it saw the word "sun" in a big blank space, it didn't find the words Belmont, Hawthorne or Belmont/Hawthorne anywhere in this image.We ran into other little problems like an inability to login to the mobile web interface, the desktop app freezing up and a Mac desktop interface that was not as intuitive as we would have liked.RecommendationsIf Evernote's OCR could improve then we'd love to see additional features like: the ability to capture the current contents of a particular application instead of just the screen or a portion of it.search from the desktop application.adding items by RSS feed.We'll keep trying Evernote for non-essential uses, but we were really looking forward to it and are disappointed with the performance issues it faces right now. 
Is LinkedIn worth $1bn? Yes. Why? Because Bain Capital says it is. The stock is not public, so you and I cannot trade it. The whole notion of the average punter trading tech stocks (or the average punter's pension fund trading it on your behalf) seems rather quaint, from some bygone era. But why has the public market for tech stocks disappeared? Where has it disappeared to? Will it ever return? The LinkedIn financing offers some clues to these questions.LinkedIn has a dominant market position, their revenues are growing like a weed, they are profitable and they have growth ambitions that require lots of capital. For the last hundred years or so that has meant a company is ready for an IPO. LinkedIn management did say something about private financing being better, due to the "distractions" of quarterly reporting. I have seldom known people refuse the IPO "golden ticket" because of "distractions". What we are really witnessing is a strange reversal of normal market rules.The rules used to be:The real stars went for IPO, where you got the highest valuation. Management also got to keep some independence and could use their public currency to make acquisitions. Everything else was second best. Next best was to get bought by a public company with a mix of cash and stock, the idea being that the public company's stock would do well and you would get wealthy from that. If the public company acquiring you had an inflated "bubble" currency, the trick was how to get quickly to cash - ask Mark Cuban how to do that.Next best was to get an all cash deal from a private company. As these companies usually don't have too much cash and hoard it carefully, these deals are smaller. But if you showed some strategic value you could do well.If you grew slowly and made some profits you fell into a category that VC call "the living dead". Not dead, as the business is profitably self-sustaining. But not hot enough for deals 1,2 or 3. This was where a very unfashionable firm called a Private Equity (PE) Fund stepped in. They had lots of spreadsheets showing net present value, all of which are designed to show you that your business is worth an awful lot less than you thought. These rules determined valuation. IPO got you the highest multiple. If you have real profit growth you could get a PE multiple of 60 to 100. If your profits were growing at 60% that PE of 60 would be a PEG of 1.0 and that is viewed as a bargain. In the Private Equity world, an EBITDA multiple of 6 is bargain time and 10 is considered "frothy". EBITDA is not quite the same as PE, but it is good enough to show that these worlds (public and private) used to have 10x factor difference in valuation.Clearly these rules no longer apply. Bain Capital is a Private Equity Fund, a rather special example of the breed and sharing some characteristics with VC Funds, but still a Private Equity Fund. And they appear to have given a multiple that is in the 60 to 100 range. (My calculation is based on LinkedIn statements that revenue in 2008 will be in the range $80m to $100m and and assumption that profits are in the 10% range i.e. $8m to $10m.) In other words, a Private Equity Fund is giving a public market valuation.In which case, LinkedIn management got a good deal. They got the valuation premium normally associated with a public market without any of the hassles and uncertainties of a public market. Given the big tasks ahead for management (more on that later) that seems like a smart moveWhich begs the question, did Bain Capital get a good deal? This was Series C, so earlier investors - all of whom are top tier VC - got a paper increase in value and probably put in more cash to maintain their % ("re-upping" in deal terms). So the earlier investors did well on paper. What about Bain Capital?Bain Capital has a first class reputation. They are separate from Bain Consulting but grew out of that strategic consulting stable. So they are not passive investors, they really look for ways to build a ton of value and historically they have done that. So it is reasonable to assume they looked at this very carefully and have a shot at making a lot of money from this investment.However, these are clearly strange times and the strangeness is reflected in what PE Hub called the " late night infomercial" where all the investors are on YouTube proclaiming over and over again that $1bn was a screaming bargain. So, did Bain Capital get a bargain? Well, it all depends on what management does with the money. LinkedIn is the dominant business networking site in America. That is a hugely valuable asset as switching costs are high. (You can argue, correctly that LinkedIn misses key features and they are still learning how to monetize fully. But those are execution issues and they have a strong management team who can fix those issues. The simple fact of switching costs makes LinkedIn a valuable asset that, if properly managed will generate a lot of profits). LinkedIn dominates in America and other English-speaking markets. But we live in global markets and LinkedIn has an equivalent in Europe - Xing - that on some metrics is stronger than LinkedIn, as we have outlined here.And the huge Asian markets are still up for grabs, with no obvious pan-Asian champion.Using private financing for an acquisition led global expansion is the sort of thing Bain Capital knows how to do. It is slightly foreign territory for LinkedIn's earlier investors. So, this deal seems to make excellent strategic sense.So, this is a two horse globalization race. The American horse - LinkedIn - has private capital. The European horse - Xing - has public market investors. This does illuminate some of the bigger market questions:Why has public market for tech stocks disappeared? Because a bunch of slick promoters hyped up tech stocks in the 1998 to 2000 era and some of them turned out to be outright scams. The bar is now really high - as it should be. But, on historical standards, LinkedIn looks strong enough for IPO.Where has it disappeared to? To Europe and Asia, which did not have the same wild boom and bust and which therefore is not suffering the same regulatory and investor pushback that we see in America.Will it ever return? It has to. Private Equity need a public market at some stage for their exits to get maximum return. Public markets are still the best way for ordinary investors to operate in a level playing field and for companies to raise large amounts of capital.