There was a time before Facebook when social networking on the Internet was about making anonymous connections with people you'd never met before rather than a way to keep an eye on the people you already know. Some of my closest friends today began as anonymous online acquaintances ten years ago -- people who I shared a common experience with and didn't exchange personal information with until I was good and ready. With some of the newer breed of social networks, such as Facebook, which requires that you use your real name, that sort of anonymity is impossible.The Experience Project(EP), which launched a public beta about a year ago, is built specifically around the concept of remaining anonymous while socializing. The site has grown to 250,000 members, almost 60% of those added in the past three months, and is backed by an impressive line up of angel investors including Ron Conway, Kathryn Gould, and Steve Blank.According to EP, by emphasizing and encouraging anonymous interaction, the site allows people to open up more than they do on other social networking sites. One member gushes, "this is the most real representation of myself anywhere -- friends, family or online. I've never felt so accepted nor had more fun anywhere online."Users create profiles on EP based around experiences, which are immediately transformed into groups where other members experiencing the same thing can share stories and feelings about that issue. These can range from the serious, such as medical conditions, battles with addiction, or marital problems, to the whimsical, such as being in love, or having seen the latest episode of Dancing With the Stars. You can also form groups around goals, such as the desire to lose weight.EP supports all the other basic social networking features we've come to expect from this type of site: friending, private messaging, blogs, moods (status), activity streams, virtual gifts, message walls, and a few that are less common like a dream journal and confessions page. But all of this is surrounded by a site that has taken great pains to keep everything anonymous (should the user desire). EP can evenblur pictures you upload to the site to make sure no one deciphers you secret identity, and unlike many social networks, deleting your account from the Experience Project is a painless process that can be done from the account settings page.Where EP really shows potential, though, is not in the whimsical stuff, like talking about Halloween costumes(though that sort of thing has a place and helps keep users entertained), but rather in the site's ability to set up virtual, anonymous support groups for a range of serious issues. The I Experienced Racismgroup, for example, has 136 people talking about racism, sharing stories, and discussing how to deal with it. This is powerful stuff and I suspect that the promise of anonymity makes a lot of people feel more comfortable about opening up regarding these serious and potentially sensitive issues.ConclusionIn the end, EP won't replace the socializing you do on sites like MySpace or Facebook, but it might be a good alternative for people who want or need to discuss issues that they don't want broadcast to all their friends. Or it might be a fun way to meet people who genuinely share the same interests as you in a safe and anonymous environment.

  Blog search engine Feedsterhas had the following notice on its frontpage for at least a few weeks now:There is no sign of life on the site and the Feedster bloghas already been killed off (the big 404 in the sky).In terms of the blog search market in general, Feedster has been struggling for 3+ years now - this RWW post in July 2005shows how Feedster was falling behind Technorati even then. Now Feedster seems to be, if not in the DeadPool, then at least in the PurgatoryPool. PubSub was another victimin this market.Nowadays, the blog search market seems to be made up of 3 main players - Google Blog Search, Technorati and Bloglines/Ask.com - and a lot of smaller players such as Zuulaand Blogdigger. Personally I still use Technorati a few times a week, and the search function of Google Reader. I also am a heavy user of Google's main search, which I find brings up good blog results (i.e. often I don't see the need for a specialist blog search engine). I did a quick poll of the other RWW writers. Josh said he still uses Technorati sometimes, but also Google Blog search. Marshall said that he uses Ask.com for minimizing spam, relies heavily on feeds with subscribers in Bloglines, and uses Technorati too. He finds that GoogleBlog Search is good for speed.What blog search engine do you use - and why?

  Here in the US it's the busiest travel day of the year and while media events and new product launches lay low, entrepreneurs and geeks are hard at work building the software that will launch in coming weeks. There's no better time to kick back and let yourself get philosophical.Social software is a whole new world in many ways and people everywhere are trying to figure out how to design effective and compelling applications. I offer for your consideration today three recent attempts to articulate social software design best practices. Let's discuss.Social Software Elements by Thomas Vander WalThomas Vander Walis the man who coined the term folksonomy, meaning classification through collaborative, social tagging. (His tagging tool of choice, you might note, appears to be Ma.gnolia.)Yesterday Vander Wal posted the following slide from a presentation he gave this month inStuttgart, Germany. Like any good venn diagram, there's just a little to look at here but lots to think about. I'd gather, for example, that Vander Wal suggests here that conversation is one place where identity and objects come into contact, involving both relationships between individuals and group membership. If you and I are discussing a photo online, let's say, then I'd like to know who you are, what groups you belong to and what our relationship is; if not explicitly then implicitly when that knowledge offers clear value to me. I think of it as a thought exercise, an opportunity to consider which factors in design to highlight for the sake of user experience. I'm sure there are other ways to read any single point of such a diagram, though. There's some smart discussion underway already on Vanderwal's Flickr page. Thanks to nonprofit tech consultant and North Carolina smart-guy Ian Wilkerfor posting Vander Wal's slide.OpenSocial's Recommended PracticesThough I like to make fun of OpenSocial by calling it OpenWidget and saying it's overhyped, there's probably more meat there than I've given participants credit for.One of the most interesting things to come out of it so far has been the OpenSocial "Social Design Best Practices." The recommendations include things like "focus on the 30-second experience; before distracting the user with expert features or sending invites, slow down and give the user a simpler taste of what your application is about." That's good advice that a lot of startups could benefit from considering.Massachusetts design expert Josh Porter wrote about the Google recommendations on his excellent blog, pointing out that only a few are specific to social networking sites. It's a good, simple articulation of social design principals. It may not be literally visual like the title of this post implies, but you can certainly use it for some visualization exercises.Factory Joe's Flickr Stash of Cool Design ExamplesFactory Joe, also know as Chris Messina of San Francisco consultancy CitizenAgencywhen he takes his cape off, maintains an excellent collection of screenshots on Flickr. He saves all kinds of good examples of contemporary interface design in the social software world. I point people to it all the time, now you can too.See also this collection of shotsof websites implementing the Carousel design (like iTunes coverflow) from the Yahoo! Pattern Library.I'm sure readers here can suggest other good screenshot collections for design consideration. These collections are a lot of fun to look at.There's So Much More to Explore!It's an exciting time in social media and design is a big part of that. There's an infinite horizon in design alone but also factors like Adobe's AIR and Thermo, not to mention the thrillingly tiny mobile world. The new web is supposed to be all about democratized participation (you can not only Read, you can Write to it too!) and usability will be an important part of making it not just sustainable but helping the web really live up to its potential.

