Google's mission statement has long been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Last night, Yahoo! announced their new mission, "to connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge." While Google emphasizes the data, Yahoo! will emphasize the people (the Google also recently debuted a new tagline: "Search, Ads and Apps," so maybe they're more about the money).
Last November, an internal memo at Yahoo! from SVP Brad Garlinghouse, dubbed the "Peanut Butter Manifesto" by the press, called on the company "to boldly and definitively declare what we are and what we are not." It seems that Yahoo! has decided that they're less about search, and more about community.
Amazon announced today that they will begin selling DRM-free MP3 music downloads from over 12,000 labels, the largest being EMI. EMI, of course, was the first major record label to sell music without DRM via Apple's iTunes store earlier this month.
"Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO in a press release. "We're excited to have EMI joining us in this effort and look forward to offering our customers MP3s from amazing artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones and Joss Stone."
We're midway through the week and this week's poll has thrown up some interesting results so far. We asked: among the big Internet companies/orgs, whose web app deployment platform do you like best? Frankly I was expecting Adobe and Microsoft to top the poll, as Apollo and Silverlight have gotten a great deal of attention lately. But instead, it's Mozilla (which as yet hasn't even got a platform! -- but they could get one) and Google (which mostly relies on Ajax and the browser). Poor old Sun doesn't seem to have many supporters so far. Why? Perhaps because they're seen to be re-inventing the wheel (i.e. Ajax)?
I'd suggest then that the takeaway from the results so far is that people a) want the browser to remain the main platform for deploying web apps; and b) preferably they'd like it to be open source.
Here are the results so far. We've had 470 votes up till time of publishing this post, but there are still 3 days left in the week - so have your say by voting below.
Qst: Whose vision of web app deployment do you like the best?
Mozilla (open source, microformats, browser-based) 35% (166 votes)
Google (Ajax, mostly browser-based) 29% (135 votes)
Adobe (Apollo, browser/desktop) 22% (102 votes)
Microsoft (Silverlight, DotNet, browser/desktop) 11% (50 votes)
Sun (JavaFX, alternative to Ajax, browser/desktop) 2% (10 votes)
Other (please note in comments) 1% (7 votes)
Robert Scoble recently wrote an interesting post, about FOG - Fear of Google (an acronym coined by CEO of eMarketer Geoff Ramsey). I observed this phenomenon strongly first hand at the Web 2.0 Expo and shared my thoughts on it in the R/WW post Thoughts from the Web 2.0 Expo. There is little doubt that the combination of Google's exceptional revenue growth, continuously release of innovative products, and market share dominance, has created a considerable amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
While understandable, I believe in one area Google is more vulnerable than analysts appreciate. More than one-third of Google's revenue is completely out of their control. To be more specific, in their most recent quarterly results 37% or $1.35 Billion of revenue came from advertising delivered on other sites. Specifically, I believe they are vulnerable in much the same way that Microsoft was vulnerable in the mid-nineties.
http://netsearchengine.net announced today the launch of its new search engine. netsearchengine.net is a network of twenty vertical search engines - and users can suggest new sites or vote on how they feel about existing ones. No single user has the ability to directly add or delete a source; rather suggested sites are verified by a majority vote.
When a user preforms a search, the results will only show pages that are included in the collaboratively edited vertical search index. netsearchengine.net hopes that this will make your search results more focused and relevant to your search related needs. Give http://netsearchengine.net a try and let us know what you think.
I have long thought that social bookmarking and ranking sites like del.icio.us, digg, and StumbleUpon could be used to enhance current web search results. In March I argued that that StumbleUpon could easily be used for "enhancing or augmenting traditional search engine rankings." Some people, like Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, already think that del.icio.us provides better search results than Google.
Rand argues that del.icio.us results are more timely, more focused on his demographic, higher quality, and more diverse. He concedes, however, that del.icio.us results do not always list the best first, sometimes lack relevance, and are either ten times better or ten times worse than Google depending on your view.
A new study from Forrester Research predicts that online video download services will see sales peak this year, as consumers move other sources of online video. Read/WriteWeb reported yesterday that CBS is increasingly releasing content for free or via ad-supported mediums such as, Joost. Further, consumers are confronted with a growing number of video-on-demand options from their cable or satellite providers and Internet services.
Though sales of television and film downloads via services like iTunes and Amazon Unbox will nearly triple this year, according to the report, it is unlikely that such services will see much growth in 2008 and beyond unless the market shifts dramatically.
Tonight meebo is launching Meebo Rooms, a rich media chat room product that users can put on their blogs and websites. They can be private or public chat rooms, and can feature video content from sources such as youtube and NBC. Earlier today I spoke to Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder of meebo, about the new product.
Meebo's core product is a browser-based IM platform, allowing people to use multiple IM accounts on the one webpage. Meebo has 2 million registered users and gets about 1 million sessions and 100 million messages per day. According to the press release, meebo rooms "are places where people can chat and view media live with IM buddies, both inside meebo.com and across the Web on their own pages." Meebo has partnered with a number of content providers - including blip.tv, Capitol Music Group, CNET Networks, NBC Universal, and others. They are launching with pre-assembled meebo rooms from the 14 initial partners, with more to come. Techcrunch has more info on the features, but for the remainder of this post let's analyze what the product means...
Today, popular search engines ChaCha and blinkx announced an exciting new partnership, to add a video search feature to ChaCha's search results. ChaCha is the human powered search engine that Alex Iskold reviewed for Read/WriteWeb in December. Note also that I rated ChaCha the #1 Search Engine of the Year for 2006 (pre-R/WW days). In any case the partnership with blinkx means that ChaCha will now offer its searchers access to blinkx's video content; currently seven million (7,000,000) hours of indexed video and audio content.
Both ChaCha and blinkx have been featured on my Top 100 Alternative Search Engines lists for every month in 2007.
This week's poll is based on our current feature post, Understanding Apollo. In that post, I attempted to provide an overview of Apollo for non-developers. At the end, I looked at the high level of how the big Internet companies are deploying web apps nowadays. Here's what I wrote:
It is a fiercely competitive market, with Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Google and others all active - and each has a differing vision for web app deployment. Google is still very much focused inside the browser, whereas Adobe and Microsoft have made divergent moves to go outside the browser (but both with one foot still planted firmly in the browser). Let's not forget that Mozilla and the other browsers are enhancing their products at a furious rate. It's a key point in the evolution of web apps - so who do you think has the inside running at this stage?
I'd like to pose that question as a poll. I've noted down the main players in this market - along with (probably over-simplified) summaries of their web app deployment strategies.
