Born out of a closet dislike for "Shrek 2," Critickeris a new movie review community and recommendation engine that aims to match users with like-minded individuals who share the same cinematic taste. Once you've rated 10 movies at Criticker it begins to form what they call a Taste Compatibility Index (TCI) that matches you up with not only other users, but also professional reviewers who share your taste in movies (though, I found that site really doesn't start delivering usable results untily you've rated around 50 flicks).One of the most important features of the site is how painless they make the process of ranking first 10 films (or your next 100). While you can search out specific films and rank them one at a time, similar to any other movie community, you can also page through randomly generated lists of 10 films at once, ranking each on a 1-100 scale. I was able to rank 80 films in just about 30 minutes by going the random route. Certainly not all my favorite films were represented (I made sure they were ranked later by searching them out), but I did give the site a good sized sample to work with that covered both films I like and films I loathe. Had I been forced to search out movies on my own, my list likely would have been skewed toward mostly films I like -- recommendation engines should in theory work better if they also know what not to send your way.After ranking your first 50 or so movies, Criticker begins to fill in your TCI with users and critics who have similar tastes based on mutual rankings. The more films you rank, the better and more accurate your matches will become -- matches based on 100 rankings in common are bound to be more accurate than those based on 10.You can set a "films in common" minimum for Criticker to take into consideration when using your TCIs to power recommendations. I have mine set to the default of 10% (or about 8 films out of my 80+ rankings). That means that even though at the moment Jamie Levy of Variety is my top critic match, Criticker should ignore his recommendations for me because we only have 3 films in common.When Criticker makes a recommendation, it assigns movies a Probable ScoreIndicator (PSI), which estimates the ranking you would likely give the movie based on your past rankings the rankings of your TCIs. Based on critic reviews, the site is today recommending that I should go see "Into the Wild" with a PSI of 88, and based on users and critics the site is telling me I should rent "Casino Royale" with a PSI of 90. Those recommendations seem pretty accurate -- "Into the Wild" has been on the top of the list of movies I am looking forward to, and I enjoyed "Casino Royale" (I haven't rated it yet, which is why the site recommended it to me).Criticker lets you add friends (called "kumpels") as well, and track their ratings and reviews, even if their TCI score does not make them a match to your own. And this week the site launched a Facebook applicationthat brings their social film recommendation engine to your Facebook friends list and competes with popular Facebook film rating and review apps, such as Flixter's ubiquitous "Movies."ConclusionCriticker is a nice site that makes rating a lot of movies fun and easy -- I rated more in 30 minutes on the site than I have in 10 years of casual IMDb use. Their recommendation engine makes mostly good recommendations (with a few misses here and there), and the ability to tweak how it interacts with your Taste Compatibility Index to determine rankings means you can up the accuracy of ratings. Unlike sites that recommend products based on what everyone thinks of them, Criticker recommends films based only on the opinions of people who have a similar taste as you, which makes a big difference.The lesson there may be that the crowd as a whole isn't always smart (or at least isn't well suited to every task we try to throw at it). However, more focused crowd intelligence can yield potentially exceptional results.

  Everyone is jumping on the Facebook "open platform" bandwagon, but LinkedIncan at least say it was among the first to issue copycat-intent statements shortly after the Facebook event. Richard MacManus covered the possibilities offered by a LinkedIn platform here in June. Now LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye has done an interview with the New York Timeswhere he laid out some of the vision for the company's upcoming outreach to outside developers.It won't be a very warm welcome compared to the Facebook lovefest. Though this should be unsurprising, LinkedIn's platform will require permission from the company before developers can get in on the action. Though Facebook apps do need to be added by Facebook to the app directory, a quick look through there shows that the bar is low enough that it may as well be open to all.I've talked to many companies holding out for a future opportunity to score real estate on LinkedIn profile pages. Nye says in this interview that the average income of a LinkedIn user is $140k per year - it's a real injustice that such high-quality human beings won't have easy access to all our widgets.LinkedIn will focus its platform on letting developers tie LinkedIn functionality to outside services (Salesforce is the example given, surprise surprise) and to adding buttoned-up business functionality to LinkedIn itself. It's Not a Social Network!Nye also told the Times that LinkedIn doesn't consider itself a social network, either. That's funny, that's what Facebook loudly insisted on to its developers pre-platform launch, too. They weren't allowed to mention MySpace or the phrase social networking in their PR. Facebook is a social utility- they insisted. That was an eye-roller at the time and sounds even sillier now.We'll see what the LinkedIn platform looks like when the rubber finally hits the road, but when it happens - don't quit your day job to be a LinkedIn app developer.

