In our recent post,
MySpace: Hot or Not?, we took a look at the social networking
giant to understand what's going on with the site. We found that while 'MySpace' is slowing down as a trend, the site
is alive and kicking and people are actively communicating (although some communication is focused on fairly questionable topics).
While doing research for that article, the difference in approach between MySpace and its major rival Facebook was particularly striking.
While Facebook built elegant infrastructure and a clean look, MySpace allowed people to create a seemingly incomprehensible zoo of information on their pages. But after a closer look, one begins to see why MySpace remains attractive to so many users. MySpace puts communication and self-expression at the forefront, with communication with your friends really being the point of each page. Facebook, meanwhile, showcases different applications installed by its users on their profiles pages, and pushes one of its primary communication features, the Wall, to the bottom of the page.
At the center of Facebook today is the news feed - a dynamic listing of the collective activity of all your friends. The news feed shows updates from your friends, prompting you to explore their profiles and the site. When someone adds an application or befriends someone new or posts a video or a picture, the news feed directs you to their profile page to check it out. It may seem like these features and their minimalist design make Facebook simpler and easier to use than MySpace, but is it?
MySpace may have saved itself from being absolutely intolerable today when it added an option to require a CAPTCHA entry before sending a friend request. Every one's friend Tom announced a host of changes to MySpace this afternoon, most of which were aesthetic and likely to be of consequence only to serious MySpace users.
For the rest of us who keep accounts there primarily to facilitate discovery by old, non-technical friends - the new spam controls will probably be the only change that matters. What a change it is, though! If you've been tempted to cancel you MySpace account because you're tired of porn stars trying to be your friend (is it just me?) now you can log in and change your account settings to block automated friend requests. Sweet. What took so long?
The Google-sleuths at Google Operating System broke the news this afternoon that mobile startup Zingku has been acquired by Google. Zingku provides all kinds of content sharing and alert services for mobile users. The company appears to have been founded 2 years ago in Middlesex, Massachusetts and never left private beta.
Based in part on the language used by Google in confirming the deal, that they have "acquired certain assets and technology of Zingku" I'd guess that the service will likely be absorbed to provide new mobile functionality across a number of other Google Applications.
If a new layer of SMS alerts, polls and sharing features start appearing in Google Docs, Grand Central and elsewhere in the coming months - that will probably be the result of Zingku dissipation across the sprawling Google properties.
So we remain split on whether to call it a "social graph," but one thing I think we can all agree on, is that many of us are suffering from social network overload. Facebook, and MySpace, and LinkedIn, and Twitter, and Digg, and del.icio.us, and... oh my. We each only have so much attention to give and it can be hard to keep up with all our of social networking -- especially when our network of friends is spread across a number of duplicate services.
Blogger and PR guy Steve Rubel has a solution: use Gmail. In a post yesterday Steve outlined how to turn Gmail into what he calls a "Social Network Hub" which aggregates activity from friends across multiple networks and even lets him post status messages via email.
Dapper, the Israeli founded super-tool that "creates an API for any website" is looking to make the transition from useful service to viable business with the release of DapperAds, the company's new ad serving technology.
Dapper's basic service, found at Dapper.net, is essentially a screen scraper with a point and click interface. You identify a field that's common across multiple pages on a website and Dapper will deliver whatever values are in that field by RSS, iCal, KML (mapping language) or in a variety of other formats. It's a very cool way to create mashups on the fly. The company recently released an interface for making Facebook apps quickly and easily.
Dapper is really a head turner, enough so that it has raised VC backing - something only a few consumer level data manipulation services like this can say. They've got a long term vision of creating an API marketplace that could work if website owners get on board. In the meantime, though, they've come up with something simpler and easily monetizable.
The new Dapper Ads service takes Dapper's core technology and puts it to work for site owners themselves. It's pretty simple.
Today was the first MySpace/MTV Candidate Dialogue, featuring US presidential candidate John Edwards. The townhall meeting style event was a joint presentation between MySpace's Impact channel and MTV's Choose or Loose site aimed squarely at one-upping the CNN/YouTube debate held in July (and coming again in November).
