Digg.com is not only a thriving community and great source
for news, it's also an increasingly influential website for bloggers and website owners.
It can be a heavy driver of revenue-generating traffic and can also help make your
website viral (= popular). Given its growing importance then, I thought I'd investigate
digg's stats and identify the main trends. Let's look at the official dig.com stats
first, then turn our attention to a new (unofficial) site call duggtrends.
A page on digg.com called Top Diggers shows that a select group of digg users are highly influential. These top diggers have a higher chance of getting a story digged to the homepage than other users. Unsurprisingly Kevin Rose is right at the top, with a whopping 119 of his 120 submitted stories making it to the homepage (he has a 99% "Popular Ratio")! What was the single story that *didn't* make it, I wonder?
If you order the results by 'Most Submitted', you'll note that a number of these heavy submitters have high Popular Ratios. Albertpacino has a 31% ratio (800 of 2570 submitted), BloodJunkie 26%, gwjc 24%, digitalgopher 36%, dirtyfratboy 37%, and so on. All of these folks have submitted over 1000 stories. I'm pretty unsurprised by these figures however, because it is a community site after all. So it's only natural that friends will digg each others stories.
Digg users also have their favored blogs and websites, which get a disproportionate amount of attention than other less fortunate sites (alas, I'm one of the latter). For example, AppleInsider has had at least 4 homepage diggs in the past week. A lot of times, the favored sites get dugg very very quickly by digg users. The main problem with that is that the original source for a story often gets overlooked - and the popular site garners all the diggs instead. I speak from recent experience :-)
A site called duggtrends (but the URL is diggtrends.com!?) is tracking other digg data. According to duggtrends' stats, Sunday is the least active day and Thursday the most active. Apparently most of the digging by users happens during office hours, US time. So duggtrends estimates 9:00 AM EST as the best time to submit a story.
Duggtrends says the percentage of submitted stories that make it to the digg homepage during the week is around 15-19% (using Wed-Thu as a guide). However those particular stats in Table 1 don't seem to correlate to the much lower 'stories-to-front-page' ratios in Table 4??
Duggtrends also analyzes the new categories, introduced when digg version 3 was released. Unsurprisingly, "Tech Industry News" still dominates - it had 2184 stories submitted to it in one week - "World News" was the second-most popular category with 1287. But note this comment from duggtrends:
"Stories submitted in this category probably will have fewer chances to make it to FrontPage. Most of the time these stories get pushed back in Upcoming Stories within few minutes."
Indeed the stats do show that only 120 of the Tech News stories made it to the homepage (just 5.5% of the stories submitted to that category).
Over time, as digg V3 matures, we may see the non-tech categories increase in popularity. Certainly digg's owners will be hoping so.
So an interesting look at the world of digg. If you have further digg data or anecdotes to share, feel free to leave a comment. Oh and for the love of TBL, will someone please digg this post! ;-)
The new-look Ajax-powered Yahoo.com homepage goes
live in the US on Monday and will roll out to other regions during the rest of July.
Read/WriteWeb exclusively profiled
the "preview" two months ago and now it is ready to be the default homepage for Yahoo's
500 million users. The new homepage - which utilizes 'Web 2.0' functionality such as
Ajax, personalization and collaborative filtering - will display to US visitors from
Monday and all visitors of Yahoo.com internationally "in the coming weeks".
Localized versions of the new homepage are available in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, UK & Ireland, and Vietnam. Other locations will be added over the coming weeks.
To celebrate, this month Yahoo! is running a homemade video competition. They arranged for students from leading film schools to create video shorts, based on a series of scripts about Yahoo! changing. Also anyone who wants to participate can create and share their own videos - using (if they wish) the Yahoo! logo, yodel and script ideas. People can submit their videos under a new Yahoo! Video category entitled 'New Yahoo! Campaign'. The best of these videos will be selected by Yahoo! to run in ads across its network.
In the press release, Yahoo is calling the new homepage "the most significant re-design of its flagship destination since the site first launched in 1994". Yahoo is the world's biggest Web property (a point they reminded us of recently!), with 500 million users of Yahoo! branded Web properties worldwide.
