Spotted on the Google homepage today, using the IE browser, was this blazing advertisement for Firefox:
(click image for full screenshot)
While Google has advertised Firefox on its homepage before, it was a co-promotion of Firefox with the Google Toolbar. This current advertisement is for Firefox alone. But what does "Optimized for Google" mean??! The Firefox 2.0 browser already comes with Google as its default search, but this advertisement implies there are more default Google services integrated into Firefox. Is it just Google Toolbar, or does it include other things?
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus.
Paul Graham, as a
combination of investor and uber geek, is a unique figure in the web industry. There's an
increasing trend of entrepreneur-friendly blogging among investors; Guy Kawasaki, Baris Karadogan and Fred
Wilson are perhaps the best examples of this. But Paul Graham has always been
seamlessly close to the entrepreneurs, especially young and inexperienced ones. His
essays and books have been the best friends of wannabes and his seminars enlighten many
students with entrepreneurial flame. Possibly that's why his investment company, Y Combinator, specifically targets young entrepreneurs
- albeit their investment size is generally much lower than the standard. In this
article, we look closer at Paul Graham and examine the current status of his investments,
his investment patterns and discuss some of the effects of his essays.
Adam Carstens from the Attention Company emailed today to tell me about some new research they've just published. It's a report entitled “Out There” and surveys the attitudes of people who participate in online communities. Here is the report as a PDF.
I'd not heard of them before, but the Attention Company is made up of smart people - and they've written some good books about the Internet in the recent past.
The main findings of the report were that people who are “Out There” are more likely to:
Web metrics firm Compete has an interesting post, outlining the top 20 websites (for US traffic). According to Compete, all 20 of them got over 20 million unique visitors in October 2006. Here is the chart:
A couple of people noted in the comments that if you add Microsoft's 4 top 20 properties together (msn.com, live.com, microsoft.com and passport.net), then they would probably be number 1. However a counter to that is that a lot of passport.net domains currently re-direct to live.com. I think there may be some crossover between live.com and MSN too. So it may well be that Yahoo remains number 1, even accounting for Microsoft's multiple brands. Plus of course Yahoo and Google both have separately branded properties too - e.g. Flickr, YouTube. If I was to estimate, I'd put Microsoft at number 2 overall - but interested to hear what others think.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
There has been a lot of talk lately
about 2007 being the year when we will see companies roll out Semantic Web technologies.
The wave started with
John Markoff's article in NY Times and got picked up by Dan Farber of ZDNet and in other media. For
background on the Semantic Web in this era, check out our post entitled The Road to the
Semantic Web. Also for a lengthy, but very insightful, primer on Semantic Web see Nova
Spivak's recent article.
The media attention is not accidental. Because Semantic Web promises to help solve information overload problems and deliver major productivity gains, there is a huge amount of resources, engineering and creativity that is being thrown at the Semantic Web.
What is also interesting is that there are different problems that need to be solved, in order for things to fall into place. There needs to be a way to turn data into metadata, either at time of creation or via natural language processing. Then there needs to be a set of intelligence, particularly inside the browser, to take advantage of the generated metadata. There are many other interesting nuances and sub-problems that need to be solved, so the Semantic Web marketplace is going to have a rich variety of companies going after different pieces of the puzzle. We are planning to cover some of these companies working in the Semantic Web space, so watch out for more coverage here on Read/WriteWeb.
While looking through Mary Meeker's 2006 Web 2.0 Summit presentation, I was struck by the figures on page 19: "Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic was 60% (and rising) of Internet traffic in 2004, with BitTorrent accounting for 30% of traffic, per CacheLogic". You can definitely see why this is the case, as P2P is normally used to download very large media files - music, movies, etc. But still it makes you realise just how big P2P currently is on the Internet and, given the increasing amount of video coming onto the Web, how crucial it is going forward.
Source: Mary Meeker presentation, via CacheLogic
I followed up by checking out the CacheLogic webpage, which has an interesting research presentation on its homepage entitled True Picture of P2P Filesharing. Also note that there is an updated 2005 version of the report on the site.
Today Microsoft released a beta of Live Search Books, its competitor to Google Book Search. The content inside Live Search Books isn't that modern - it basically only includes out-of-copyright books. As the Live Search team noted, this release "makes tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books available from our library scanning initiative, including books from the University of California, the University of Toronto, and the British Library."
What's of most interest is that it's yet another example of Microsoft matching blow for blow whatever online product Google comes out with. Books isn't something you'd normally expect Microsoft to bother with, except perhaps by making it easier to read eBooks on their Tablet PCs. But books is a very strategically important area for Google to enter into, because Google's main remit is to organize the world's information. As books are still probably the main form of in-depth information delivery, it makes perfect sense for Google to try and cover that. And indeed they've been going to great lengths in recent months to do that. But for Microsoft, a book search service seems almost irrelevant for them - except as a way to copy and cover whatever Google does.
Online video sharing sites are a dime a
dozen these days, but a newly launched one caught my eye this week. Coull.tv promises to enable users to search inside videos - to
find specific segments within a video that they want to view - as well as interact with
"moving objects" inside the video. You may remember that Gotuit does a similar
thing, by manually inserting metadata within videos. I'm tracking their progress too,
so I thought I'd also investigate coull.tv's system. Note that Gotuit is focused on
'professional' content, while coull.tv is a YouTube-like consumer play on amateur
videos.
The key differentiator with coull.tv (from the likes of YouTube) is that it allows users to search for specific moments within video - as well as click on and interact with what the company calls "moving objects" during play. The latter is done via a downloadable app called ‘video activator’, which enables users to make objects within a video interactive. Using this app, objects within the video can be edited by the coull.tv community - with the aim of making video searching more contextual and relevant. So this in turn enables viewers to find specific points in a video and perhaps send specific links within a video to friends.
Video Activator in action
Written by John Milan and edited by Richard MacManus. Images by Jon Cornforth. This is the second article of a two-part series - see Part 1 here.
The other day I was trying out IE 7. It has a nifty feature that
downloads all the elements of a web page and stores them together in one file for future
viewing. We do a lot of work with SharePoint at my company and I was curious how many bytes a
generic, freshly created Document Workspace takes. It turned out to be 715K or so, which
is surprisingly close to a megabyte. Thinking maybe this was MS/SharePoint specific, I
tried a new Google Docs page (472K), a new Google Spreadsheet page (418K) and the front
page of Yahoo Finance (429K). Somewhere along the lines, as HTML pages have entered the
mainstream as real workhorses, the nimble HTML burros of the early web have morphed into
plodding, three-tiered-architecture clydesdales. It doesn't take too many clicks and page
refreshes before you've downloaded more bytes than a comparable rich application. Many,
many more bytes. And that's just one page.
Could history repeat itself? What will be the tipping point for a few rich application machines to replace scores of web page clydesdales? One possibility is an increase in the cost of all those bytes, which is why Google (and most other web application providers) really would like to see a Net Neutrality amendment or bill [update: we edited the previous sentence after publication, based on comment 14 below].
Zoho recently released a set of APIs that lets anyone write their own program to use Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet data [disclosure: Zoho is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb]. As Matthew Ingram explained, it "means that other companies -- online storage providers such as Box.net, Carbonite or Mozy, for example -- can easily build support for Zoho's services into their own products."
Also Google recently announced their Google Spreadsheets API, as noted by John Musser. This API is part of the GData set of APIs that Google has already utilized in Google Calendar and Google Base. Here's how it's described:
