Out of Milan, Italy comes Koinup, a new social network for your virtual self. Koinup is aimed at citizens of popular massively multiplayer online worlds and games like Second Life, The Sims, and World of Warcraft. It intends to be a central place for players of those games to share photos, videos, and tutorials.
Earlier this month on the Guardian's Games blog, blogger Aleks Krotoski posed the question, would social networking be helpful for online games? The response from the handful of commenters was mostly, "yes." So is Koinup onto something here? After all, people will invest hours into making social networking profiles for their pets, so why not for their avatars?
There are big changes underway over at MSN Video, some of which represent a real look forward for the industry. It's hard to believe, and it isn't pretty, but this is a site you've got to check out. The site's design, full screen player and advertising model are big.
The big news at MSN Video is that the site has embraced a "Time on Site" traffic metric that's sure to represent the future of advertising. Neilsen announced this summer that they are replacing page views with time on site as the primary web traffic metric. It's widely acknowledged that AJAX and online video are making pageviews less and less relevant all the time. While other sites (like YouTube and MySpace) keep pumping out the pageviews and trying to figure out how to best run ads - this new MSN Video site has hit on a formula that will likely represent the video portal of the future: AJAX powered video playlists, including recommended videos, that do not require new pageloads and are monetized by time-based advertising. You could spend hours watching a playlist of videos from a variety of sources on MSN Video without ever loading a new page.
That del.icio.us dominates the social bookmarking space is clear, but by how much? Where do the other players stand? We'll attempt to sort it all out and predict what's coming next for social bookmarking in this post.
A year ago in our Social Bookmarking Faceoff post, we looked at the state of the social bookmarking space. In the post, we used several techniques, ranging from counting the number of users who bookmarked a particular post, to counting posts with specific tags, to estimate the number of users for each service. Our conclusion back then was that the market was dominated by del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.
A year later we're passed the hype, StumbleUpon has been acquired by eBay, and during this digestion phase social bookmarking has largely become yesterday's news. In this post, we'll look at what happened to the other players in the space and look into what the future holds for social bookmarking.
In Chongquing, China - the world‚Äôs fastest-growing metropolis - hundreds of small motorcycle firms are using a radical form of collaboration to triple output to 15 million motorbikes per year, which beats their giant Japanese competitors. That story was told in the book ‚ÄúWikinomics, how mass collaboration changes everything‚Ä?. It's is a deeply impressive book, because it relates the flurry of Web 2.0 innovation to real world economics.
The Chinese motorcycle story is not about an online network, but it illustrates a potential for Web 2.0 technologies that goes well beyond today’s relatively simple consumer applications. The motorcycle entrepreneurs build trust through lots of face-to-face time in coffee shops. China has a weak rule of law, making personal relationships even more important.
This is an ‚Äúemergent‚Ä? business network, because there is no centrally defined structure. The structure emerges from lots of little interactions that are designed to solve specific problems. There is no ‚Äúbig Daddy‚Ä? making the rules. These are not markets dominated by say Wal-Mart in retail or Microsoft in PCs.
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If you got excited about Streamy, the feature rich super-social RSS reader that made the rounds among the review blogs last month (see our review), then you should check out FeedEachother. Unlike Streamy, FeedEachother is open today for anyone to use.
Think the RSS reader market is all wrapped up? While major market share may not be redistributed any time soon, these edge-case feed readers offer some interesting innovations and could serve your needs better than the big guys. Read on for a summary of what FeedEachother does very well.
The Official Google Blog just announced that Google Alerts will now be available for video search queries. When new results for a video search you're interested in become available, you can get an email with links to clips on not just Google Video and YouTube, but on a handful of other video hosting sites as well.
Video is huge, I think it's established that it's not a fad. Comscore reported this month that US consumers are watching an average of 3 hours of video online in the month of July, more on Google sites than anywhere else. It's a lot higher than that in my house (though we watch StumbleUpon Video). I'd be very interested to see how that number compares with other forms of media consumption like movie theaters and newspapers.
Though it might seem small, the inclusion of video search in Google Alerts could be big. Sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference, especially when it's Google that does them. I'm willing to guess that there are as many or more people in this world who use the Google Alerts system as there are who knowingly read RSS feeds in a reader. While that makes me shudder on principle, any progress for a "publish and subscribe" paradigm instead of a "broadcast and hope they come" approach is good news in my book.
When video consumption numbers continue to rise, it will be because of small steps like this one, increasing the accessibility of the medium.
Our post a few weeks ago, 10 Future Web Trends, received a lot of excellent feedback. The most interesting was from people offering alternative future web trends to the ones we had chosen. In fact there were some grumblings that our 10 picks were not futuristic enough - so in this post let's see if we can address that! There's nothing smarter than 'collective intelligence' after all...
From the comments and trackbacks to the original post, plus some hunting around of my own, here are 10 more future web trends:
1. Integration into everyday devices (suggested by Mark Schoneveld); As examples Mark mentioned your grocery-ordering refrigerator and your health-monitoring bathroom. Commenter #63, Jack, had a nice term for this: "device pervasiveness". One can imagine Microsoft and Google battling it out in this domain over the coming years.
The biggest news of the day so far has been Amazon's launch of their DRM-free MP3 store, which competes with Apple's iTunes. I find it kind of amusing, however, that Apple is actually driving some sales for Amazon on its first day in the DRM-free MP3 biz.
As the graphic to the right shows, the #1 and #10 song for sale at Amazon today is '1 2 3 4' by Feist. Why does this relatively obscure Canadian indie rock singer have two of the top ten best selling tracks on Amazon? Presumably because her single was recently featured in the new Apple iPod Nano commercials, which actually propelled her onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time (#61 on September 20th).
See our coverage of AmazonMP3 by Marshall Kirkpatrick, and also check out the coverage at our network blog last100. Check out the iPod Nano commercial below:
