Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feedor by email.Note: If you would like to sponsor the Weekly Wrapup- which gives you a banner ad in our feeds as well as on site - please contact the editorfor pricing details.Web NewsThis week was dominated by Google OpenSocial, a project that will tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers can publish widgets to with one set of code. The project wasn't officially launchedtill Friday morning US, but throughout the week there was a lot of discussion about the impending release. When news first surfaced of OpenSocialat the beginning of the week, it was said to be 3 fairly generic API calls; and initial partners were 'second tier' social networks such as Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. So at that point OpenSocial was viewed as a threat to the big social networks, MySpace and Facebook in particular.However Google's real coup was announced on Thursday US, when it was revealed that the world's top social network MySpace had joined OpenSocial as a partner. Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace, said that "this is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network." This announcement put the pressure squarely on Facebook, whose platform has been criticized in the past for not being open enough.Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick took a more critical look at OpenSocial in a post entitled OpenSocial: Three Big Concerns. Marshall asked:Is Google exercising leadership or control?Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another?Why couldn't this all be based on microformats and other existing open standards? These are important questions - check out the post and comments thread(see also digg) for a fascinating discussion.Facebook's Response?At this stage it's not known if Facebook will join OpenSocial. However, the young company isn't standing still. Next week Facebook will launch its "Social Ads" advertising service. This will take Facebook ads outside the social network and enable third party sites to run them. Essentially this is Facebook's answer to Google's Adsense, so it will be watched carefully in the industry!Also next week we'll hear more details on Facebook's "Project Beacon", an internal project that will allow Facebook to gather buying information about its users on third party ecommerce sites, in exchange for free advertising in the news feed from those third parties.Web ProductsHulu Peeks at the Public with a WhimperHulu, the online video project from Newscorp and NBC/Universal - with participation by Sony, MGM and others - began its highly controlled opening to the public this week. The Hollywood-content-only, wildly over funded project opened up a private beta to a few thousand users. However it is US-only and seems to just be filled with old episodes of TV. As Marshall Kirkpatrick grumbled, you won't likely be able to interact with the Hulu site for months and much of the content is available on other sites, in their video players, now.Marshall's conclusion: there's nothing courageous or innovative about Hulu - the whole project is quite the opposite in fact. Huge media is exposing its crown jewels to the web because it has to - much as they wish it wasn't, this internet thing is real. The initial offering that Hulu is bringing to market is shamefully uninspiring and woefully inadequate for a new world of media.Plentyoffish: 1-Man Company May Be Worth $1BillionThis week we caught up with Markus Frind, owner of leading online dating site Plentyoffish, a site he runs almost single-handedly and earns a great deal of money from. In our post, Markus said that POF will earn $10 Million + next year (which puts it at around $30k per day). He also compared his business favorably to Facebook, noting that per page view, Plentyoffish has 5-10 times the click through rate of Facebook. So by his calculations, POF's 1.2 Billion page views per month is the same as 5-10 Billion Facebook page views per month. Facebook "only" generates 40 billion page views a month and yet it has a $15 Billion valuation. You do the math and see if you agree, but either way Markus Frind is a huge success story on the Web.You can find many other startup profiles in our Startups category.AnalysisWhy Amazon's HaaS (Hardware as a Service) Strategy is a WinnerWe all know the term 'Software as a Service (SaaS). The term SaaS was coined in a conference in 2005 and then popularized by Salesforce with its "No Software" motto. Today Google is one of the strongest backers of this approach, with such products as Gmail, Google Reader and Google Docs. And ever since Bill Gates' famous Internet services memo in November 2005, Microsoft has been promoting the concept too.But today there is a new, similar term: HaaS, for 'Hardware as a Service'. Hardware has always been available as a service through dedicated hosting providers, but it was never so well abstracted until Amazon introduced S3 and EC2. Emre Sokullu explains why in this post, by comparing Amazon's HaaS strategy to Google Adsense.Amazon Dynamo: The Next Generation Of Virtual Distributed StorageContinuing the Amazon theme this week, Alex Iskold explored Amazon's highly available storage system called Dynamo. Since early last year,the e-commerce giant has been making forays into becoming a Web OS company. Alex concluded that Amazon is on track to roll out more virtual web services, which will collectively amount to a web operating system. The building blocks that are already in place and the ones to come are going to be remixed to create new web applications that were simply not possible before.The State of Office 2.0 and its FutureEmre Sokullu's post is a great overview of Web Office and where it's headed. He wrote that over the past 10 years, Corel, Sun, IBM and others have tried to compete with Microsoft in the office software business, but thus far none of them have been able to take a significant chunk of Microsoft's large market share, which generates revenues exceeding $15 billion each year. These companies have tried everything; including Sun open sourcing their StarOffice suite and releasing it as the free OpenOffice. Yet, even this very compelling move has not been able to