Snackr is an RSS Addict's Dream Come True
From Read/WriteWeb, popular since 2 months
Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am [...]Go to site
Users love it when products and services from one company are nicely integrated with one another. It helps to keep users from bouncing around services. Companies love it because it's a way to lock users in, while gaining their trust. Nevertheless, Google has me hooked on yet another product from their labs: iGoogle. While I may be late to joining the RSS dashboard game, here's a look at a few of iGoogle's new features that users will enjoy.Gmail IntegrationIf you're using the Gmail widget in iGoogle, you can now maximize the widget box and get a full view of your Gmail account. Users can star messages, compose new eamils, and more. The only downside to this widget is that there is no access to your labels.
Google Reader IntegrationGoogle Reader integration works a little differently from the Gmail integration. For feeds that you subscribe to in Google Reader, but also display in iGoogle as a separate widget, you can maximize the widget box for Google Reader style viewing. In this view you can also check your other feeds in Google Reader. This view seems to be only available for RSS subscriptions in both Google Reader and iGoogle.
Click to EnlargeGchatYou can now talk to your friends in iGoogle with the Gchat sidebar widget. Just be careful when refreshing the page because you may lose your ongoing conversations. Also, Firefox and Safari users will not have this feature at the moment. The chat widget will only display in Internet Explorer.
Click to EnlargePreview the New iGoogleTo preview the new iGoogle simply head to the iGoogle homepage and paste the following in the address bar:javascript:_dlsetp('v2=1');To revert back to the previous iGoogle simply paste the following:javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');This is is by far one of the best integrations I've seen from Google and it looks as if it'll only get better as time goes on. I'd love to see the same integration style applied to other Google services such as Google Analytics and Picasa Photo Albums. For now, these new features and integrations have pulled me in as a new fan of iGoogle. 
I did it! I resisted the cravings all week. I did NOT buy an iPhone. It took a lot of deep Buddhist meditation to deal with my cravings. The iPhone is just gorgeous - this is user interface design at the highest level of art. Plus, the developer platform makes developers who dream in design patterns go all weak at the knees. The last time a UI and API induced equal cravings was in NeXt. No that is not a snide comment, Jobs learned from NeXt and this one is a big, big winner. But, oh yes there is a but, iPhone is still a piece of utility electronics. When the sizzle ends, the steak still has to taste good. The iPhone has to be better than what people are currently using based on simple metrics of productivity. If the competition is Mac OSX vs Windows, it is no contest at all. Not only is OSX great eye candy, it also wins on productivity and the competition suffers from really annoying stuff like crashes, brownouts and other time-sinks.But the competition here is not Microsoft. For the business user, the competition is Blackberry; and Blackberry is not Microsoft. I am a long time Blackberry user and it is seldom annoying. It just gets the job done. So unlike when I switched back from Windows to Mac, which I did with a big sigh of relief, I am in no hurry to switch based on anything wrong with what I have.And a few reviews are making me think that iPhone could be a high maintenance date. Sure, high maintenance dates can be fun, but I am judging this on boring utility criteria. For example:1. Keyboard. I am ready to be convinced by touch-screen keyboards. But I am not sure I want to spend the time adjusting. Outside the USA, where SMS is the major use of a mobile phone, I think this is a big deal. Flipping to horizontal is neat, but does this work for email?2. Battery. Any mobile device that cannot do a full day's work and play without re-charge is a pain. You don't want to be in "don't leave home without it" mode regarding your charger unless you are going for more than a day. On a normal day, it's plug it in before you go to sleep and pick it up in the morning.3. It's a bit big as a phone. OK, so is the Blackberry. But, as they say, size matters when you are holding it to your ear. Some people express almost comical amusement at the idea of using the iPhone as a phone - "you still call people, how quaint". Then don't call it a Phone, because it does set that expectation.I know that resistance is futile. I will get an iPhone eventually. Or Blackberry will give me a better browser, which is really what I love about iPhone.The killer app for me? Skype to Skype calls over WiFi. I believe that requires an unlocked iPhone. It would dramatically change the economics of mobile phones. Which AT&T certainly knows and will be resisting for as long as possible.Plus a really slim but full function collapsible keyboard, so I can write full length stuff as easily as on my laptop. And then a simple way to plug into any screen that's around, so I can edit docs stored in the cloud. So that I can stop lugging around my laptop; that's a big win for people who spend a lot of time away from their desk. My guess is that the iPhone ecosystem will bring all these things to market fairly soon. The iPhone is the first real new platform since Windows (sorry, Facebook).Image: After the iPhone Keynote, Jan 2007; pic by mac steve 
Microsoft. Depending on who you are, their name alone elicits some pretty strong feelings. Some people love them, others love to hate them. Few people are neutral. However, everyone can pretty much agree that Microsoft has been fighting an image problem lately and one that has started to make them look less like a towering giant and more like the underdog. Those "I'm a Mac" ads didn't help, either. However, some recent innovations make us wonder if the tide is starting to turn for the big blue monster.Earlier this year, we wondered if the Microsoft was beginning to wake up from an apparent slumber. That post addressed cloud databases and IE8, but perhaps those won't be the turning points for Microsoft's image after all. In fact, given the number of happy Firefox customers, IE8 may still be somewhat of an uphill battle. But some other innovations prove that even Microsoft can still be cool. Netflix Comes To Xbox
Earlier this week, Netflix subscribers got a nice surprise - they no longer need to save up for that Roku box to get instant access to Netflix movies on their TV. Instead, the new set-top box for Netflix is going to be one that many people already have in their living rooms: an Xbox 360. The partnership between Xbox and Netflix will be bringing a new "Watch Instantly" feature that will appear on Xbox later this fall. In addition, a "Live Party" feature will allow people to watch movies together over Xbox Live. Well, the coolness of that feature is debatable...but still, Netflix on Xbox? Did Microsoft just win the living room from Apple? Deep Zoom Changes the Web
Bah humbug - another browser plugin. Is that what you think? Well, like it or not the Silverlight plugin is being pushed hard. It's going to be installed on millions of HP computers and it's going to power NBC's Olympics '08 website, so it's going to become hard to avoid installing this one after a while. If you've been paying attention to Silverlight news, you know that one of the most remarkable things about it is its Deep Zoom feature. It's definitely the coolest. It initially received attention when Hard Rock debuted their Memorabilia website. Then there was the incredible Deep Earth site (which technically didn't use Silverlight's Deep Zoom, but instead uses Silverlight plus a custom-written component created in Visual Studio). Now we have a Silverlight Deep Zoomable image of Yosemite National Park. 70 photographers, GPS-enabled cameras, 10,000 high-res photos. The results let researchers study rockfall activity and help Yosemite search-and-rescue teams with their operations by providing detailed, zoomable maps of the rockfaces. Cool? Yes, definitely. Live Mesh
This service is rapidly approaching coolness. Mac fans have complained there's no Mesh for them, but that's only a matter of time. In the past couple of days, we've seen Live Mesh open up to all and launch a mobile web site. Via m.mesh.com you can see your stream of Mesh news, access your Meshified folders, and move your photos, videos, and other content from your mobile device into your Mesh, instantly making them accessible from any computer, anywhere. The Live Desktop (cloud storage) offers 5 GB, but you aren't limited to meshing only 5 GB - you can mesh as much as you want. Data will sync from device to device via P2P connections, but only 5 GB are stored online for access when you're away from a device you own. You have the option to configure which files are part of that 5 GBs, too. Oh, and it does Remote Desktop, too. If you haven't been able to wrap your head around Mesh, yet, this video is a killer introduction. Here, Ori Amiga demos the native Mesh feeds, WPF applications using Mesh, a Silverlight client that supports working on and offline, a custom Facebook application that syncs Facebook photos with Live Mesh, and even a Mac client that sends photos to Live Mesh. Cool? You bet. Ori Amiga: Programming the MeshYour guide to this video 10:53: Skip to this point to start seeing the best stuff 19:10(ish): The developer stuff continues until 19:10ish 19:40: WPF demo app Family Show 27:01: Silverlight App PhotoZoom running offline 33:08: Mesh connector for Twitter 34:35: Mesh connector for Facebook 36:45: Mesh running on the Mac - photo from Photobooth synced to Mesh almost instantaneously - to both PCs and mobile! 43:00: Opening/editing files directly from the cloud - the cloud will be a shortcut on your desktop 46:09: Viewing offline RSS feeds synced to Mesh in your RSS readerDo these innovations change your opinion of Microsoft? Are you impressed, annoyed, neutral, upset, undecided? Let us know what you think in the comments.Author Disclosure: I also blog for Microsoft's Channel 10. I'm not a Microsoft employee, just a technology fan. This is not a paid endorsement - these are personal opinions. 
Traffic analytics company Hitwise released search market share numbers for dating websites in June today and two things were striking about the data. Ad supported free site PlentyOfFish is trouncing everyone in the dating game and huge numbers of mainstream users are still afraid to navigate there directly using their browser's address bar. The economics of user ignorance are serious and could have big implications for online innovation.More than 10% of the searches for the top 10 dating search terms were URLs (match.com, plentyoffish.com) and almost all of the queries were something that .com could have been added to for direct navigation. If mainstream users learned to navigate using the address bar instead of the search bar - what would happen to the search economy and innovation online?
What is Wrong With People?How many times have you seen someone enter a URL in the wrong field of their browser? Apparently it happens a whole lot, over and over again, all day long, all around the world.Those users end up being shown links other than the place they want to go, including sponsored ads, competing sites and related sites sometimes with confusing URLs. Many of the top dating sites are buying AdWords links to their own sites in searches for their own URLs. How much are the search engines making from user click throughs of Match.com AdWords when users search for Match.com, even though Match.com is the top natural search result as well? Oddly, no one appears to have bought ads for the search term plentyoffish.com on Google, though Hitwise seems to suggest that would be a good idea. We won't claim to understand AdWords enough to explain why there aren't ads there now - perhaps a reader can do so.Web 2.0? Uh...While we're all excited about the Read-Write Web, filled with empowered user contributors and thrilling new web applications - a huge number of people online don't know the difference between their browser's address bar and search bar. Let's keep that in perspective.What will it take for them to learn? Do the browser providers and search engines want them to? They've got a clear financial stake in that not happening.In fact, countless parties online probably do. If mainstream users learned how to use the internet, it could be devastating for an online economy based on monetizing their ignorance. Everyone knows that's true for spammers and phishers, but the numbers indicate that there are a whole lot more people than that who are dependent on user ignorance. Luckily for them, there's plenty of it to go around. If more savvy users are less likely to click on ads, what does that mean for website usability and user education? Will an explosive future of smart users creating content online and using the web's powerful features be limited by the financial interests of the companies providing online services? We think that's probably already happening and it's a real shame. 
According to Andrew Fogg from kusiri, Google will start rolling out offline support for both Gmail and Google Calendar through Google Gears within the next six weeks. Google enabled offline access to Google Docs earlier this year, after they had already been using if for Google Reader for over a year. Fogg also found out that Google will start supporting SyncML for synchronizing contacts in Gmail around the same time.As Google is trying to push more of its products into small businesses and enterprises, having offline access to email and calendar functions is becoming an absolute necessity for Google. Even as mobile Internet access is becoming more ubiquitous every day, few business users would want to risk being caught in a situation where they don't have access to their email or calendaring clients.Some of Google's competitors such as Zimbra or Zoho are already offering some of these capabilities based on Google Gears. MySpace, too, is working on making its messaging platform available offline using Gears.As Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog observes, Google's support for SyncML is also noteworthy. SyncML is an open standard for synchronizing information between different devices and, so far, has mostly been adopted by the mobile phone industry, with all the major companies such as Motorola, Nokia, Sony, LG, as well as IBM and Siemens supporting it in at least some of their products.The latest version of SyncML has added support for push email. According to Andrew Fogg, Google is using SyncML for synchronizing its contacts database with the iPhone, but in the long run, it is probably worth speculating if Google might also start pushing email to the iPhone (or any other phone for that matter), using the SyncML push technology. 
