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Kevin Rose is on stage talking about what Digg knows. He says they have 600k editors that digg stories. Yesterday they set a record for fastest story to hit digg frontpage - the Rumsfeld resignation story took just 4 minutes to hit the homepage after it was submitted! He said netscape and reddit also got the story on their frontpages before mainstream media. 33% of diggs for popular stories typically come via Swarm or Stack.
Kevin said that they'll be launching a custom flash toollit for publishers soon, for them to skin their own interface for swarm/stack. He shows a very cute (but Kevin called it a bit lame) example of bees pollinating (=digging) flowers (=stories), so the flowers will grow over time.
Kevin now addresses the issue of gaming. He says they have 1 sitewide administrator, so they have to create the tools behind the scenes for that person plus the community to help prevent gaming. He says they gave the power to the community to prevent the spamming, but they wanted to go one step deeper. So they take a look at digg patterns - trying to pick up "unhealthy patterns". So they look at referrers, ip addresses etc - if for example 90% no referrals for a story, the know it's spam. Another thing they look for is same-source digging - always digging the same source. Also high % of anon proxies.
Kevin ends by saying they have around 20 new features coming next month.
comScore has released some intriguing data about Web usage internationally. They say that 14 of the top 25 US Web properties now attract more visitors from outside the US than from within. That includes the top 5 US properties - Yahoo! Sites, Time Warner Network, Microsoft, Google Sites, and eBay.
This is significant because it's a continuation of a long-term trend for online population to be more distributed around the world - particularly in China and the rest of Asia. Indeed comScore says that the US share of global online population has fallen from 65% to less than 25% in 10 years. We've been tracking these trends on R/WW all this year - in September we noted that as a percentage of world Internet penetration, Asia increased from 35.6% to 36.5%. This incremental increase is happening month by month, whereas the US figure is staying static. As Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe, said:
"The fact that more than three-quarters of the traffic to Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft is now coming from outside of the U.S. is indicative of what a truly global medium the Internet has become."
Even at the Web 2.0 Summit this year, it's been noticeable that there is a larger international presence in the presenting companies. It's a great trend and really shows how mature the Web medium is getting. There are also big implications for marketers and advertisers, as more and more of the Internet's population becomes international.
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Today has already had a flurry of announcements and news. Here's a brief wrap of them:
I'll follow up with more substantial analysis a little later. It's been so hectic here and yesterday I was extremely fortunate to see Lou Reed playing live, courtesy of AOL at the after-dinner show! I'm still buzzing about that, as I'm a huge Velvet Underground fan. Anyway, more tech related stories coming soon :-)
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In the final session of the day, John Battelle chats with Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. John starts with the now famous memo, which "leaked" (but it wasn't leaked, according to Ray) - he asked Ray how it was progressing. Ray said the intent of the memo was to start people thinking. He said now they're at a very interesting juncture, now that office and Vista are "done" - i.e. "released to manufacturing" said Ray. He said this means when it will be released to the public, it won't be perfect but "it's fulfilling the role that an operating system needs to have in this era". He said the single biggest thing Vista can do is provide a secure environment for doing things on the Web. He said "Vista really was secure by design", to ensure vulnerabilities were removed before it is shipped. Vista will be released to businesses by end of Nov, and to consumers by end of January. Office is due by end of Nov.
John asks if there'll be a cultural change in Microsoft. Ray says that Microsoft has a lot of different groups and he says things have changed already - but "it's not one person that makes this happen, it's a conversation".
John asks if the current web services and online advertising business model as big a deal as the mid-90's Gates memo on the Internet. Ray said it's as big a deal business-wise. He says they ask themselves what is the best way to deliver value - which John notes is called 'scenario-based design'. He says his message in the memo was: for the experience being delivered via the Internet, which piece will be on PC and which via the browser? So it's an evolution of thinking from the PC era, then the server era.
John asks what Ray thinks of Google. Ray praises Google and says they stay focused on the user. John says Google is proving the advertising model for web services, so he asks Ray what's the zeitgeist on the Microsoft campus. John mentions the office suite. Ray says there are half a billion odd users in the office market, so he says they already have the audience - so his question is how they deliver value to this audience in this era. John asks when Word will be completely web native? Ray says it depends on the scenario of the usage - he doesn't see that it's the right thing to do to take the PC interface and functionality, and port it up to the Web. Ray says the Web is good at universal access, sharing scenarios, etc - and the PC is good at flexible and fast UI, is reliable. He says we're going to a world where we're dropping media items into our documents, but the PC was designed for media editing.
John says that Bill Gates had ability to mandate things to happen, so will Ray have that ability? Ray says that the way that Microsoft works, it is very rare that Bill just gave orders and they had to be done. For Ray, he was given "a free pass" when he came into the company, but he has to earn the "followership" that Bill had.
