These summary posts are designed to be a 'quick fix' of the top Web news, for those people who don't have time to read the full articles but who want to stay informed.
- Internet Boom in China Is Built on Virtual Fun; NY Times continues the western fascination with all things China. This article profiles Tencent and their dominant mobile entertainment and IM service called ‚ÄúQQ‚Ä? - which "has reached more than 100 million users, or nearly 80 percent of the market." The crux of the piece is that US companies like Google and Yahoo have largely not succeeded in China because they haven't adapted to China‚Äôs Internet market, "which is geared primarily to entertainment and mobile phones".
- New Panama Ranking System For Yahoo Ads Launches Today; as Search Engine Land explains, Yahoo's Panama ad system is designed to take "ad quality and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages (a system similar to that long used by Google)." The high level question most are asking is whether Yahoo has left this move far too late, to seriously challenge the dominant Google AdWords?
- New Google Mini Integrates Google Analytics; more evidence of product integration happening at Google.
- Digg further reduces the influence of top diggers; what makes this so fascinating is that Digg is trying to make their site more democratic, but at the same time not piss off their top users (too much). It's a delicate balancing act for Digg.
A recent Techcrunch Forum thread asked what is the difference between Techcrunch, Mashable and Read/WriteWeb? I think each has a unique brand and we're pretty complementary when it comes down to it. But the comments got me thinking about what type of content people expect from R/WW.
So please help us out and tell us what you like to read at R/WW; what type of posts rock your boat. The following poll is multi-choice.
Couple of bits of Google
product news this weekend. Firstly, at last some tangible
evidence of an online presentations app from Google, one of the missing pieces so far
in the much-anticipated Google Office suite.
The 'Google Operating System' blog dug into some file notes from Google that reveal the
code-name of the tool is Presently (a play on Writely, the name of the online word
processor bought by Google). This will be an online version of Powerpoint, but no other product details are known at this point.
In other news Google is ramping up its personalization efforts. Now when you're signed in to Google, you'll "have access to a personalized Google - one that combines personalized search results and a personalized homepage." Google's best-known blogger, Matt Cutts, mentions this in his latest post - as well as linking to external analysis on the personalization theme.
I actually came across it myself the other day, via Google Accounts. At the time I wasn't sure whether this message in the Google Accounts Help was new or not:
It's a bit late, sorry, but here is a summary of last week's action on Read/WriteWeb....
Our poll last week was an eye-opener. We asked: 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? In the end 1,542 votes were cast and 57% of people said they regularly OR always faked their Web identity (41% regularly and 16% always). 20% of respondents said they always use their real identity on the Web, while 23% admitted to occasionally faking it. The comments make for interesting reading, for example this one from Jan1:
"If I deal with institutions or people that I do commerce with you get my true me.
but for sites who just want to put me in a database, I fake it."
For more analysis on Web identities, check out Jitendra's post called Nobody Knows You're A Dog 2.0 (you can blame me for the title). Also a lot of great comments on Digg on this topic.
Charles Knight's post profiling some of the best alternative search engines really got peoples juices going. With over 90 comments on the post, not to mention the discussion in Slashdot and Digg, well there's more than enough to get you thinking - and testing new search engines!
Tonight there's a crucial
cricket game on in the international Tri-Series involving Australia (the world
champions), New Zealand and England. My team, New Zealand, is playing Australia tonight
at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Sadly I don't currently have TV access to the sports
channel that televises cricket games here in NZ, so I have to use the Internet to follow
the play. Cricinfo.com is the Web source for international cricket lovers - and
tonight I was pleasantly surprised to discover a new live 3D service at Cricinfo. This is a perfect
illustration of the benefits of 3D on the Web, a theme we've been tracking
lately.
Cricinfo's coverage is a 3D animated representation "created from Cricinfo's rich scoring data." It's the next best thing to live tv coverage on the Web, which is no doubt too expensive for Cricinfo to purchase. Using 3D, Web viewers can see a graphical representation of the cricket shots being played live, "shortly after the actual action has taken place". After each ball is bowled, the screen refreshes automatically - just as with the textual ball-by-ball commentary that I usually tune into when I'm sans TV coverage or just busy with work.
What's more, you can choose your camera angle - something you can't do by TV... yet. There are 8 pre-set angles: bowler, batsman, the 2 umpires, and 4 fielding positions. You can zoom in and out, and pan around the stadium with a 360 degree camera.
Yahoo has rolled out a new portal-type service called OurCity, a beta product that aggregates content about cities from across the Yahoo network and Wikipedia. It's rolled out to just 2 cities so far, Bangalore and Delhi. It is described on the TechMag blog (who brought this to my attention) as a "mashup of yahoo service[s]", which is an accurate description as there is news, photos, events, videos, etc from Yahoo properties on the pages. There is also some Wikipedia content, but as GigaOm noted - no Yahoo Maps.
