Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.
This afternoon I attended an amazing
panel titled
"Web App Autopsy". This was one of the panels I was most excited about when I was
getting ready to come to Austin.
The panel examined four live web applications (RegOnline, FeedBurner, Wufoo, and Blinksale) at an amazing level of depth. If you are involved in any part of designing, building or marketing a web application, then you really need to go download a copy of the slides.
While the entire presentation was packed with useful information, the data I found most interesting was around the conversion of site visitors to customers - both free and paying customers. The slide below shows a summary of the data the panel presented.
Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.
The SXSW conference has multiple panels
going on at the same time. I started my SXSW experience by attending the "World
Domination Via Collaboration" panel. The presenters were: Jory Des Jardins
Co-Founder, BlogHer LLC; Betsy Aoki Program Mgr, Microsoft; Jessica
Hardwick Founder and CEO, SwapThing; Lisa Stone Co-Founder and Pres of
Operations and Evangelism, BlogHer LLC; and Jenna Woodul Co-founder, LiveWorld
Jory Des Jardins opened the panel by stating that in 'web 1.0', community was a "nice to have". In 'web 2.0' the new reality is that community is "the business". The panel then jumped in, focusing back and forth between two topics:
(1) Tactics and policies to build a community organically, and
(2) How to convince other individuals in your organization to actually spend time and resources developing a community.
While the serious talk today is about Freebase, a new next-gen search engine from Danny Hillis, it's the end of the week and so time for a bit of fun. Author of the popular Top Alternative Search Engines list, Charles Knight, flicked me an email this morning with an example of a weird alt search engine that he'd discovered: www.ufocrawler.com/search.
That got us to thinking about what other 'weird' search engines are Out There. Below is a short list that Charles came up with (his knowledge of alt search engines knows no bounds!). But we'd like to throw this open to you, the readers, as a kind of Friday or weekend survey. Please let us know in the comments about the weirdest alt search engines you've come across!
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb.
Earlier this week we reported that Yahoo's mobile social networking experiment Mixd had closed, after two months of testing. Actually it had shut down at the end of February, but it wasn't noticed by bloggers at the time. What certainly caught peoples attention though was the announcement of a new beta version of My Yahoo on Thursday. Our headline for this was: My Yahoo! Gets Web 2.0 Makeover. Essentially it's Yahoo finally upgrading its long-running personalized homepage, with a new design more closely aligned to yahoo.com, splashes of Ajax and dollaps of personalization. Ex-My Yahoo Boss and now Pageflakes CEO, Dan Cohen, responded to the My Yahoo Beta with a sharply-worded quote (great comments thread on that post!). And some geek users remained unimpressed. Said digg user rishep:
"My concern is, there is no additional functionality. It is just prettier and slower."
Fellow digger 'space4thepoppa' was more positive:
"I've been using my.yahoo.com for years ... I stick with it because I am familar with it. But, I can't get the beta - it won't let me. I'd switch in a second - I love the new mail client."
That's not the end of the personalized homepage news. Another 1.0 vet, My.Netscape, also re-designed this week with Ajax.
Earlier this week Emre wrote about declining
traffic on Technorati and considered the exit options for this blog vertical search
and portal site. The challenge from Google Blogsearch is certainly serious. It is
difficult to compete with Google on speed and breadth of the results. But Technorati is
more than a search engine for blogs - it is also a directory and a popularity site. In
this post, we tap into Technorati to review the current 100 popular blogs. We attempt to
understand what is popular in the blogosphere today; and why.
Technorati has a three ways of measuring popularity. Firstly an automated system based on links from other blogs. This is similar to the original Google page rank algorithm, which essentially says that importance of the site equals the number of incoming links. Technorati measures the popularity of the blog by number of incoming links to its posts.
Another measure of popularity is favorites. Each user of Technorati can favorite any blog they like. This can be done via a bookmarklet or directly on Technorati site - for example click here to Favorite Read/WriteWeb ;-).
Finally, recently Technorati introduced a Digg-like way of measuring popularity, called WTF. It lets users vote on blog posts.
ShoppingPath.com is launching the beta version of its shopping comparison service. A preview of the ShoppingPath technology is located (for some reason) at the domain www.CrispyShop.com. What caught my eye was its unique, ipod-like, product comparison UI. It's a mix of Ajax and Flash and is quite interesting... maybe even compelling. Here is a screenshot, taken from a TV example:
How this works is that you scroll along either the blue dotted line (representing price) or the bottom line (showing product images), until you find a product you like that fits your budget. The scrolling is very reminiscent of using the scroll wheel on your iPod - it's the same kind of interface theory of being able to scroll through hundreds of options easily.