Qst from the audience: what will be the theme for software in next generation? (3-5 years). Ray said that on the office side, he thinks the biggest opportunity is mobile devices, smart phones - so a lot of opportunity with those different types of productivity scenarios. On the Vista side, hardware is moving from multicore to manycore (many processors), so the system needs to help app programmers to consume that. He also thinks there's opportunities to innovate in power management. He says they'll address Windows support things like state separation and deployment models will be brought up to date ("everything should be deployed on the Web").
Qst regarding the Adobe CEO's comment that PDF has won the game of electronic reading file format. Ray said that they're now in an era where customers are storing data for a long time, so it's imperative that all vendors create formats that enable data longevity. He says XML makes data transparent and that's the world we're in right now.
Qst re Zune, why did MS come up with a closed system for music. Ray says there's one very strong focus with Zune, that is to build an end-to-end experience. He says they never would have succeeded at this if they put too many dependencies and complexities in the product at once - but this may open up in future.
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This session at Web 2.0 Summit reunites two old Ask.com execs, current Ask CEO Jim Lanzone and former and ex-CEO and now senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft Steve Berkowitz (whom I interviewed a couple of days ago).
60-70% of Ask's revenue historically comes from Google (the current figure isn't being revealed, but Jim said it's in that ballpark). That's from contextual ads on Ask.com, which come from Google.
Steve notes that Microsoft's challenge is to take the search experience the next step from Google. He says that Microsoft's challenge is to move search from products to experiences - "keep the users engaged".
John Battelle asks if Ask.com will begin to roll out more new features. Jim says that 6-7 months after the ask.com launch, they need to earn the respect of people - after the poor reputation for quality Jeeves used to have. He said they're not a portal, but a straight search engine - which is another reason for the ask.com brand. He's aiming to be the number 2 brand in search - he says the top results in Ask are editorial, which he thinks makes them higher quality.
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At last year's Web 2.0 Conference, Mary Meeker of MorganStanley outlined how mobile and Asia were set for big growth. At this year's Summit, Meeker focused on video and monetizing that.
Mary speaks at a million miles per hour and data points go past faster than one can type them. So check out the slides for all the data details. Some quick notes:
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Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen is talking to Tim O'Reilly on stage now. Bruce says that before the Macromedia acquisition, Adobe was a peripheral player on the Web - so the acquisition brought them back into the heart and soul of the Web. He talks about the importance of Flash on mobile (Flash lite), which is key going forward.
Tim asked him about Ajax and how it is taking over the use of Flash in some things. Bruce replied that they don't view Ajax as a competitor to Flash. He also says they've believed in open standards from day 1.
On the challenge from Microsoft, Bruce said he's pleased Google is "a heat shield". He says "the good news is that Microsoft has lots of enemies". He notes that Microsoft has been competing with Adobe almost as long as they've been in business - e.g. Microsoft's PhotoDrop product in the mid-90's. He says Adobe will focus on what they're really good at - "making things local".
Tim mentions the electronic reading apps that both Microsoft (via NYTimes) and Adobe have come out with recently. Bruce says the NYTimes Reader is similar to what Adobe has been trying to do with PDF. Adobe are extending that themselves with their Digital Reader. He says over the last 7 years they've been talking about ebooks, but he thinks "we're almost there" in regards to ebook devices - he points to Sony Reader as an example.
Finally he talks a little about Apollo, which renders Flex and HTML etc both within and outside the browser - "think iTunes on steriods". Tim asks whether that makes Adobe the "dark horse" of Internet platform players, a question which is left hanging....
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Day 2 at the Web 2.0 Summit and Jeff Bezos is on stage, talking about S3 and EC2. He says "we're a small company with big ideas", but they've been surprised at the level of interest in these services. He thinks people are excited because they can see a future where you can go from idea to implementation very quickly - and that it's very empowering. So Amazon is taking care of the 'heavy lifting', which they call "muck". He notes that it's a continuous loop. He says 70% of energy and dollars in web app development by people is in this heavy lifting, so Amazon wants to solve that. He ends with: "we make muck, so you don't have to".
Now Tim is asking questions to Jeff - he starts off by asking why Microsoft isn't in this business (they are a customer of Amazon in these services). Or Google. Why a retailer? Jeff says they've been doing this for 11 years - operating a web-scale business. He says they have to be very efficient at Amazon.com, so they've always operated their infrastructure like that. Tim asks why though? Jeff responds that they've been working on these services for several years now. His definition of web 2.0 is computers talking to computers - which is a lot of what we're seeing with web services. So Jeff says they're doing this because they're good at it, they know how to do it and they think it's a great business.
