A new survey released this week by the marketing analysts and consultants at Anderson Analytics found that Facebook is now the #1 most liked website among US respondents between the ages of 18 and 24. In other words, it's not just tech bloggers talking about Facebook all the time.
The sample set for the survey consisted of 1,000 young people suckered into answering questions and viewing ads at the "analyst" company's website, Brandport.com, and 500 Facebook users - for a total of 1500 respondents. Perhaps our headline should then read "Young Facebook Users Think Facebook is #1." The release is here, I found it via Kathleen Mazzocco.
Last year's #1 spot was held by MySpace and presuming the study surveyed 1/3 of its respondents on Facebook then as well, this is a big change. I can say anecdotally that everywhere I look I see laptops (other than mine) on Facebook all the time. You can read our in-depth comparison of MySpace and Facebook here.
Gender differences in the survey were marked; use of social networking sites was twice as high in self-identified women as it was in men, only 33% of women said they were satisfied to use just one social networking site and MySpace was the #2 favorite for women while falling out of the top 5 for men.
The survey's authors say they believe this shows that the social networking world is set to change drastically when today's youth replace contemporary adults in the workplace. Social networking is currently believed to be much more common among adult men.
In August we wrote about Stan Oleynick, an Internet developer who was selling the rights to his name to finance a web project. At the time, his top bid was $16,000. Now, it's $25,500 (and he's actually only received one new bid since we wrote about his interesting, if a little wacky, idea). That's still well off his goal of $250,000. But Stan still has 3 days to attract bidders, and now they might have a bit more incentive to pony up the big bucks.
Along with the rights to give Stan his new name, the winning bidder will also receive a 10% stake in the web company he is attempting to launch. When we last wrote about Stan, his web project was stil under wraps, though he promised it would be revolutionary. This week it was finally revealed: the winner of Stan's name will also become a shareholder in CrowdChess.
As the name would suggest, CrowdChess is a crowdsourced version of chess. Teams made up of hundreds or thousands of players compete against one another by voting for the best move (from a list of choices suggested by the crowd). Each team has one hour to complete their voting and make a move. It's an intriguing idea, and would be an interesting test of crowd wisdom theory to see if a large group of average Joes playing chess as a team could beat a grandmaster or an IBM supercomputer.
Docstoc, which demoed at the TechCrunch40 last month, is offering 1000 private beta invites to Read/WriteWeb readers. Docstoc is aiming to be the YouTube or Flickr of professional documents, by allowing users to upload and share (via an embeddable flash widget) professional documents.
Docstoc has been in private beta and approaching official launch, but they were kind enough to give 1000 Read/WriteWeb readers a chance to preview the service early. Just navigate to http://docstoc.com/User/register.aspx and enter "RWW" (without the quotes) as the invite code to claim your invite. These are released on a first come, first serve basis.
A video introducing Docstoc to Read/WriteWeb readers (you!) is embedded below.
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times removed the pay wall in front of its TimesSelect service, which controlled access to much of the paper's archives and its popular columnists like Thomas Friedman and Frank Rich. Unfortunately, much of the paper's non-wire service content still sits behind an utterly useless and annoying registration wall.
The Times says the reason they ask for registration is to be "able to offer people around the world free-of-charge access to news, reviews and more." But is it really necessary? Can't they do all those things without annoying users? Do to they get anything out of it? I don't think so.
Multiple press outlets are reporting this morning about the increasing use of YouTube's messaging and basic video hosting features for spam. There's nothing that many people hate more than spam, apparently feeling obligated to read every email that lands in their inbox. Why the new world of social networking and social media hasn't taken the most basic steps to stop spam and pre-empt this criticism I don't know. Perhaps like MySpace's awful but page-load intensive site design, YouTube doesn't stop spam because it serves their interests in driving traffic and selling ads.
Google's video sharing site still hasn't instituted as much as a captcha requirement in order to send a message through its service, something that even MySpace did only last week. If the proliferation of spam blogs on Google's Blogspot is any indication it may be a long time before YouTube does anything about spam emails driving users back to their site.
[Richard] The Future of Web Apps conference was held again this week in London. John O'Shea and Fergus Burns of nooked were there (a company I am an advisor to) and John offered up some comprehensive notes for Read/WriteWeb. I read through them and decided to post 'as is', because there are plenty of nuggets there - and I'd hate to edit out any of the good stuff! So here you go, John's notes from FOWA in their unedited glory:
For decades financiers of one type or another have been the “Masters of the Universe”. People who, as Bob Dylan once sang, “make the rules, for the wise men and the fools”.
In the 1970’s, with stagflation and oil crises, it was the commodities traders who ruled the roost. As the 1980s kicked in, the forex traders had their day; when Tom Wolfe published Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987, the leading character was a bond trader. From 1995 to 2000, the VCs in Silicon Valley had inherited the formula for turning base metal into gold.
Today the crown is shared by Private Equity (PE) and Hedge Funds. When you see the PE big shots selling shares to the public, you know the PE party is nearing its riotous end. And the Hedge Fund party is getting crowded, with too many lesser talented investors dragging average returns down - to levels similar to buying an index fund (but with massively bigger fees).
So who will be the next 'Masters of the Universe'? For the first time ever, maybe it won’t be another financial asset class. All those assets classes remain and their practitioners will always be wealthy and influential; it's a great time to be in commodities again for example. However, we are at a unique moment in history when power is shifting to creative entrepreneurs.
Microsoft today unveiled their new consumer health and search site Health Vault. Built around their fairly impressive health search engine, Microsoft hopes that the site will become a central repository for people to store and selectively share their health information and records, including patient records, test results, and prescription info.
I have no doubt that eventually health records will be stored online. Easier access and sharing of health information between doctors and hospitals is something that can lead to better and quicker diagnoses, less headaches when changing doctors or moving to a new town, and less chance of a serious condition being missed by a doctor. Many large companies are betting on the future of online health information portals, Google, Intel, and Cisco all have initiatives underway in this area. But there are major hurdles toward gaining public trust and acceptance, not least of which is security concerns.
Personal health records are something most people guard very closely -- as closely as financial account information. I agree with Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling, who points out that the success of HealthVault or any similar endeavor is tied very closely to the outcome of universal health care proposals in the United States. People will be far more likely to feel comfortable putting their health records online knowing that their insurance coverage won't be in jeopardy should that information leak out.
Just a few years ago, large venture firms were incubating companies for months. During the incubation period,
the founders wrote 70+ page business plans, which described the market opportunity, the execution plan, along with
the five year financial projections. The plan was a proof, a risk management tool, used to justify that the idea
has legs and will work.
But this isn't true anymore. You can't afford to be in stealth mode for months. Your can no longer build realistic projections for five years. The only way to create a technology company in this market is to evolve it.
If the way in which a company is built has to change, the way in which it is funded needs to change as well. What are the new rules for tech venture capital? Where and how should the money be allocated? In this post we take a deeper look.
The distributed group of developers working on the Open Authentication spec OAuth have released what they hope will be the final draft of their 1.0 version. The OAuth spec will create a standardized way for applications to request permission for access to user info from other applications and for info-holding services to communicate clear rules and options for accessing parts of the data they hold.
The spec got a burst of publicity earlier this week when the widely used feed reader Bloglines announced that they intend to support it in addition to OpenID and the Attention Data standard APML.
In this post I offer a high-level overview of what OAuth does, in as much as I understand it, followed by some thoughts on the concepts from some helpful industry experts.
