Last night Yahoo! announced they are integrating RSS into their web mail and alerts products. As Scott Gatz explained in an interview with PodTech: Yahoo's plan, which started in January 2004 when they launched RSS in the My Yahoo portal, is to "bring RSS to the masses". I liked how Ben Barren described this as Yahoo's 'RSS Everywhere' strategy. If that's not Yahoo's slogan in regards to RSS, then it should be. Oh wait, Microsoft has already used it - back in June 05 when they announced RSS would be integrated into the Vista OS (then known as Longhorn). Microsoft has also since announced RSS integration within Windows Live and a new RSS extension getting big wraps, called SSE.
Which brings me to my point - Yahoo and Microsoft are busy building out an 'RSS Everywhere' strategy. What is Google doing with RSS? They toyed with integrating RSS into Gmail - remember Web Clips? Last month Google released an RSS Reader, which turned out to be average by industry standards. And they've implemented bits and pieces of RSS into Search and Google News. But compare Google's clumsy RSS experiments with the total acceptance of and immersion in RSS by Yahoo and Microsoft.
Watching Google and RSS is like watching a high school student experiment with a chemistry set. Meanwhile Yahoo and Microsoft are busy inserting RSS into their DNA.
As I wrote back in April, I think Google wants to harness RSS. Most of their huge take of advertising revenue comes to them via webpages - their own pages, plus external webpages that use Google Adsense. Google wants to ensure that huge revenue doesn't get siphoned off by RSS-izing everything. The Gmail 'Web Clips' feature mentioned above had adverts alternating with the content, so it was an unsubtle experiment at monetizing RSS.
Perhaps Google should take a leaf from Yahoo and Microsoft's book and start immersing itself in RSS, instead of trying to harness it. As Dave Winer mused today, Google shouldn't try to lock in content. The value of RSS is that it's the best form of content distribution we have on the Web today. RSS - you're soaking in it. Hmmm, perhaps Yahoo should make that their slogan?
From Yahoo's RSS honcho Scott Gatz:
"Tonight we are launching a full post rss reader in the new Yahoo Mail beta. If you are in the beta, you’ll automatically get the new features.RSS in mail makes perfect sense for a few reasons: 1) people already spend a lot of time in their Mail experience, why shouldn’t personally relevant content be there too 2) While you read RSS you are probably gonna want to forward good stuff you find 3) Hundreds of millions of users use Yahoo Mail, so if we want to reach the masses, we need to go where they are."
That third point is the biggie - millions more people use Yahoo! Mail than use the MyYahoo portal. And most of them probably haven't been directly exposed to RSS feeds yet.
I'll analyze this news fully tomorrow, but for now check out TechCrunch and Podtech.net for all the initial details.
Ted Gilchrist pointed to a new text-to-voice service he's running called Botcast Network. He's created a special podcast feed for my blog, so you can regularly listen to my blog posts being spoken in a robot voice.
I actually already had a text-to-voice service running on Read/WriteWeb, Talkr, so I thought I'd compare the two services. Here is Talkr reading my recent post about my MT upgrade and here is Botcast Network reading the same post. In terms of voice output, Botcast uses a male robot and the quality is a little faltering. Talkr uses a female robot voice and runs smoother (it's also quite alluring...but I digress).
To subscribe to a robot podcast of Read/WriteWeb in Talkr, use this feed (registration required I think). In Botcast Network, use this feed. Either way, it's great to see innovation happening in text-to-voice, because it makes the Web accessible to blind people and those with vision problems.
In my previous two ZDNet posts, I've been exploring the Web browser market. Here are brief highlights from those posts:
Mobile Web browsers - Microsoft's downfall?: As we begin to use mobile devices more and more to access the Web, Microsoft's browser dominance may begin to ebb away. 2008-09 is predicted to be when the Mobile Internet hits big. So who are the early leaders in the mobile web browsing market? PC browser battler Opera is styling itself as "the world leader in mobile browsing technologies". In August this year, Opera Software launched Opera Mini - a browser for mobile phones. They also recently released a mobile AJAX Platform product, which impressed mobile expert Russell Beattie. Nokia has a product called Web Browser for S60, for browsing on a range of Nokia phones. Microsoft has its Smart Phone and Firefox has a mobile browser called Minimo. There have even been hints at a Yahoo! mobile browser.