  If you walk into any suburban Starbucks these days, you won't see people's faces, instead you'll see laptops.Moms and dads increasingly work from home; broadband took over the US and wireless isabout to do the same. Digital cameras and cell phones have become the eye witnesses of local events.More and more people are connected to the grid from places previously untouched by technology.And as they plug into the Internet, they bring with them something that did not exist before - hyperlocaldigital information.Information processing and information creation are what defines us as a species. When sitting in a localStarbucks, a blogger might write about what it feels like to be in Opelika, Alabama today, for example. On the way to work inLewistown, Montana an amateur photographer might take a picture of the local grocery store. And all over the US, teenaged clones of Justin.TV will record countless hours of their surroundings.The net effect of all of this is the increasingavailability of fine-grained information about locales. This information is both interesting and valuable. It issought after by people living in these places and by advertisers who are trying to reach these people. A handful of startupsare recognizing the big potential of local information - relevance. In this post we look at different aspects ofthe hyperlocality, from satellites to local blogs, and ponder how this information will be organized and monetized.User Generated Hyperlocal ContentThe picture at the top of this post is the view of my house produced by Google Maps.Even a few years back such picture would be unthinkable, but today we take it for granted and don't make much of it.Satellite imagery is an example of top-down hyperlocal content, but most hyperlocal content is bottom-up becauseit is user-generated. Photos and video are most familiar. Millions of users all over the world are taking snapshotsand streaming videos of their surroundings.At the start of the social media movement people got excited about tagging their content. While this is an effectiveapproach, it is not always precise. Lately we have seen more and more tools that allow users to specifythe location of the content more precisely. One of the more popular techniques is geotaggingor geocoding,in which users typically specify location using latitude and longitude coordinates. The corresponding microformat, called Geo microformat,allows people to geocode photos which are embedded into web pages.Admittedly some of the user generated hyperlocal content is of questionable utility. The video above shows a train leaving the Opelika, Alabama station.Besides serving as proof that the place exists and that there is at least one person with a video camera there, there is not much to it. But we would feeldifferently if the video had instead captured a local crime. This example points to a big challenge with user generated hyperlocal information - filteringand organizing it on a massive scale.Because there is so much of this kind of information out there, distilling the truly interesting content is a big challenge. Because this information is created by people all over the world using different tools and technologies it requires a combination ofmining techniques. User generated tags, titles, descriptions, geo information as well as sophisticated image and video processing tools have to be used together to make sense out of all this content.Self-Organizing Hyperlocal InformationPerhaps one of the most innovative and interesting usages of hyperlocal informationhas been developed by a startup called Dash. Launched at DEMOfall 2006, this company is creating one ofthe first distributed traffic systems for drivers. At the heart of Dash is a simple idea of havinga car computer connected to the grid in real time.Instead of relying of local news to report traffic jams, Dash drivers get traffic updates from each other.Each Dash system is linked into the local network with other Dash drivers, acting as a single node.The traffic information is automatically inferred by centralized software based on the location and speedof individual cars. Clearly, in order for this system to work, there needs to be a sufficient number of driverswith the Dash system installed on the road in your neighborhood. Yet, this example shows a potential power of automatichyperlocal information.Hyperlocal ClassifiedsLocal photos and videos may still be new to many of us, but not classifieds. Hometown newspapers have beenin the business of connecting people to local real estate, cars and jobs for quite some time. When Craigslist came online it changedthe rules of the classifieds game. And recently Craigslist went mainstream. We looked at job and real estate listings in Montana and found them quite vibrant.In all cities and areas where the site is available local newspapers are losing their business,because in most places you can post to Craigslist for free.Yet, Craigslist just scratches the surface of what is possible with local classifieds because it only offers rawinformation. It doesn't provide research. As we wrote in our overview of the classifieds marketseveral startups are creating vertical applications that not only show listings but augment them with research. For example, Truliais a vertical search and research tool for real estate.Another example of enhancing classifieds is adding salary information. The job search engine Indeedshows not only available jobs, but local and nationwide salaries for the exact job you are searching. Recognizing that classifieds are tightly coupledto research is important because most decisions, like getting a new job or buying a new house, are not made on a whim.Hyperlocal Social Networking?One of the big pet peeves of American culture is privacy. Arguing with your neighbors about who would pay for the fencebetween your houses was the thing to do in the 1950s, 60s and maybe even in the 80s. Are people ready to warm up to their neighbors?StreetAdvisorand FatDoorthink that the answer is yes.Both startups offer social networking based around your local neighborhood. While FatDoor is still in the stealth mode, StreetAdvisor is up and running.The angle that StreetAdvisor uses is asking people to rate their street as a segue into local social networking.The rating and information approach is certainly interesting, but it is still questionable whether peoplewho can't bring themselves to say hello to each other in person, will want to first connect online. The Alexa traffic chart for StreetAdvisor hintsthat the answer is no, but perhaps there is a spin on this that might just work.Aggeregating Hyperlocal InformationEven though people might not want to network with their neighbors, there is little doubt that people want to know what is going onin their neighborhood. The challenge of re-aggregating web information from the geographical perspective is big. Given that very littleof the content is probably geotagged, sites like Outside.inand PlaceBloggerare re-crawling the web to make this information available.The picture above shows a typical way in which local information is presented. In this case, it is from an Outside.inentry about the increasing fares of New Jersey transit. The information is aggregated from various sourcesand automatically tagged. The chart shows the amount of buzz on this topic in the past few days. The related links allow readersto explore more on the topic from local blogs and newspapers.Monetizing Hyperlocal InformationThe race to build businesses around hyperlocal information is not accidental.There is a belief that there's a big monetization play here. In our recent conversation,Outside.in CEO Steve Johnsontold me thatknowledge of the geography of the audience is very important to advertisers. He cited two examples.The first, was the current presidential election. Parties could send direct advertising to zip codes that are knownto be tipping points in swing states. Since the stakes are huge in each election, each party wouldpay big premiums to reach undecided voters on web pages with hyperlocal content.The second example he gave was local advertising. For a while, white pages made a business by selling ads.Hyperlocal web sites, however, promise to take the concept to a whole new level by enabling local businesses to deliver highly targeted and relevant advertising. But this isn't a simple problem.To make it work, one needs to build an advertising platform where local entities can bid on ads.The platform would need to make money on the volume the ads, since doing door to door sales in such a business isnot scalable.ConclusionThe global grid is becoming ubiquitous. It is growing at a mind boggling speed and absorbing enormousamounts of information. With the spread of the grid we are observing the rise of hyperlocal information.User generated media, classifieds, and other local content is increasingly more tied to specific geography.Despite globalization, hyperlocal information is very valuable both to people and advertisers.In the coming years, we will be seeing the rise of a new way to look at information - geography.Inspired by utility and the promise of hyperlocal advertising, startups are racing to build businesses that deliver highly relevant, local information to users.Hyperlocal information and aggregation is just in its infancy with much more to come. In themean time, please tell what hyperlocal information you find most interesting? What information services would you like to see around hyperlocality in the future?

  I am the wrong age for Facebook or MySpace. But I happen to have a relative who is in the LA music scene, who gave me a tour from his perspective - and now I totally get it. A few decades ago that is where I would have hung out. I am not looking for a social network. I cannot imagine choosing one single place as my only online hangout and I certainly don’t want the hassle of managing my identity and my relationships on multiple sites. However I am interested in how different tools give different pieces of the social networking puzzle; and what ties them together.When I wrote about LinkedIn compared to Facebook, some Facebook enthusiasts pointed out that messaging within Facebook is better. I think that is true, but I don’t want to use messaging that is controlled by a site - and I think that is true for most people who grew up with the Internet before social networks evolved. It may be nothing more than habit, but habit matters a lot for adoption.The reason that LinkedIn is so interesting is that it is the missing piece of the puzzle. We already have two good basic pieces:1. Blogging tool - Wordpress, Typepad or Blogger.2. Start page - Pageflakes, Netvibes or MyYahoo. My online social/business network happens to be WordPress + PageFlakes. PageFlakes is where I consume content and Wordpress is where I create it. If you are interested in what I write you RSS it into your start page. It's not hard.Sure, that could be MyYahoo, Netvibes or iGoogle instead of PageFlakes; and Typepad or Blogger instead of Wordpress. To update an old phrase: "you loan your attention you takes your choice." Choice really is the point. Unlike the all-in-one stereo system of Facebook, I get to mix and match my speakers and woofers as I want (yes I know, that analogy dates me). Switch PageFlakes for Netvibes? Sure, if it is different enough.What’s interesting is the ecosystem of vendors that work in the background to make my PageFlakes and Wordpress experiences better. Actually PageFlakes is really just a glorified layout tool and the clever stuff is in the apps that feed into my panes. There is still a lot of room for innovation in this area, around intelligent filtering. I think of RSS like SQL. It is a standard and that enables innovation and value creation. It is not ideal, but no standard is ideal.I am still a Wordpress newbie, so my use of widgets is limited. But I vow to catch up with Fred Wilsonone day and have all those widgets on my Blog (although load time is getting to a bit of an issue!) This is an area with lots of innovation that has the potential to a) make my Blog more interesting and b) make some money from my Blog (maybe just paying for my Starbucks habit). In that sense, PageFlakes and Wordpress genuinely are platforms, with RSS as the enabling standard.What’s interesting about LinkedIn in this context is:1. I don’t have a choice. It is the only site that has my business network. That makes me think I would much prefer to be an investor in LinkedIn than an investor in PageFlakes or WordPress. They have a network effect and that means big bucks.2. Most of my network does not have a Blog. So I cannot just link to their Blog via RSS. My guess is less than 10% of my contacts have a Blog. More are creating Blogs all the time, but the % is way below the threshold where getting an RSS feed from my network is worthwhile. Go into the business mainstream and that sub 10% with a Blog is still true. As Alex Iskold has pointed out, Blogging is in a digestion phase- so we cannot just assume that everybody will get a Blog. However if LinkedIn tries to become/remain a destination site, I think they will fail. I don’t want to check LinkedIn regularly, I've got too many other things to do. So they won’t get the busy biz guy that’s too old for Facebook. Nor will they get the Facebook/MySpace crowd who will see it is rather bland and uninteresting as a social hangout. The only people who will hangout regularly are people trying to sell you something; which will rapidly become self defeating.However a feed of what is happening in my business network, feeding into one pane on PageFlakes? Now that is interesting. Particularly because although nearly 80% of my business network is on LinkedIn, most of them are not active Bloggers. However if LinkedIn gave everybody a simple interface that was more MicroBlog like, and that worked well with Blackberry and other wireless devices, people could easily send out “personal press releases” about a new job, deal, project or whatever.As long as I had good filtering tools so I can tune how much I get by person, by periodicity and by type of news; that is a very useful service in the business world. None of this requires any single new thing that we all have to buy into - and no complicated new identity standard. It will just build on APIs and RSS and existing services.If LinkedIn becomes a feed and not a destination, the monetization question is the issue. It certainly cannot be CPM, but that's a weak model anyway. It could be subscription fees. If they really have all my network, would it be worth $10 per month to get that feed? From an ROI point of view that's pretty easy. If I had no alternative, I would pay.Alternatively they could move into success-based transaction fees. That would be harder to pull off, but could be a multi-billion dollar revenue play.If LinkedIn misses this, tries too hard to be a destination site and does not open up the API in a smart way, some start-up will find a way to beat them by leveraging email systems. We are still in the early stages of this game.

