Grooveshark, a startup from a group of University of Florida students, is aiming to shake up the music industry by compensating file sharers for putting their music libraries on a peer-to-peer network. Their interesting approach, which is currently in a closed alpha test, is one part Last.fm, one part Limewire, and one part iTunes store.
On the surface, Grooveshark most resembles a Last.fm-style social network. The web site scans your music collection and serves up recommendations based on people with similar musical tastes and user behavior. It's built around a simple social network with friends lists, messages and a standard profile page.
I was shopping
for a digital camera this weekend and my first stop was naturally Amazon. While browsing pages I noticed the new look and feel:
There is even more information on each page, the reviews are displayed in a new way and tags are being leveraged more. These
changes ranged from useful to interesting to perhaps a bit too much. But there was one thing that was very surprising.
The Amazon pages feature text and banner advertising. Why would the world biggest online retailer include links in its pages that divert customers from transaction? Amazon has invested so much in its recommendation engine that the company has no rival when it comes to slicing and recombining product and consumer behavior information to drive transactions. So why would Amazon include low relevancy contextual and completely non-relevant banner ads on its pages? This was a mystery to me, so I wrote this post as an attempt to make sense of it.
Google China has released a Q&A site, in partnership with Tianya Club. The Make Meaning blog notes that Tianya Club was founded in 1999 and is one of the most popular discussion forums in China. Tianya has almost 20 million registered users, 80% of whom are 18-35 years old.
By Guest Blogger Mark O'Neill
Much has been written about Internet Telephony product Skype and its potential to completely revolutionize the telecommunications market (when it's not suffering major outages!), but as yet not much has been written about Skype's extras. When you download Skype, you are given a basic shell of a program and it's up to you to populate that empty shell with the features you need. How many Skype users realise there is an extras manager attached to Skype? If you have never heard of it before, go to Tools > Do More > Organise your Extras.
With a little bit of extra searching, you can find great add-ons for Skype that have the potential to aid your productivity and even revolutionize your business if you are self-employed. These are often free useful extras, developed through Skype's API. Some are approved by Skype, most are not. In this post we'll explore the Unyte Application Sharing extra, a desktop sharing app for Skype that is similar to Webex or GoToMeeting.
A July Pew report indicated that 57% of U.S. internet users have watched videos online and most of them share what they find with others. The 18-29 age group, at 76%, watches the most online video. Our network blog last100 further reported that 19% of adults watch online video on a typical day.
News is the most popular genre of online video with every age group except for those ages 18-29, for whom comedy is watched more. YouTube is the most popular destination, with 27% of online video consumers saying they watch or download video from YouTube.
It's on that latter point that this week's poll will revolve. Read/WriteWeb readers are likely to use a larger variety of online video sites than the Pew audience, so we're curious what the results of this poll will be. Note that there are literally hundreds of video sharing sites on the Web - we listed a lot of them in our February Online Video Index. So we can't hope to include them all. But shout out in the comments if your favorite online video site isn't in the list.
In October 2006 Google acquired the hottest online video property on the planet, YouTube. Later on that same month, news came out that the founders of Kazaa and Skype were building an Internet TV service, nicknamed The Venice Project (later named Joost). To underscore the point that online was Where It's At, in December Read/WriteWeb readers voted online video most likely to be the biggest Web trend of 2007.
So, it's now August 2007 - has online video been the biggest trend in 2007? You could argue that Facebook and iPhone have been bigger events in 2007, but online video is still right up there.
To find out exactly how big an impact online video has had in 2007 so far, we're doing a special series this week. We'll look back on R/WW articles about online video, as well as those from our niche blog devoted to online video and other aspects of the digital lifestyle - last100. We'll also pick out the best of online video and predict what's to come.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
The latter part of this week was dominated by the major outage suffered by popular VoIP product Skype.
Also this week eBay stepped up its attack on the online classifieds market in the US, by rolling its UK subsidiary Gumtree to three US cities - Boston, New York, and Chicago. Gumtree is the most popular classifieds site in England, and is popular in other European countries and Australia, serving 500,000 new ads every month. This move follows the launch into the US market last month of eBay's popular overseas classifieds service Kijiji. Note that eBay owns 25% of craigslist!
By 2020, eMarketer estimates that Internet radio will have 180 million listeners and generate $19.7 billion in ad revenue. That can't possibly happen, however, if prohibitively high royalty fees in the United States force the bulk of net radio stations to stop operating in the US or shut down completely.
We'd be remiss not to post an update on the fate of Internet radio during our Online Music Week. When we last wrote about the face off between Internet radio companies and the RIAA's SoundExchange, the organization charged with collecting royalties, a late-night deal had granted radio operators a last minute reprieve. The group decided not to collect on the new royalties, which some have estimated would cost radio stations as much as $500 per listener, per year, giving time for net radio stations to negotiate lower rates.
This week is Online Music Week at Read/WriteWeb, so I decided to check out how the leading music streaming services compared. I used this week's poll to determine the top 5 apps. As of writing, the top 5 are quite a bit ahead of the the rest of the services in our poll. They are: last.fm, Pandora, Yahoo Music, iTunes Music Service and Rhapsody.
To test each of the above 5 services, I wanted to see if my favorite band - The Velvet Underground - could be found. And if so, did it play similar artists or have some way for me to 'personalize' my music listening experience? After all, personalization is a big part of 'web 2.0'. So here goes...
fav.or.it is a new type of RSS Reader currently in private beta, which aims to solve the long-standing issue of feed content being separated from commenting. The fav.or.it RSS Reader lets you read feed content and comment, all within the app. The comments can be two-way, meaning publishers can choose to aggregate fav.or.it comments into their blogs. As of now the site is not public, so we can't check this out, but the company is asking for people to submit 10,000 blog feeds that will be the initial content that makes up the site.
Fav.or.it is a full-featured browser-based RSS Reader, similar to Google Reader. But the main highlight of the service will be integrated commenting, or "full cycle feed reading" as the company refers to it. This means users will be able to read feeds and comment on them within the fav.or.it app. This is a neat feature, however it also means that fav.or.it will need to build its own community in order to attract comments - much like any blog does.