make a serious dent in the market.However, with web 2.0 and the rise of Rich Internet Applications there are renewed hopes for entrepreneurs to be able to compete with Microsoft's Office juggernaut. Now these smaller players can leverage the sharing and collaboration capabilities of the Internet, remove installation and maintenance frictions, and provide globally accessible office software.You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.R/WW Network Blogslast100This week our Digital Lifestyle blog last100had a feature post analyzing Google's mobile phone plans. Daniel Langendorf wrote that we’ve been waiting a long time to hear from Google about its mobile plans and the so-called Gphone or Google-powered phones - but that wait may be over soon.Alt Search EnginesAltSearchEnginesreleased the November edition of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines Listthis week. ASE Editor Charles Knight says that 2008 will prove that the Future of Search (FoS) is the Vertical Search Engines (VSE) plus (+) a Virtual User Interface (VUI). FoS = VSE + VUI. Check out the list to find out which alts are leading the charge. Also Charles was featured in a Newsweek article, which asked: Is Google Vulnerable to Alternative Search Engines?.Read/WriteTalkSean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalkchatted with David Karp, the CEO and founder of Tumblr. Tumblr is a platform that makes it easy to express yourself on the web. In some ways, it is very similar to Twitter and other services like it. This week Tumblr announced a number of new features, which Karp talked about in the podcast.PollPoll: Are We Still Changing the Web?There was some blogger discussion during the week about whether there is innovation happening on the Web currently. So in a poll we asked: are there enough startups and initiatives changing the Web? Here are the results:Yes, there is more Web innovation today than ever 33% (35 votes)Yes, but not as much as previous years 27% (28 votes)It's about the same 10% (11 votes)No, there is not enough Web innovation today 18% (19 votes)The bubble's going to burst! 8% (8 votes)Other (please comment below) 4% (4 votes)70% of respondants think there is still innovation happening; only 26% were pessimistic about this. So that's good to hear! We here at Read/WriteWeb think there is still a lot of innovation on the Web - and we do our best to cover and analyze it all for you each week :-)That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
TechCrunch has uncoveredpart of what Facebookwill be announcing next week at ad:techin New York. "ProjectBeacon" is an internal project that will allow Facebook to gather buying information about its users on third party ecommerce sites, in exchange for free advertising in the news feed from those third parties.The way it works, according to a leaked document obtained by TechCrunch, is that participating partner sites would give buyers the option of sending purchase information to their Facebook news feed (i.e., "Username bought a product at Partner Site"). Third party sites don't receive any monetary compensation for participation in Beacon, but in return they get free advertising in the Facebook news feed. On their end, Facebook gets highly valuable user data, which they can use to better target ads, and they get increased brand awareness (on those retailer web sites).Image from TechCrunch.As with most things involving the news feed, Facebook users will have finely tuned controls over which participating ecommerce sites can send purchase information to their news feed, and can choose to send all data, send no data, or ask after every purchase on a site by site bases (or, users will reportedly be able to make those settings global).Beacon, at least as it exists in the leaked document that TechCrunch reported on, is a good idea. If Facebook can get just a handful of major retailers that have a lot of reach on the Internet to participate, they'll be able to get a large amount of very valuable data on their users. Imagine buying a playpen on Amazon and then getting ads for baby toys on Facebook -- that's very powerful stuff. Further, I think if the privacy controls are done well, people won't look at this as an invasion of privacy because shopping is already such a social activity for so many people (just take a trip to your local mall to see what I mean). As long as you can easily leave embarrassing purchases off the news feed (or purchases that are made as presents for friends who might read said news feed), this should fly with users.What do you think about Facebook's planned tie-in with third party ecommerce sites? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/University_Defies_RIAA_Demand_to_Release_Student_Downloaders_Names';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';The University of Oregon (my alma mater, coincidentally) is believed to be the first US educational institution to refuse an RIAA demand to hand over the names of students alleged to have illegally downloaded music. Detailed reporting and lengthy discussion can be found at SlashDot- one alumni tech blogger's perspective below.The Oregon Attorney General, working with the University, has filed a motion in court to quash the legal move by the Recording Industry Association of America, which the University says is trying to force the educational institution to perform a legal investigation for the benefit of a private corporation. The agrieved parties ought to perform their own investigation, the University argues.A number of the names requested are of students living in University of Oregon dorms, making it impossible to determine which of the students living there downloaded the music, representatives of the school said. The U of O is infamous for its inhumanely cramped dorm rooms, though, making it improbable that one resident could have committed such an act without the other being intimately aware.According to the elderly gentleman in line at the coffee shop this morning who first told me about the news (we were discussing In Rainbows, which was playing on the stereo there) - the music industry needs to get with the times and stop taking their giant profits from the old business model for granted.
