Tafiti is a new experimental search site from Microsoft. It has rich visualizations and aims to meet the needs of people doing research on the Web. Tafiti runs on the Silverlight browser plug-in platform (Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash) and requires you to install Silverlight if you haven't already. The underlying search engine is Microsoft’s Live Search.
Adotube is a new video advertising network that offers publishers a way to monetize their videos by using opt-in, lead generation ads that overlay on top of the video in a (mostly) non-instrusive manner. Similar to LiveRail (which we profiled earlier this month), Adotube ads are opt-in, meaning viewers must click on them before they play. But unlike LiveRail, Adotube does not serve video ads, but instead displays interactive banner ads that are focused on lead generation.
"Our opt-in advertising technology was created for those seeking a simple and effective way to make money online," said Adotube President Leo Grzhonko in a press release. "We refer to it as the in-stream interactive online video monetizing solution."
YouTube has come to define the new era of online video, so let's take a look at their most popular videos of all time.
I was expecting something like lonelygirl15 or the original menthos coke video to be number 1. But no, the most popular video of all time on YouTube, so far, has been Evolution of Dance by comedian Judson Laipply. It was added to YouTube on April 06, 2006 and has since gone on to attract 55.8 Million views. It's had 60,476 comments, the first of which was: "That was freaking AWESOME! Thanks for sharing!!". The comments for this video are still going strong today - the latest 10 comments have all come in the last 30 minutes, as of writing. Plus it's been favorited 252,082 times (making it the number 1 Top Favorited video of All Time).
SimpleSpark is a directory of web 2.0 applications and services that launched in May. When we included them in our web 2.0 lists round up in late June, they'd just crossed the 3,000 sites indexed mark. Today, they've indexed 5,000 sites, which is an illustration of just how large the web 2.0 application universe has grown -- whatever your definition of the term.
To further illustrate how many sites that is, and to celebrate their milestone, the folks at SimpleSpark created a video showing the logos of all 5,000 companies in 333 seconds (or just over five and a half minutes). It's embedded below. Enjoy.
When Kyte launched in April, I called it "Twitter that moves" -- which I think is still a fair comparison. Since it is online video week here at Read/WriteWeb, it seemed like a good time to revisit Kyte and try to get a better grasp on what they're all about. Last week I caught up with Daniel Graf, founder and CEO of Kyte, who chatted with me about what this exciting start up is doing and where they're headed.
Kyte now has over 8,000 channels, and has produced 50-60,000 shows resulting in millions of views since its April beta launch. The San Francisco based company, which employs 25 people, launched a Facebook application in mid June that really exhibits what Kyte is about.
There are two seemingly divergent themes in the Web Office world currently: 1) office software is increasingly heading online, in the form of products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Zoho and ThinkFree; 2) web apps are increasingly adding offline functionality. The reason for the 'bob each way' is that broadband service is not yet ubiquitous or entirely reliable. So you may want to do some word processing on the train, or in a cafe that doesn't have wireless (believe it or not, in my part of the world that is the usual scenario!).
Enter Zoho Writer's offline support, just announced tonight. Note that it is read-only for now, but Zoho plans to make it 'read/write' in 3-4 weeks. Interestingly, it was built using Google Gears. Users have to install Google Gears to use the offline functionality - it works on Firefox (Windows and Mac) and IE. Perhaps this will compel Google to offer offline functionality for Google D&S, because as yet it doesn't have it. ThinkFree however does have offline support in ThinkFree Premium.
Social networking startup CollectiveX has just launched a new product called Groupsites. TechCrunch has the details of Groupsites, noting that it's a combination of discussion forums, email lists, calendars and social networks. Groupsites are free to use and there are privacy options. Current use cases include membership groups and clubs, social networks, and company Intranets and workgroups. It's a wide-ranging and flexible product, but essentially it is a DIY social network - similar to services like Ning and PeopleAggregator that we profiled recently.
It might seem like covering your bases to have a product that can be used in so many different ways - by consumers as social networks, by enterprises as workgroups, by clubs as a mix of both. But it reflects the trend of 'the consumerization of the Enterprise'. In the enterprise, social networks have come to be known as groupware. Ebrahim Ezzy wrote an excellent Groupware primer for R/WW back in November. He defined groupware as "applications that facilitate real-time communication, coordination and collaboration amongst groups of people."
Adobe today announced the latest version of its near ubiquitous Web video software, Adobe Flash Player 9. It's codenamed Moviestar, because it includes H.264 standard video support – the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players. In other words, the quality of video has been substantially improved from the previous version of Flash Player 9. Also added to the mix is High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support and "hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback".
Adobe claims that these advancements will extend their leadership position in web video "by enabling the delivery of HD television quality and premium audio content".
The new Flash Player will be available later today as a beta at Adobe Labs - and the final release is slated to be available in the fall (September - November). The last big update to Flash Player was the launch of Flash 9 in June 2006.
comScore today announced changes to their search tracking service, qSearch, which they say will better meet the needs of what is a continually evolving search market. The key take aways from qSearch 2.0 are an expanded global data set, a better understanding of vertical search, better counting of "multi-tab searches," and the counting of hosted or affiliate search.
comScore will also provide a break down of searches performed on additional properties owned by core search sites, though these numbers will not be included in the "core search" market share numbers for consistency's sake. For example, in July 2007 Google served 6.6 billion searches, but more than 1.1 billion were performed on YouTube. Those YouTube numbers are counted by qSearch 2.0, but not included in the core search share metric.
Since launching a few weeks ago, the people search engine Spock is experiencing very heavy traffic - according to the company and also external measures like Alexa. Spock is currently rated number 1 on the Movers and Shakers page on Alexa. Other Alexa stats indicate that the site is experiencing good growth in France, Germany, U.K. and Belguim - as well as the U.S. The site is just outside the top 1000 websites in Alexa, so it is still small in terms of other mainstream search engines. However for a brand new site, its growth must be encouraging to the founders and investors.
The company told us they had 1 million unique visitors at launch and "a very strong engagement from users" - averaging 10 search pages per visitor. Spock has indexed 1.5 billion records to date and they say they're "adding more every day". The site gets around 20 billion search queries about people per month and the company says it is positioning itself to dominate the people search space.
