"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.”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.
When 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 higherlevels 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 way to 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 is unavailable, 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?
If you have a fast broadband Internet connection, enjoy it while it's still fast. According to a study by Nemertes Research, video and interactive web sites will begin to overwhelm Internet service providers as early as 2010."Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it's back to the bad old days of dial-up," Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson told USA Today. "The cool stuff that you'll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won't do it."According to the report, cable and phone companies, which provide 94% of the United States' broadband access, must invest about $55 billion to upgrade their networks to cope with the coming bottleneck. That is far more than planned, says Nemertes.The biggest upgrades will need to be made in upstream data capacity. Until recently, the web was mainly read-only, and service providers built their networks around downloading. But with the explosion of video and photo sharing, self publishing (blogging, etc.), and bandwidth-intensive activities like video conferencing, networks will begin to feel the strain on the upstream end."Two years ago, nobody knew what YouTube was," said Johnson. "Now, it's generating 27 petabytes of data per month."Much of the cost of upgrading will be in installation of higher-capacity lines, according to the Nemertes study. Verizon's new fiber optic service, FiOS, which reaches 1.3 million users in the US (myself included) is a start, but the study implies that the upgrade may not be happening fast enough to stave off an impending bandwidth crunch.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/TinyURL_Outage_Illustrates_the_Service_s_Risks';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';The link shortening and redirection service TinyURLwent down apparently for hours last night (it's still down, in fact), rendering countless links broken across the web. Complaints have been particularly loud on Twitter, where long links are automatically turned to TinyURLs and complaining is easy to do, but the service is widely used in emails and web pages as well. The site claims to service 1.6 billion hits each month.There are many free public alternatives to TinyURL, some with better ancillary features (see elfurl.comfor just one example). The name TinyURL is very literal and memorable though. I use SNURLmore often, myself.It's not good when so much of the web runs through a single service. For some, politics could be a consideration as well as technical considerations. The man behind TinyURL, Keven Gilbertson, uses his hugely popular website to promote US presidential candidate Ron Paul, which I personally find somewhat distasteful, and encourages people to use TinyURL to obscure affiliate links on their webpages - which strikes me as extremely distasteful. Presumably a Paul supporter would want our redirects to run wild and free too, unbeholden to a centralized service provider capable of holding us under its thumb (I joke, but really.) URL shorteners are important because they make long links much easier to communicate. The print world could learn a thing or two from these services; InfoWorld magazine, for example, used to to publish very short redirects through infoworld.com for all links it discussed. That's great for efficiency and brand recognition and makes me wonder whether all of us ought to have our own private TinyURL service.If there was some sort of distributed standard or tool that could be good as well. The Online Computer Library Center(OCLC) has run Purl.org(Persistent Uniform Resource Locator) since the 1990's but user experience there is something only a librarian would put up with. A public institution solving this problem gracefully might be as realistic as it would have been for the Library of Congress to have acquired Del.icio.us (my fantasy) instead of Yahoo!The moral of the story, though, is that it isn't supposed to work this way. There ought not be one single point of failure that can so easily break such a big part of the web.
According to the China Internet Network Information Centerthere are 162 million Internet users in China - a number that has grown by 140 million users in just the past 7 years. 7 million of those users already call Zhanzuo.com, China's largest social network, home.The Times of Londonis reporting that Facebookhas made an $85 million offer to purchase Zhanzuo.com. The Times reports that Zhanzuo.com CEO Jack Zhang and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have engaged in talks but that no deal has been completed. Facebook is denying the report.Facebook's English site already has 100,000 users in China, according to the newspaper. A purchase of Zhanzuo would give Facebook a dominant entry into one of the world's fastest growing Internet markets.Facebook, however, is denying that they have any intention to acquire Zhanzuo.com -- or any Chinese site, for that matter. Facebook's Director of Communications Brandee Barker told TechCrunchthat Facebook has not made any acquisition offers for the site. "No offer has been made and no acquisition in China is being considered by Facebook," said Barker. "And I don’t know who the spokeperson [sic] is that they are referring to in the story. The Times never contacted me or my team to confirm the accuracy of this story."