  I'm regularly outspoken about my concerns that Google is going to take over the world and start passing out brain implants - but the fact of the matter is that I love Google services. Today's announcement that more GMail storage is on the wayis heartening, but you've got to wonder: why is this mighty giant messing around with anything other than a total storage solution for all my data across all their apps? Where is the GDrive already?Google told analystsmore than a year ago that it wanted to store 100% of our data, a "golden copy." Perhaps its failure to do so yet is a sign of the finite power it truly holds. Or perhaps its just a ruse to lull cynics like me into a false sense of security. That's probably not what's happening.I should probably pay $50 for super Google, as advocated this morning by Amit Agarwalin reference to the news. See also one estimate of forthcoming free storage capacity over at the blog Googlified.Finally, I'm sure there are some of you out there that still haven't seen the following video about the future of Google and the web in general. It's not to be missed, it's thought provoking and funny. See you in the "hive mind" if it ever arrives!

  A new Forrester reportanalyzes how the big IT vendors are utilizing Web 2.0 products in the enterprise. As with most Forrester reports, it overlooks the many innovative startups in the 'Web Office' space - focusing instead of the big fish such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle. However there is a new report coming soon that will address what Forrester calls "pure play" vendors. Andit must be said that the big vendors are the ones many enterprises look to for their IT solutions, including web 2.0 technology. So let's check out this report and see what it has to say.The crux of the report is that each of the biggest IT vendors Forrester looked at - Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP and BEA - has a unique perspective on the market. States Forrester:- BEA, through acquisitions and new 2.0 products, now has numerous enterprise Web 2.0 capabilities, including blogs, wikis, communities, tagging, tag clouds, and a framework for building mash-up applications;- IBMmelds the world of application development with user experience with its WebSphere product family. It is a dominant player in the collaboration space and will deliver enterprise Web 2.0 functionality as part of its upcoming Lotus Quickr and Connections offerings;- Microsoft's entry into the market is clear: if you want enterprise Web 2.0, you get it in Sharepoint;- Oracleis a relevant infrastructure vendor and a thought leader in enterprise applications by offering Web 2.0 capabilities;- SAPis looking to create end-to-end processes.One company the report doesn't mention - at all - is Google. While not a traditional IT vendor for enterprise, Google is certainly a "big" vendor and making a lot of progress in enterprise. Forrester describes the enterprise 2.0 moves by big vendors like Microsoft and IBM as a "land grab". So Google should've been included, as it is grabbing its fair share of 'land' in the enterprise.Having said that, traditional IT people will be quick to remind me that vendors like Google haven't necessarily got all the right solutions for enterprise yet: security and compliance are two areas where Google and other web 2.0 vendors have work to do. And the ability to integrate with existing business processes is another hot spot - the Forrester report points out that "line-of-business applications have traditionally been very focused on structured business processes", which is something that Microsoft, IBM et al have a lot of experience in. Forrester came up with a good diagram showing how web 2.0 technologies could be implemented by the big vendors, to support business process:Collaboration is the name of the game with Enterprise 2.0, so I agree with Forrester that web 2.0 tools can be very useful here. In my time as a corporate worker (I used to manage intranet and internet sites), collaboration was very difficult to achieve with traditional IT tools - so wikis, blogs and Web Office tools such as Google Apps have really raised the bar for collaboration in enterprises.So which of the big vendors is making the most progress with Enterprise 2.0? According to Forrester, IBM has made "the boldest move into Enterprise 2.0 from any of the traditional vendors" - with Lotus Connections being their key product. Read/WriteWeb covered the launch of Connectionsin January 2007, noting also that Microsoft went on the defensive at that time with a press release touting SharePoint. Lotus Connections includes blogs, tagging, communities, profiles, and task management; Forrester wrote that it "represents a highly integratedplatform that is enterprise-ready."Forrester said of SharePoint that it "has had strong momentum in the market, and it’s installed and under evaluation in many enterprises serving a variety of purposes."In conclusion, the big vendors are all well and truly part of the web 2.0 landscape now. The products, like Lotus Connections and SharePoint, remain complex and broad in scope - which in many respects goes against the grain of simple and easy-to-use web 2.0 products. However Forrester points out what many of us have been saying for a while: that the big vendors will "acquire best-of-breed vendors to augment, extend, and cover gaps in their own enterprise Web 2.0 portfolios." Google has been on such a buying spreeover the past year or so, and the other big vendors will do the same.IBM 2.0 pic by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

