RSS feed remixing has been a
pet topic of mine for quite some time, so
tonight it was a pleasure to discover Yahoo's new Pipes service (hat-tip Thejesh). It's a beta service from Yahoo and the name, which pays tribute to Unix pipes, betrays that it's designed for geeks and early
adopters to experiment with. Pipes is described as "an interactive feed aggregator and
manipulator" and essentially it enables you to create remix feeds. It's a hosted service
"that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming
environment."
You can either create a new pipe from scratch, using the nifty visual tool, or browse through existing pipes and select one that strikes your fancy. You can also 'clone' a pipe, and make your own adjustments. Then click on "Run this Pipe" to see the results. Some automatically deliver a set of results, for example this pipe that aggregates Yahoo blog feeds. Others you need to add additional data to get results - for example this "hot deal search" pipe [screenshots below].
The real power is in the filtering options. Opening up the editing environment reveals a lot of choices to manipulate the individual feeds [see final screenshot below].
- Microsoft to Support OpenID; details are sketchy at this point, but Microsoft looks likely to utilize OpenID (the open, decentralized identity system) in some of its products. Brady Forrest has more info at O'Reilly Radar. If this turns out to be true, it'll be a huge step forward and will put pressure on Yahoo and Google. Frankly, I think Microsoft can achieve a rare moment of 'higher ground' with this - for once, Google will look like the laggard in supporting open standards.
- Google opens Gmail to all; Google has removed the invite-only part of Gmail, after nearly 3 years (it launched April 2004). I note that the 'beta' tag is still there though! Also it could probably do with a boost in data allowance, as I for one am now over 50% of my allocated 2814 MB.
- Amazon Unbox on TiVo; Amazon.com and TiVo partner to beam movies and TV shows directly to their customers' living rooms. We're really seeing some action in the Internet TV space this year, with Apple, Microsoft, Wal-Mart and startups like Joost all jostling for early market leadership. Key to TiVo choosing Amazon over other partnership contender Netflix was Amazon's "large customer network and a large catalog of distribution rights".
- Google to cable operators: Let's collaborate; related to the Amazon/TiVo news, Google head of TV technology Vincent Dureau is reaching out to cable operators because "the Web infrastructure, and even Google's (infrastructure), doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect". This is mostly because of online video, which is expected to put a huge strain on Internet infrastructure this year and going forward.
Yet another social network
launched publicly today, but this one called Change.org
caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly it's for a great cause - enabling people
to form communities around social issues like global warming and Net Neutrality. But it's
also a very well designed site that makes excellent use of 'web 2.0' technologies.
The first thing that you notice when you visit the homepage of Change.org is the tagcloud, which draws attention to the top issues in the network. The tagcloud constantly updates, but as of writing 'Empower Women' and 'Recycle' were the top tags. To get a feel for the site I clicked on 'Stop Global Warming', a hot topic currently (pun intended)...
Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus
MySpace has some hard decisions to make, as last year they entered into an advertising relationship with Google and now they find themselves unable to make similar deals with other companies. An alliance between MySpace and Google last year, where Google became the sole provider of text ads on MySpace, guaranteed News Corp's media darling $900 million in shared ad revenue over the course of three years. The deal, made six months ago, has not been finalized but it has already taken effect. A Google search bar and ads are already present on the site and MySpace is receiving payments from those.
But now MySpace is looking to partner with eBay, to allow MySpace users to sell items using eBay's PayPal. And like a jealous lover, Google is protesting. The Wall St Journal is reporting (full article behind paywall) that MySpace's dalliance with eBay is holding up finalization of the ad revenue deal between MySpace and Google. You can imagine the Google ultimatum: it's either him or me! :-)
Rather than spending the night writing posts, I've been wrestling with CSS and various other design issues - the result is a new menu and content tab structure for Read/WriteWeb. The design work on all the tabs was done by the amazing Mike Rundle (he also did the logo a couple of months ago). There are still a few minor things for us to update, but I decided to release in 'beta' mode tonight. You may need to do a hard refresh of the page (shift-F5) to see the changes.
The reason for the content tabs is to provide topical ways to navigate through R/WW's content - and also to help focus our writing on those topics. One inspiration for the tabs was Gigaom.com, who implemented them last year in their re-design.
Let us know what you think, bearing in mind that we haven't 100% finished it yet.
By guest author Jawad Shuaib, the founder of Shuzak.com: The social network for geeks.
Startups have been multiplying like rabbits over the past three years. Due to the added competition, many startups are beginning to narrow their focus to a much smaller demographic. The year 2007 will mark the transition from startups aiming for the mainstream markets to specialists intensely focused on gaining smaller grounds. This is a different landscape, one that demands new rules of the game. It is the entrepreneur's job to anticipate these changes in order to align them with their startup's future.