[full story here...]
Browser Wars 2006 - Microsoft set to continue dominance: IE has been losing ground to Firefox over the past year and most tech bloggers (including me) report a higher percentage of Firefox than IE users. However in the mass market, IE is still by far the dominant browser. According to Web analytics company OneStat.com, as of late October 2005 almost 81 percent of Americans used IE, 14 percent used Firefox, and only a small percentage used Opera, Netscape, and all other browsers combined.
[full story here...]
In an article entitled The Return of Monetized Eyeballs, Om Malik values BoingBoing at $34 million - calculated at $38 per unique monthly website visitor (the average purchase price per unique user of acquisitions during the past year). John Battelle, who manages BoingBoing, thinks that figure is off because it'd be hard to make that investment back on a site which has "fierce attitudes about content and the author/audience relationship".
Now Jason Calacanis, who recently pocketed a large sum of money by selling weblogsinc to AOL, has come out and said BoingBoing's value is closer to "between 500k and $3M". Jason wrote:
"Boingboing, like any other web property, is worth 1-10x revenue and 5-30x earnings. So, if BB does 30-50k a month/360-600k a year (which seems possible to me based on the ~5m page views a month) it would be worth between 500k and $3M (based on revenue since with five mouths and server hosting to pay for it doesn't really have earnings--yet!). Those numbers fall into line with my calculation of a really loyal user being worth $1-3."
Personally I like Om's numbers better, because it makes me a multimillionaire on paper. But I suspect Jason's figures tell a few home truths about what it takes to actually do a deal. On the other hand, eyeballs still seems to be the currency of choice in the Web world - bubble or not. How many current Web 2.0 companies are earning decent revenue? Perhaps that only goes to prove Jason's point, that it's all bubble talk.
I'll stop now before I get totally out of my depth - financial analysis not being my forte. But I'm interested in what people have to say about it. Who do you think is closer to the mark - Om (eyeballs, $34M for BB) or Jason (revenue, earnings, 500k-$3M for BB)?
Thinking Outside the VC Box is a fantastic, almost Philip K. Dick-like, essay by an unnamed SOA Web Services Journal writer. It's on one of my favourite themes, the virtual office. Among the things discussed is "the momentary enterprise", defined as a temporary business that leverages "pervasive data". It seems to support Evan Williams' recent list of rules for start-ups, where the number 1 rule is to be super-focused - i.e. a specialist and not a generalist.
In the SOA article, I particularly liked this description of how and why XML is a crucial part of the 'momentary enterprise':
"XML formatting allows proprietary databases and records to now have a nearly universal method for describing their contents. One does not need to be a sophisticated programmer who understands how to read a "schema" document or how to encode SQL statements to make sense of XML statements. A computer-literate teen could happen upon an XML fragment and derive some sense from it. He or she could likely import it into a favorite spreadsheet package and sort or average or trend it with a few keystrokes.
Business back ends are now XML-crazy. Information that needs to be expressed to another computer system is now expressed in some XML format. Most significantly, XML enables far higher business-to-business cooperation that is squarely aligned with the Web's chief goal: information exchange (as opposed to data exchange). XML has been enthusiastically embraced by business and allows for significant efficiency gains and better customer experiences. We will see XML reaching into the consumer world and our homes as well via wired and wireless appliances, for example. For the momentary enterprise, XML is the magic glue that allows vast sources of data and internetworking infrastructure - from PDAs to wireless video cameras - to share information."
That's got to be the best description of XML I've read this year. It captures the simplicity and ease-of-use of XML; its pervasiveness on the Web; and its utility to computer networks, 'users', businesses and programmers alike. XML is the lingua franca of our networked world.
The writer goes on to describe the web-based office, which has been one of my main themes this year. The human part of this is what the author calls a "matrix worker", defined as a subject-matter expert in a particular area:
"Often these people prefer to work as independent consultants rather than full-time employees. Technology and connectivity have truly allowed a great many of us to work anywhere and everywhere, and at any time. As more and more people allow their skills to be better published and exploited, a new form of professional - the "matrix worker" - will emerge."