  Portland, Oregon based Kumquatwent live today in a limited beta release. The service is a very light-weight but well thought-out tool for gathering self-initiated performance reviews in any field. Account registration will be open for the next 24 hours at the URL hellokumquat.com/rww- after that you'll have to provide an email and get in line. The company believes that there isn't a really easy way to secure performance evaluations from people you've worked for; they aim to make it simple and they do a pretty good job at launch. See also competitors iKarma, YouRaterand to some degree Rapleaf.It's got some early performance issues but scores high on usability otherwise. If you are seeking feedback on your work from clients or peers - Kumquat could be just what you're looking for. First some product description and good news, then the bad news last.Form creators can select from a list of 6 general questions to ask respondents about their work, ranging from the "value of the effort" to the proficiency with which it was managed. After each of the 6 basic questions is a field where more details can be added for specifics or clarification. Respondents can be allowed to respond anonymously or not and to either see the list of all recipients of the request for evaluation, or not.Those questions are answered with a series of sliders for scoring and text fields for details. The interface is crisp, clear and pleasing to use.Throughout both the admin and the resulting form, Kumquat uses clever witticisms to flirt with the line between a formal and informal tool; inquiry emails can even be sent out with a "more stuffy," "less stuffy" or custom message. The messages are well composed and genuinely useful.Results can be viewed individually, multiple replies to questions can be viewed as an average and replies can be viewed in PDF format.And Now for the Bad NewsFor all its elegance, Kumquat's also got a ways to go before anyone should be too enthusiastic about the product. Forms can only be sent out once, they can't be edited later. Templates are on the roadmap for later. There's performance issues - forms marked private by the creator are said to recipient to be notprivate. That's a deal breaker, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't fixed by the end of the weekend. The site is also honest about the fact that initial emails requesting a review will almost always land in your recipient's spam folder. That's bad. The company's working on that too, though it might be a bit trickier. Microformats are supported wherever possible, Kumquat says, and you can log in with an OpenID account. All great news, but the OpenID login is just a grunt and a request for a URL. OpenID is becoming widely enough known now that I'm going to start holding it against people if they don't treat it as a teachable moment and make logging in with brand-name accounts as easy as falling off a log. Kumquat does not.Finally, I can't help but think that there's something more that could be done here. Simplicity is good, maybe it's good enough. Integration with other reputation systems? A widget? I'm not sure, maybe those steps would be overkill and Kumquoat is just what independent workers need.Once the above problems are fixed, I'll likely try using it myself in some real-life situations.

  Being a big Radiohead fan, I was quick to go and buy their new album 'In Rainbows' via their website. As has been reported, there is no set price for the album - you input your own price, or get it for free. I mulled it over in my head what I should pay and in the end I opted for 7.50 pounds, equivalentto US$15. It came through on my credit card as NZ$22, which is almost exactly what I paid recently for the latest Foo Fighters CD (an actual physical CD that I bought from a shop). My reasoning for 7.50 pounds for Radiohead was that I'd pay what I usually pay for CDs - but in the knowledge that the extra profit will go to the artist (Radiohead) instead of the record company and shop. Being a fan of Radiohead - and of artists ability to earn a living independently - I figured this was fair. However reading Fred Wilson's post today, in which he said he paid 2 pounds for In Rainbows, made me wonder what others think is a fair price. I'm sure some people paid more than me, and others would've paid less. It's chump change whatever way you look at it, for anyone earning a wage, so it's not really about the money from the consumer's perspective. But there is certainly an interesting principle here about what you think an album sold via an artist's website (or their social network page) is worth. So even if you're not a fan of Radiohead, insert your favorite artist in the poll below and let us know what you're prepared to pay if the 'middleman' is cut out.Free Polls- Take Our Poll