  The latest figures on the state of the US newspaper advertising industry indicate that print advertising sales have continued to plummet. Online ad sales, however, have risen significantly, though not enough to offset the sharp decline in print ad revenue.The Newspaper Association of America said that print ad spending fell 9% in the third quarter compared to the same period last year to $10.1 billion. Online ad spending, which rose to $770 million, makes up just 7.1% of the industry's ad revenue, and though up sharply from 5.4% a year ago, it was still not enough to offset the declines in spending elsewhere. On the whole, newspaper ad spending fell 7.4% in the third quarter.The biggest declines occurred in classified ads, retail ads, and national ads. The NAA blames the decline on "broader economic issues," such as fallout from the trouble in the US home mortgage industry.Even so, this marks the 14th consecutive quarter that online newspaper ad sales have seen double-digit percentage gains, reports Reuters. While the industry as a whole continues to suffer, the Internet may be the light at the end of the tunnel.The winners here may end up being online advertising networks, and especially Yahoo!, whose newspaper alliance continues to grow. Two weeks ago they added the New York Daily News- the fifth largest paper in the US with a circulation of over 700,000, and last week the consortium added 17 regional papersowned by the New York Times Co. (though not the Times itself).Yahoo!'s alliance now reaches nearly 400 papers, and though right now it only covers online job classified ad sales (via Yahoo! HotJobs branded sites for newspaper partners), it it likely that it will expand to display ads in the future, at least for some papers. Further, newspapers in the Yahoo! alliance use Yahoo! for their web site search engine, which means added search revenue for Yahoo!.

  We've discussedbefore on Read/WriteWeb about how we've entered The Digestion Phaseof the Web, a term that Alex Iskold coined. He defined it as "a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together." Tim O'Reilly has also been reflectingon how innovation has slowed down and consolidation is occurring.But something doesn't sit right with me when we start talking about reflection and consolidation. Both of those things are happening, for sure -- and much of today's tech news and blog coverage is about M&A and how big Internet companies are integrating web 2.0 features. Which is precisely the problem! It's not nearly as interesting as Web innovation. I can't be the only person bored with the tech blogosphere these days. How can we - as bloggers, entreprenuers, businesspeople - get back to thinking about actual innovation?A lot of the Web technology that has inspired me in recent months is Mobile Webapps and the Semantic Appswe're beginning to see blossomon the Web. Also, like Tim O'Reilly, I find myself increasingly interested in what is bubbling up from China and other international markets. It's not to say Silicon Valley isn't still fascinating (Google's OpenSocial and Android initiatives were both fine developments), but there are new innovations and markets that are in many ways far more interesting than what is happening in Silicon Valley.So in an attempt to break through to the other side, I've set myself the task of investigating 'the next wave' of Web innovation. It's something all our writers look for - e.g. Marshall Kirkpatrick's superb analysis of the Twitter ecosystem(and Twitter is certainly innovative and something to watch), and Josh Catone's analysis of facial recognition platforms. So what else is out there in terms of Web innovation?Where Web Innovation is Happening - All Over the World, in Certain SegmentsTangos Chan of China Web2.0 Review posteda very interesting set of slidesthat he presented at an event organized by Orange Lab, called "Web 2.0 in China: What’s Next?". He first makes the point that China's Web scene is not just made up of copycat sites - he says that phenomonem is happening all over the world. Then Tangos reveals some areas of innovation in China:Image via Tangos ChanWhen you think about it, the above list of current Web innovations could easily belong to any other country - including the US. Real or near time communications technologies (online forum, IM, etc) are a hot area of innovation currently; and again I point you to Marshall's Twitter post. In Rebecca MacKinnon's excellent summaryof recent China Web 2.0 events, she points to Tangos' comments on a couple of Chinese IM services of interest: Anothrand Jiwai. Anothr delivers RSS feeds to your IM client (it started out in Skype, but now supports others), while Jiwai is a similar serviceto Twitter.Jiwai homepageMobile Web has been on everyones list of 'The Next Big Thing' for a long time. The (potential) market is undeniably huge. Noted Mobile author Tomi T Ahonen blogged earlier this yearthat there are 2.7 billion mobile phones in the world. To put that in perspective: there are 800 million cars, 850 million personal computers, 1.3 B fixed landline phones, 1.4 billion credit cards, 1.5 billion TV sets. Tomi's post is from January, so the figures will have changed since then - but the point remains that Mobile Web is where a lot of innovation will happen, simply because that's where the users are. It's also well known that China, Japan, Korea and other parts of Asia are very heavy Mobile users - often at the expense of the PC.There will of course be amalgams of current trends with near future ones - e.g. Tomi Ahonen notedin an October post that the mobile social networkingmarket is worth $5 billion now. This is apparently bigger than the current revenue derived from browser-based social networks. Or as Jason Grigsby put it, "today’s big thing–social networks–is already bigger on mobile devices than on PCs." [incidentally I got the last few links from Marshall Kirkpatrick's Twitter stream!]A couple of innovative and well-liked Mobile Web appsI posted about recently are Fringand Shozu. Fring is a free mobile VoIP software, that lets you connect to all your IM services and talk for free when connected to 3G or Wi-Fi. Shozu enables you to send your videos and photos from your phone to the Web - e.g. your Flickr account, YouTube, Facebook. Plus the big Internet companies of the West are ramping up in mobile - particularly Google.In his slides, Tangos mentioned mInfo- a natural language mobile search service that works through WAP and SMS.This is all to say: there's a lot of innovation happening in the Mobile Web right now. They're not digesting or consolidating, they're inventing!ConclusionI'll discuss more about Mobile, Semantic Apps and other areas of innovation in future posts, but the one main point I want to make here: there is a ton of Web innovation happening out there. Beyond The Digestion Phase, beyond Consolidation, beyond Silicon Valley. Those things are all necessary and interesting, but beyond all that there is exciting innovation happening in the Mobile space, in places like China and Korea, in real-time communications platforms like Twitter, etc.When I was at the Mobile 2.0 conference in October, one of the presenters made a joke about how their small 1-day event compared to the much bigger Web 2.0 Summit being held later that week. The presenter said something like: "in 10 years time it'll be the reverse: Mobile 2.0 will get the big crowds and Web 2.0 Summit will be the niche conference." [it was said much more wittily at the time!]. That to me sums up the enthusiasm I see in Mobile Web and other segments. That enthusiasm is missing from other segments of Web technology, or at least in the coverage they receive in tech blogs (RWW included sometimes) -- where X startup gets a new social networking feature (yawn!), or X gets $X funding (who cares), or X is acquired by Y, or worse, X is rumoredto be acquired by Y! BORING!!!I'm not in a position to call a stop to The Digestion Phase. But I do want to emphasize that for Web technologists, entrepreneurs, bloggers - now is the time to focus on the next stage of Web innovation. Some of you will be busy consolidating your businesses, looking for M&A opportunities, integrating, reflecting. But don't forget that right under your nose is a lot of opportunity in the tech segments mentioned in this post.