Florida-based DailyMeis a personalized news aggregation service that creates a daily online newspaper that can be delivered at set times via email or browsed from the web. The site aggregates news in a wide variety of topic areas from over 3,000 mainstream and blog sources, including the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Engadget, Time Magazine, and BusinessWeek.DailyMe lets users choose and prioritize the news topics they are interested in tracking from a large list of prepackaged topical sources. Users can further drill down the topic modules by entering keywords - for example, only receiving Internet news related to "Facebook." Users can also subscribe to specific sources, which can be refined by topic or keyword.Setting up a newspaper is easy and the interface is slick, though I had a few issues. First, every time you add, move, or remove a source from your DailyMe selections lineup, the site has to refresh -- which is slow and annoying. I also had trouble with some of the Javascript scrollers, which got stuck a few times and wouldn't let me scroll to the source I wanted. Javascript effects are only good if they work!Another issue I had was with the implementation of keywords. DailyMe creates a separate page in your newspaper for each keyword, but that's not overly clear when setting the page up. As such, when I entered a bunch of keywords on a single line, I ended up with a bunch of blank pages.Slight caveats aside, however, DailyMe was generally a breeze to set up. The quality of the news that DailyMe displays is pretty good, though the site doesn't deliver a lot of it (however, the page is updated fairly regularly with new content). I am assuming that there is a mix of algorithmic and human editing at play here to decide which news stories are published at the top of the page, however that's just a guess. The real alluring aspect of DailyMe is that they have secured licensing agreements with their content sources, meaning that articles are delivered in full -- no teasers or headline links. This gives them a slight leg up, in terms of news contennt, on competing sites like MyYahoo!I think that DailyMe will appeal to a more mainstream crowd than news aggregators like Digg, Techmeme, Reddit, Drudge Report, or Fark. Because DailyMe gathers actual content, rather than just links, it feels more like a personalized newspaper than an aggregation service. Set up is easy enough to appeal to novice Internet users, and the site offers a wide variety of distribution methods, including scheduled email delivery and online publication. The site even offers an automatic printing service via a downloadable client (Windows-only for now) -- imagine how convenient it would be for some folks to wake up every morning to a personalized news report sitting in their printer tray.What DailyMe lacks, is a little polish. It could also use some more customization options - i.e., it would be great to be able to block keywords, as well as track them, and to be able to subscribe to custom RSS feeds (a feature the company has said is coming).
Back in June of 1999, while the dot com IPOs were coming fast and furious, I participated in a fantasy stock market game on Yahoo! Being 16 and having no real knowledge of the stock market, I sunk all my virtual money into Broadcom and the Mail.com IPO. Much to my surprise and delight, by the end of the month I was ranked in the top 100. Now that I know a little bit more about the market (not much more, mind you), and now that tech companies -- the only kind I know anything about -- are doing well again, I've often thought it would be fun to try my hand at a virtual stock market game, but unfortunately, Yahoo! long ago discontinued theirs.Happily, in our email tips box this week came word of two new startups, The UpDownand Big Smarty, have launched fantasy stock trading games that let users compete for real cash prizes. Both take very different approaches and have vastly different aims.The UpDownAt The UpDown, users are given $1 million in play money to invest in the real stock market however they wish. Each trade costs $100 to make (virtual money) and anyone who outperforms the S&P 500 Index gets paid (real money). Each month the site dishes out cash to any member who has outperformed the S&P in the given month, and over the past 12 months (or since they joined). The UpDown also pays members weekly for submitting the best stock analyses. Analyses are rated by members, but it's unclear if community ratings are a determining factor in who gets paid.Interface-wise, The UpDown is very slick and basically modeled after a real-world trading application.The money comes from real investments the site makes based on the aggregate market data from the site. In that regard, the site is very similar to Marketocracy, which launched in 2000 and uses the data from over 65,000 model portfolios (filled with play money) to manage their very real, Masters 100 fund. The fund has consistently outperformed the S&P 500 and has gained a 3-star ratingfrom Morningstar. So the idea is plausible. By adding the competition component, which could motivate users to be more serious about investing their play money, The UpDown could have better results than Marketocracy.The UpDown is backedby Swiss serial entrepreneur Joachim Schoss, who sold his most recent company in 2004 for $221 million. The site was founded by three Harvard students and is headquartered in Cambridge, MA.BigSmartyBigSmarty Wallstreet is fantasy stock market that gives out up to $50,000 per month in a variety of tournaments. For example, the $200k Racegives a $1,000 cash prize to the first player to double their portfolio from $100,000 to $200,000 in play month, while the WallStret BINGOgame involves picking 25 stocks that will gain between 1% and 5% each month, each week, a lucky winner gets a $200 cash prize."Our goal is to become the ESPN of Wall Street, where we can discover the superstars of stock trading," said Douglas Burdick, CEO of of the Chattanooga, TN-based company. "We've combined the fame and fortune aspects of Fantasy Football, American Idol, MySpace and The World Poker Tour and wrapped them all into a world-wide competition."Phew! That's a mouthful. But for stock market novices or those with only a cursory interest in investing, BigSmarty's alternative approach might work. Those who are more comfortable with tradition investing tools, however, might find BigSmarty's games gimmicky. I'm not sure where the company's business model lies (I guess advertising? The data gleaned from most of these games is a lot less likely to be as helpful as the trading data The UpDown and Marketocracy collect), but they seem to have some cash to throw around for now. BigSmarty recently announced a $50,000 "World Series of Wall Street" tournament that will run next January and February -- top prize is $15,000.The site is operated by the Wallstreet Investor Network, which sells a stock trading training course.