Some interesting Web Tech news out today...
- Web giants ask for feds' help on censorship; mostly relating to US Big Internet Companies (Goog, MS and Y!) trying to do business in China, although this CNET report suggests that about 25 countries around the world are currently engaged in Internet filtering.
- Yahoo Planning to Add 100 Web Sites for Entertainment; NY Times reports on Yahoo's Brand Universe strategy, which aims to "create environments where fans of brands can hang out when they are online." The first example is the Nintendo Wii site, which R/WW covered in November. I think it's a good way to drive more traffic and eyeballs, and it utilizes the Yahoo 'social media infrastructure' (to coin an awkward phrase). In essence Yahoo is shifting focus more to being a Web platform for externally branded content - rather than creating most of the content itself.
- Google 4Q Earnings Nearly Triple; The Googernaut rolls on, with the Mountain View company earning $1.03 billion during the final 3 months of 2006. Not wanting to appear over-confident, Google CEO Eric Schmidt cautiously noted in his public announcement of the earnings: "To be growing this fast at this stage is phenomenal".
- comScore Networks Releases Top Web Properties Worldwide for December; this is interesting, as Google sites are now ranked number 2, just behind Microsoft sites and ahead of Yahoo. Also check out the top-gaining categories worldwide in 2006: Multimedia (up 37 percent, mostly due to YouTube), Community (up 33 percent, including MySpace and Blogger.com), E-mail (up 16 percent, thanks largely to Google Gmail - up 71 percent to 60 million visitors year-over-year), News/Information (up 15 percent) and Games (up 14 percent).
Our current
poll has been causing a bit of water cooler discussion amongst the Read/WriteWeb
authors. The question we're asking in the poll is: in your current Web
activities where an identity is required (i.e. you can't be anonymous) do you
ever fake all or part of your identity?
After 511 votes so far, an astonishing 55% of respondents say they regularly or always use fake Web identities. Just 12% of people said they always use their real identity. Remember we're specifically asking about the times when you use an identity rather than being simply anonymous - so for example if you use online dating sites, peer-to-peer transactions sites such as craigslist or ebay, and general social networking sites like MySpace and Second Life.
One thought amongst the R/WW authors was that the poll might be a bit too general. Indeed the poll results reminded me of a comment made on an earlier R/WW post (by Jitendra Gupta) about Throwaway Identities. This is an extract from the comment I'm referring to, which was made by a 19-year old:
A new "3D community" has
just been launched, with the unusual name of Teapotters. The name comes from 3D pioneer
Martin Newell, who created the first free 3D model in 1974 - a teapot model. The site
Teapotters.com aims to popularize 3D displays and sharing across the Web - websites,
social networks, blogs and more - via a "3D widget". The email pitch I received referred
to the service as "the Youtube of 3D". I know, that kind of description makes most of us
roll our eyes. But still, I was intrigued enough to check it out...
The way this works is via a plugin, so to actually view any of the 3D widgets you first have to install the plugin. Here is what you encounter before you've installed anything (this is in Fx, but it's a similar process for IE):
In
my previous post, I noted how the new Gmail/Google Docs & Spreadsheet integration
feature threatens Microsoft. There's also some high level discussion going on in the tech
sphere about how Microsoft's continued loss of search market share and
confusion over the Live branding means they are losing the "web war". Infamous Dot
Com analyst Henry Blodget goes as far as to
say that Microsoft is sliding into "Web Irrelevance". I very much disagree with that
prognosis. Like John Battelle,
I think there is a lot more Web innovation to happen yet. Google certainly won the battle
(with search and online advertising), but they have not won the war.
Let's look at the threats to Google. As Greg Linden pointed out, Microsoft has a prime opportunity to "control the search experience in Windows". So desktop/web search may be Microsoft's best hope to challenge Google in search. Also as the Read/WriteWeb crew has written about many times on this blog, there are a lot of very innovative search solutions being worked on by startups - any one of which might rise up and surprise Google. Check out Charles Knight's list of top 100 alternative search engines, for a taste of the amazing innovation happening right now in search.
On Monday Google released a relatively
minor, but useful, feature. It's worth examining a bit more closely, because it's yet
another signal that Google is quietly pecking away at Microsoft's lunch in office
software. Now I know that Microsoft Office has a lot of advanced functionality that the
online office apps don't have, but hear me out...