Enterprise 2.0 is a rapidly growing trend that takes the concepts and tools of social media (social networking, RSS, wikis, blogs, etc.) and re-purposes them for business use, wrapping them up into applications that make the tools at work seem more like the tools we use in our day-to-day lives. While these enterprise 2.0 apps give us that web 2.0 feel, it's rarer to see actual Web 2.0 services like Facebook or Twitter used by businesses. And although we've seen many people promoting the business use of Twitter, we had not yet heard about anyone actually going so far as to integrate Twitter into a non-consumer focused application. However, that's just what Joint Contact has done. Their PM tool now shows how tweeting can actually be a productive activity. Twitter For Work?
Many people have made cases for Twitter as a tool for business. Here at ReadWriteWeb for example, we told you how Twitter can be used for journalism. We've posted about how companies were using Twitter for customer service and how PR professionals could use it for pitching purposes. The Twitter Fan Wiki is also keeping track of other Twitter usage cases that go beyond simply having conversations. Despite this growing perception that Twitter can be actually be useful, we haven't seen business applications that make Twitter an essential part of their program...until now.Project Management Via TwitterThe online project management system Joint Contact has just been updated to allow its members to Twitter their project statuses and other project-related messages - a task normally relegated to email. But email isn't always the right tool for the job - Twittering is faster, simpler, and thanks the the 140-character limit, the messages stay short and to the point. Twitter is also available on a number of devices from computers to PDAs, but unlike email, Twitter also works over SMS, so even those team members without a data plan on their phone can receive Twitter messages about the project when they're away from their computer. In the Joint Contact online software, project members can post entries from discussion groups directly into Twitter - the subject line of a discussion group doubles as a tweet. Members can also update their work status via Twitter, too. 
Twitter in Joint ContactAs far as the actual software itself, Joint Contact looks pretty standard. It allows you to manage tasks, documents, images, contact lists, online discussions, and team announcements in a way that's similar to how Basecamp works. Twitter Replaces Email
What's most interesting about this recent update to Joint Contact is that it's a great example of how email can be replaced by social media tools. We know that the younger generation communicates via social media - most often on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook - often only using email to communicate with the "old people." We also discussed whether or not email was in danger not too long ago, and received a slew of comments debating this hot topic. Whether or not you believe that email is danger, you have to admit, email is broken - our inboxes are so overloaded that a non-profit organization IORG has been recently been formed to research solutions to this problem. Well, here's one idea - replace email with other services (like Twitter) when possible to lighten the load on the inbox. For this innovative concept alone, we wish Joint Contact success. 
In the introduction to his book,Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, wrote that life is about entertainment.He might seem the last person you'd imagine as focused on entertainment, until yourealize that Linux started as a hobby.Entertainment is increasingly the center of our lives, and we also want work that challenges and entertains. With the rise of the Social Web and new forms of communication like Twitter, iPhone, YouTube and others, entertainment is just a click away. In this post we look at today's Web through the prism of both entertainment and utility.These days work and entertainment increasingly mix. So we need software that understands what mode we're in. When we work, we search forinformation. When we play, we're browsing and we want to be entertained. The informationfor work must be precise, whereas that for entertainment can be imprecise and casual.Help me: Search, Business Tools and Autocomplete
Search is the most important utilityon the web and is indispensable in business. Whether you're a programmer looking for a library,a researcher seeking a scientificpaper, or a doctor wanting detail about a drug, search helps you find information.Today's search is dominated by Google. Much has been written about Google stagnation and many attempts toimprove the search, but the fact remains, people prefer Google. Yet there has to bea better way to search. After each query we must sift through myriad choices.And we start each new search from scratch.We're looking for software that will guide us through the pile and help us find the answer.
In business we have a set of toolsto help get things done. From Microsoft Office to theskinny gems from 37 Signals, business tools enable us to collaborate, manage projects, salespipelines, contacts, etc. While we complain about these tools, the fact is we couldn'tdo without them.The most important factor about business tools is context. The best tools understand what we're doing. The best tools encode business flows andprocesses, and guide us through the process.Back in 2003 at IBM, I encountered a giant flow chart thatdescribed the process of releasing a piece of software. My immediate reaction was,this needed to be a pieceof software because no human could work through it without making a mistake. This is what softwareis for, to help us deal with complex processes.
The autocomplete function is commonin your search box, iPhone and spell-checker. Autocomplete mode works by listinga set of choices that match what you typed. Imagine in the future most utility softwareunderstanding the context of what you're doing and offering an autocomplete: choicesthat make sense in this context.We already see this in many systems. All popular IDEs offer automatic fixes for common programming errors,iPhone understands that you're looking at a phone number and offers you to make a call. Google understands that yousearched for an address and shows you a map. These are examples of autocomplete or shortcuts,based on your context.Truly helpful software of the future will be a sequence of shortcuts thatunderstand yourcontext and help you navigate to the next step. The computer will present the choices andthe decision will be yours.Entertain me: Twitter, Randomness and Recommendations
While utilities are getting morerigorous, entertainment software is getting more casual.The new entertainment is based on a couple of patterns. First is brevity. With increasing (andnowadays unbearable)amount of information and choice, modern entertainment software knows it has youreyes for only a limited time.Twitter is the proto entertainment riding the exponential curve of popularity. The reason is it's short.But there's another aspect to Twitter that's part of a broader pattern. Twitter is casual.The Twitter UI is a flattened list of messages intended to be scanned. Unlike itsarchetype email (link), whichis meant to be drilled into and answered, Twitter places no obligation on reading or replying. It's a feelgood, hedonistic experience not meant to last more than a few minutes.Modern entertainment is more casual and short because with ubiquitous web access, rise ofthe social web and work from home, people want to be entertainedduring the day. Nothing that takes a long time could work, but checking Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook fora few minutes is fine in most people's minds.