I'm like a prototype matrix worker, I suppose. Along with millions of other people. The great thing is this kind of working life is becoming more and more common. XML and all the other technologies of our age - wireless, laptops, mobile phones, Voice over IP, etc - are enabling many of us to work and create outside the box. Or should that be -- in The Matrix?
ProgrammableWeb has released a list of 'popular' mashups, which John Musser calculated from a mix of click-throughs and user 'votes' based on a 1 to 5 scale rating system. Here are the top 10 mashups according to ProgrammableWeb:
1. Virtual Places
2. Weather Bonk
3. Diggdot.us
4. Flash Earth
5. Adactio Elsewhere
6. Where's Tim Hibbard?
7. Elicit
8. 2RealEstate Auctions
9. Flickrmap
10. Streampad
All the usual API suspects are included in these mashups: Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, Amazon. I tried out Virtual Places and was impressed that it includes little old New Zealand. Here is my hometown of Wellington:
I've been checking out mashups from other sites too, particularly Ning.com. A couple of note are Restaurant Reviews With Yahoo! Maps and Anytown Marketplace With Maps, the latest version of Jon Aquino's craigslists-like mashup.
Also the media companies are coming on board, led by BBC Backstage but also washingtonpost.com recently released an excellent site called mashingtonpost.com. Some interesting mash-ups that people have done already on mashingtonpost.com: News Cloud (a tag cloud), Ripped from the Headlines! (a daily news quiz), world map interface, thumbnail quiz of Arts & Entertainment stories, and washingtonpost.com search results via RSS.
This is an exciting time to be experimenting with mashups, whether you're a publisher, a 'user' or an API-wielding company. As Yahoo's Matt McAlister put it, "the idea is to make your content mash up ready and to build incentives for people to use your content." In that spirit, I've (finally) freed my own RSS feed under the Creative Commons, plus I'm currently trying my hand at mashups. Anyone can do it, so why not give it a try?
I've upgraded my blog to Movable Type 3.2, in order to defeat some bugs and trackback spam that had infiltrated the previous installation. So apologies if you'd visited my site recently and found it under construction. Note that I resisted the urge to put a blinking and animated 'Under Construction' button on my homepage - it would've been retro, but annoying.
If you can be bothered clicking through to the website, you'll see a new design. It's one of the many new SixApart gallery templates, but tweaked to my needs. I still have some tidying up to do. Also I re-opened comments and trackbacks to last week's posts (I had to close them a couple of days ago due to a particularly annoying bug that killed my RSS feed every few minutes).
It feels almost like a fresh start to my blog. On that note, the Weekly Wrap-Up is being moved to a Friday publication. I think it's better suited to the end of the week, rather than the start.
Let me know your feedback about any of this, especially if you spot any glitches in the new design.
Back to normal writing transmission shortly.
Dan Grossman has a thought-provoking post entitled Silicon Valley's Hiring War - And The Impact to Startups. He suggests that Start-ups will start looking outside the Valley for talent:
"...I think the talent wars will be good for cities outside of the Valley, as companies look elsewhere to find smart people. It's already possible to stay connected and contribute from almost anywhere in the world."
He mentions my New Zealand-based blog as an example of how people as far away as the other side of the planet can contribute. I'd like to add that I actually earn my living as a consultant/contractor for various Silicon Valley companies - even though I live in New Zealand. I do analysis, research and writing work on Web 2.0, Social Media and RSS topics.
Dan also said that "we'll see an increasing number of important startups based outside of the Valley over the coming few years." Again, I think this is a trend to watch out for. Not only in big countries like China, but in very small countries like my own. I'm certainly keen to create and participate in Web 2.0 opportunities from my part of the world. You only need to look at a company like NZ-based Eurekster, creator of Swikis, to see that it can be done.
On that note, recently Nat Torkington from O'Reilly set up a Google Group for New Zealand Web 2.0 people, called NZ 2.0. Ironically this was instigated after Silicon Valley's Mike Arrington referred a local kiwi company to me, which led me to send a group email to a bunch of kiwis, which led to Nat creating the Google Group. So if there are any kiwis reading this who want to be part of NZ 2.0, shoot me an email (readwriteweb AT gmail DOT com). It's all happening Down Under! :-)