Let us take a look at the social networks available for parents; in this category alone we have Cafe Mom, Maya's Mom, MothersClick, MommyBuzz, MTV's ParentsConnect, Famster, and Minti. The niche for parenthood seems to be taken. Yet, it can further be broken down to, say, "Grandparents", "Stay at home mothers", "Single mothers", etc. Becoming a master of any of the smaller niches has many great advantages, such as less competition, loyal readership, and better focus. All marketers exploit a basic positioning principle that states that it is better to be first than to be better. It is clearly too late to be the first social network, or bookmarking service, or video sharing startup. Consequently, the Web 2.0 era demands that startups put intense focus on their niche regardless of the smaller demographics.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has posted his Thoughts on Music in the 'Hot
News' section of the Apple website. He starts off by explaining the background to Apple's
DRM on iTunes:
"Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices."
Fair enough, Apple had to play by the rules of 'the big 4' record labels. Apple’s DRM system then, called FairPlay, is all about protecting the copyright of the music companies. And who can argue with the success of that strategy - Jobs notes later in the article that up till the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store.
The crux of the article is Jobs' 3 alternatives to DRM for the future:
The 30 Boxes blog celebrated
today the first
anniversary of their product launch. The online calendar space has been a tough one,
ever since Google released its calendar app in April last year.
But right from the start 30 Boxes has been recognized
as an innovative app and not just your usual Outlook clone. 30 Boxes takes great pride in
being only 3 people, but managing to not only foot it with giants like Google and Yahoo -
but out-innovate them. I asked one of the 3, Narendra Rocherolle, to tell me about the
user growth and product milestones 30 Boxes experienced in 2006.
30 Boxes began as a fun project for 3 people behind Webshots, the online photo app sold to CNET Networks in 2004. Nick Wilder, Julie Davidson and Narendra Rocherolle started getting excited about "a way to share schedules and life bits in a way that would dramatically broaden the notion of a calendar." 30 Boxes launched 5 February 2006 and immediately captured the interest of early adopter bloggers and mainstream magazines like PC World.
In terms of stats, 30 Boxes currently has 80,000 registered users and gets around 30,000 unique sessions per day. It also has some 50,000 outside RSS feeds under management. As can be seen from the following chart, a snapshot of 30 Boxes' stats from Aug 06 to Feb 07, growth has been steady (the dip was over the holidays):
Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus
After the Super Bowl and the defeat of my team the Chicago Bears, I checked my inbox to see how many Evite invitations I'd received for Super Bowl parties. Evite has been around for a relatively long time (1998), with very little competition. For example all my friends use Facebook or Evite to send out electronic invitations. But what competition is out there for Evite? In this post I check out a few of the 'web 2.0' sites that could one day usurp Evite. They are all promising, but have some way to go before they appeal to the average person and not just early adopters.
This Chicago-based Evite
system is meant for casual events. Currently the user interface is not aesthetically
pleasing, but the service offers a wiki-like product to enable gatherings big or small.
With some refining of the UI, they have a chance. I like the navigation and their
emphasis on sharing and aggregating information for invites. Currently, the site has no
clear monetization strategy.
I know as much about the SuperBowl as US readers know about cricket! Nevertheless I am aware that SuperBowl is the biggest sporting event in the US and advertising during the game is highly expensive - over $2M for a 30 second TV slot. An interesting angle for Web Tech fans is: how well did SuperBowl advertisers integrate their TV and other media ads with their web sites and Internet campaigns? Reprise Media has tried to answer that question in their third annual Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard. Specifically the report looks at how well SuperBowl advertisers used search to harness the buzz generated by their commercials and drive traffic to their sites. The answer apparently is: still not very well.
In the Scorecard brief, Reprise Media notes that in general Super Bowl advertisers "made strides in integrating their offline and online efforts this year". However, there were still "a significant number of missed opportunities". For example, while a majority of companies provided URLs during their ads, less than 20% gave viewers a compelling reason to visit their websites. The one exception to this trend, according to Reprise Media, was Pizza Hut:
"Though its commercial was not consumer-generated, Pizza Hut used paid search to link users to a customized YouTube channel instead of its own corporate site, allowing visitors to continue a dialogue about its ads and products."
However in my view Pizza Hut's online content is still very poor. For one thing it doesn't look like much dialogue has happened over on YouTube, where the custom Pizza Hut channel has attracted zero comments (as of writing) and just 33 subscribers. Another problem, there is a playback error when you try and click on a video - it has the message "The owner of this video does not allow video embedding". What's more, the accompanying MySpace page for Ted the Pizza Hut delivery driver is, well, cheesy [screenshot at the bottom of this post].
