With the attention-grabbing headling Social Networking Goes Global, comScore has released its latest stats on the large social network sites. According to comScore, MySpace is over twice as large as its nearest rival, Facebook. Both Facebook and Bebo have had extraordinary growth over the past year (270% and 172% respectively):
These are interesting stats which show that a) MySpace is still King; and b) Facebook is worthy of the attention it's getting.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a company that lets you send snail mail from the web for free by completely a bunch of spammy offers. At the end of that post I concluded that if someone "offered a service that stored my address book online so I didn't have to constantly retype the recipient's address, and allowed me to pay the postage and not have to bother with all the offer mumbo jumbo, that is actually one I would probably use."
Shortly after the post was published I heard from Postful, an email-to-snail mail service that does exactly the things I was asking for. I finally got a chance this week to give the service a whirl and a proper review.
Next generation internet messaging product Tangler has just announced embedding and integration functionality. Tangler is a tool for enabling real-time discussions anywhere on the web. It's part forum, part IM - a hybrid product that uses web services.
Tangler is still in beta - and has been for some time. In fact there's a Tangler forum for web 2.0 betas, where beta products can have discussions with their users. For example here's an (unofficial) Tangler group for Pownce, which Lachlan Hardy pointed to in his Pownce review. Other uses of Tangler so far include 'My Tangle' (using a forum as personal publishing) and using Tangler as a general discussion forum for any topic – e.g. general conversation, travel, gaming, social etiquette, sports. As of July 2007, Tangler claims to have over 1,000 forums, at 9.5 hours per month average usage (3 times Facebook, although of course the user base is much less).
We have written here extensively
about the rise of web services and the transformation of the web into a platform. In our post
When Web Sites Become Web Services
we argued that more and more web sites will open their information via an interface. In our post about Yahoo! Pipes
we wrote about viewing the web as a massive, and in essence relational, database. And finally in the post about
the Future of RSS we looked at the past, present and future uses of the really simple syndication protocol.
Today we will look at an example of putting all of these elements together. Wine.com has launched an innovative way to expose their catalog - via RSS with the API on top.
JayCut is a flash-based online video editor, not unlike Yahoo!'s Jumpcut, that launched earlier this month. The Jaycut team emailed us on July 5th when they launched, and I remember being impressed by their screencast, but for whatever reason, it got lost in the shuffle. JayCut is rather impressive, however, so today I revisited for a more in depth review.
I know every time I look at a new online video editing suite I call it one of the best I've seen -- but they honestly keep getting better. JayCut has to be looked at among the cream of the crop, and offers a couple of features that others do not.
Most Web users probably use at least one Yahoo product on a regular basis. So as part of our 100 Days For Yahoo week, let's take a look at 10 that are among the leaders in their particular market segment, or are particularly innovative. These are subjective selections, because it's almost impossible to use objective criteria to judge such different web properties. So we encourage you to comment on what you think should be in the list, or what shouldn't. Also note that the following list is in no particular order.
1. Yahoo News is the number 1 Internet news site, according to comScore. It is a blend of automated and editorial, and also offers a number of personalization options. As Josh Catone explained in a recent R/WW post about news aggregation, Yahoo! takes news from the wires -- the Associated Press, Reuters, AFP, and PA SportsTicker, among others -- and aggregates them into a single stream. Editors keep duplicates to a minimum and decide which stories are the most important to be listed as top headlines. This mix of technology and editors creates a high quality news stream, albeit lacking the immediacy of blogs.
Read/WriteWeb network blog AltSearchEngines has launched a fascinating series today. It's a 3-part series attempting to define what is a search engine. While it's focused on 2007, the series will also address what a search engine might look like in the future. The first part, entitled What is a Search Engine?, is written by Nitin Karandikar. Part II is entitled What is Not a Search Engine? by Kaila Colbin and will be published tomorrow on ASE. The trilogy will be complete with Charles Knight's Part III: What is an Alternative Search Engine? on Wednesday.
Any of you who have followed closely Charles Knight's Top 100 Alternative Search Engines List will enjoy this series.
Iceberg on Demand
is declaring war on software, according to Co-Founder and head of product
development Wayne Byrne. Iceberg is a private beta startup that
provides a Web based platform for building, sharing and selling powerful
business applications, without the need to do coding. A
user at Iceberg can create applications using simple DIY Web tools. Virtually any process can be emulated,
utilized, created or cloned using Iceberg's simple user interface. This innovative approach to development
does not render code or software useless, but simply unnecessary for the Iceberg
user.
As part of our focus on Yahoo!'s next 100 days this week, I am going to dive into how I would go about fixing the company. Or at least starting along that path. According to comScore, Yahoo! is the 3rd most visited collection of web properties worldwide (trailing only Google and Microsoft), reaching about 61% of the global web audience. In the US, the company's websites are still #1, and actually have a broader ad reach then Google domestically. Yet Yahoo!'s total revenues for the first six months of 2007 were less than Google's revenue for just the last quarter.
Though that serves as a table setter for the problems at Yahoo!, I won't get into financials in this article, as that is not my forte. Instead I will focus on what can be done to create a more useful and meaningful Yahoo! for users, one that can keep people on the site and drive them to use their search engine. Remember that Google controls ~50% of the search market share and pay-per-click text ads on search results drive a significant portion of their revenue -- search share is very important to Yahoo!
Panraven is an online photo book creation application that lets anyone create very attractive online scrap books, which can also be turned into hard copy printed books. The two-year old Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company began by initially offering its services to travel tour operators, but this month Panraven launched its new online photo book creation app and printing services to the general public following a three month closed beta.
Panraven is a web application that is aimed at novice users. It really takes the guesswork out of page layout by providing a large library of pre-made styles and page layouts that are guaranteed to look good.
