Way back when I was in high school I found myself in a high school science
class. It was your typical experience, replete with bunsen burners, saftey
goggles and a science teacher named Norbert. But one day Norbert had an
inspriation - he let the class watch a video of James Burke and his Connections
series, which described all of the happy accidents in technology through the
years, that have brought us where we are today. My favorite accidental
connection was the development of fine mist sprays for perfume bottles. While it
may have helped people smell better, the real combustion happened in your
automobile, where the fine mist sprays became fuel injection nozzles for the
modern gasoline engine.
Like a fine fragrant perfume, Amazon has a revolutionary technology sitting right under everyone's noses. Their happy accident? Building a reliable, scalable and robust ecommerce system. While I'm sure Jeff Bezos didn't envision his online company being compared to perfume sprays, the fact of the matter is, even after immense technological investment, retail needs a lot of perfume to make the margins smell nice-- even if you're online.
But in their quest to prove to the world that online retail is the wave of the future, Amazon has created not just a fine mist. They have unexpectedly created a vapor cloud - or internet cloud - that is ready for ignition. Most fortunately for Amazon, they've been able to build one of the world's most impressive, massively scalable datacenter systems. Most fortunately for you, they're willing to share it. And most fortunately for corporate programmers, you're about to be relevant again.
MyStrands, a music discovery and social networking
site that covers the PC, mobile and physical worlds (see our profile in
January), has released an interesting new recommendations feature. It uses the
MyStrands Public APIs (called OpenStrands) to link their
social music recommendations to Wikipedia information. Essentially it's a mashup of MyStrands
music recommendations with artist information from Wikipedia. It's not a huge feature,
but it's a neat example of the innovation that is happening with music and the Web.
OpenID has gained two more high profile Internet company
supporters. Wordpress announced their support today
and also Chris Messina did a bit of snooping and discovered that
37Signals support is nigh. These two organizations join Digg, Microsoft,
AOL, Yahoo,
LiveJournal, MediaWiki, and others in their support of OpenID. There are still gaps -
e.g. even in today's Wordpress announcement, it's worth noting that you can't actually
sign into your Wordpress blog with an OpenID a/c. But you can (as Chris
Messina explained) use your WordPress.com URL as an OpenID elsewhere, making
WordPress.com an “identity provider”.
Remember our poll, which showed that 52% of respondants either don't have an OpenID account or don't know what it is? Well that's slowly changing - and every time a new Internet company supports OpenID, the chances of OpenID becoming the decentralized identity service of choice increase.
Television is big business. No, let's not
understate it: television is very big business. The global broadcast and cable
television industry generates billions of dollars worldwide annually from subscription,
equipment, advertising, and service fees; and is dominated by huge media conglomerates
like General Electric, Viacom, News Corp., and Disney. The new kid on the block is
Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), which sends television signals over the Internet - and the
early forecasts are bright. Research firm iSupply predicts that IPTV will be a
$26 billion industry in 2010, while Gartner says that 3 years from now IPTV
will have the attention of 48 million pairs of eyeballs.
This post looks at 3 new IPTV startups (plus a couple of "sort of IPTV" websites) that have been gaining steam over the past few months. Analysts and pundits view these companies as competitors to the cable industry, far more so than video sharing sites like YouTube.
Joost, which is currently in closed beta and was initially known as The
Venice Project, is the big new kid on the block. They got the most media coverage
of all the startups profiled here (26,527 mentions on Technorati -- none of the other
sites here crack 1,000) and they have deep pockets by virtue of their founders, Kazaa and
Skype creators Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom.
Segala is a specialist in web accessibility, mobile
testing, mobile web testing and certification. Based in Dublin and privately owned,
Segala provides a range of services to help you better understand what problems your
website and mobile applications might have in terms of accessibility. Let's take a look
at their services...
Segala is at the forefront of promoting Content Labels, which are RDF-based files that contain metadata about trust. Segala developed Search Thresher, a Firefox plug-in for examining Content Labels in search results. It only works on your Google results and only a handful of sites use Content Labels, but Search Thresher is really just a stopgap to demonstrate how Content Labels might actually work if widely adopted. If Content Labels are adopted, Segala hopes to become a major player in verifying these - which would be a very lucrative business. Segala helped to create the original charter and is co-author of the final report with ICRA.
Content Labels are now moving onto a full recommendation track within the W3C, so it is a promising technology. Content Labels will be proposed as a replacement for PICS, a W3C spec which enables labels (metadata) to be associated with Internet content.
