ReadWriteWeb

FriendFeed, the multi-network activity aggregator co-founded by GMail creator Paul Buchheit, announced today that it has entered the crowded field of real time search. FriendFeed was already the best way to learn what early adopter social media users were saying about any topic across blogs, Twitter, delicious and other diverse social media sites. If FriendFeed wants to step it up to the next level and challenge business-class conversation trackers, we believe there are four steps the company needs to take.

We think that would make a whole lot of sense. In fact we think that if real time search were turned into a business tool it could challenge social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Sysomos. Here's what we think needs to happen in order for that to become a possibility.

Since yesterday, eMusic, one of the world's largest subscription-based music retailers, features music from Sony's catalog in its store. Most users on eMusic subscribe to the service because of the eclectic selection of independent music it offers, and very few users were excited to hear that eMusic was going to make major changes to its service, including raising the price per song just in order to give its users access to mainstream music that they were not very likely to be interested in. While eMusic did a fine job at communicating the basic changes to the service, it didn't reveal the full extent of the changes until yesterday, and its users are anything but happy about them.

Google just announced a number of changes to its blog search engine, Google Blog Search, but none of them will knock your socks off. RSS feeds for search queries were added, something that no self-respecting search engine of dynamic content would be without. Hot search queries and recent posts from popular blogs round out the slight redesign of the Blog Search home page.

While many different Google projects push the envelope with features and interface innovation - users are excited just to see Blog Search make catch-up moves, since it's a sign that the product is still breathing at all. No news about much needed spam control, no response to Twitter stealing many blogs' thunder, no personalization, no visualization, no semantics, no mobile play - nothing. It's really disappointing. Google Blog Search remains the best option if you're looking for fast results, but other options are better if you have any needs other than speed.

Rupert Murdoch, the 78-year-old CEO and chairman of News Corp., just gave a revealing interview to The Street's Dan Freed. In this interview, Murdoch argues that the latest head-count reduction at MySpace was necessary because the number of employees at the company had grown out of control. In addition, he also told Freed that he wants the site to be very different from Facebook, which, in his eyes, is nothing more than a directory, while MySpace is a place "to find common interests, share music, that sort of thing."

According to a study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, patents may be harming our ability to innovate. Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts, written by Bill Tomlinson of UC Irvine and Andrew Torrance of University of Kansas School of Law, tested the hypothesis with a game called PatentSim. The game is an online simulation of a pure patent system, a patent-free commons system, and a mixed system. Within each environment, first year university students were asked to license, assign, infringe, and enforce patents. The study found that while a mixed patent environment and pure patent environment did not offer substantially different results, students in a commons system generated significantly higher rates of innovation, productivity and social utility. Essentially, the study supports what Lawrence Lessig and free culture advocates have been saying for years: a society free from intellectual property monopolies is a society that is better off.

Users on Kmart's and Sears' web properties can now use their OpenID credentials to sign up and log in to these sites. MyKmart.com and MySears.com, which are both owned by the Sears Holding Company, implemented technology from Viewpoint and JanRain to allow users to use their login credentials from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Windows Live, as well as from any other OpenID provider. This marks one of the first times that such a large, mainstream online retailer has adopted OpenID.

A June survey released by Facetime, makers of a gateway appliance for managing Web 2.0 applications, revealed the growing popularity of social networking applications in the workplace. Out of 1199 survey respondents, all IT professionals, there were more who felt that social networks played an important role in the business world than those who didn't. What's more, it appears that the IT folks are now seemingly okay with providing access to these networks behind the firewall - even for those who don't approve of their use!

When we first looked at Faviki, a social bookmarking application which made its debut last year, we were intrigued by their idea of "semantic tagging." What makes Faviki different from its competitors, services like del.icio.us, Diigo, and the now-defunct Ma.gnolia, is the way the service suggests tags to its users. The suggestions don't come from the community of Faviki users and their tagging history - they come from structured info extracted from the Wikipedia database.

Today, Faviki is releasing an upgrade to their service which will give you even better control over the tagging process, making bookmarking even easier than before. They're also announcing support for OpenID.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Israelis were considered gurus in technology, research, and innovation. While the dot-com boom infused the offices of San Francisco with color, creativity, hope, and foosball tables, Israelis were hard at work in a fairly strict environment creating and developing digital infrastructure, inventing new approaches to network security, and leading the field in hardware-oriented projects.

There was a myth that Israelis were not very good at creating consumer-facing products. Notwithstanding their creation of ICQ, Israelis were known as engineers and researchers who did well within the confines of a lab but not so well when reaching out to end consumers. Over the last couple of years, though, the high-tech industry in Israel has gone through dramatic changes.

When the young (and we mean young) team for music-focused startup The Next Big Sound was accepted for the TechStars acceleration program, they had a good product.

But just one week into the tech/business mentorship process, they realized they had a few ideas that were much better. The founders were nervous about presenting an entirely different product to their advisors, but they learned a valuable lesson about making big changes early in the startup game. Watch this video interview with co-founder David Hoffman and see how changing horses midstream might not be such a bad thing, after all.