The new feature is a one-click import feature for attachments in Gmail. The D&S team explained:
"Whenever those of you who use Gmail receive a spreadsheet or a document in an email, you will see a new link next to the "Download" link that says "Open as a Google document." Click on that and the attachment will automatically be imported into Docs & Spreadsheets and added to your personal document list where you can make changes, invite collaborators and search for it later."
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
I was reading a Time magazine article online today, entitled Marketing to your mind. This article was very provocative and I enjoyed reading it. But after I was done, something else caught my attention. I was surprised to see a row of 'web 2.0' buttons at the bottom of the article. Time magazine, a mainstream publication, has an impressive array of web links to these services. Is this an indication that mainstream media has caught the new social media winds? Time magazine after all did name the Web-enabled YOU as their person of the Year last year.
Whether we like it or not, media has a huge influence on us. We learn news and in exchange media gets to pitch us (gently) their points of view and their advertisements. The blogosphere has a strong hold on the minds of early adopters. However, it is mainstream publications that reach millions of people - many of whom still know very little nothing about new web technologies.
VoIP company SIPphone is at DEMO today, where it is launching Gizmo Call - an online service that makes VoIP phone calls possible from any web browser. It works via a Flash plugin, which enables users to make calls simply by typing a phone number into a text-field in a browser. Users can also use URLs like http://gizmocall.com/18005551212 (that link is an example only and will not work). Gizmo Call is separate from SIPphone's other app, The Gizmo Project, which is a download VoIP app like Skype.
You do need to download a 1MB Flash plugin for Gizmo Call to work, so it's not a download-free browser app. However it's a once-only install and it lowers the bar for consumers wanting to start using VoIP. I myself am trying to use VoIP more in my life and telling family members about it too (of course poor broadband service is an issue here in my country!).
Mission Research, a vendor of contact
management solutions for the nonprofit sector, has launched a product today at DEMO aimed
at the SOHO market. The product is called SalesWorks and is similar to Salesforce.com, in
that it's used to manage contacts or sales leads. In fact it's being billed as "a
Salesforce.com for the SOHO market", but without the cost or complicated features.
The people who founded Mission Research have a successful Dot Com sale behind them already - Charlie Crystle and team sold Chili!Soft for $70 million in 2000 to Cobalt Networks (which was subsequently acquired by Sun Microsystems). Perhaps that success is the reason why their current venture is focused on being "socially responsible". For example, last year they donated over $1 million of software to nonprofits. In terms of their software approach, Mission Research aims to produce a combination of desktop and Web tools - an approach they've named "The Hybrid Web". They want to achieve "the power and safety of desktop applications integrated smartly and safely with web-based functionality."
Disclosure: Zoho is a sponsor of R/WW.
At DEMO today Zoho, the Web Office suite company, will announce an
interesting new preview product called Zoho
Notebook. I was given a run-through of the product by Raju Vegesna. The obvious
competitors to Zoho Notebook are Microsoft's OneNote application and
Google Notebook. This new offering by Zoho
is sufficiently different to both of those - indeed Raju went so far as to say that Zoho
Notebook is "not just an online OneNote". And from my tests of the product, it offers far
more than Google Notebook.
Zoho Notebook is an online app that works in both Firefox and IE browsers. You can create many different types of content, including text, image, audio, video, drawings. With audio, Zoho Notebook comes with a recorder - or you can get your audio from the Web or in your file system. And with the video, you can insert it from a service like YouTube, or record from your webcam straight into Notebook. Zoho Notebook will also come with a browser plug-in, similar to Google Notebook.
Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus
With the consumer release
today of Microsoft Office 2007, it's a good time to look at the online office space - and
what, if anything, Microsoft will do to address this growing market.
In 2007 we expect to see good progress in the adoption of Internet-based productivity applications, such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zimbra. At this point, the 'Web Office' space is in its infancy - but the market is maturing quickly. Already online suites such as those offered by Thinkfree and Zoho are starting to get some traction as cheaper, hosted alternatives to the Microsoft Office desktop suite of products. Online office services are usually free, you can easily share and edit with others, and you can access them from anywhere with an internet connection. But still, people will have to get over security and server concerns; as well as interface and usability differences.
Perhaps the real question here is: what will Microsoft do to defend its office software turf from online office services? We know they are keeping close tabs on online office products. For example in August 2006, Microsoft listed ThinkFree (a web-based word processing and spreadsheet program company) as one of its competitors in its annual 10-K filing.
To help frame the question of how Microsoft will respond to Web-based office software, here is a SWOT analysis of where Microsoft is, where it could be, and some things it could consider looking at - in 2007 and beyond.