  "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." Bill Clintoncan rest easy knowing that he will soon have more verb options when updating his status on Facebook. Facebook announced to developers last night that it will soon be dropping the word "is" from status message updates.The developer platform has already been updated so that external applications that update user status can avoid prepending the word "is." For now, status updates on Facebook still include the "is," but Facebook platform engineers promise that the change will be pushed to Facebook at large soon and make the lack of verb a default behavior rather than something you have to specify. "In a few, we will delete that parameter and change the default behavior to be that you must include your own verb," they wrote.Though the update is aimed specifically at developers, and it is still rather hazy whether this change will only apply to external applications that update status via the API or to Facebook as a whole, it seems likely that the latter is true.Status is a fairly important part of any social application, and I have noticed more and more of my friends utilizing Facebook's status feature on a regular basis recently (though, that could be because I have started using it more often in the past few weeks and thus have been paying more attention to it). It is, however, clear that a large number of people were annoyed by the lack of verb choice when updating status.A group to petition Facebookto drop the "is" gained over 163,000 members -- much more than the majority of Facebook groups -- and today is proclaiming victory based on the platform update. It was one of many groups crusading against the verb. Though it would be silly to say that 163,000 members speak for the rest of Facebook's 50 million or so members, it is hard to believe anyone would object to this change. I often see my friends already ignoring the is in status updates and ending up with clunky, incorrect sentences like, "Jim is just left the symposium early." I can't count how many times I've made the mistake of including the "is" when typing my status out and ending up with "Josh is is" -- it's just natural to want to use your own verbs. My guess is that Facebook initially included the "is" to help people understand what status was and how it was intended to be used, but now that people know what it is, dropping the verb is a great idea.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/music/SpiralFrog_Looses_3m_in_3_months_Big_Music_Still_Doesn_t_Get_It';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';SprialFrog, the big music industry's experiment with free music downloads, is bleeding money and considering hiring bloggers to improve their public profile. According to financial filingsrequired by the company's investors and dug up by Joseph Weisenthal at PaidContent, the company reported a Q3 loss of $3.4 million on revenue of only $20,400, leaving only $2.3 million in the company's bank account.That's a whole lot of money to throw away but it shouldn't come as any surprise. The SpiralFrog model is awful. Users get free downloads of DRM laden songs that they can listen to in Windows Media Player, but they have to periodically answer survey questions and view ads in order to for the songs to continue playing. The site itself looks like one big ad with music appended to it. While some music execs have publicly changed their tuneand said "going to war" with users was a bad idea - SpiralFrog's crazy plan is probably just a distasteful waste of money. The next step will be to annoy people with a marketing blitz.For a totally different take on free music downloads as an ad supported business, see our coverageof Peter Rojas's startup RCRD LBL. RCRD LBL is hardly a dream come true, either, but it sure leaves SpiralFrog in the dust.Wiesenthal quotes the company's report in the following response to the dismal numbers.“Execute marketing campaign in the United States aimed at 13-34 year olds, through one or more of the following approaches: hire gorilla marketing firms for unconventional promotions; consumer targeted press releases; advertising on some of the youth community sites; or hiring ‘bloggers’ to attract attention to us on the internet.â€�Here's one blogger, SpiralFrog, that will help attract attention to you any time there's a juicy story.

  Walt Whitman said that he liked to write in iambic pentameter because there is beauty in constraints. I think about that often when I use Google Custom Search Engine, which is at least once a day. Today, Google announcedthat its platform for searching inside a finite list of domains is now available for the first time in 40 different languages. (As UK semantic web developer Tom Morrispointed out, like all web projects CSE was always was international - it was just ignoring it.) See our in-depth write up of Google CSE's excellencein September.Now people with non-native English reading website audiences can make their sites searchable in other languages . Now people around the world who are researching any particular topic can easily build a search engine, with an interface in their own language, that brings back results from only the key reference sites in their field. The Custom Search API, leveraged to build even more tools like the increasingly popular Lijit(disclosure: a sponsor, but also a simply fascinating service), can now be leveraged in multiple languages as well.English may be the dominant language of the web, but there's no reason for it to be the only language of particularly useful web services. It certainly isn't the only language in which other forms of poetry are written.