The other face of casuality is randomness. Apple made a brilliant move when it released iPod shuffle; a lot of peopledon't care about the order songs play. Netflix cracked it with the Queuea long time ago; many people don't carewhat movie to watch tonight as long as they pick it at some point. Digg shines with its top newsbecause people are looking for random bits of information.We still talk aboutpersonalization, and ideally we'd love to get the right recommendations for everything. But in the absence of sucha magic algorithm, randomnessand Amazon Bestsellers do the trick. We're entering the age where entertainment isa mode of browsing, where the browsing partis squeezed to 0. We don't want to spend time choosing entertainment. We want a quick pick, quick duration,quick satisfaction. Unlike business application where we must pay attention, wewant entertainment to be relaxed, quick and simple.ConclusionSoftware is increasingly polarized into utilities and entertainment. Utilities help us work and arebecoming more rigorous. We're looking for helpful software that understands our context and guidesus through the process, whether it is search or a complex business task.Entertainment software is at the opposite spectrum, being casual, brief and random. We'reunwilling to spend hours browsing, but instead seek quick and satisfactory entertainment.And now, please tell us what business software is the most helpful to you? And what entertainmentsoftware you find the most entertaining? 
Gmail, Google's powerful web based email service, announced some changes to its contact management features today. Contact management has for some time been a contentious matter among Google Account holders - the company does strange and mysterious things with your email contacts, including tying them in to some other applications without anyone's permission.Today's new changes failed to alleviate those concerns, perhaps making the situation even less clear than it was before.There Are Your Contacts and Then There Are Your ContactsThe post on the official Gmail blog today announced a new policy. There are now two types of contacts in your Gmail contacts list. There are your explicitly added My Contacts and there are your frequently emailed Suggested Contacts. The distinction between the two is unclear enough that I won't even try to summarize it. Read the following closely.My Contacts contains the contacts you explicitly put in your address book (via manual entry, import or sync) as well as any address you've emailed a lot (we're using five or more times as the threshold for now).Suggested Contacts is where Gmail puts its auto-created contacts. By default, Suggested Contacts you email frequently are automatically added to My Contacts, but for those of you who prefer tighter control of your address books, you can choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts (see the checkbox in the screenshot above). Once you do this, no matter how many times you email an auto-added email address it won't move to My Contacts.Taking a look at my new contacts page raises some questions though. Why are suggested contacts being added to My Contacts by default? What are suggested contacts if not frequently emailed contacts? Why are so few of my suggested contacts in My Contacts if that's the policy right now and why is that the policy still by default?It appears that Google has issued an obtuse policy around an opt-out feature while even bigger questions remain. (Continued below...)
My Gmail contacts tonight, with BetterGmail2 script changing the colors. Does it seem creepy to show some of my contacts' names in this post? Maybe you're someone who takes contact privacy seriously, then.What Are You Doing Messing Around With My Google Contacts Inside My Google Reader?
When you open up Google Reader, the company's RSS reader, you'll find not just the feeds you've subscribed to but also the feeds of shared items from your "friends." Those friendships were defined somehow by Google, according to who you email in Gmail apparently. They can opt-out of having their shared items publicly visible at all, but short of doing that - you are seeing their shared items and someone, presumably, is seeing your shared items too. No one knows for sure.I showed Google Reader to yet another group of new RSS readers today and without any prompting from me, several of them recoiled at the "friends' shared items" feature. Personally, I like being able to see friends' shared items but I definitely do not like that the whole phenomenon is a black box. Where else is my social graph being cross applied by Google without my knowledge?While Google wrestles with lawsuits over user data from companies like Viacom, it would be nice to know that the company has a coherent and respectful policy. Adding a check box and a blog post for those of us "paranoid" enough to be interested in opting-out of Google's strange Contact magic is not the kind of step that would help build and maintain trust. We are unimpressed.We love Gmail here at RWW. In December we wrote, though, about Gmail's terrible lack of adherence to standards in email. In February we wrote about Google's nonresponsiveness to complaints about Gmail's lengthy message delivery delays. In March we asked why the new Gmail Contacts API couldn't play nice with others and be based on standards.Given all that, we'd appreciate it if Google wasn't all loosey-goosey with our contacts. Who knows. Maybe Gmail, and all the Google Apps, are an even better example than Twitter of a service we'll put up with no end of crap from. We still love it. 