I used to write a blog about ebooks - some of you may remember eBook Culture(alas I let the domain name slip and so it was gobbled up by a squatter). Anyway, as a lover of both books and the Web, the vision of an Internet-connected eBook Reader has been one of my obsessions over the years. And now it looks like Amazon has, finally, taken the always-nascent eBook industry to the next level. This week, wrote Steve Levy in a rapturous article in Newsweek, Amazon will release the Kindle- an e-reader that uses E Ink and will have Internet connectivity. The latter point is what will differentiate the Kindle from its chief competitor currently, the Sony eReader that was launched in 2006.Kindle image via EngadgetLevy wrote in Newsweek that the Kindle " will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish." He unleashes other doozies of hyperbole too: "the iPod of reading" and "the first 'always-on' book".The Kindle will cost USD399, which is $100 more than the Sony eReader. But the wireless Internet connectivity easily makes the increased price worth it. The wireless is via a system called Whispernet - which according to Newsweek is based on the EVDO broadband service offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere and not just Wi-Fi hotspots. Here's Levy's description of what the device looks and feels like:"It weighs but 10.3 ounces, and unlike a laptop computer it does not run hot or make intrusive beeps. A reading device must be sharp and durable, Bezos says, and with the use of E Ink, a breakthrough technology of several years ago that mimes the clarity of a printed book, the Kindle's six-inch screen posts readable pages. The battery has to last for a while, he adds, since there's nothing sadder than a book you can't read because of electile dysfunction. (The Kindle gets as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two hours.)"The Kindle will be able to hold 200 books, with new releases being offered for just $9.99. Also, apparently blogs will be part of the service - at a cost of either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog. Matthew Ingram was appalledthat he'd have to pay. I'm awaiting details on this, because it sounds like premium content deals have been made with the likes of paidcontent.org. Either that or Amazon will try to make money from bundling feeds. It may be attractive to mainstream people who haven't gotten into RSS Readers yet, we'll have to wait and see. Like Matthew, I wouldn't pay unless there is a 'premium' offering (in which case I would certainly consider paying).Issues: 'Ugliness", DRM, PricingThere is some debate about whether the Kindle is as beautiful as an ipod. David Rothman, who has been blogging about eBooks for much longer than me, says it's ugly. And judging from the picture above, it doesn't look like something you'd cuddle up with in bed!David also notes the DRM issues - but then you'd have to say that Steve Jobs managed to circumvent that easily enough with the iPod. Amazon has, according to Newsweek, already gotten all the major book publishers on board. As with the iPod, there are mutterings from publishers about the low pricing. But long term I would expect Amazon to do exactly as Apple did and use their market muscle to easily push forward with the low pricing and DRM.Another issue that David Rothman brings up could be the one that Amazon gets unstuck on: formats. This is a hobby horse of David, as he is a fierce advocate for an open ebook standard. He asks:"Will Amazon’s Kindle work in the future with .epub files, or will Amazon thumb its nose at the IDPF, publishers and us e-book readers who are sick, sick, sick of eBabel—all those clashing e-book formats."That's an as yet unanswered question that we'll track.Books as a ServiceWhat is most interesting though is how Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, is positioning Kindle in relation to the e-commerce bohemoth. Yet again we hear the word "service" being conjured up: "This isn't a device, it's a service", Bezos said in Newsweek. The Kindle is being seen as "an extension of the familiar Amazon store". In other words, the Kindle is shaping up as a highly strategic move by Amazon. Probably much more important to its future business than the Web Services stack that has gotten so much (deserved) hype over the past year. Because the Kindle is literally going to change Amazon's core business model. This will take years to play out, but it all comes down to the dream that eBook fans have held for years: that books delivered electronically can offer much more flexibility, richness, search, communities, etc etc. But it all depends on having a suitable eReader device, which Amazon now claims it has created.When I wrote my 'goodbye' post for the blog eBook Culture in November 2004(yikes, is it 3 years since then already!), I noted my key themes in the eBook world: eBooks as a practice, not an object; eBooks and social networking; Remix culture (of textual content, in this case); and finding out what the various "jobs" of eBooks are in different contexts.eBook Culture logo, circa 2004I can't wait to get the Amazon Kindle, which must be a good sign that Amazon is on the right track! ;-) I think Amazon will overcome the issues that David Rothman and others have raised - they have to, because the eBook industry needs an iPod-like device and the support of a heavyweight like Amazon to finallyget traction. It has to happen with the Kindle, surely. Then we can get to exploring new business models and read/write methods of book-writing.
Most of the comments and trackbacks from my post on LinkedInconfirmed that LinkedIn has momentum as a business social network. However some Facebook fans believe that LinkedIn is only enjoying a temporary time in the sun.For example Stowe Boyd, a man who knows a thing or two about social media, had this to say:“Bernard Lunn thinks LinkedIn is in a great spot because 80% of his contacts are there, and Facebook isn’t real for business yet. Wait six months, Bernard.”I am not sure what Stowe is predicting in six months. However I am interested in prediction markets, so how about we define a specific prediction and then revisit it in six months? If Facebook and/or LinkedIn were public companies, we could test our predictive powers in the stock market with real money. However because they are private companies (for now), we can just do this for fun and bragging rights. Anyway public companies are now all boring, predictable enterprises; we have to recreate the fun in the private markets.So the prediction, we think, from Stowe is this:“In 6 months Facebook will have more of your business contacts than LinkedIn”.We'll check back in 6 months whether that prediction comes true. But for now we'll run a poll to see whether RWW readers think LinkedIn can hold off the Facebook challenge in business networking. Please take a moment to vote in this poll:survey- Take Our Poll
Our friends from Polldaddy, the online polling service we use here at RWW, have launched a new version of their site. The new features:New online survey tool;Addition of pro account for $20 per month - gives users more access to the site and allows removal of the link to PollDaddy in their polls;New indepth reporting on voters, voter location and IP analysis for fraud detection;Many other new little features for the polls tool, such as hiding results from voters once they have voted and ability to change the system text in the poll into foreign languages.Co-founder David Lenehan [disclosure: David is an occasional writer for RWW]told me that "the main thing about this launch is what it allows us to do in the future". The original PollDaddy, according to David, was an experiment - so the code for the original site was not built to scale. With the new version, they've re-written the entire application from the ground up. So PollDaddy version 2 is, said David, "astarting point to launch PollDaddy as a full blown professional application."So what can we expect in the future from Polldaddy? Surveys are the first new feature, and in the coming months Polldaddy will build a platform for "collecting data from the web" - which means services such as forms, quizzes, and other user-requested services. David told me that Polldaddy hopes "to build a system eventually that will ask our users what kind of data they want to collect and provide them with a selection of ways to do it."Polldaddy has 2 full time developers, including David. Their polls are registering 70 million impression per month and they seem to be the biggest online poll provider (but please let us know in the comments if you know of bigger poll services). Polldaddy has around 70,000 registered users at present. In terms of Polldaddy's integration within social networks, David said they are working on integrating with Google's OpenSocial "before Christmas." Apparently 20% of their polls are used on social network profiles. The other 80% are made up of blogs and websites, such as RWW.