I said when the preview was released that this new homepage is a big step forward. Indeed I think it marks a turning point in the whole 'Web 2.0' trend. If Netscape.com was a badly managed transition of old-school portal to a Web 2.0 community news site, then the transition of Yahoo from portal 1.0 to version 2 has been done with caution, has not been rushed, and has introduced new functionality subtly. That's the way it should be done - tweaks generally work better than wholesale changes. Kudos to Yahoo for creating a new 'Web 2.0' homepage and managing the transition for its large user base well.
Wufoo
is a new web app that enables users to create their own web forms. I have to disclaim
that Kevin Hale, the guy who re-designed my blog,
is one of the people behind Wufoo - so I'm somewhat biased in writing about it. But to
balance that, I'll also mention other companies who have developed similar web apps.
With Wufoo you can create your own online form and integrate it within your blog or website, or create a separate form page (which you can style). Other features include ability to email the form to people, RSS feeds to track usage, and a Report Manager. The process to create a form is very simple and it took me just a few minutes to create a test form, which I've copied and pasted below. There's lot's of Ajaxy goodness to make the process smooth and whizzy, but more importantly the end result is a useful one for website owners and bloggers. Here's my test questionaire, embedded into my blog (hopefully - I can't tell if it's working or not until I press 'publish'):
Update: It does work, but clicking 'Submit' takes the user away from my blog page. Also it'd be cool to have results automatically updated and displayed on this page.
Update 2: I've put the form on a separate page, because it was causing some display issues on my homepage.
Wufoo's business plan is subscriptions and by the looks of their page of examples, they're targeting everyone from software developers (for bug tracking) to mainstream website owners (e.g. create a wedding registration form). It's interesting to read how Wufoo came about - it was a product of Paul Graham's Y Combinator program for statups. Wufooer Chris Campbell wrote a useful post about the experience, entitled The Top 10 Questions Investors Asked Us.
Wufoo is the latest in a line of recent services that make building interactive Web apps easy. There are a number of new widget-builders - Snipperoo, PostApp are two that I've noted recently. Also Phil Sim launched WyaCracker in April.
In terms of online form builders, in addition to Wufoo there's The Form Assembly and JotForm (that I'm aware of). Also let's not forget the larger-scale DIY web app builders, like Ning, JotSpot, Ning, Zoho Creator, Dabble DB, DataMashups.com.
Overall, it's all part of a larger trend for web-based services that make creating interactive applications easy as pie - a great sign for the mainstreaming of Web20.
If you've visited R/WW over the past week you'll have noticed a new design has been rolled out. The designer was Kevin Hale of Particletree, who did a superb job. I want to thank Kevin very much for his hard work on the design and for the end result, which I'm delighted with! There are still bits under construction (in particular a couple of IE7 glitches), but I couldn't wait to go live with it - so I pushed the button earlier this week. I'd love some feedback on the new design, so feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.
Also a note about my goals for R/WW. These days I'm attempting to cover the high-level of web20 - market segments, product positioning, Web theory, industry insights, etc. My goal is to provide high quality analysis, while also producing a regular supply of posts. It's possibly ambitious to try and provide high quality posts and at least some of the quantity that other more news-focused web20 blogs pump out. So that's why I'm also on the look-out for more guest bloggers, to help me write insightful and instructive posts about the New Web. Contact me if you're interested!
btw if you missed it, I recommend reading my post on Rhapsody Web Services - in which I interviewed RealNetworks and Rhapsody execs. Also check out PeopleAggregator and Open Social Network Systems for a look at the future of social networks. Finally New Netscape = New Coke? is a story making waves right now.
RealNetworks is announcing today an enhanced set of Rhapsody Web services APIs and RSS feeds,
along with a 3-month competition aimed at getting developers to build on their platform.
Rhapsody is one of the biggest music subscription
services on the Web. It has over 2 million tracks in its library, which users can listen to
for US$9.95 per month. There are also options for users to purchase music items.