When the Facebook platform debuted last year it was touted as the next big thing.Media, VC, startups and big companies shared the enthusiasm for its future.And no wonder: Facebook enabled access to 50 million users.You no longer needed to bring the audience to your app. Instead your app could bedelivered to one of the largest audiences around the web. And not just delivered,but injected into a massive social network.While it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issuessurfaced:Technical: Should the app be just a teaser that leads users to their site or should it be a duplicate and have full functionality?Business: If e.g. New York Times builds a Facebook app, will it be economic for them (since there's little revenue in Facebook)?Provider costs: Does it pay for Facebook to maintain the platform? As a business with a huge valuation, Facebook needs to maximise profit. With these issues out in the open for the last year, the platform is suddenly not so compelling.How could this great idea go wrong?The Technology Behind the Platform is Solid
There is little doubt Facebook's platform is revolutionary. Overnight it openedaccess to amassive audience. Big companies and startups just needed to write an app, submit it to the gallery andthey have access.From the development view the platform is good.Sure there are quirks, but people can build apps. Security and scaleability are wired intoits coreand there are APIs and libraries in popular languages.Teasers vs. Native Apps
Right now there are two types of Facebook applications:teasers and native apps. A teaser exposes partial functions of the application and offersusers a click to leave Facebook to go to another site. Native apps are developed to run onFacebook.The problem is, any existing site wants to build a teaser application. Most sitesmake money on ads and they have existing ad infrastructure in place and all theyneed is traffic.This is a product management nightmare because it isn't clear what info should be exposed.And the user experience is bad because users dislike jumping between Facebook and other sites.Some companies built copies of their apps that live entirely on Facebook and mimicthe functionality of the real one. This solution creates both engineering and marketing problems.Maintaining a duplicate code base is costly, and messaging users to come to the website or Facebook page is confusing.And the issue of monetization on Facebook remains.The applicationsthat live only on Facebook are clear winners. These are custom-designed for the platform.Show Me The Money
Unlike Apple, Facebook did not build an infrastructure for paid applications. The only way to monetizethe apps is via advertising. Yet social networks aren't natural for targeted ads.Certainly ads are served inpages, but their effectiveness has still to be determined .Specifically, if talking about a large news site like New York Times, there's no way itcan match its native ads on Facebook. New York Times sells high-CPM ads and has polishedits targeting mechanism. Plain Facebook ads can't match that.An app is free to serve more ads on its own Facebook pages, but then the reader will be seeing two types of ads andthe ratio of ads to content becomesunbearable.It would be an advance if Facebook would enable companies to plug in their own ads into the sidebar areas,but currently there's no such infrastrucure. We're not seeing clear and comparable monetization on Facebook asit exists on original sites.The User Problem
Out of thousands of applications, only ahandful gain sizable audience. Whose fault is this? Again this isn't a simple issue. How many apps cana user want? The apps thatwin audiences initially get progressively bigger, making it harder for new apps. Because there's nopay-to-play, there's a lot of noise.Users have too much choice. What seems like a great idea (let users choose theapps) quickly leads to this: users try a few apps and conclude thatapps aren't interesting. Users are confused with the amountof choice.What's the solution? Not really clear, but the current situation can't last much longer.Platforms Are About Risk Management
With the platform not working out well for either Facebook orits users, the company is taking action.The changes are aimed at simplification and toning down the apps.At this point it will be a welcome change for the users, but application makers will feelscrewed just a year after the fanfareand all the money spent on building the apps. Providers havedone nothing but good for this platform, making things work quickly.Platforms, Web Servicesand APIs are not just money makers. Platforms come with responsibility. Amid the never-ending marketingwar, the rush and pressure tends to push out stuff that's half-baked.Perhaps it's time to take a lesson from the 90s. Back then, when companies boughtlibraries from software vendors, these came with commitment. Solutions were customer-drivenbecause people paid to use them. Vendors worked hard to make things backwards compatible. Platform providersunderstood and respected the risk people took relying on their systems, and they assumed responsibilitybecause they were paid.Perhaps if Facebook charged for access to its audience, things would be more businesslike.Once again, free comes back full circle and backfires.Conclusion The Facebook platform was certainly a big event in technology. As the first open system to enable access to ahuge audience, it's a triumph. But its future is clouded because of its businessinfrastructure,improper user education, and almost anarchic delivery of the applications. Withthe imminent changes, larger players will have even less incentive to plug in.Only time will tell what it means for the futrure of the platform. HopefullyFacebook leadership will find the right path. 
Online self-publishing firm Lulu and social document sharing site Scribd have just announced a partnership in which Lulu will begin using Scribd's iPaper viewer to display Lulu's free e-books online at the lulu.com web site. In addition to making it easier for users to gain access to these free publications, Lulu will also be using Scribd's unique feature that allows for displaying AdSense within iPapers to monetize the free content being provided by the e-books' publishers. The iPaper format was designed to be sort of a YouTube for PDFs and other standard document formats. With iPaper, publishers can easily upload and share their documents online via the Scribd.com web site. On the site, document creators can publish their files so that others can then also share, email, download, or embed the documents elsewhere. The document creator can also choose to lock down the file to be read-only if they would rather restrict its use - it all depends on privacy settings the content owner selects - no DRM is involved. Beginning this month on the self-publishing site lulu.com, you will soon find a broad selection of some of the site's most popular free content made available via the iPaper format. There will be numerous titles offered from a variety of genres including cookbooks, biographies, photo books, books about computers and Internet, and books about arts and photography. And thanks to iPaper's ability to embed AdSense ads within the documents, content creators will now have a way to offer free e-books that also have the potential to earn them an income.Over the next three months, Lulu will test the use of Scribd's iPaper on their site, and, if all goes well, they will then explore rolling out iPaper to include more of their site's content. 
Of course, we all know that the event of the past week (or perhaps we should say the event of the year, given the news coverage), has been the launch of the iPhone 2.0. Yet even amidst the iPhone news frenzy - the lines at the stores, the activations, the failures, the apps! - there was another phone getting some press too - the Google Phone. The rumor was that Google was going to build its own phone after all. Yet while that rumor was catching the headlines, the real story was taking place within the developer community itself.gPhone - It's Just A RumorA few blogs ran with the story that Google might be considering building the gPhone after all. The reason for this latest round of rumors? Hollywood Reporter's Dan Cox wrote an article summarizing a semi-formal press conference on Friday where Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt met to discuss the state of the technology community. In the article, Dan wrote: "The trio of Google execs also used the opportunity to talk about the inroads the company is making with its own branded mobile phone as a replacement for the iPhone." Add to that a claim that the Ammunition Group is designing it and you've got a full-on Gphone rumor. 