  Last night, Mozilla released the first public beta version of Firefox 3. You can grab version 3.01b from the beta download site. According to Mozilla, the new release has fixed over 11,000 bugs as well as made the move to the new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine.My first impression of Firefox 3 Beta was, "This doesn't seem very different." After playing with a while, though, I started to notice a few changes -- mainly for the better. First on that list, Firefox 3 is fast. The release notes cite "major architectural changes" that have increased speed, and promise things will only get faster with each beta.Pages definitely loaded much faster in 3.01b than they do in the current non-beta release of Firefox (2.0.0.9), to the point where I was actually surprised when some often slow-loading pages jumped right up. For me, the improved speed is probably the most noticeable change while using Firefox 3 for regular web browsing, and is certainly a welcome one. Other changes that caught my eye include the rewritten download manager that lets you resume downloads (hooray!), integration with anti-virus software and built in malware detection, the ability to save tabs when restarting the browser (no need to force quit to do that anymore), single click bookmarking, and a simplified password manager.Unfortunately, one issue that still exists in Firefox is memory leaks. According to the release notes, developers plugged "over 300 individual memory leaks," but still after just a few minutes of browsing with just 8 or so tabs open, Firefox was using over 150mb of RAM -- and I often have 20 or 30 tabs open while writing and researching stories. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch noticed the same thing.In the end, I've switched back to Firefox 2.0.0.9 because none of the plugins I use on a regular basis work yet in Firefox 3. Eventually, though, the faster page loading and file download resuming will make the switch worthwhile. Here's hoping they fix those memory issues while they're at it. There is much more on Firefox 3 Beta on Techmeme.

  stumble itadd to del.icio.usWhen I first discovered Twitter, my reaction was much like many peoples'. I thought it sounded stupid. I, like hundreds of thousands of other people, have changed my mind. For all its downtime, UI awkwardness and challenges for the uninitiated, Twitter is a paradigm-changing communication platform that cannot be dismissed.Call it ambient intimacy as the video at the end of this post does, call it persistent social intelligence as I often do, call it the hive mind as I'm afraid it might be - there's something really powerful going on. World news is being reported first on Twitter, casual conversation being truncated and higher levels of involvement between people enabled - Twitter is poised to make a big impact on many peoples' lives.The service itself is simple enough, but hundreds of other applications and interfaces have been built on top of the all-too often shaky Twitter API. We wrote about our 10 favoritesover the summer, many of which were search engines and public message display tools. They keep coming - I just discovered PlusPlusBottoday, for example. I get a significant number of leads on Twitter that turn into stories here on ReadWriteWeb, something I've written about here.The 3rd party publishing interfaces alone could easily be the entire basis of an college class on contemporary interface design.I find myself talking at least once a week to other companies about lessons learned from Twitter-based third party interfaces.A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to write a blog post comparing the top Twitter interfaces available. I found though that there were too many to compareand that my own judgment would likely be too arbitrary. Instead, I've taken a survey.I've recorded the publishing tools reported to have been used in more than 700 publishing instances on Twitter over the last two weeks.I looked at the tools appearing on my with_friends page, on the same page of some of the most popular Twitter users and for every user appearing on the public time line at various times of day. If someone's with_friends page displayed 5 tweets in a row from the web by Robert Scoble, I counted that as 1 vote for the web interface. I saw a lot of Twitter messages in Spanish and Japanese. This post took me a very long time to put together (everyone on staff will be glad that I'm finally done, I'm sure) but I don't want to call it scientific. I do hope you find this interesting and useful, though. If you're still unconvinced that Twitter is useful, see the short video from MIT's Technology Review at the very end of this post.The World's Most Popular Twitter Publishing ToolsIn 717 instances of publishing to Twitter I saw 19 different tools used more than once and 5 more just once. The top 8 methods used to publish are as follows:Web49.5% (355)Twitterrific14.1% (101)IM 5.3% (38)TXT 5% (37)Snitter4% (29)Twitterfeed3% (23)Tweetr1.4% (10)Twit1% (7)According to my count:3rd party publishing tools accounted for about 40% of the use instancesThe top five 3rd party apps, listed above, accounted for 60% of that activityThe 16 remaining 3rd party apps I saw used made up 40% of use activityThough that looks like a healthy, balanced ecosystem to me, it probably also indicates that there is little chance of any but a few of these apps monetizing themselves. If there are 500,000 Twitter users total and we extrapolate on these percentages, I'd guess that Tweetr has about 7000 users and Twitterrific about 70,000. Both estimates are probably very high since 500,000 is only the number of estimated total (not active) Twitter users. Below are descriptions of these apps, screen shots, thoughts on the pros and cons of using them, as well as information about the 11 next most popular tools used.Web 49.5% (355)The web interface for Twitteris fairly good, obviously good enough for many people. There are, however, major disadvantages for the Twitter power user to having to go to the web page each time you want to interact with the service. If you don't find yourself using Twitter very much, you should try some of the other tools below.Twitterrific 14.1% (101)This Mac desktop app is an incredible success story early in the Twitter ecosystem. Twitterrifichas a simple but sharp look to it and it can sit above your other applications for persistent use. It's a very good piece of software.Twitterrific's userbase is so substantial already that it recently started inserting advertisements in the user interface and offering $15 premium subscriptions to remove the ads. Many users were upset about the $15, apparently there's a lot of charity cases who use Twitterrific - that or they don't really like it as much as they seemed to. Perhaps it's just a particularly cheap, whiny demographic. Can you tell I think that charging $15 for this, or almost any, application is perfectly reasonable? I do.It's striking that Twitterrific sees a lot more use than the native IM and SMS methods of interfacing with Twitter. Unfortunately for the makers of Twitterrific, there are some serious challengers on the horizon, poised to steal its marketshare.IM 5.3% (38)The third most common wayto interact with Twitter is by IM. IM users miss out on seeing their friends' avatars and they must have their IM clients bouncing constantly with updates. I would think