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/OpenSocial_Three_Big_Concerns';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';The Google-lead initiative called OpenSocialis all the buzz this week with anyone interested in online innovation, but beyond all the enthusiasm there are a number of questions that ought to be asked more visibly than they have been so far.OpenSocial is a hugely ambitious project that would tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers could publish widgets to with one set of code. There are some issues that need to be discussed about OpenSocial, however. It's not all a bed of roses, believe it or not.Here's my list of concerns, what's on yours?Is Google Exercising Leadership or Control?When rumors about OpenSocial started to take shape it appeared that it would be all based on Google - that communication between social networks would have to go through Google. According to participating companies now free to discuss the platform, that's not the case. An application could jump from MySpace to Ning without ever having to communicate with Google. Still remaining is the question of Google's control over the standards creation process. It's not possible that one of the largest companies in the US and the largest in this consortium would act entirely out of concern for the world at large. You know they bullied everyone else involved into accepting their terms of openness, at least a little and probably a lot.Google has control over a frightening amount of information about our world, from maps and email to genetics and the world's libraries. Tell me it's a brave new, open social world and Google is leading the charge and I can't help but be skeptical. They make great apps but I won't accept the brain implant no matter how open Google assures me it will be.Are These Write-Only APIs?While most APIs tend to be read-only, the OpenSocial APIs might be capable only of allowing widgets to be published from one network to another. Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another? That's not being discussed at all. The phrase Open Social implies portability of personal and social data. That would be exciting but there are entirely different protocols underway to deal with those ideas. As some people have told me tonight, it may have been more accurate to call this "OpenWidget" - though the press wouldn't have been as good. We've been waiting for data and identity portability - is this all we get?If This Is Good, Will Official Sanction Kill It?Web 2.0 application adoption tends to develop entirely outside of the official IT plan. Big media's "viral content" is almost always awful. When The Man tries to "get hip" it's usually a real disaster.Why couldn't this all be based on microformats and other existing open standards? Why the mysterious, brand-driven, limited APIs? Perhaps the culture of control and mega-corporate blessing is the only thing that the big players participating could comprehend. In that case it's probable that OpenSocial will likely be more closed and more anti-social than many of us would like.There's a whole lot of excitement around OpenSocial, and with good reason. I'm excited to see what it makes possible - but I'm also very cautious to see how reality compares to big words and an impressive participant list.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Amazon_S3_Exceeds_99_99_Uptime';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';We're hearing of more and more startups using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for their storage needs; and this stat will please both them and their users. Webmetricsreported today that Amazon S3 maintained more than 99.99 percent uptime for the month of October, exceeding the performance requirement of its recently introduced SLA. Webmetrics monitored the response times and availability for the REST- and SOAP-based APIs for Amazon S3 during October, using its GlobalWatch Monitoring platform. Performance results for each API were as follows:Web ServiceAverage UptimeAverage Response TimeAmazon S3 REST API99.9915% 1.63 secAmazon S3 SOAP API99.9912%1.55 secS3 has more than five billion objects currently under management; including for37Signals, webmail.us, YouOS, ElephantDrive, adaptiveblue, and more. Indeed just this week PollDaddy, the poll app we use at R/WW, reported they'd switched to S3. Polldaddy told us that "the system [S3] is very stable and all polls will now be served off Amazon S3 so there should never be any lag."Starting October 1st, Amazon introduced a new SLA for S3 guaranteeing users 99.9 percent service uptime. If uptime is less than 99 percent, customers can apply for a service credit of 25 percent of their total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99 percent but less than 99.9 percent, customers can apply for a service credit of 10 percent of their monthly charges.Once again we're seeing the benefits of Amazon's HaaS (Hardware as a Service) strategy. As Emre Sokullu said in his article, Amazon is leveraging its deep scalability know-how and expertise. It's making web publishing even easier and cheaper - andreliable. This is a real game changer on the Web, especially in this new age of utility computing.