Unfortunately, the rumor is most likely just that - a rumor. Silicon Alley Insider took a look at Reuter's reporter, Ken Li's, notebook from the event and made the determination that "the Google guys were talking about the fact that they're not producing their own branded phone, and that there isn't a 'Google phone.' And something got mixed up in the translation."They also made the rather sensible statement that "if the Google guys had talked about a major change in their mobile strategy, you'd think the story might have appeared in other outlets."We asked Google for comment and they actually pointed us to the same Silicon Alley Insider story, saying it was all just a misunderstanding by one of the reporters in the audience. They also noted that their hope for the Android platform will spur the development of thousands of different kinds of phones.We wonder though, if these rumors point to the fact that there may be a demand, or at least a desire, to see Android loaded onto a Google-branded phone as opposed to it being just another mobile platform? Are people already looking for a solid iPhone competitor?Android Developers Are Mad
Of course, before you can have a successful gPhone or mobile platform, you have to have a happy developer community and lately, those guys have been getting antsy. Public developers recently started an online petition on Android's Google Group because they're frustrated with the lack of an updated SDK - the last one was provided in March 2008. The complaints are that the current SDK is buggy and that certain features don't work.The Android Developers' Petition The first post that begins the petition states: In order not to lose many highly encouraged developers, I think its time to release some news about the development process of the SDK. Maybe let us know why we have to live with these long cycles...In my personal opinion it is not the right choice to keep developers in the dark. We, the developers, are the absolute base of success to the whole Android platform. The presentation with GoogleIO was a good first step but for me it was nto enough.Other developers chimed in to express their dissatisfaction, too. One developer claims he's only going to wait until the end of July, then he's switching to iPhone or Windows Mobile. Another says the developer community is falling apart, calling them "Google roadkill." A third notes that by the time a new SDK ships, many of the developers will have already released software on the iPhone platform, noting that it's "a platform with 20+ million users versus ZERO user install base for Android. It's not a hard decision to make after all. Hopefully someone wakes up sooner than later." Google's Android Engineers Are Frustrated, TooAmong the 37 responses, a Google Engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru spoke up. Although he makes it clear that he's not the official spokesperson for Android, he does try to address some of the issues while also expressing some frustrations from the engineering team's side of the fence, too. In fact, reading between the lines a bit, it sounds like some of the engineers aren't happy with the decisions being made, either. His post reads, in part (see the full version here): I'm going to get into trouble for this post... There is some truth however in saying that we (the Google Android team) are very much focusing on playing our part in getting an Android device on the shelves as soon as we possibly can, and that focus comes at the expense of other tasks, like getting an SDK out. There've been quite a few long threads recently in various groups(this thread, along with one in android-developers and one in android-internals) around the issue of communication from Google. I'm sure that many of the people who participated in those threads get the feeling that their comments fell on deaf ears, whereas in fact that's not true. Quite a few members of the Google Android team read those groups (and we also read a number of community web sites), and (quite a bit by definition) we are the ones who do care about the community. Many of us have played roles in various developer communities in the past, very often on both sides of the fence, and in more ways that one we understand the situation that the developer community is in right now and we share the pain. So, while those posts aren't falling on deaf ears, they're typically falling in the wide-open ears of people whose hands are tied and whose mouths are gagged, and the frustration that such posts create in the Android team might in fact be larger than the relief that gets created in the community. I'm afraid that none of all that I just wrote brings any closure in terms of communication. That's all because it's not my role to communicate the "big picture" answers that people would like to hear. The Google Android people who read the groups hear you, we understand your pain, we communicate it back up to our management, we're not happy about the situation either, we'd love more openness too. And, just like anybody else, we don't like to read implications that we're lazy, or that we're liars, or that we don't care about you, or any of the other nasty things that have been written or implied about us, because none of that it true.The full post is much longer and is followed up by a second post where Queru says that he's not about to say anything concrete about the ship date for the next SDK.Wow. What on earth is going on over there with Android? 
For those of you wondering why you haven't seen a Twitter post on ReadWriteWeb for, oh, a couple of days now -- here is one! And you'll be pleased to know it's very easy to digest this post, because it's in cartoon form. This is courtesy of the wonderful Rob Cottingham of Social Signal. Rob runs a regular cartoon blog called Noise to Signal, in which he puts in graphical form some of the big questions of the social web. We thought we'd trial some of his cartoons here on RWW, especially in the weekend when you may not be in the mood to read long text posts. Let us know what you think.
The subject of Yahoo's independence will be decided, as it should, by Yahoo's shareholders. The battle to control Yahoo fascinates so many other people because it is a good drama. However, it is more than just drama. Yahoo's independence does impact the Internet ecosystem - developers, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs will all benefit from more choice and more competition. An Internet dominated by GYM (Google Yahoo Microsoft) is better than one dominated by just Google and Microsoft.Yahoo has a very strong hand to play. It is # 1 in two key markets - start page and webmail. It is still # 2 in search. It has some really good social media assets and developer tools. Facebook's stumbles have left room for leadership in social networking based on open protocols and standards. The fact that Yahoo management has not converted those assets into stronger financial results gives Microsoft an opening and lets Icahn make a strong case to replace the Board.The case against management is not that Yahoo has made a strategic error. It is that the company has executed poorly. I do not believe that Microsoft would do a better job. They are still too enamored of lock-in strategies that leverage their PC assets. That would probably destroy a lot of value in Yahoo. Microsoft seem to believe that we are in some late stage of a consolidation game where it is all about hoovering up as much market share as possible. I believe that is a fundamental misreading of the market and that growth in the coming years will come from innovation and not consolidation. Microsoft has a huge problem that stems from the failure of Vista. Fixing that would open up many really big opportunities as well as generate masses of immediate cash. But that, as they say, is another story. Buying Yahoo is a really expensive way to buy time while they fix Vista.In which case, if Microsoft buys Yahoo, it will lead to loads of opportunities for entrepreneurs to jump into the vacuum created when Microsoft fails to grow the Yahoo assets. So Yahoo's independence does not matter? Yes it does matter. We are entering a more difficult period for start-ups, with a consumer recession and jittery VCs. Yahoo with strong leadership has a much, much better chance of withstanding Google's relentless drive to own online advertising than lots of small, under-capitalized start-ups. A strong, independent, public Yahoo is also needed as a buyer for start-ups. Yahoo's strategy to enable thousands of entrepreneurs to develop on top of their assets is totally right. SearchMonkey was a good start. BOSS is a great next step. It is likely to be followed by more. They could (should) open up at different levels of the stack:Top: Really simple end user tools, competing with Google Custom Search Engine. Middle: Services that require good good scripting skills, but where you can still get reasonable results in days without any investment.Bottom: Services more like S3/EC2, requires real investment but gives total flexibility.That model enables entrepreneurs to play at whatever level suits their ambition/budget. The revenue share for Yahoo is less at the lower levels, but the volumes will be higher.Yahoo looks well-positioned in the middle and could do more in the top and bottom layers of the stack.I don't expect BOSS, or other related announcements, to do anything for the stock price. That's a different game. But Yahoo could have a really strong independent future as the platform for thousands of start-ups. That was how Microsoft rode to glory. Google leaves less on the table for partners. Amazon is only at the bottom of the stack. Go, Yahoo, go. 