  Next week I'll be in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Summit. I'm also attending the Mobile 2.0 Conferenceon Monday 15 October, and will pop my head into the Widget Summitevent being held by Niall Kennedyon the same day.Today Read/WriteWeb is the first to announce the Mobile Launch Pad demo companies at Mobile 2.0. These are all exciting and up-and-coming mobile web startups; I'm looking forward to checking them out next week. Here is the launchpad list:Part 1:Heysan- http://heysan.com/Taptu- http://taptu.comMippin- http://mippin.comMobile Research- http://www.mobileresearch.com/Part 2:Webwag- http://www.webwag.com/RuleSpace- http://www.rulespace.com/KyteTV- http://www.kyte.tv/ExMachina- http://exmachina.nl/We'll be reviewing some of these products over the coming weeks.As well as the above startups, the speaker listat Mobile 2.0 is a who's who of the Mobile Web world -- so keep an eye on Read/WriteWeb next week as we provide coverage of this event.

  Our digital lifestyle Network blog last100has been tracking the upheavals in the music industry over the past couple of weeks. First Radiohead releasedtheir new album entirely via their website (I got it and it's awesome!), then Nine Inch Nails (a band which has experimented with the Internet a lot before) announced it has freed itself from recording contractsand become a free agent, and now Madonna is reported to beclose to leaving her long-time label Warner Bros. Records for a reported $120 million deal with concert promoter Live Nation, Inc.last100 has been tracking all of this news and editor Steve O'Hear today offers up an analysis of where the music industry is at. The artists are experimenting and the record labels themselves are under big pressure. Steve wrote:The record industry is in dire trouble and the major record companies know it. According to the IFPI’s most recent figures, “physical” music sales were down 11% to $17.5bn in 2006, and, blaming piracy — both CD copying and online file-sharing — the IFPI says that overall music sales have fallen for the seventh year running.However, none of this was unpredicted, and in post-Napster2003, Steve Jobs appeared to offer the recording industry a way into the future, through the iTunes Music Store. People didn’t wantto steal music, argued Jobs, and if paid-for downloads could compete on price and convenience, then many of those illegal file traders would be converted back into paying customers. As a result, Jobs insisted on the unbundling of albums; instead all tracks would be offered for purchase individually, at the same price — 99c — whether they be a new release, top 40 hit, or an older and more obscure song. To which the majors reluctantly complied, and would later learn to regret.Fast-forward again to 2007, and although paid-for downloads are on the increase, they aren’t rising nearly fast enough to make up for the loss in revenue from falling CD sales. By Jobs’ own admission, on average only three percent of music on an iPod originates from the iTunes Music Store. As if to rub salt in the wound, iPod sales accounted for nearly half of Apple’s total revenuefor 2006.Instead of recognizing that the record industry’s aging business model, even with the intervention of Jobs, is a broken one and in desperate need of a fix, the response has largely been litigationcoupled with the introduction of technology, in the form of DRM, designed to enforce copy protection, which, ultimately, just inconveniences paying customers.If the iTunes model isn’t the answer, and business can’t go on as usual, then what is? Here are five alternative models for selling music, many of which are actually being tested by artists, entrepreneurs, and even the major record labels themselves.Read full story at last100

  Ellen Levy, a Silicon Valley veteran who has worked at companies like Apple and Softbank Venture Capital, built her new firm, Silicon Valley Connect, on the principles she learned while Director of Industry Collaboration and Research at Stanford's Media X. Media X is an industry affiliate program that liaises between industry representatives and the university.Upon arriving at Media X, Levy quickly realized that "the university" was a complex ecosystem and not a single entity. For outside businesses, interacting with the university in a manner that was beneficial to their goals was not always a simple task. Levy realized that the key to getting things moving in the right direction was to ask good questions.She decided that Stanford needed a virtual reorganization around ideas (which was plausible, where a structural reorganization was not). Using common tools of engagement (requests for proposals, graduate student funding, focus days, conferences, and meetings and correspondence, Levy was able to build the Media X program to a peak of 25 partner companies with a minimum investment of $50,000 in the university. Twice she had to close the door to new companies because they had all they could handle. Her biggest innovation was that you have to ask the right questions to get the ball rolling.Levy talked about an RFP she put together for Cisco and Nokia which was basically a sheet of questions that they had focused on hashing out over a month. By asking who at the university was doing research that informs about how mobile phone applications can be used around the world, Levy received 17 proposals from colleges around the university -- and not just technology focused areas of the school. The right question led to the involvement of the entire university from medicine to law to engineering.Of course, Levy said, it's all about ROI. But ROI doesn't mean the same thing to everyone involved and has to be translated accordingly. For businesses, it means return on investment, for universities in means research of interest, and for the government it means results of importance. For everyone, the bottom line is: what can we get out of this?Levy left the audience at the BIF-3 conference, with three guiding principles the she learned from her experience at Stanford:Start with good questions. The question, said Levy, is the universal language.Relationships over transactions. Translate why people should be at the table together.Sufficient metrics don't yet exist to measure what you get out of the network effect (which says that every time to add someone to your network, everyone in the network benefits).