NYTimes.com has today launched a new version of its technology section, which includes more aggregation of news from around the Web. Of most interest perhaps is that its Techmeme-like news aggregator, Blogrunner, has been fully integrated into the Tech frontpage. It has the headline "Technology Headlines From Around the Web" and is positioned in the middle of the page. Blogrunner links will also feature at the bottom of NYT articles. Finally, two new feature content providers were announced today: IDG Media Brands and paidContent.org.NYTimes.com/Tech Editor Saul Hansell told Read/WriteWeb in an email that Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year." Further, Hansell said that "unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren't trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts."Blogrunner.com is a news aggregator that was acquired by the Times Company in 2005. NY Times has been building on the servicesince then - at one stage it was called "The Annotated New York Times". In February 2006we wrote that Blogrunner offered an "interesting way to remix the NY Times and bring in external citations"; although we didn't think it was one of the top news aggregators at that point.It's taken a long time for NY Times to integrate external news aggregation technology into their website, but kudos to them for doing it now. It provides opportunities for leading tech blogs - such as Techcrunch, PaidContent and of course Read/WriteWeb - to distribute their content to a wider audience. It also exposes NY Times readers to the more social - and arguably much faster - news cycle of leading blogs.Blogrunneritself still seems behind Techmemein some areas. For example Techmeme provides an easy-to-scan look at all related stories, on its frontpage. Whereas you only get the top story on Blogrunner's frontpage - you need to click the "related" link to see all the coverage. Also, and admittedly this could be seen as a pro rather than a con by mainstream readers, the publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors (thankfully R/WW seems to be among the chosen ones!).So there is a strong editorial focus with Blogrunner, which NY Times states in its press release "enables readers to get a thoughtful overview of the day's top print and online coverage, all on one site." I think this is a sensible move, as a key part of the NY Times experience is its reputation for editorial quality - so Blogrunner should leverage that. As noted above, Google News and Techmeme by comparison are automated (although with both, the initial news sources were editorially selected).All in all a great move by NY Times - tell us what you think in the comments. Will you use the NY Times Tech frontpage more because of this new feature?