Yesterday we analyzed the financials of the 7 publicly traded Internet Big Cos. There was nothing bubbly there, with an average PEG of 1.4. So the next stop is the "middle 20". These are publicly traded web technology stocks with a market cap over $1 billion. In our analysis below, more than half have a PEG below 1.0, which tends to signal "bargain opportunity" to investors. (caution: of course that is only a starting point for analysis, there could be some real dogs in there). Check out this chart:
So, it is official - there is no bubble in public Internet stocks. There might be in private valuations, but that is almost impossible to analyze accurately without access to hard data on late stage VC valuations. Anecdotally, it does look like private valuations are higher than public valuations. That is a very odd reversal of normal market rules and will create problems at some stage - the shares have to be sold to somebody who will pay a higher valuation.A reminder to participate in our weekly poll, about the top Internet companies: Which Internet bigco has impressed you the most over the first half of 2008? ( polls) 
Yesterday, Google released Lively, a browser based virtual world somewhat reminiscent of The Palace from the mid-90s. A lot of people have been wondering why Google would be interesting in entering this market, but according to Hitwise, it seems Google is looking at all the major categories its search engine is sending traffic to and then tries to develop a product for that category.Hitwise has a very good track record in using its Clickstream data for predicting Google's next moves. In January, they predicted Google would enter the health, travel, or virtual world market. Since then, Google launched Google Health and Lively, though it doesn't have a major travel product besides Google Maps in its portfolio just yet.Looking at the latest data, Hitwise predicts that Google would either enter the automotive or music market next. Both of these are very broad categories with a large range of competitors already operating in them, but then, that has never stopped Google from entering a new market.
Google AutosGoogle could easily build a competitor to cars.com, Vehix, or Autotrader by tying together data from its Google Base product (which already has a 'Vehicles' category) and mashing it up into a more comprehensive used car market by also allowing users (or dealers) to easily put up their own cars for sale. As of now, Google is only aggregating data from all the major online car buying sites. Google Music Rumors about Google Music have flared up regularly over the last few years, but so far, no actual product has materialized. Entering the music business is obviously fraught with problems for any new player. Given the issues around licensing music, as well as its failure in selling videos on Google Videos, Google might not want to develop a mainstream music platform.What Google could do, though, would be to offer a platform for independent musicians, somewhat akin to what MySpace was in its early days or what AmieStreet does today.Google TravelGiven Google's background in search, we think Google might also be likely to develop a competitor to the large travel aggregator sites like Kayak or FareCompare. Not only is this a market where Google could develop a decent revenue stream outside of its core advertising market, but it would fit in right with Google's core expertise. As of now, Google only links to Kayak, Expedia, Hotwire and others when you enter the right query into its search engine, but it doesn't display any results for flights itself yet.Our Prediction: Travel is NextIf Google is indeed trying to fill out all of these major niches with a product of its own, we think a travel product is still Google's most likely next move. It is not only the closest to Google's core competency of search, but Google could also easily put ads on there as well. 
VC Fred Wilson asked recently on his blog if there is a business in browser add-ons? I have a vested interest, since my company is in the add-on business. Adding a bit of functionality to your browser can be fun and customization makes software more personal, yet there are issues such as privacy, performance, and the inability of mainstream consumers to manage add-ons.So, can browser add-ons become viable businesses?The browser is a web battlefield. Microsoft will do everything in its power to keep on top of the browser game, but it's been losing ground to Mozilla's Firefox - where security and add-ons are a differentiating factor. Firefox is not only the early adopter browser, but it is also being marketed as the people's browser.add-ons help Mozilla foster its vibrant community. Redmond recognized this and a year ago started a major push for browser add-ons. Both major browser makers now focus on add-ons and this support offers the opportunity for startups to reach millions.Can this result in a business built around add-ons? In this post we take a detailed look.Browser as a PlatformEvery major browser offers a plug-ins infrastructure. Mozilla and Opera made add-ons fundamental to their strategy, while Microsoft has recently started to focus on add-ons. These are the reasons why it's important for the browsers to support this: 1. Keep the core browser light to avoid feature creep. 2. Foster a community of innovators and entrepreneurs, helping to evolve and define the next generation browsing experience. 3. Enable users to customize and personalize the browser.
