James Corbett has
an interesting post speculating that Google Reader might become a 'read/write' app
over the course of 2007. Says James:
"The addition of support for tagging and link blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a fully fledged Reader/Writer (let's call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is the first product that will tie the major pieces of the Read/Write web together - RSS/ATOM (feeds), OPML, Social-Bookmarking/Tagging (folksonomies), Attention and Microformats."
I agree that Google Reader has been adding some fantastic functionality over recent months. Indeed I now use Google Reader as my main RSS Reader - just last week I loaded it up with a bunch more OPML files and RSS feeds. Also by reading the official Google Reader blog, you can tell the engineers are passionate about building up and adding new things to the product - something sadly missing in other top online RSS Readers, some of which have stayed largely the same for 2+ years now.
It remains to be seen whether Google Reader will add more 'writer' features over 2007 - Google has to be careful the product doesn't become too geeky and experimental. You can quickly scare off people with talk of OPML and microformats (guilty!). But I think Google Reader is the most interesting online RSS Reader around right now, so if they can integrate the 'writer' functionalities into the product in a way that they're very easy to use... the RSS reading market could come alive again.
Greg Linden just posted on his
blog that Findory, the personalized news service he
created and has been running for the past 3 years, is to slowly "fade away". In other
words, he's not going to put any more effort into developing it or the business. However
findory.com will continue to be a live site throughout 2007.
Findory is kind of like a personalized newspaper, in that the system learns your preferences over time and filters your RSS reading list accordingly. As it says in the Help section: "The more articles you click on, the more personalized Findory will look." It launched on January 2, 2004. I must admit the app never caught on with me, despite giving it a couple of tries. And looking at its Alexa chart, it seems that Findory never managed to get network effects going.
But I've always admired the concept of personalized news and Greg was right at the forefront of it with Findory. He's an ex-Amazon developer with a background in personalization systems - and his knowledge of the field showed through on his blog and whenever he left a comment on R/WW.
Todd Bishop at Seattle P-I newspaper has published a telling tag cloud view of Bill Gates' speech at CES earlier this week. Notes Bishop:
"Putting our fancy new gizmo to work, we fed the text of Bill Gates' Sunday night Consumer Electronics Show keynote into the tag-cloud generator, and added the results to our scrolling timeline of Microsoft keywords. Here's the static view below, showing the most commonly used terms from the speech, and providing an alternative look at what the company was saying during this year's show."
Here is the result:
This is an excellent use of tag clouds! I wrote in our wrap-of Gates' speech last Sunday that Xbox was mentioned a lot - and the tag cloud clearly shows this. I wondered if Vista would be top word/phrase, and sure enough it is about equal with Windows. Other words to stand out include 'media', 'hardware' and 'video' (amongst others). One word that seems to be conspicuously absent is 'live'...
Also note the fairly big 'deliver' :-) 2007 is the year when Microsoft has to put up, or shut up.
OK so Jobs didn't use the word "ain't". But in a Newsweek
interview with Steven
Levy, Jobs put the kibosh on any talk about the iPhone opening up its
platform for third party developers:
‚ÄúYou don‚Äôt want your phone to be an open platform,‚Ä? meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. ‚ÄúYou need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn‚Äôt want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.‚Ä?
Perhaps the most revealing quote is about the issue of mobile walled gardens and how Jobs and Apple first approached Cingular:
‚ÄúWe talked to several of them and educated ourselves,‚Ä? he says. He finally decided to deal with AT&T‚Äôs Cingular network. ‚Äú[They] were willing to take a really big gamble on us. We decided what the phone is. We decided what software would be on the phone. And so we could make the product we wanted.‚Ä?
(emphasis ours)
The bolded bits really sum up Apple's philosophy. Their products are closed up tight, so that nobody can meddle with them. People weren't allowed to touch the OS in Macintosh back in '84 and nowadays they can't even change the battery in an iPod. The iPhone will be another product that locks out developers and any meddling from users. As Nick Carr put it: "In Jobs's world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet."
Ever
wondered what a MySpace-like social network site, which are seemingly a dime a
dozen these days, is worth on the open market? Well the developers of ShoutCentral.com,
which claims to have "over 1,000 users", has just
sold their SNS for $13,800 on eBay. The sellers were originally after $15k,
so it was close to what they wanted. This was the eBay auction write-up:
"Now is your chance to buy a premier social network already generating buzz around the Internet. With over 1,000 users and a completely custom coded network you can become the next Tom from MySpace!! I have spent the last year building this website from the ground up using PHP and AJAX on a MySQL backend and poured my sweat and tears working many a late night to add new features. The reason I am selling the site is due to my lack of time to update and improve the site. Hopefully the right someone can acquire it and continue to make the site better and grow the community. The code can be easily modified to add whatever you choose."
So $13,800 works out to be $13.80 per user (give or take a few users). As a rough comparison, at the time MySpace was sold to News Corp for $580M it had 27 million unique users - valuing the purchase at $21 per user.
But really 1000 users is a pittance in the world of social networks, so the purchaser probably bought it more for the technology. It would cost about $15k for a web design agency to build you a social network site - and ShoutCentral seems to be a competent design.