The big news of the day is that MySpace, the leading social networking platform, has joined Google's OpenSocial projectas a partner. OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web - and it will be officially released tonight here. The press release today states that the MySpace/Google partnership "spearheads an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications." It also states that MySpace will continue building out its own MySpace Platform, which will support OpenSocial.We will have a deeper analysis of the news later today, but for now here are the main bits from the press release. That is followed by a screenshot showing Flixter in MySpace, and a video that Robert Scoble did with Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.“Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialized development for every platform,” said Chris DeWolfe, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of MySpace. “This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network. We’re pleased to collaborate with Google to establish a landmark standard for social applications.”As a founding member of OpenSocial, MySpace will provide critical user mass and platform guidance. The OpenSocial standards are designed to evolve through contribution from the open source community and as new features are developed by various partners. Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.“As the most trafficked website in the country and the most popular social network in the world, MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social Web,” said Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer of Google. “We’re thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative.”Here is a screenshot of Flixster integrated within MySpace (click for full-size image):Robert Scoble videointerview with Chris DeWolfe and Eric Schmidt:
For the most recent episode of Read/WriteTalkI sat down with David Karp, the founder of Tumblr. Tumblris a platform that makes it easy to create Tumblelogs - which Wikipedia defines as: A variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. One of the many tumblelog sevices is tumblr.Tumblr is announcing a number of new features today. We touch briefly on these features in the podcast, but also discuss David's vision for Tumblr. We also discuss how his service is specifically different than two competitors (Twitter and FriendFeed). In this post, I'll quickly cover how Tumblr is different, as well as put the spotlight on the new features being announced for Tumblr.New Features It has been six months since David and his colleague released Tumblr 2.0 and at that point they were still only working on it part time. (Beyond Tumblr, David was providing digital media consulting services in the New York area.) This is the first release since they started working on the project full time -- and they've been busy. David explained that it includes over 400 new features, fixes, and improvements. Beyond fixes, the features seem to cluster around four important themes for this release: Supporting Audio PostsUpgrades to Video Posting Private Communication: Channels Easier Integration Points (APIs)Audio Posts According to David, one of the most requested features was to support audio posts. The new version of Tumblr allows you to create an MP3 audio file or use your phone to create one and post up to one audio file per day. It will then play within a flash player on the post. Upgrades to Video Posting Before this release, Tumblr only recognized embed codes from major video sites. Now, they are supporting any video or Flash embed code. They also have partnered with Vimeoto allow, from phone or browser, posting videos directly to your Tumblelog. It should be noted that Jakob Lodwick, founder and CEO of Vimeo, participated as an angel in the funding round that Union Square and Spark Capital led a few months ago - so I'm sure the partnership between Tumblr and Vimeo is deep. Private Communication When I was interviewing David, he was very excited about the ability to support private group communication from Tumblr's posting tools. They are calling this capability "channels." Obviously, there are a lot of tools that are trying to make it easy for groups to collaborate, but to the extent a group is comfortable with the Tumblr posting UI, I could see this proving effective. Easier Integration - APIs The Vimeo integration is clearly a good example of a traditional partnership with Tumblr. However, they also have expanded their API and now support JSON. This is allowing applications to be built on top of the Tumblr API. Some of the companies that have taken advantage of the APIs already include Jottand Disqus. The importance of this is clear when you look at the value other companies have gotten from opening up their APIs. For example, when interviewing Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, on an earlier episode of Read/WriteTalkand he emphasized the importance of Twitter's APIs saying, "the API has easily 10 times more traffic than the website." Competition It is important to point out that there are a number of other companies that are operating either in adjacent areas or are direct competitors to Tumblr. TwitterWhen I first learned about Tumblr, the first service that jumped to my mind as competitive was Twitter. I asked David how he felt Tumblr was different than Twitter. His response was: Twitter is a service you use to tell people what you are doing. We look at Tumblr as a service to share those experiences ... It's also interesting that Union Square Ventures has actually invested in both Twitter and Tumblr. When Union Square announced the Tumblr investment on their blog, they proactively responded to the question of whether they are competitive services: We don't think so. As you can read in our post on investing in Twitter, we see Twitter as a communication platform ... By contrast, Tumblr strives to be the easiest place to express yourself online, to create your web presence simply and beautifully. In the designing the best service to tackle their respective missions, both Twitter and Tumblr have become services that enable short-form expression. That's why many people see Tumblr and Twitter as competitive services. But, this comparison is superficial and does not grasp the goals of each service. If Twitter succeeds in fulfilling its mobile communications goals, all the problems that Tumblr addresses will still exist; and vice-versa for Tumblr. So, in our opinion, these two investments are not competitive. FriendFeed In the area of aggregating other web-services, FriendFeedseems like the most natural competitor to Tumblr. In our interview, David also contrasts Tumblr to his understanding of FriendFeed, but acknowledges he hasn't tried the service yet. This is understandable as the service is still in a private beta. It's probably worth noting that Bret Taylor and Jim Norris founded FriendFeed as Entrepreneurs in Residence at Benchmark Capital after leaving Google. They have a great track record for developing innovative web applications while at Google including Google Maps, Gmail and Google Groups. While right now they seem more focused on aggregating different feeds from your life (such as Flickr, Twitter, YouTube) and letting you publish them in places like your blog or Facebook profile, it is a very early service so time will tell how they compete in the long run. Other Competitors Beyond Twitter & FriendFeed, there are other companies you could perceive as competitive to Tumblr. For example, Jaiku which was recently acquired by Googleand Pownce which was founded by Kevin Rose. However, both of these really seem like direct competitors to Twitter. Therefore, they are probably only as competitive with Tumblr as Twitter is. Conclusion To learn more about Tumblr, I'd encourage you to listen to my interview with David. I'd love to hear what you think of Tumblr in the comments below. Are they competitive with Twitter and FriendFeed? What do you think of the new features released today?