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The Launchpad at the Web 2.0 Summit is a popular event, the venue is packed. 13 companies have 5 minutes each. Here are some quick impressionistic views of how it went....
In
the chair is a music-based video game, where people can interact with music -
e.g. generate your own content and play along. It's being billed as a music
publishing platform, with mashup and remix tools. Today is the launch of their
version 2 beta. Seems like a cute tool, not sure how useful it is for most
people.
instructables
is "step-by-step collaboration" for home projects. It's targeted at
"passionate" hobbyists. Again, it's a nice tool... not groundbreaking.
Klostu
is positioning itself as "the blogosphere of bulletin boards". Its aim
is to connect boards together, by giving you a unique id that you can use across
multiple boards. As the presenter said, it "has all the bells and whistles
of social networks".
A good concept perhaps, although not sure if it's compelling to bulletin board users - aren't they loyal to their particular boards? Not sure, but I'm curious to know the percentage of people who use multiple bulletin boards.
Sharpcast
is next and this is a product I like (we've profiled it before on R/WW). It
synchs data across PCs, the Web and mobile. Sharpcast Photos was the first such
product, but today Gibu Thomas the CEO is launching a product code-named
Hummingbird - which synchs all files. Gibu had some issues with his demo
computers, but nevertheless the product is a compelling one I believe.
Rael
Dornfest's new company has a product called stikki.
He too was initially affected by demo issues. Stikkit is a yellow post-it notes
tool. One of the things it does is "make messy data smarter" and
allows you to share that data. So it's a very granular data-sharing app. It aims
to get as close to paper as possible. Sounds interesting, but it'll have a tough
job replacing paper in my life (I still use paper notebooks!).
Turn
is a search-like tool for online advertising. It has bidded CPA pricing, for
graphical and text ads. The CPA actions could be a sale, a lead or anything.
They claim to analyze webpages to determine which ads are suitable for it. They
rank all their ads based on the probability of action. They call this
"automated targeting". It sounds impressive, particularly as CPA is
mostly an unsolved problem right now on the Web.
Sphere
is a blog search engine. It's had a lot of blogosphere buzz already, but
Technorati still seems to dominate this space. Now they're partnering with
mainstream media, starting with MarketWatch. They have also introduced a little
clickable pop-up link, which displays related blogs and articles.
Omnidrive
is an online storage app, that aims to merge the desktop with the web. It's now
positioning itself as a "storage aggregator". It has both a desktop
and web interface, which both have an OS style interface. It also has sharing
features and a developer API.
Adify
enables you to build your own advertising networks - creating "one thousand
John Battelles" in the presenter's words. [nb: by this point I'm getting
drowsy... not Adify's fault, I should add! But it's a long session and there's
only so many product pitches I can bear....]
3B
is a 3D social network, that operates from inside the browser. You can use
MySpace, Hi5 or Bebo pages or photos you've loaded onto Flickr, Photobucket or
any other web service. For example it can spider MySpace, allowing you to add your friends there onto
3B. You can see and interact with your friends with 3B. It's also a visual
search tool, allowing you to order search windows in the 3D space. You can
change the wallpaper and create "personal 3D spaces". It looks like it
uses scraping to put other web content inside this 3D environment. Intriguing
product, which I am keen to explore some more. Received a good round of applause
from the crowd here.
oDesk
is a jobs website and community. It basically matches freelancers (called
"providers") with employers. It has some project management tools to
complement all this. One of its aims to is to "build trust" between
participants - e.g. it can take screenshots of the worker every 6 hours and
track their mouseclicks (!!!). How this builds trust I don't know...
Venyo
also aims to build trust, by giving blogs and other sites reputations. Includes
the Vindex, a "global trust index." Sounds like a little too much work
for the participants. It's a nice idea and possibly has a market, but getting
take-up will be challenging.
Timebridge is a scheduling and
calendaring tool. It works with Outlook and works by proposing meetings to
participants by email. Participants reply via a team environment. At this point
Timebridge does the scheduling (finds suitable time for everyone, confirms and
notifies, etc). Sounds like an interesting value-add for Outlook users, but is
it enough to lure Outlook users to try it?
Phew, that was a long session and everyone is tired now. Of all the ones listed here, 3B was the one that intrigued me the most. But check out the ones that interest you and let us know what you think.
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I'm at a session at the Web 2.0 Summit called 'Breaking Free: Working with Real Time Data, Online, Offline, and Outside of the Browser'. The speaker is Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Technical Evangelist from Adobe. He starts off by saying that Adobe is looking for a "high definition user experience". He thinks the following things are still missing from the Web:
He then talks about the Flash Player 9, which includes a virtual machine for ActionScript (like Java). In laymens terms, "virtual machine" refers to the software used to run applications.