Rather than a full-on debate, MySpace and MTV opted for a series of townhall-style meetings with a single candidate at each. The first, held today at noon ET, featured Democrat John Edwards and was broadcast live from the University of New Hampshire. I got to catch the last 40 minutes of it.
The video was streamed live via Windows Media to both the MySpace and MTV election 2008 web sites and was simulcast with a Spanish translation on La Vibra. Edwards fielded questions on ten topics ranging from health care and the environment to terrorism and the war in Iraq. Most of the questions were asked by members of the studio audience in New Hampshire, but the hosts would jump in occasionally with follow-ups from MySpace users who sent in questions during the broadcast via MySpace IM.
The latest iteration of Microsoft's Live Search, which was first "leaked" last week, is now live and in the wild. According to the Live Search team, the improvements cover four major areas: an expanded index (reports say Live now searches 20 billion pages), faster load times, a new look and feel, and more integrated content.
I was going to remark that because I use Google and Yahoo! almost exclusively for my searching, it would be hard for me to comment on speed improvements at Live Search, but I'm actually not seeing the new Live at all. I'm still getting the old results, and the old design. So it's hard for me to comment on any of it.
Mashery, possibly the coolest company in Silicon Valley that most people have never heard of, announced a Series A funding round tonight. The All-Star crew of angel investors in this "mashup service-provider" are being joined by VCs from two more firms, Formative Ventures and The Accelerator Group. The total A round was under $5 million and Mashery also announced a 16 company customer list.
What's so cool about this company? Mashery provides other companies with an interface through which to manage access to their APIs (application programming interfaces). Mashery applies the "business rules" of API access for its clients, managing throttling, caching and vetting requests. I wrote about the company in depth on TechCrunch almost a year ago when they launched.
In other words, Mashery helps companies enable their data and services to be used by 3rd party sites to combine their services with those of Mashery clients.
Who do I wish used Mashery to get a solid API out the door ASAP? Here's my fantasy list - what's yours?
A new study by Rubicon Consulting released today at the AJAXworld Conference in Santa Clara, California indicates that web apps have spread beyond the so-called "early adopter" set and have made their way into the consciousness of a majority of web users. "Most industry observers talk about 'Web 2.0' applications as something that's coming in the future, but our research showed that some web apps are already spreading rapidly through the PC user base," said Michael Mace, a principal at Rubicon Consulting of the report.
According to the study, which surveyed 2,000 randomly selected US adults who have a personal computer (Linux, Windows, and Mac), 80% said they had heard of web applications. More than half have actually tried a web application and 37% use at least one on a regular basis. That's more than the 16% usually thought of as early adopters, said Rubicon. The survey defined web applications as "websites that replace a task the user previously performed using a software application installed on the PC."
Things aren't so rosy for all segments of the web app ecosystem, though. Email and games enjoy the highest adoption rates, but well-covered (by blogs and the press) segments such as web office apps are still struggling to attract users. Just 2% of those survey had ever used a online database app, for example. Among those market spaces that have attracted usage, however, they are garnering a lot of attention from users. On average, those who used at least 1 web application regularly used web apps 40% of their total application usage time -- meaning that desktop apps are starting to be replaced completely by web apps.
Two years to the month after launching its large podcast search and listening site, Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! Podcasts will cease operation on Halloween, October 31st. The site never came out of Beta before the plug was pulled. There's not much information available beyond an underlined non-link now at the top of the site reading "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007."
Some would argue that podcasting hasn't caught on like it was expected to, that it's been dominated by existing media giants and beaten as a medium by the rise of video. I still love me a good episode from ITConversations, Briefings Direct or our own new show Read/WriteTalk when I'm walking the dog - but Yahoo! users looking for podcasts will soon have to look elsewhere. I don't know how many people ever cared for the site anyway. I hadn't looked at Yahoo! Podcasts since just a few months after it launched, when there were no RSS feeds and you had to login with a Yahoo! ID in order to download audio files instead of listening to them through a pop-up Yahoo! audio player.
The exact date of the closure seems to have fluctuated a bit already, but whenever it happens there are plenty of competitors ready to give podcast search outside of iTunes a go for themselves. See, for example, Podcast.com (from whose Tweets I found this news) and the recently funded Pluggd, who are doing some interesting speech-to-text technology for both audio and video and licensing it out to other media companies.