WordPressfounder Matt Mullenweg was at WordCamp Argenita yesterday where he announced the forthcoming launch of a new product offering - the WordPress Theme Marketplace.As liveblogged by Leo Prieto of the popular Spanish blog FayerWayer, Mullenweg told conference attendees:"The idea is that designers will be able to upload themes, we put a price (Automattic takes half), and users can navigate the directory and quickly select, pay and install a template, everything from the same place and without major expertise." (Thank you, Google Translate. And thanks to San Francisco based consultant Antonio Altamiranowho Twittered about the announcement.)The Theme Marketplace will provide an incentive for developers to build high quality WP themes and provide a frame work and distribution channel for those already interested in selling themes. No time frame was announced and the options for the WordPress.org community aren't clear yet.For buyers this sounds like a great idea, as long as the price point is fair and the variety is wide enough that it's not obvious you bought one of the 20 themes for sale. I'll be curious to see how pricing is handled as there will be a wide range of types of customers interested.For sellers a 50/50 revenue split is hard to look at at first, but will probably be acceptable in exchange for the prominent placement and automation involved. The company behind WordPress, Automattic, now has a growing list of ways it makes money and is doing well enough that it reportedly turned down a $200 million acquisition offer recently. None the less, calls to the company for comment went to a voicemail box that said "You've reached Matt, leave me a message." That made me laugh.
With the rise of social networking and online photosharing, more and more people are putting their likeness online. But often, it's hard to get a perfect shot of yourself. Holding a camera out in front of your body and looking in a mirror (how I took the photo below), you often end up with something crooked, poorly lit, with a distracting background and messy hair -- not really the way you want to represent yourself on social networking sites perspective employers (or love interests) might be looking at!Enter Pixoo.us, a new service based in Spain that employs a network of graphic designers to fix profile photos to people to their specifications. Pixoo.us, which styles itself as a "beauty salon for social networking sites," is currently running a close beta test of its services. When it opens, profile picture touchups will cost $19.95 each and files are delivered within 24 hours.I had a chance to check out Pixoo.us over the past couple of days. I uploaded the photo below yesterday afternoon:I wanted to really put the Pixoo.us artists through their paces, so I asked for a pretty extensive touch up on my picture. Since I've cut my hair since that photo was taken, I asked them to give me a trim. I also asked them to fix the distracting background and odd angle of the photo, remove my glasses, and dress me in something more professional. That's a pretty large order to fill, but true to their word, by this morning, I had an edited photo waiting for me:While the results on the first pass aren't perfect, they're not bad either. My hair is more controlled, I'm in a suit, my glasses are gone, and the background is easier on the eyes. Everything I asked for was addressed. The only problem is that the whole thing looks a little painted -- but that is likely a result of which of the site's artists worked on the photo (I imagine results will vary from artist to artist) and the amount of work I requested. It would be great if the site also encouraged users to request a style for their editing work (i.e., painted vs. photorealistic) so that the company could match you up with the appropriate artist. Oh, and I'm not sure why they gave me a little gray in my beard; at age 24 isn't really something I want yet -- though I suppose it may make me look more distinguished (they also got my eye color wrong, but that's not something you could tell from the original photo and they would have had to guess).Pixoo.us offers a satisfaction guarantee, so theoretically, I could reject this result and have it refined by telling the site what I dislike about it. Once I accept the photo, however, the image is saved and delivered in a large number of sizes optimized for almost 50 social networks.The Pixoo.us virtual beauty salon is an interesting idea, and with so many millions of social networking users, most of whom don't know the first thing about fixing a photo in Photoshop, there is likely to be a market for this. More technical savvy readers of this blog may not fall into that target user base, but I would not be surprised if Pixoo.us does quite well servicing a rather broad niche.