I wondered how long it would take before Pageflakes
responded to the new-look My Yahoo beta, given that the sharing and 'pages'
features in My Yahoo beta are very similar to what Pageflakes has already done.
Sure enough, the following quote by new Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen was just
emailed my way. And actually Dan is uniquely qualified to discuss this, as
before becoming CEO of Pageflakes in January this year he was head
of MyYahoo. Here is what he said:
"The new My Yahoo is a step forward but misses the mark. It is more about Yahoo! and less about today's users of the Web, who expect more from their personalized page. Their new personalization feature steers you towards Yahoo! services while restricting access to others like Google and MySpace. The new version limits user choice because it isn’t open to developers. Lastly, you can’t publish your personalized page on the web, or collaborate on your page with others."
What it comes down to is that Yahoo obviously has a huge store of content and Web properties it can utilize in its personalized homepage. Whereas Pageflakes is one of the 'little guys' (along with slightly bigger little guy Netvibes), so its strengths and opportunities will be in opening up its platform and encouraging use of content from all over the Web.
I have written a few framework articles
recently, defining Web 3.0 and Enterprise 3.0. I also wrote a piece
towards the end of 2005, called What is this
Sea Change? In this article, I am going to start coverage on a very interesting
company called Rearden Commerce, which
touches upon many of the concepts we’ve discussed in the 3 pieces referred above.
(I recommend you read the framework pieces first, before reading the rest of this
story.)
Rearden is a services marketplace that consolidates various service providers (Travel, Dining, Conferencing, Shipping, etc.), and offers it to the employees of an Enterprise. It is a very well funded company, with $100 Million investment, and was featured in Business 2.0's 25 startups to watch list at the end of 2006. Rearden Commerce's business model is subscriptions and it currently has over 200 customers.
Hot on the heels of My.Netscape's
personalized homepage makeover, Yahoo has announced a new version of its own long-running
personalized homepage, My Yahoo. It will at first be a
private beta, with a limited number of users being offered a beta account at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade. Yahoo's plan is
to gather feedback from those early users and then make the My Yahoo! beta more broadly
available - with additional features - over the coming months.
Read/WriteWeb got a sneak peak at the beta and we have some screenshots, along with our initial impressions, below. There is also a screencast available (but for now it is high res and slow to load; I'll notify you when a better version is up).
My Yahoo! has been Yahoo's personalized offering to its consumers since 1996. In the preview, Yahoo told me that My Yahoo! is seen as their "narrowcast" option for users, while the yahoo.com frontpage is seen as the broadcast model. However I was also told that, over time, the two homepages will converge. Certainly, the first thing I noticed about the new beta My Yahoo was that it had some of the new features Yahoo introduced last year with its Ajax makeover of yahoo.com. And the look and feel is very similar between the two.
My Yahoo! is essentially a user's dashboard, or start page, for the web. So it shares a lot in common with Microsoft's Live.com, Google's Personalized Homepage, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Webwag, and many others. However up till now, My Yahoo has been a relatively static personalized homepage - mostly devoid of the widgets and gadgets that populate the likes of Netvibes and Live.com. Also the design was rather conservative, although to be fair probably much more usable than the other 'start pages'. Also, My Yahoo was an early adopter of RSS feeds (not full text though).
Today I was invited to
TVNZ's headquarters in Auckland, along with several other local bloggers, to check out
their new web-based television on demand service - called TVNZ ondemand and due to be launched
later this month. It will have a mix of free (ad supported) and premium content; the latter may only be viewed for 7 days, after which the user's rights to it
expires.
Even though Read/WriteWeb has a global focus, it's worthwhile talking a little about how a national state-owned television network is adjusting to the IPTV revolution. Remember that earlier this week Josh Catone wrote a fantastic article for Read/WriteWeb entitled Internet Killed The Television Star: Reviews of Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo, and More. I mentioned this post to the TVNZ honchos, but actually they are well aware of what is happening in the IPTV world - and indeed they're already talking to Joost and others, to try and make deals for their content. The local NZ market is their first priority, but over time they will market their TV programs to worldwide IPTV services such as Joost.
I was most struck by one thing TVNZ said in our meeting (which btw we were told was public and bloggable). Part of its digital strategy involves TVNZ promoting and positioning its website, including the on demand service, as their third channel. To put this in perspective, TVNZ has two major TV channels (networks in US parlance) - imaginatively called TV1 and TV2. Being national TV channels/networks, TV1 and TV2 are the prime assets of TVNZ. So to raise the website, tvnz.co.nz, up to the same level as their TV channels... well that is great for the Web and goes to show that IPTV is seen as a critical component of television networks going forward.