  Google announced this morningthat geotagged YouTube videos will now be viewable in a featured content layer of Google Earth. The company quietly addedthe ability to easily associate a geographic location with your videos at upload over the summer. At least in my part of the world, there's quite a few videos that have been geotagged already. This new layer sounds like a lot of fun and could be quite an educational experience as well, depending on video selection (see below).As far as I can tell video is not yet integrated with Google Maps, so that would be the next logical step. Video is one of the most compelling mediums in existence and its inclusion in local search could really bring some zing to a search field everyone expects to be huge. Google Earth is likely another service with the bulk of its impact still far ahead of it.The company didn't discuss whether there was any kind of filtering of the videos, though up until now there has been little incentive for video spammers to geotag their content. Now that geotags will take on a new relevance for searchers it will be interesting to see if existing filtering tools or perhaps simple popularity will be sufficient criteria to vet this content for inclusion in Google Earth. YouTube cynics who think nothing on the site is worth watching should spend some time on the community filtered StumbleUpon Video.The Google Maps team says the YouTube layer is similar to its Google Book Search layer added in August.

  About 15 years ago, Euan Semple had a rather serious medical problem. He talked to his local general practitioner, then to an expert who after a few weeks of impersonal tests and questions told him there was nothing wrong with him. Disheartened, Semple went online to seek out people with a similar issue and ended up finding groups and forums that led to a solution to his problem.This experience stuck with Semple, who 7 or 8 years ago launched talk.gateway, an online, internal social networking platform for the 30,000 employees of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Today, 23,000 BBC employees talk on the talk.gateway forums, 5,000 are using wikis to collaborate on projects, and 4-500 are blogging. Bringing social networking to the BBC seemed like the inevitable thing to do, says Semple, recalling the early days of the project.There exists a potential for collaboration over the web that didn't exist before, according to Semple, but not everyone at the BBC agreed with him. Some at the BBC saw his project as a waste of time and he initially had to fight to get people to accept it. Semple recalled that at times forum threads would grow divisive or silly, but he encouraged people to self moderate and asked questions to elevate the discussion rather than stepping in and being the "grown-up." The result of creating an environment where users were trusted was that they began to learn how to take responsibility for themselves.Erica Driver from Forrester Research has an excellent postabout Semple where she identifies 4 lessons learned from enterprise web 2.0 adoption at the BBC. Briefly (I'm paraphrasing):Enterprise web 2.0 can encourage collaboration.Start small and define ownership clearly. (At the BCC, their system was owned by everyone.)Trust your users and they'll trust you (and each other).Push your comfort boundaries.I think Semple best sums up the lesson to be learned from his experience at the BBC in a quote from the bio distributed to conference goers, "If you make systems too serious or too business-like, people won’t use them. But, as a consequence of blogs and networks, it is possible to connect your brightest and best people with each other and with their organizations. Business is based on relationships, and this way you actually talk to the people you want to talk to."

  digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/tech_deals/New_VC_Model_For_Small_Scale_Financing';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';There is a great meme circulating about how the VC industry needs to adapt to a world with massively lower barriers to entry. Paul Graham - from YCombinator - who is leading this change more than anybody has the definitive post. Its worth a careful read. Fred Wilson, from a more traditional but still very innovative VC (Union Square Ventures) agrees with the general trendand is well positioned to play by the emerging new rules.There is a wonderfully entertaining rant by Dave McCLureabout how VCs had better get with the program or else. He hits a very serious point about standardisation of deal terms and online closing process being essential. Here is another clearly heartfelt postthat would probably be echoed by a lot of entrepreneurs.When I first heard about YCombinator, I thought “incubator” and even worse “drive by VC”, both late cycle excesses in the Web 1.0 boom that led to a lot of capital destruction (in small chunks of course). As is so often the case, when history repeats itself, it does so with a surprising twist. Which now makes me think that this might be a sustainable new model.The model clearly has almost nothing to do with traditional VC. The big “VC aristocrats” (aka “Tier 1″) with their $multi-billion funds and huge success stories behind them will almost all say that it is classic late stage bubble excess. At some level they have to think this as they certainly cannot play in the new rules where $300k might be a Series A. Many of the Tier 1 players, who made their fortunes in IT, are also generally thinking, along with Nick Carr, that IT Does Not Matter. They believe that the big wave of opportunity has moved onto frontiers such as CleanTech and personalized medicine.The A&R model from the music industry offers some interesting parallels for this new world of lots of small web start-ups. A&R(Artist & Repertoire) defined by Wikiepdia as:“In the music industry, Artists and Repertoire (A&R) is the division of a record label company that is responsible for scouting and artist development. It is the link between the recording artist/act and the record label, generally to help with the artistic and commercial development of the label’s artists. An A&R person is often required to handle contractual negotiations, find songwriters and record producers for the act, and schedule recording sessions.”In this new world the A&R function - scouting and entrepreneur development - is done by new style VCs such as YCombinator, angels and angel networks. They are independent of the “record label”, which we can now think of as the big platform acquirers (GYM and the newly energized AOL and maybe soon Facebook - making a rather unpronouncable GYMAF), but they have good connections with these platform companies when it comes time to exit.The A&R guy would hang out in the Clubs checking out new bands. Years of experience gave them great intuition to make quick judgement calls, essential when a bit of dithering might mean you went down in history as “Decca Records turning down the Beatles”. The most fundamental skill however was a well tuned ear for the “clapometer”, seeing the enthusiasm of the audience at first hand in a tiny basement and extrapolating from there to Shea Stadium.Like any analogy it cannot be stretched that far, but it does fit some recent trends, particuarly the trend to younger entrepreneurs. Fred Wilson kicked up a storm a few months agowhen he simply observed that they were seeing a lot more young entrepreneurs. Young people obviously know better what appeals to other young people.More fundamentally, the music business and this new start-up model have fundamentally different power laws to traditional VC. “Classic VC” worked on a portfolio with say 10 deals, 1 could be a megastar, 3 reasonable returns, 3 make their money back and 3 bomb totally - or some variant on that theme. The new model might have 100, but still only 1 megastar. There is only one top of the charts or only one Google/Facebook/eBay. That sounds like a bad deal but it is not because the returns to the megastars are massive, many will make a reasonable income (derided by VC as “lifestyle businesses”) and even the weak ones can get sold to at least recoup the money. The maturity of “pay as you go infrastructure” changes the financing rules dramatically. You don’t need to use precious equity to finance capital expenditure. You use a small amount to build the service and get some traction. By the time you need to scale the risk profile is dramatically different. This is where quasi-debt structures are likely to evolve (i.e. with some Warrants so the debt provider gets a small equity (”kicker”). It is like the record company saying “wow the kids love this, crank up the presses”.This new model also dramatically changes what the entrepreneur needs from their VC in addition to cash. In Enterprise IT, the VC’s “golden Rolodex” and reputation was worth more than the cash; it signalled “survivability” to a CIO burnt by doing deals with start-ups. In the new era many sites don’t even bother with About Us, as the decisions are taken one click at a time based solely on the value of the service.The new VC may show some additional value by advising on how to scale and maximizing valuation on exit. These are valuable but not mission critical. The sustainability of this new model is based on three fundamentals:1. The continued evolution of mature web standards so that new services can easily be “plugged and played” in the acquirers platform. This trend looks pretty solid. It should be a key financing criteria. 2. The continued growth of online advertising. The gap between time spent online and $$ spent online is still “big enough to drive a truck through” so this should be OK. There is still a lot of innovation needed to generate engagement and to demonstrate measurability - but that will probably happen and “is another story”. 3. GYMAF and other large companies continue to fail to meet the emerging trends with internal R&D and therefore will always be willing to pay a premium to acquire from outside. This trend looks solid. It has been true for decades and is even more true when the next “hit” is completely outside the normal range and is so dependent on fickle consumer taste. Record companies that tried creating their own bands ended up with The Monkees (and that was the success story!).

