As we rush through life and a myriad of web pages, we leave traces. We don't have time to think deeply about any of this. The blogs that we visit, the music we listen to, the movies we watch; we take all of them for granted. Yet, all of the different kinds of information that we interact with defines us. In turn, we change the world by issuing a verdict of what we like and what we do not like. Sometimes explicitly via bookmarking, rating and digging. But most often, implicitly.
Today Flickr is launching in seven additional languages, including French, German, Spanish, Japanese and the Hong Kong dialect of Chinese. I spoke with co-founder and head of Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, about the news - and also found out the meaning behind the "loves you" label currently on Flickr's logo! More on that below.
Flickr now has 525 million photos and Stewart told me that about 55% of Flickr users already reside in non-US countries. They're hoping to increase that with the internationalization being announced today. Currently 45% of Flickr users are from the US. UK is next, followed by Canada, then Germany - and others such as Australia and Spain make up the top 10. Curiously, this is a very similar country breakdown to Read/WriteWeb's user base - where 50% come from the US, around 7% from the UK and so on. It could be that this is the 'early adopter' spread for web technology (in the english-speaking world)!
Are you ready to spend a whole day, today (Tuesday), without using Google? There are literally hundreds of alternative search engines to choose from. Once again here are the 'ground rules', as prepared by AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight:
1. All day Tuesday, June 12th, don’t use any of the 5 major search engines.
2. Avoid Meta search engines, since most of them include the major search engines.
3. Likewise, the specialized vertical search engines may be too narrowly focused.
4. Consider changing your homepage or downloading their toolbar. You can always uninstall everything and change back on Wednesday.
5. On Wednesday, leave a detailed comment on AltSearchEngines and share your experience with the rest of us. Which alt search engine did you chose? How would you rate the experience?
Babelgum, an Internet TV competitor to Joost, is in limited beta and has started to send out invites. You may've seen them already on other sites, but if you haven't got an invite yet then click here to go to the Read/WriteWeb/last100 Babelgum signup page. Note: the app is Windows only.
last100 has covered both Joost and BabelGum recently. The last100 review of Babelgum explained that it is a new peer-to-peer online video service founded by Italian billionaire Silvio Scaglia. Like Joost, it aims to combine the "lean-back experience" of television with the interactivity of the web. Check it out and let us know what you think.
Todoist is a to-do list application that claims to be "useful, fast and easy to use". In the crowded market of task management apps, led by the likes of Ta-da List and Remember the Milk, it has to be. And, as I found out in my tests, it is.
Built with a focus on absolute simplicity, this application is a joy to use for my task lists. It allows a hierarchical structure of categories or projects - each with their own task items. Sub-projects can be collapsed to simplify the interface even more.
In an effort to boost market share, Steve Jobs dropped an unexpected bombshell on the audience at the WWDC this morning: Apple's Safari web browser is coming to Windows. IE currently controls about 78% of the browser market, Firefox 15%, and Safari just 5% (according to Jobs' stats -- depending on who you ask, Safari accounts for between 1.5% and 6% of the market; W3Counter's Global Stats put Safari at 1.86%). In order to grow Safari's market share, Apple has released a version for Windows.
According to Jobs, Safari is the most innovative browser (I'm sure plenty of Firefox fans would beg to differ) and runs 2 times faster than IE7 on Windows (not a big surprise) and 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. The Safari 3 public beta, which was released today, comes in three flavors: OS X, Windows XP, and Vista.
Even in a completely online world, the book will never go out of style. The novel hasn't changed much over the years, barring more colorful covers, more environmentally friendly paper, and some new electronic distribution methods -- but that doesn't mean the way you write the next bestseller has to stay the same. Below we'll explore some start ups that take creative writing into the Web 2.0 era.
Novlet is a collaborative writing web application. It allows what they term "non-linear" writing, which means you can take any story in their database and write a fork, branching off from any point in the story. Stories are divided into "passages" -- sections of about 2-3 paragraphs. Readers are given the opportunity to create a fork at the end of any passage. What you end up with as a reader is a sort of "choose your own adventure" (remember those?) where at the end of each passage you are often presented with a choice of which path to proceed down -- or you can create your own.
Colorado-based Me.dium is announcing today a $15M Series B round led by Commonwealth Venture Partners. Me.dium is developing a next-generation collaborative browsing technology that dynamically combines visualization and chat. We covered Me.dium during its February launch at DEMO. We noted at the time that me.dium appeared quite intrusive on users - both from privacy and activity point of view. So how has it developed since then?
This week's poll was requested by a reader, who wanted to find out what online collaboration platforms R/WW readers used. The email I received noted: "While mass services such as myspace and facebook get a lot of coverage, there's not a lot of data showing how well collaborative platforms do. I think that your audience could help." It's very true, the blog world tends to get excited about the latest consumer apps - like Facebook or Twitter - but there is a lot of interest outside the blogosphere on which online collaboration apps are being used.
Below is a list of such apps - and it is a fairly wide-ranging list, and open to contention about what exactly is an "online collaboration platform". I've included the main Web Office suite players, as well as project mgmt apps and some wiki platforms. And I'm bound to have missed a couple of obvious apps (do me a favor and yell out which obvious apps I forgot to include, asap, in the comments!).
Last week I was briefed on the new online advertising platform that Tumri is launching today. Flush with $16.5 million in investment and already well covered by business tech blogs, Tumri is building out a widget-based Merchandising Network that it hopes will be The Next Big Thing in online advertising - after Google Adsense. Tumri Advertiser aims to combine brand marketing with products and offers in a single advertising widget.