There's a Yahoo City blog online as well, which notes that you can use Our City to explore and share photos, videos, events, news, weather, blogs - all based on locale. This is yet another example of Yahoo spanning out to as many content verticals as possible. Doing city pages makes perfect sense and I suspect it will be integrated into Yahoo Travel once it goes out of beta. City pages would be a natural complement to Yahoo's travel portal - think LonelyPlanet.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
DEMO 2007 has just wrapped up from
Palm Desert CA. The companies that demonstrated their products covered a wide spectrum:
Web apps, social networking, hardware, media, wireless, security, enterprise software and
other technologies. It was an action-packed two days of presentations, so in this post we
pick out our 10 favorites (listed in alphabetical order). Note that each logo is linked
to their home page and the name is linked to the DEMO page.
Jam across the globe with eJamming.
The eJamming web site and desktop software allows musicians to play in sync over the
internet. The intricacies of channeling music, let alone synchronizing it, over the web
are well known. eJamming's secret sauce allows musicians across the globe to connect and
seamlessly play together as if they were in the same rehearsal room. eJamming seems to be
a great addition to our virtually connected lives. If we can work from home, why not jam
from home as well?
Discover and enjoy the world of cinema with Jaman.
Less than 1% of the movies made in the world are available to the US public. Jaman is
about to change that by delivering these movies straight to Windows and Mac Desktops with
innovative, better-than-DVD quality software. On top of getting us these unique movies,
Jaman software creates instant social networks by placing an interactive control bar to
the right of the movie window. The controls allow you to turn on commentary from the
other users, and rate or review the movie. Interacting with other users while watching a
movie could be distracting, but Jaman seems to nail down the problem with the great user
interface.
I'm no stock market expert, but Adam Hewison from MarketClub has produced a 9-minute video that even I can follow. It uses stock chart theory to predict the fortunes of Google and Yahoo stocks this year - concluding that Yahoo will probably have the most percentage gain:
The chart above is the Yahoo one, which has fallen over the last year. But MarketClub maintains that Yahoo potentially will gain 24% when it moves over 30.00 (it's currently 28.35), whereas they think Google will probably gain only 11% when it breaks over 513.00 (currently it is 481.75).
The Read/WriteWeb team is a little
obsessed with next-generation search, even more so after Charles Knight's illuminating
post outlining 100
alternative search engines. Although Pixsta
didn't make that list (note that Charles is constantly updating the top 100), it is a
"visual browse and search" engine that has a unique approach to search. It caught my eye
today when Kris Hoet from Microsoft blogged it.
This is how Pixsta is described on its homepage:
"pixsta software reaches beyond the current text-based approach to search by automatically extracting visual content from images. we can organise large image collections into hyperlinked networks of visual similarity, so that users can browse the network to find images that come close to what they want, and also spark off new searches."
(emphasis ours)
London-based Pixsta's visual search technology is targeted mainly at e-retailers, and it aims to increase the all-important conversion rate of browsers into buyers. Whereas most search engines use text as their main variable, pixsta's algorithms are able to sort variables such as colour, outline shape and texture. In this respect, pixtsa is competing against Riya's like.com - which is also using image search technology for shopping. Also alarm:clock noted in a Nov 06 post another contender, Polar Rose.
A summary of the main Web Tech news today...
- del.icio.us now has 1.5 million users, according to the official blog; Also talks about doing "more meaningful joint development work" with its parent company Yahoo, including re-doing the UI.
- Amazon Q4 Announcements; sales up 34% including "for the first time, non-Media dollar growth [e.g. electronics] exceeded Media dollar growth"; also interesting notes about endless.com, their experimental shoe and handbag website, and a 55% increase in developers registered to use Amazon Web Services (now over 220,000 developers). See also ZDNet's analysis.
- Digg continues the War On Gaming; Kevin Rose says they are removing the Top Diggers list and are also aiming to improve social networking via interests (i.e. topics).
- WSJ profiles Netvibes, Pageflakes; Walt Mossberg concludes that "Netvibes -- and competitors like Pageflakes -- will give My Yahoo a run for its money. They provide an easy way to cut through the clutter of information that confronts us all." It'll be interesting to see if Yahoo develops its own personalized start page, or whether they'll acquire Netvibes or Pageflakes...
- The Web Profile Aggregators; Frank Gruber has a great post outlining all the Web identity aggregators - and there are a lot of them! Frank recommends Spokeo, but he has good things to say about most of them.