  We've heard from a couple of reliable sources that social network Bebois about to announce a developer platform very soon. Apparently it will be a "platform API". The source of these rumors is a Bebo investor, so we think it's on the mark. Bebo is one of the largest social networks in the world and is above MySpace and Facebook in some parts of the world (e.g. it is number 1 in the UK).Earlier this week we heard that MySpace will launch its 3rd party developer platformin just a few weeks. And of course the instigator of large scale social networking platforms, Facebook, announced their "open platform" in May 2007. Although it turned out to be not quite so open, the Facebook platform has been probably the year's biggest Web success story to date.So the social network 'platform wars' will be well and truly on, once MySpace and now Bebo launch their developer platforms! Watch this space for more on the Bebo news...

  Linden Labs, makers of Second Life, announced a partnership with IBM and nearly 30 other companies today to work on creating a layer of interoperability across all online virtual worlds. This layer, the plans for which are being discussed publicly for the first time at today's Virtual Worlds Expoin San Jose, would allow users to port identities and other assets from one virtual world to another.It's a logical next step for the medium of virtual worlds and one that could cause their number and size to grow substantially. It could also lead to bitter, if sometimes humorous, conflict between users identified primarily with different sites. Nick Carr warned this morningthat the move will likely lead attacks on peaceful Second Life residents by ogres from World of Warcraft.Is the move towards interoperability a meaningful announcement and what kind of future could it lead to? I asked three industry experts for their opinion this morning.A Musical Tour of Select SecondLife LocationsIncreasing User NumbersWagner James Au is the founder of New World Notes, a blog focused on Second Life. He was an embedded reporter on staff with Linden Labs in the games early years and is now working on a forthcoming book about SL. Au told me that he sees the interoperability announcement as very related to today's release of the Electric Sheep Company's simplified Second Life browser; both are events that could be key in turning Second Life into "a truly mass market phenomenon." That seems plausible to me; other virtual worlds are far more populated than Second Life and its official client is notoriously difficult for beginners to use.Making mass access to virtual worlds more viable could lead to any number of events. IBM dealt with a relevant situation just last month when it was the target of what's believed to be the first labor strike in Second Life. Nearly 2000 people from around the world stormed the company's SL business center is solidarity with striking Italian IBM workers on the 27th of September. Innovation in IdentityBarb Dybwad, Producer of the gaming Joystiqand Engadgetnetworks at Weblogs, Inc, says the interoperability announcement raises the possibility of a standards based environment of incredible fecundity - the kind of thing the web at large should embrace more than it does. "It's basically mashing up Second Life with concepts like OpenID and web standards and turning a once proprietary walled garden model into open architecture," she said, "and that's a good thing for users and businesses alike."Professional virtual world gadfly Eric Ricetold me this morning that it would not be easy to translate identities from one platform to another. He's known as the character Spin Martin in most of the worlds he visits, including Second Life where he's the owner of one of the premier event spaces in the world. That's not the case in the warfighting world of Halo, however, where Rice feels the need to operate under a more battle-ready identity. Likewise, graphics standards are wildly different from world to world and Rice said that residents of some of the more visually high-end worlds would likely take on a "Not in My Backyard" attitude about ugly avatars from less visually compelling worlds if interoperability presumes a direct translation of avatars. Rice also predicted that some worlds would only respect standards in theory while in practice building non-compliant but technically superior avatars and functionality for their users.Innovation Through Open Architecture"I think digital identity/avatars is one component of it," Barb Dybwad told me in response to Rice's concerns, "but they go beyond that and are talking about opening the architecture in the platform itself - including transactions and integration with existing web services using web standards. That could be big."I asked Barb if she thought the move could make Linden Labs more relevant to the virtual world market in general than it currently is. "What this work could do is open the market completely so almost everyone could add virtual world functionality on top of their existing services; so there would be a million second lifes. It distributes the virtual world market instead of hoarding it under linden lab and i think that's a smart move for them."Dybwad believes this type of platform could become nearly ubiquitous online someday soon. "I'm playing a few other MMOs and I definitely see a future where gamers and even people who don't identify as gamers are spending much more time inside virtual worlds," she told me. "It's an incredibly compelling experience. It's experiential in a way that things like Facebook and Myspace don't quite get ... until they make their own 3D platform on top of themselves."Standards are never an easy thing to agree upon but it's exciting to thing that these questions could be close to seeing some working answers developed. One thing's for sure - when the time comes I'd appreciate if you'll have pity on my poor, under-dressed avatar.