MSNlaunched its sustainability focused content portal, MSN Green, this week and the announcementlooked good enough. MSN will distribute videos and articles on environmental news from a wide variety of partner sites including heavy hitters TreeHuggerand Grist.org.Now that the site has been live for a few days, it's clear that MSN Green is nothing more than an object lesson. If you think that big company acquisitions of small technology innovators lead to stagnation - wait until you see what a content partnershiplike this looks like. MSN Green is a classic example of cynical crap; a super low-investment way for big media to sell ads against ostensibly important content.How is that the case? Here are just a few of the ways.There's no mention of Green on the MSN front page.There's a whole lot of links to a whole lot of content projects there - but nothing pointing the bulk of MSN traffic to the option of learning about this oh-so-important initiative. The Green page itself is all about links to other MSN content - it's enough to make you think that Green is nothing more than a niche marketing tactic to drive marginal eco-engaged yuppies to the entertainment and financial news sections of MSN. Of course this is no surprise, but then it's no surprise that the whole project is a joke, either, is it?Less than 25% of the content on MSN Green is from independent environmental specialists.There is no shortage of content available, but these celebrated partnerships are really just window dressing while MSN selects a handful of old, politically safe content from partners that publish hundreds of new articles every day. Ask anyone who's been acquired in a content deal and they'll tell you it's an awful struggle to get any of the formerly grass-roots content featured meaningfully on a big media portal - even if that portal paid a whole lot of money for the content. I imagine this distribution deal is one the independent partners will just try not to let themselves think about too often, until they need to pull it out for bragging rights or to secure similar deals.The content hasn't changed since the site launched three days ago!The content could never change and Chevy would likely keep renewing that huge ad on the site. Mission accomplished. What a joke. It's a good thing this is the only MSN site I've been able to find that doesn't offer an RSS feed - because nothing would likely ever come through it.The videos section of the site is almost entirely populated by licensed VideoJugcontent.VideoJug is a great site for evergreen tutorials, but there's a world full of timely environmental news video available, even from existing partners. Perhaps this way no one will notice when the the video section doesn't change for 6 months or a year, though. Yahoo! at least pledged to go carbon neutral when launching their environmental portalback in May (see our review). It was very nice of them to take time out of their busy schedule turning reporters over to the Chinese government for decades of imprisonment in order to launch a green portal and go carbon neutral.Moral of the story? At least some of these deals, but MSN Green at the very least, are worthy of nothing but disdain. If ecological crisis were no big deal then this wouldn't be either. As it is, this kind of big media eco-cynicism is strikingly offensive.
According to New York-based rmbr, which is currently operating in closed alpha, organizing photos is a pain. When you get back from vacation, tagging, sorting and organizing your 400 vacation photos is a lot of work -- and no one wants to associate vacation with work! Instead, many people just dump their photos in chronological order into a photo sharing service like Flickr or Webshots. And most of your friends likely don't want to click through your entire vacation slide show just to find the small handful of photos that might be of interest.To make the process of tagging, organizing, rating, and sorting photos less work and more fun, rmbr has developed a series of games based around photosharing. This concept is called funware, and according to rmbr co-founder and CEO Gabe Zichermann, a veteran of the computer game industry, funware is already employed all over the web. Yahoo! Answers, he told me, is really just a research game, i'm in like with you is a flirting game, and so on.Users can import photos from any popular photosharing service into rmbr. Once the photos are inside the application, users can discuss and vote on them using an interesting scale that ranges from 'sucks' to 'cute' to 'funny' to 'cool.' Users are also encouraged to play games around their photos and attempt to win points toward a site-wide competition -- Zichermann told me that eventually rmbr would like to award cash prizes to top point getters as an incentive to use the service.The point of the site is not just about having fun and competing for points, however. While discussing, rating, and playing games based around their photos, users are actually contributing valuable semantic data to each image. rmbr has developed a number of games already, including standard favorites like "Memory," where you match photos, but one of the most intriguing games I was shown was one called "Super Photo Match." In the game, the a user selects a photo and chooses a handful of words to describe it. Friends then attempt to guess which words were used to describe the photo and whoever gets the most matches wins.Unbeknownst to players, while having fun playing a seemingly innocuous game, rmbr is gathering the information provided to learn about your photos. Those words used to describe the image are actually tags, and if multiple players use the same word to describe a photo, it more likely to be an accurate description. The idea behind all of rmbr's games is to get users to do things like tag, organize, and rate photos without making it feel like that's what they're doing -- in other words, remove the work from photosharing.Though rmbr can be used as a full photo storage solution, Zichermann told me that the company is really more interested in addressing the tagging/fun layer than the storage layer. They fully intend to free the organizational data that they create for users and let people export their photo data back out to the third-party storage services they already use. The company is currently working on a two-way iPhoto connector, but with online services it is a bit harder to make that possible. Zichermann told me there are a lot of great APIs that allow you to take data out of photo services, but very few people want to put data back in, so adding new tagging data back into a photosharing site, for example, is not always easy.rmbr is currently in private alpha, but you can sing up for a slot in the beta slated to begin later this month by entering your email address on their site. What do you think about the idea of using funware make the process of tagging and organizing photos less work? Is a rmbr a service you would use? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