Ugenie,
a comparison shopping service that we profiled in November, has released a new
textbook service. You may remember that Ugenie's defining feature is the the
ability to group items into a 'bundle' and find the best price for that bundle -
i.e. find the best price for multiple items across multiple merchants. This
takes into account all the coupons and discounts being offered. So textbooks is
obviously a natural extension of that, seeing as students require different
textbooks for different courses.
For the textbooks app, Ugenie has aggregated textbook information from more than 150 universities. The user selects his/her university from a pull-down list, then they review the textbooks they need for each class. Alternatively the user can search by book metadata such as Title, Author or Keyword.
The idea is a simple one: that students can find the cheapest prices for all their books in one click. Students are generally thrifty sorts by necessity (at least that was the case for me back in the day), so saving tens or even hundreds of dollars on textbooks is a pretty compelling thing for students.
Ugenie's user interface is fantastic - very smooth and a lot of useful filter options to find the right bundle. The problem, as we noted in our November post, remains that you need to purchase each individual item separately. The last mile of the Ugenie shopping experience is not automated. But still, it's a very good value proposition for students wanting to save money on textbooks. I can also see potential partnerships here, with the likes of Facebook and other sites where students hang out.
Written by Jitendra Gupta of KarmaWeb and edited by Richard MacManus
At the NewTechMeetup
on Tuesday, I saw a presentation from Robert Chea, Founder and COO of PowerReviews.
PowerReviews is a new startup that provides free Amazon.com-like
user reviews to web retailers. Amazon.com reviews are one of the main reasons why the giant retailer is considered the
premier product research site on the Internet. Also, these user-generated
product reviews have contributed to Amazon.com’s spectacular revenue growth.
PowerReviews creates a central repository of user reviews collected from its retailer customer base. If a retailer doesn't want to share the reviews generated on its site, PowerReviews will charge a monthly fee. Otherwise it is a completely free service. When a retailer signs up, they get access not just to their own user reviews - but to all user reviews in the system. By leveraging this distributed model of collecting and displaying reviews, PowerReviews provides web retailers with many more reviews than a small retailer will typically have. This allows small retailers to compete with Amazon.com, by providing shoppers with extensive user-generated information at the point of sale. In addition, PowerReviews provides several interesting features that make it easy to use the user reviews content - like PowerTags, PowerSummary, TagSuggest.
Example user review
There's one industry which has continued to flourish, whether it be web 1.0 or 2.0 or anything in between. And that's the domain name market. The Domain Name Values Weekly site polled 30 domain name experts to find out their Top 20 Domain Transactions of 2006. The main criteria wasn't most money paid, but best long-term value (4+ years). Here are the results:
1. Red.org (8) - $50,000 [note: this is Product Red's domain name]
2. Football.us (4) - $18,510
3. Brown.com (5) - $300,000
4. NewYork.info (2) - $46,392
5. XS.net (2) - $13,000
6. Fun.mobi (0) - $100,000
7. CD.com (0) - $277,750
8. Blue.com (1) - $500,000
9. Stockquotes.mobi (0) - $27,000
10. Sex.net (0) - $454,500
11. Wifi.com (2) - $225,000
12. Cameras.com (1) - $1,500,000
13. SexEducation.com (1) - $120,000
14. Prize.com (0) - $70,000
15. Wrestling.com (1) - $500,000
16. CD.net (0) - $20,000
17. Flowers.mobi (2) - $200,000
18. 20.com (0) - $75,000
19. Scouts.com (1) - $107,000
20. Bike.com (0) - $500,000
* First place votes in ( )
While I'm no expert in domain names, it's interesting that 3 .mobi domains are in this list - the mobile Web coming up. Also 9 of the domains are not .com. There are 3 domain names for colors and 3 sex-related domains (some things never change).
Only 1 seven-figure domain in this list though (cameras.com went for $1.5M), so the market isn't as bubble-ish as it was in the dot com era.
The NY Times has an interesting article about how many office workers forward work email into their web email accounts (Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, etc). Employers are worried about the security implications, as well as legal issues. It's a classic case of web 2.0 consumer apps infiltrating the enterprise (the consumerization of the enterprise, as it was labeled last year). NYTimes writes:
HIT
stands for Human Intelligence Task and it's the term for a small job at Mechanical
Turk, Amazon's AI task management service. According
to Wikipedia's definition, "Mturk enables computer programs to
co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are
unable to do." The payments are micro, but the idea is that they are tasks
which groups of people would do for fun or to ease boredom.
Since its launch on 2 November 2005, Mechanical Turk has gradually built up a following - there is a forum for "Turkers" called Turker Nation, which appears to have light-to-medium level patronage.
However it's fair to say that Mturk isn't being used as much as the initial hype period in Nov-Dec 05. There are 259 current HITs, but even Turk fans seem to lament the lack of quality HITs. Says Turk Lurker:
"Personally, I've been scanning the available hits every few weeks myself and there's just doesn't seem like there's much worth doing out there right now. Still no "killer apps," which has plagued the project since the beginning."
