Techcrunch is reporting that last week's rumors about Google being close to acquiring RSS feed management and advertising firm Feedburner have been confirmed. The purchase price is in the ball park of the rumored $100 million, in a mostly cash deal that locks the founders in for a couple of years.
This is a great deal for both Feedburner and Google. For Google it gives them access to over 720,000 feeds including, 111,000 podcast or videocast feeds, many of which can now be added into the Adsense network. It also gives Google access to a wealth of data and information about how people consume blogs and information across the greater blogosphere.
Technorati announced a major relaunch this morning, 6-months in the making. The new Technorati has evolved from a blog search to, as the site puts it, an "everythinging in the known universe" search. What that really boils down to is: user generated content. Technorati mainly searches blog posts, photos, and videos, but also music and events. Technorati CEO David Sifry says people are using the site to "get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more."
To that end, Technorati is now a hub for user generated content, aggregated across over "250 million videos, blogs, photos, podcasts, events, and other social media objects." A lot of these media features were already available at Technorati, and indeed much of the relaunch is about the overhauled site design and search results integration than anything else.
Personalized start page service Pageflakes today announced that their "Pagecasts" feature, which allows users to share their Pageflakes pages with the public or a specific group of users, has been used to push out 100,000 Pagecasts. They also announced the release of their Pagecasts directory which allows people to more easily find user pages.
While this announcement seems fairly insignificant, the quick uptake of the Pagecasts feature is really good news for the startup. One of their chief competitors, Netvibes, offers a similar feature called "Universes" that so far has only been used 156 times (or just over 3700 times if you count shared tabs).
Today AdaptiveBlue released a new version of its BlueOrganizer product, a Firefox extension that aims to provide extra contextual information to you while browsing the Web. Basically after you install BlueOrganizer in your Firefox, it enables you to discover all kinds of relevant content while you're browsing - such as books, music, links, related information, etc. Essentially then, it adds personalization and semantics into the browser (Firefox).
AdaptiveBlue is the company of Alex Iskold, a regular writer on Read/WriteWeb. He is one of the smartest technologists I know and his posts here are a consistent source of inspiration and conversation amongst the R/WW community. Which leads me to say: what's interesting about the new release of BlueOrganizer is that it puts much of Alex's theories about Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web into practice. I'll explain how in this post.
This week the Wall Street journal published an excellent piece on the upcoming Facebook Platform, which Josh also covered for Read/WriteWeb. The WSJ article outlined a Facebook platform that will allow companies to offer their products and services to Facebook users, enabling them to tap into Facebook's large network. With widgets (which can plug into networks like Facebook) getting more popular, this is welcome news to many startups - and probably e-commerce giants too.
But what's in this for Facebook? Could they end up eating Yahoo's lunch?
Written by Phil Butler
Second Brain is a fascinating startup now in testing and accessible by invitation only. The service is a personal library where people aggregate all their creations, services and favorites - and then share and/or publish them online. Second Brain was founded by Lars G. Teigen who also co-founded Making Waves, one of Norway and Poland's leading design and technology services. The project completed its prototype and alpha stages back in November 2006 and the private beta was released in early February of this year. Second Brain's vision is to be the central service for collecting and sharing knowledge in 2008.
The Second Brain site organizes the chaos people feel from utilizing content across a wide variety of services, like YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr and others. Ultimately Second Brain is trying to fill the niche between people's need to organize and use data, and the need for services to attract and retain users. Second Brain looks at Web 2.0 and beyond as a network of mostly small independent applications serving the needs of the market. Essentially, they see the Internet as a widely distributed desktop, albeit a huge one.
Editor's note: Sramana Mitra is currently running a series on her blog reviewing the photo sharing industry. In this Read/WriteWeb post, she looks at Flickr's offering using her Web 3.0 framework.
Before I get to my analysis, here is a quick overview of Flickr's history and its current position. Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Ludicorp, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based company, launched Flickr in February 2004. Flickr is a photo-sharing site, familiar to most of you, which allows users to search, upload, create photo albums and share them with community members. Flickr has 17 million unique monthly visitors. The company was taken over by Yahoo! in March 2005. Flickr has over 8 million registered users with over 500 million photos.
Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks has an interesting post today about Ask.com, in which he lays out his strategy for getting the search engine back on track. That caught my eye because last night when looking over the latest search data from Nielsen//NetRatings, Richard and I started talking about Ask.com. They have a long uphill battle if they want to make a dent in the search market, and I'm talking about a very steep hill (you might call it a mountain). While Ask.com has sat steady at the #5 spot among search engines the last few months, their 1.8% market share is a far cry from Google's 55.2%, or even MSN/Live's distant third place share of 9%.
Ask.com is planning a $100 million marketing blitz this summer with the intention of grabbing more of the search market, which includes the guerilla billboard campaign against Google already underway in the UK. However, according to Hitwise, Ask.com's share of the UK search market has actually fallen in recent months, while Google's has risen. So it remains to be seen if a large marketing assault will yield any long-term benefits for Ask.com.
Google today launched an improvement to their Trends service, Hot Trends, which lists the top 100 break out searches of each day. These are not the top searches, but the ones that deviate the most from their normal search pattern.
Clicking on a trend leads to a page that includes news, blogs, and web searches in an attempt to explain why that search term might be as popular as it is. For example, today "bubonic plague" checks in at #70 because yesterday's news story about a capuchin monkey at the Denver Zoo dying of the disease. The results are, of course, not always perfect.
At the end of January, we reported on a new "preview product" called Zoho Notebook. Well tonight it has launched as a beta product. In the office software space nowadays, comparisons must be made not only to the equivalent Microsoft Office product - but also the equivalent Google Web Office product. Not forgetting of course the many smaller vendors of Web Office. In any case, when it came out in preview Zoho Notebook was immediately compared to Microsoft's OneNote application and
Google Notebook. My own conclusion when trying out the product back then was that Zoho Notebook offered different things than Microsoft OneNote and more things than Google Notebook.