this would inhibit their ability to engage in personal IM conversations, but obviously many people find this a compelling way to use Twitter. One of the advantages to turning on Twitter to your IM is that you can use Twitter's tracking feature. It's like a search feed for your keywords. Inexplicably, it's only available by IM or SMS. I might be wrong, but this strikes me as one more example of the half-hearted approach to the user experience that Twitter often exhibits. I can't live online without Twitter but for now I can live without the tracking feature. I wish I didn't half to, but I don't personally want to get Twitter involved with my IM.TXT 5% (37)Messages can be sent to Twitter by SMS text message by registering your phone number on the web and then sending notes to the number 40404. This is a very simple way to write to Twitter but it tends to be write-only. Unless you're in special circumstances, at a major event or using Twitter with just a small group of friends, no one gets messages sent to their phone by SMS. It's just completely impractical over any extended period of time.Direct messages sent by Twitter SMS are an easy alternative to email as well - a person's Twitter name is often easy to remember and a short SMS to 40404 is faster than composing an email.Snitter 4% (29)Snitteris a new desktop application that works on Windows and Mac computers using Adobe's AIR runtime (easy to download). Frequently updated, Snitter is a joy to use.You can select between multiple color schemes, there's a built-in link shortening tool and almost all information available on the Twitter webpage, including user profile info, can be viewed in Snitter. Most importantly, Snitter can sit above your other apps, it uses nice big avatars and highlights public replies sent with an @your user name by sounding a nice tone and putting that message in a box. It's small but satisfying interface decisions like this that make Snitter the best example of a Twitter-API based service that's a model paradigm changer in online communication. If you haven't tried the "fortune cookie" setting on Snitter, you should.If there's any good reason for Twitterrific to not charge for its application it's that Snitter is better.Twitterfeed 3% (23)Twitterfeedlets you publish any RSS feed to your Twitter profile. You have to give the program your Twitter username and password, but you can login to manage your feeds using OpenID. Where's Twitter's OpenID support? That's a good question.Some people really like automating the publishing of Tweets using Twitterfeed. I do not. I don't like reading them and I don't like writing them - I prefer to customize each message I send out, even if it's about a blog post or shared item. It's a much less personal experience this way, but many people clearly like it. I do subscribe to the local newspaper's headline Tweets, but that's all I'm interested in receiving that way.Tweetr 1.4% (10)Tweetr (tweet-r.com) is a wonderfully charming little Twitter app built in New Zealand (go team!). It sits on your desktop, is very easy on the eyes and has some cool features. It's another AIR app so it can be used on both Windows and Macs. Tweetr lets you post publicly available files for sharing and post URLs for photos from your webcam. Unfortunately the files are limited to 2MB, so even a single song can't be shared. When I tested it Tweetr made sound every time I did anything, including for all messages received. That was very annoying and a real lost opportunity in contrast to the joy of auditory notification of replies to you personally in Snitter. Twit 1% (7)Twitappears to be a Windows desktop Twitter client with a Japanese interface.Others with 5 or fewer appearances, in order of popularityTwitterfoxis a small toast-style Firefox plug-in for Twitter. It looks nice and clearly suits some peoples' use patterns.Spazis a gorgeous looking, open source, cross-platform desktop AIR client. It looks great by itself but you can upload your own CSS file if you like. Unfortunately, it's unable to sit on the top of my other apps on my desktop, sound options are limited and it's more pretty than well suited for heavy lifting.Hahlois an iPhone Twitter interface.Twitbinis a Firefox sidebar plug-in. It's easy to use but I found the avatars far too small and the updates too infrequent for my tastes. Twittertoolsis a WordPress Twitter integration, built by Alex King, maker of the WP Theme Viewer and himself a Twitterrific user. It's not well described on the site.Twitkuis a web interface that lets you view and write to Twitter and the now Google owned Jaiku at the same time. Not as cool as it sounds, in my experience.iTweet.netis another iPhone app.Seesmicis Loic Le Meur's psuedo-private Alpha-stage video micropublishing tool that can send links to Twitter. Le Meur himself is the most charming thing about the service so far. You should watch his videos.Moodblastis a multi-client publishing tool with the most obtuse web presence I've ever seen. I can't figure it out, but a handful of people have been able to apparently.Movatwitteris a Japanese web based Twitter interface that seems pretty straightforward.Twittergramis Dave Winer's audio tweeting service, which unfortunately too many people post to with no more description than "Twittergram!" Single appearanceFacebook, Twadget, Twitterpod, Pockettweets, FlockMore to come, I'm sureWho knows what incredible Twitter clients will emerge from the long list of contenders. It's a beautiful little ecosystem to watch. If you jump into Twitter, find yourself a good client and add a bunch of Twitter loving friends (mineare a good start) - you'll likely be exposed to all kinds of new ways to experience this exciting new medium.// By use of this code snippet, I agree to the Brightcove Publisher T&C // found at http://www.brightcove.com/publishertermsandconditions.html. var config = new Array();/* * feel free to edit these configurations* to modify the player experience*/config["videoId"] = 1311207190; //the default video loaded into the playerconfig["videoRef"] = null; //the default video loaded into the player by ref id specified in consoleconfig["lineupId"] = null; //the default lineup loaded into the playerconfig["playerTag"] = null; //player tag used for identifying this page in brightcove reportingconfig["autoplay"] = false; //tells the player to start playing video on loadconfig["preloadBackColor"] = "#000000"; //background color while loading the player/* do not edit these config items */config["playerId"] = 79489195;config["width"] = 530;config["height"] = 320;createExperience(config);