There's another major driving force: webification of the desktop. Some 2 years ago one of my first articles discussed the convergence of the desktop and the web. Desktop applications have become more web-aware and in a sense every app is now a web app. Why not make such applications browser based?Browser add-ons are easier to deliver than desktop applications. Every major browser player becomes a sought-after distribution point. The Browser War also becomes the Desktop War.Users: It's all about utility
Browser makers know what's at stake. Modern users seek convenience and utility; they're looking for contextual software that helps them get things done. And they don't want to pay for it.Because the add-ons are compact and update mostly automatically for consumers, they feel very different compared to heavy desktop apps, where people had to manage large chunks of software on Windows machines. These days users do one-click installs of the recommended, popular and new-add ons from the gallery. The experience is the same regardless of your operating system and the add-ons update automatically. In a way it's what Sun has been doing with Java, except there is no virtual machine to download. The Browser is the Virtual Machine.Businesses: It's all about numbers
In evaluating business opportunity, we need to consider scale and monetization. Popular Firefox add-ons enjoy tens and some even hundreds of thousands of downloads a week. Firefox itself had a record number of downloads recently and it's pushing add-on downloads along with it. Since Microsoft has been focused on add-ons lately as well, popular add-ons are getting great exposure via the IE community as well. Browsers have opened a massive distribution channel for application delivery and companies are starting to leverage it.Not all add-ons will do well. The power law argument applies. A relatively small number of add-ons will dominate, and most will have just a few hundred users.What is the shape of this power law curve? Just how many add-ons can be successful businesses? And how many add-ons can one user have? It's difficult to imagine more than 10 per user.Only great add-ons will stay permanently and will have a chance of being a business. The same is true about every online/software business: iPhone apps, Facebook apps, web services and desktop applications.The add-ons of today have a much clearer shot at the user base compared to the desktop applications of the 90s. Everybody uses a browser so the target market is massive.How will add-ons be monetized?
Assuming that an add-on gains users and becomes popular, how will it be monetized? Four ways come to mind: Charge the users; sell advertising; use an affiliate model; be a data/service provider.Charging users is not really an option. We've written about the danger of free, but this is just the state of today's market, where consumers don't pay for software. It would be difficult to fathom the model where consumers would willingly pay for premium features. Flickr manages to do that and 37signals has managed to build a business around paid premium services, but these are exceptions.Advertising is the de facto choice to make money on the web, but for add-ons this is not a natural. Users are okay with banner and link ads in pages, but if browsers start to advertise on top, that could irritate. An advertising model would need to be delivered in a way that fits the functionality of the add-on.An affiliate model seems more feasible. Many add-ons focus on enhancing shopping; having smart contextual product experience wired into the browser makes consumers happy. This model is fine for add-ons that focus on books, music, movies, travel, and other verticals. The affiliate game is all about scale, and being part of the browser gives the businesses presence around the web.The last model is essentially a data play. As users browse the web, they reveal their preferences and habits. Individual, group and aggregate information about user's attention can fuel services, from personalized alerts and improved search to web-wide popularity and recommendation engines. The issue here is privacy; sites and ISP providers track people, but people hate being tracked.In order for the data businesses to thrive, they need to have a clear stand on information ownership. One strategy is to make personal information completely private: i.e., put the user in control. The aggregate and group information can still be used for business purposes, but not traceable back to individuals. There is opportunity to enable users to leverage personal information on their terms. Add-ons can enable pipe businesses that faciliate connection between the users and other web services.All these opportunities are not well understood today, since the promise of the Attention Economy has never really been fullfilled.ConclusionBrowser add-ons are increasingly interesting ways to reach consumers. Since the browser is the most used application on the desktop and major browsers are platforms, businesses are looking for opportunities to reach consumers through this new channel. Better than desktop applications, browser add-ons are light and update automatically.As with any vertical business, only a few add-ons can become real businesses. The competition is tough and the business models have not been mapped out that well. Yet if there's a shot at reaching users via a download, browser add-ons seem to be it.What is the future of browser add-ons? Do you think business will be built around them? What business models will we be seeing around add-ons? 
URL shorteners like TinyURL are a wildly popular way to share long links over email, IM, microblogging and other contexts. The millions of shortcuts that have been created through such services represent a huge opportunity to capture interesting data - but to date those opportunities have all just gone down the drain. Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward looking developers. We've been waiting for a more intelligent URL shortening service to hit the market but even in our most ambitious visions we haven't seen something like this coming. We hope you'll use it - the more we all do, the more everyone will benefit.What Bit.ly Does Today
At launch Bit.ly is a relatively sophisticated URL shortener. It uses a cookie to remember the last 15 links you've shortened and displays that history on the home page when you visit. It allows you to set up a custom URL ending for your link. It automatically creates 3 thumbnails for every page you save a link to.How about these features, though? Bit.ly saves a cached copy forever of every page you shorten a link to, on Amazon's S3 storage (processing is done on EC2, as well, so uptime looks good). Bit.ly also tracks clickthrough numbers and referrers so you can see what kind of traffic your shortcut got. There's a simple API for adding Bit.ly functionality to anyother web app (Betaworks affiliated gaming site ImInLikeWithYou already has this live) and all the data, including traffic data and thumbnails, is easily accessible by XML and JSON feeds.Those are some pretty awesome features but that's only the beginning. A javascript submission bookmarklet and user accounts should be available soon.The Future of Bit.ly: Semantic and Geo Spatial AnalysisIn the background, Bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters! Calais is something we've written about extensively here. Bit.ly will use Calais to determine the general category and specific subjects of all the pages its users create shortcuts to. That information will be freely available to the developer community using XML and JSON APIs as well.As if that's not a whole lot of awesome already - Bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of all the web pages it collects. You want to see all the web pages related to the US Presidential election, Barack Obama and Ashville, North Carolina? Or about Technology, Google and The Dalles, Oregon? That's will be what Bit.ly delivers if it can build up a substantial database of pages. Once it does, it will open that data up to other developers as well.Why use a URL shortener to catalog all those pages? Why not? Each shortcut signals a page that's of importance to a real human user and an army of link-senders sounds like a great way to build up that database. Semantic indexing of the web through casual but opt-in and common user activity is a great strategy.Then we can all share access to that data. We're excited and we hope you'll put Bit.ly to use.