Not content with re-making the Netscape.com portal into a Digg clone, the Netscape 2.0
crew are at it again - this time with a new version of My.Netscape. Tomorrow (Tuesday US time) it will
release "a Beta of the next generation My.Netscape". The Netscape blog
states:
"My.Netscape will retain its identity as a personalized homepage, with a minimum of ad clutter. The initial release will in fact have no ads at all! Our programming staff has worked hard to create a framework that allows for scalability and UI elegance."
That makes it sound like just another re-design. But reading into the post more reveals that it's going to be more like a Netvibes clone.
While the new site is not viewable yet, there are hints that the new My.Netscape will be a startpage - similar to Netvibes, Pageflakes, Live.com and Google Personalized Homepage. There is a partial screenshot of a weather module and the Netscape blog notes that "modules can be dragged and dropped to enable easy configuration of your layout."
It becomes even clearer when they discuss the Add Content layer (screenshot below):
Red Herring is reporting that AOL founders
Steve Case and Ted Leonsis have invested $5.5-million, as a second round investment, into
widget syndication platform Clearspring. Alex
profiled
ClearSpring back in November and other widget platforms we've covered
before on Read/WriteWeb include Snipperoo, Widgetbox, Fox's SpringWidgets and MuseStorm.
In a recent post, VC Brad Feld says there are 23 "widget management systems" and he suggests that most of them are heading for a disappointing end. He also notes that many existing web services companies are 'widgetizing' their services:
"As an investor, I’ve looked at and decided not to invest in “widget management systems.” However, all of the companies I’ve invested in that provide web services to publishers (including NewsGator, FeedBurner, Lijit, ClickCaster, and Me.dium) are “widgetizing” their services. FeedBurner is an obvious platform in my universe for this (given their broad relationship with over 350,000 publishers) as they have demonstrated with their integration of Headline Animator with Stats, SpringWidgets, and Lijit Search."
After a two-month pilot, Yahoo's Mixd mobile service has closed down. Mixd first came to light in November last year. It was a group mobile messaging tool for the youth market and had an experimental, trendy design. Currently the Mixd page has some farewell text on it and a pointer to the much more conservative UI of Yahoo Mobile.
Yahoo told Read/WriteWeb that from Mixd they "gained valuable insight about how youth communities socialize via mobile phones." Yahoo says they will incorporate group text messaging and multimedia sharing features into future Yahoo! mobile products.
About 2 months ago, HitWise published a report stating that Technorati, the leading blog search company, had for the first time fallen behind Google BlogSearch in traffic. The reason was Google's new strategy of pushing Google BlogSearch on the Google News homepage. A quite unfair competition for Technorati, but this was an expected and very natural move for Google. So in this article, we take Technorati under the microscope - looking at their technologies, strategies and ultimately their exit options.
Source: Hitwise
The Technorati vs Google question is equivalent to the Blog Search vs Web Search question. But while in regular web search, relevancy is the key parameter; in blog search, it is only a secondary parameter. The most important aspect of a blog search result is its actuality. In other words, time is the primary parameter in Blog Search.
This is a guest post written by two of the researchers behind IBM's Many Eyes app, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas. R/WW profiled Many Eyes, a "shared visualization and discovery" service, back in January. Many Eyes has been running for a month now, so in this post Martin and Fernanda showcase some of the best visualizations, so far, and talk about the future of "social data analysis" on the Web.
The idea for Many Eyes came from some
surprising behaviors that we each serendipitously observed.
Several years ago, Fernanda was working on an email visualization program. When it came time to run experiments, she was extremely careful to let her subjects know that visualizations of their email would be completely private - the assumption was that no one would ever want to reveal their personal mail. To her surprise, her subjects immediately began to ask for ways to share the visualizations with others! In fact, it turned out that the process of storytelling and reminiscing was one of the most valuable aspects of the visualizations.
Martin's serendipitous experience came two years later, when he created a baby name visualization to illustrate a book that his wife had written. After the site went live, he spent an embarrassingly long time doing Google searches to find out what people were saying about it. His self-centered surfing was rewarded with the discovery of many large, detailed blog conversations in which users - who often had no immediate interest in naming babies - speculated about various trends and patterns they'd found in the data. In aggregate, the analysis of the data was both deep and broad - uncovering a huge amount of information.
These two experiences were the motivation behind Many Eyes. We wanted to find out whether these experiences were flukes, or whether there really was a powerful social angle to visualizations. And we felt that the only way to find out was to create a participatory website available to the entire internet - to create not social software, but societal-scale software.