Rhapsody competes with the likes of Napster and AOL - but the online music market in general is
dominated by Apple iTunes, which is a
pay-per-download service rather than a subscription service like Rhapsody.
Rhapsody Web services enables people to incorporate free playback of full-length songs and internet radio stations directly into their web pages, blogs or mashups. There are also a number of pre-made widgets and gadgets available to users, a music-linking service called "RhapLinks" for bloggers, "smart URLs" for developers, and over 300,000 RSS feeds. Details of all this (including the new competition) can be found on the Rhapsody Web services site.
Yesterday I spoke to Ben Rotholtz (GM of Rhapsody Web services), Leo Parker (Director of Rhapsody on the Web) and Ronda Scott (PR Manager, Music at RealNetworks) about the new Rhapsody Web services announcements. We discussed the web services, as well as the future of online music.
Ben started off by explaining that Rhapsody is "very much a music discovery service", because they have a lot of rich metadata about the music. It offers music tracks subscriptions, as well as Internet radio (which Ben said is useful for listening to artists that don't make their music available by subscription - like the Beatles). Unfortunately for non-US people like me, Rhapsody is only available in the USA - which Ben said was due to music label restrictions. He said that they're actively working with the labels to get the rights to provide the service internationally. Ronda did note that they have Real.com music offerings in Europe, but it's a different thing than Rhapsody.
The Rhapsody Web services platform, initially launched 5 December 2005, is a way to expand the Rhapsody offering - bringing in more parts of the Web ecosystem like bloggers, social networking systems and corporate partners (e.g. RollingStone.com and Classmates.com) who want online music integrated into their sites in a big way. Ben said that the Web services will enable people to "re-represent the catalogue" of music that Rhapsody has, in new and innovative ways.
I asked if the Rhapsody Web services allow people to mashup whole songs, or is it just samples and metadata about the music (due to music label rights)? Ben said that they don't have, or provide, the rights to allow people to remix songs. What they do provide is a means to mix elements of the Rhapsody service itself with external web sites or apps. Leo said that the primary value of the Rhapsody Web services is to enable external sites or apps to play back "full length high quality songs".
The enhanced web services include a whole set of REST APIs. Using these, developers can create new ways to represent the Rhapsody catalog and/or play songs (by launching a player directly from within a website or app). Ben also talked about some of the social, collaborative aspects of it - saying that "Rhapsody is becoming more of a badge of what somebody's been listening to", rather than a standalone music-listening experience. Also people can share reviews, lists, etc. Here's an example of a blogger using lots of Rhapsody RSS:
I asked whether the Web services may affect Rhapsody's reputation for usability and slick UIs? Ben said that may happen, but it's all part of entering into the Web 2.0 world of remixes and combining services.
I asked about the Rhapsody gadgets, for services like live.com and Google IG, and how much take-up there has been of them.
Ben said that the Mac widget for Rhapsody is in the top 50 for Apple Dashboard, while their Konfabulator widget is in the top 20 in that gallery. With Live.com and Google IG, Ben said it's too early to tell because they only released those gadgets about a week ago (also they're more developer-focused audiences).
He said Rhapsody's approach, starting a couple of months ago, has been to release "reference applications" for gadgets - to inspire other developers. For the users, Ben called gadgets and widgets "very quick on-ramps" into the Rhapsody world - because they don't require users to subscribe (e.g. they can utilize the 25 free music tracks Rhapsody offers for trial users). As an example, Ben told me about a company named LabPixies which developed an RSS Reader for Rhapsody feeds - for the live.com and Google IG start pages.
My next question was about the future of music on the Web and whether, say in 3-4 years time, users will be able to remix songs much more freely than the music labels allow us to today. I wondered aloud where Rhapsody will fit into such a (Utopian?) scenario.
Ben said that over time music labels "have become more open-minded and adaptive to what the Web provides" and he thinks that is an ongoing process. He also sees music becoming more integrated inside of various everyday experiences - i.e. breaking out from just being experienced within specific music applications. In that respect, part of Rhapsody's web services initiative is to ensure music flows more freely through the Web - using their platform.
Ben also talked about metadata for music becoming a lot richer over time - with end-users iterating on the Rhapsody catalog. Finally, he said the international online music world will open up (Ed: YAY!!) and we'll see more regional content coming into their catalog.
I (optimistically) asked whether Rhapsody will have
an iPod/iTunes-like hardware/software offering in their near future? Unfortunately for
me, no scoops about a future new product slipped out of Ben's mouth (there goes any
chance this post will be Slashdotted or Digged!).
But Ben did acknowledge there has been a lot of innovation in the world of devices. He also noted that Rhapsody is the only company outside of Apple that supports purchasing and then transferring music to the iPod, which they do using their own technology.
Ben said they work with a number of hardware companies today to enable users to take their music subscriptions with them across devices. Also Ronda mentioned there is a lot of integration within home devices - e.g. Sonos.
My final question addressed whether Rhapsody has much integration with the most popular social network in the world today, MySpace - e.g. using gadget or widgets? Ben said that there's no formal arrangements with MySpace, however there are ways to integrate Rhapsody music into a user's MySpace page. Ben's test MySpace page has some examples of this.
One app that can be easily added onto MySpace is the Rhapsody Listening History Slide show.
I'm excited by Rhapsody's Web services initiative and I think it's a very positive move for the online music industry as a whole. One hopes that Apple follows RealNetworks' good example and starts to open up the iTunes platform with APIs and the like too. That's probably a pipe dream, because as long as Apple holds such a dominant position in the online music market - they will see little need to open up. But that leaves room for the likes of Rhapsody and others such as AOL and Yahoo to embrace the social Web. Letting external developers build on your online music platform is a recipe for innovation, new web apps and new users.
Written by Ken Yarmosh, a Read/WriteWeb Guest Blogger
On average, I hear a
Match.com commercial on the radio about once a day. In referring to their user base,
their catch phrase goes something like, "there are over 15 million reasons to use
Match.com." Well, they may want to re-think this selling point because MySpace has
over 90 million potential reasons to use their site.
No, MySpace is not an official dating site but it often unofficially acts as one (MySpace does have a craigslist like "Personals" under its Classified section that is quite classless). There are plenty of MySpace relationships - I know because I've seen them firsthand. MySpace has become more than just "a place for friends".
There are five reasons why I'd consider MySpace the almost premier dating site. It has nothing to do with Dr. Phil, 29 Dimensions of Compatibility, or doing fun activities together (more on that later)...so, here we go:
1. It's Mega Popular
There are just over 90 million people on MySpace. And it's still growing, supposedly at a rate of 250,000 new users per day. In the world of dating sites, people are currency. You can have a stellar dating platform but without a network of daters behind it, the technical mumbo jumbo doesn't matter. The Field of Dreams mentality does not apply... if you build it, they won't necessarily come.
Yahoo has issued a rather
hoity-toity response to Hitwise's
stats that claimed MySpace is now the number 1 domain on the Web. Sniffs Yahoo in
its official statement:
"The report that Hitwise released today with the headline “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites” is misleading. The Yahoo! network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo!’s mail.yahoo.com domain. When taking into account all of Yahoo!’s domains together as an entire network, Yahoo! clearly remains the number one property in terms of audience share, duration share, page view share and days visited per month."
The statement goes on to assert that Yahoo! gets 129 million unique visitors per month in the US, "which represents 74 percent of the online population". Itsy-bitsy MySpace on the other hand, "reaches only 30 percent". But wait, Yahoo's not finished reprimanding Hitwise just yet. "In addition", the Yahoo statement points out, "Yahoo! has the largest share of online time spent than any other property: Yahoo! accounts for 13 percent of users’ online time, while MySpace has only 3.2 percent share in users’ online time."
So there: nya nya naa naa na! Incidentally Yahoo's stats were pulled from comScore Media Metrix's June report (a Hitwise competitor).