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/The_Nearly_Never_Ending_Market_for_Niche_Social_Networks';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';A niche social network for people recovering from addiction, called SoberCircle, hit Del.icio.us popular this morningand it made me think - "my goodness, the market for niche social networksmust be nearly infinite." SoberCircle has never been profiled on any of the top web 2.0 blogs and we haven't received any press releases announcing their support for OpenSocial - but the site is yet another social network that made a mark on the web today.Most people who follow new developments in web applications closely contend that MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn are so dominant, and their tiny challengers so numerous, that launching Yet Another Social Network is among the most foolish things an entrepreneur today can do. I disagree.What is a social network? Typically, it's just a website that offers users a profile page, the ability to publish to the web, to add other users as friends and to send user-to-user messages, or sitemail. That's simple but powerful stuff; it's functionality that countless real-world organizations will benefit from in the coming years as turnkey solutions become increasingly visible.Here's my 6 reasons why I believe that SoberCircle and many of the other seemingly random, obscure niche social networks online are in fact viable businesses in a huge, untapped market.There are huge numbers of users in play.The sheer number of people online already and coming online every day cannot be ignored. Many niche content sites, from sites about street drag racing to obscure medical conditions to drag racing while suffering from obscure medical conditions, that already receive traffic on more than monetizable levels. I talk to companies regularly that see substantial traffic to sites few of us here have likely heard of.If your niche website is not receiving significant traffic, and I know that many startup web app companies are not, then there's something wrong with your marketing, your product or your luck. It's probably not that your target market is saturated - there's very few that are.In-group communication is keyPeople will share information with groups of people they know they can relate to that they never would share in a general public forum. We all seek empathy and many of us have life experiences that cannot be meaningfully discussed outside of a context of shared understanding and a base of common experience. People in recovery from substance abuse is one such huge market, people with communicable diseases another, the insanely wealthy yet another - and the list goes on.Groups on existing social networks may satisfy some of this demand, but not the way that dedicated, topical "walled-gardens" will.Privacy is in High DemandTalk to the people at Vox, at Multiply, at Tumblrand elsewhere and they will tell you that there is substantial demandfor social networking and content publishing functionality behind a wall of permission.The idea that "privacy is gone" is itself an illusion. People choose what they publish to the open web and many choose to publish to closed pages for family, friends or even just personal consumption.Sex sells - on a plane, in a train, among stamp collectors and cheese aficionados.The page that drove so much traffic to SoberCircle today? A prurient taleabout "the most dangerous drug in the world," used in various crimes related to sex. (Not linking to it here, but you tried to click, didn't you?)Every niche that has its members has its scandal. People will come to your site if they can find that scandal and if they are interested enough in the niche, they will return. Fetishes themselves are infinite. I swear though, I read Valleywagdaily for research purposes only!Many people don't want to participate in general interest social networks.They will for work or a particular hobby, though.Data portability can enable a scalable soc net ecosystem.From OpenIDto OAuthto Open Widget - I mean Google's Open Social - many, many people are working to make it easier to move from one social network to another.When, in the glorious future, you can explore a new network with an existing login - knowing that if you choose to leave it you can take your new friends, writings etc. with you back to your home base, then social networks will flourish. When I can easilypost one blog post to both my Facebook notes and my SoberCircle profile (example only!) and another post to SoberCircle alone - then market conditions will have arrived for niche networks to truly thrive.Let's go forth and network!I really believe that this industry is just in its infancy. None of the incumbents are guaranteed total domination into the future and there's no reason to believe that the long tail of niche social networks won't prove economically viable, individually as well as in aggregate. Of course most startups in this sector will fail, that's the case in any sector, but as startup tech markets go I think it's a very smart market to be getting into right now.

  Just a couple of weeks ago, CNET's Don Reisinger wrote that Blockbuster was doomed. After posting a quarterly net loss of $35 million, closing 526 stores over the past year, and seeing its stock price tumble, Reisinger predicted that the company would be out of business in 2 years. "The way I see it, Blockbuster has two options: sell off the company as soon as possible or spend huge sums of cash on research and development and strategic partnerships with distribution companies to make downloading movies a viable alternative to Netflix," he wrote. "But unfortunately, I simply don't see this happening. I think Blockbuster will try to stay the course in the hopes it can find a way out. It won't."But Blockbuster CEO James Keyes doesn't see it that way. While he admits that pursuing Netflix hard with its Total Access service (by giving away free rentals that cost the company $29 million in the third quarter) was a mistake, he doesn't think the end is nigh.Keyes told the Associated Pressthat he believes in store rentals will be an important part of Blockbuster's business for at least 5 years (which assumes that Reisingers prediction of impending doom is wrong). Eventually, Keyes says that consumers will come to stores to download and burn movies to DVD at kiosks, or save movies to portable devices like phones or PMPs.Blockbuster will begin putting kiosks in stores soon, though initially, they will not be able to burn DVDs. The company will also put more emphasis on retail, and begin diversifying its revenue stream beyond rentals by selling electronics, soundtrack CDs, and books. Finally, Keyes plans to make use of Blockbuster's $7.7 million acquisition of the movie download service Movielink.Movielink, which was a joint venture between Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros., reportedly sold to Blockbuster for far below its asking price of $50 million. That the movie studios have such a lack of faith in the movie download model, and that the market is crowded with mammoth competitors, including Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft, probably does not bode well for Blockbuster. Further, if the study we reported on earlier today, which predicts a slow downin Internet speeds over the next couple of years, is accurate, it is unlikely that many people would give up discs for bits just yet.Photo credit: AP.Though kiosks and movie downloads make sense from a convenience standpoint -- no late fees, no chance a movie isunavailable, potentially infinite selection, etc. -- I'm still not convinced that Blockbuster can compete with Netflix. The major advantage they had over Netflix was the ability to offer free in-store rentals if people returned mailed videos to the store -- a practice that customers loved, but which cost Blockbuster $29 million in a single quarter. Keyes limited the free rentals for the Total Access program that were costing the company so much money, but that prompted 500,000 customers to leave the service.What do you think? Can Blockbuster ever compete with Netflix, Amazon Unbox, Apple iTunes, and the rest? Or are they doomed?