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.Web NewsIt was a relatively quiet week in Web news, after all the kerfuffle the last couple of weeks about Google's OpenSocial and Facebook's nascent advertising network. This week Google followed up on its Mobile Web platform, Android, by putting up $10m in awards for Android Mobile Developers.In other news, online advertising was up 25% in Q3- but Marshall Kirkpatrick wondered if 80% of it is Google. Yahoo! announced a Distributed Computing Academic Program. And IBM announced this week that it will be rolling out cloud computing services for corporations in the Spring of 2008, under the name Blue Cloud.Web ProductsA Look at Mugr's Facial Recognition Platform- Josh Catone looked at Mugr, a facial recognition search site which has a developer platform. Josh also checked out the new ActiveSymbols facial recognition platformMyOffice: Full Featured Groupware Tool on Facebook- Josh has been looking for an elusive full-featured office service on Facebook. He may've found a contender here! It was follow-up to his earlier post Someone Please Build the Facebook Office.Lifestrea.ms Is Attempting to Build the Future of Life Online- Marshall Kirkpatrick profiled Lifestrea.ms, a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that you'll want to keep an eye on. Said Marshall: "It is a real testimony to the potential of the new web that anyone would even try to create something like this."You can find many other startup profiles in our Startups category.Analysis5 Essential Mobile Web Apps- this week we ran a contest asking you to tell us your favorite Mobile Web apps. We got over 50 comments and there were 5 Mobile Web apps that clearly stood out. Check out this post to find out which ones.Hyped New Platforms: Explaining the Difference Between One and the Other- Marshall Kirkpatrick compared 5 recent new social networking platforms: Facebook, OpenSocial, Android, Box.net, Bebo.Yahoo! Says the Future Will be Modeled on Facebook- Marshall analyzed the notion that the future of both email and start pages is in social networking. Much of the discussion, said Marshall, comes back to Facebook.Who is Blogging and Why? Is the Blogosphere in a Digestion Phase?- Alex Iskold got to the heart of the changes happening in blogging currently, with this thought-provoking post. Don't miss the comments too!You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.R/WW Network Blogslast100Check out a wrapof the week's Digital Lifestyle news on last100. Ryan Jarrett kicked off the week on last100with a post featuring six pioneers in the digital music space, ranging from David Bowie to the Arctic Monkeys. Readers were invited to submit their own pioneers, with Prince, Public Enemy and Trent Razor being notable omissions from our original list.Daniel Langendorf took NBC’s new TV catch-up service, NBC Direct, for a spin, and was unimpressed: “If you like living by network TV schedules, NBC Direct may be for you. For those of us who time shift, NBC Direct is a huge disappointment.” In digital lifestyle news, last100 editor Steve O’Hear turned his gadget lust to the Playstation 3 with its forthcoming support for DivX, and, following news that Comcast has been filtering BitTorrent traffic on its network, the P2P-based Internet TV company, Vuze, is petitioning the U.S. Federal Communications Commissionto restrict traffic throttling by Internet Service Providers.Making her debut for last100, Natalie Fonseca provided extensive coverage from GigaOm’s NewTeeVee Live, a one day conference dedicated to the emerging online video industry. Check herefor all the links.Alt Search EnginesThis week at AltSearchEngines, ten finalists for Alternative Search Engine of the Yearwere announced. Readers were encouraged to vote for their favorite finalist and at last count there were 108 comments. The Alternative Search Engine of the Year will be decided by a number of factors, only one of which is the popular vote (remember Al Gore?). The winner will be announced on Monday, December 3rd, along with the final version of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines for 2007, and some reflections onthe past twelve months by editor Charles Knight. Don't miss what will most likely be AltSearchEngines paramount post for the entire year!That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