But in all seriousness, Yahoo! does have a point that it is still "the world’s most trafficked Internet destination online". To suggest otherwise is a little disingenuous. Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny goes further, saying that Hitwise's post "feels a lot like Hitwise trading their credibility for some cheap press headlines."
To be fair, what Hitwise claimed was that MySpace was "the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users" (emphasis mine). So technically, according to Hitwise's data, that's a true statement. But as Jeremy said, it's a bit of a headline-grabbing statement and open to misinterpretation.
So anyway, as long as we're all clear now - Yahoo is the number 1 Web property.
Ex-Yahooligan Ravi
Dronamraju noted a couple of months ago (I've only just seen it) a subtle but
important point about Yahoo's new Ajaxified homepage:
"This homepage dropped the concept of website directory completely. I guess the
transformation is complete. Yahoo! is now more about showing people in and around yahoo!
network and not about showing people what’s most useful on the web. Yahoo! is the
new AOL of the web…"
(emphasis mine)
I think the comparison to 90's AOL is a little unfair. Yahoo is using social tools like Y! Answers and MyWeb, along with web services and its developer network, to make external content an important part of its service. Also as one of Ravi's commenters pointed out, search long ago replaced the directory as the primary means of content discovery on the Web.
Nevertheless, it is an interesting point that the new Yahoo homepage links predominantly to Yahoo properties - rather than to external sources, as it did in the old days. The directory service is still there, but has been de-emphasized on the homepage:
Then:
The directory was a section on the homepage (albeit near the bottom)...and
...it was also featured as a search option
Now:
The directory is still one of the options hanging off the search box - but isn't
otherwise featured on the homepage
Perhaps it's just a sign of the times: directories of external websites are out, Yahoo media properties are in.
-
List of Social Networking Systems (including their target audiences; very useful
resource from Sid Yadav)
- MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites (according to Hitwise, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users)
- Rise of the Socially-Integrated Media Empire (Robert Young says that media companies need to embrace "social integration", even though it competes with traditional media consumption; he likens it to cable tv)
- Fred Wilson's Social Media musings ("Social media will co-exist with produced media, what the ultimate market share of each is a big open question, but I believe they are both important.")
- Netscape crossing the chasm (Nicholas Carr comments on my recent posts about Netscape's troubles: "...the remaking of Netscape seems like the first real attempt to take Web 2.0 across the chasm, from the little land of enthusiasts and early adopters to the big world of the pragmatic mainstream.")
- Attensa for Outlook 1.5 Public Beta ("...uses our AttentionStream technology to automatically and intelligently prioritize RSS feeds and articles and bring the subscriptions and articles you find most interesting to the top")
- Top 10 Reasons to Embrace the Rich Internet Application (Ryan Stewart, who got hired by ZDNet after being noticed as a R/WW Guest Blogger, talks about why you should embrace non-browser web apps)
- Tim O'Reilly argues that Operations is key to web20 (what's more, the likes of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are not releasing their operational competencies to the open source community)
- Paul Graham on Web 2.0 ("It's kind of like they printed the name on a sticky label, threw it on the floor, and it stuck on the heel of a guy passing by. The name is a little fake, but the guy is real." -- n.b. am I that guy?)
- Anil Dash is impressed by The Long Tail ("...using a wider range of source material than even the seminal Wired article, along with the phenomenal amount of primary research into sales data, makes the book something very impressive and unique.")
Photo was taken at one of the Gnomedex events - Mike Arrington playfully hitting Steve Gillmor over the head :-)
Today Microsoft re-announced
their on-demand CRM solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM - including a new
software-as-a-service offering called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live. According to
salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, once again Redmond is reacting to the success
of service-based companies like salesforce.com and Google.
In an internal email, Benioff riffs on the state of the online business industry - paying particular attention to Microsoft's position in it. He outlines a theory he calls "The Business Web" and explains why his company salesforce.com, rather than Microsoft, is in the driving seat. In the email, Benioff says: "...the fact is that Microsoft is being out hustled by everyone."
The full email is re-produced in my ZDNet blog.
