Fresh on the heels of yesterday's news about the raid and arrest of the founder of TVLinks.co.uk by British police, comes word that British and Dutch police raided the servers of invite-only public torrent tracker OiNK.cd (formerly OiNK.me.uk) and arrested the site's 24-year-old server admin.
According to the BBC, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) had been investigating OiNK for two years. OiNK's servers, which were located in Amsterdam, were apparently seized during a series of raids by Dutch police and coordinated by Interpol last week, while the site's founder was arrested this morning in the UK. OiNK supposedly had hundreds of thousands of members and hosted a very large number of torrents. According to the IFPI, it was one of the main sources for leaked, pre-release music on the Internet, responsible for leaking 60 major albums this year.
Last week I attended the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. This is the third year running I've attended - I went to the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference in October 2005, the 2006 Web 2.0 Summit in November 2006 (it was re-named the "Summit" at that point and took on a more business focus), the 2007 Web 2.0 Expo in April 2007 (more developer focused), and now the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit. Each time I've written a round-up (see links above), a high level look at how the events panned out.
For some reason, the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit has been harder for me to analyze than the previous 3 events. I think it's partly because I spent less time this year in the sessions and workshops - this time I roamed around the conference center and did lots of meetings. But also it was difficult to identify an over-riding theme to this conference.
To quickly re-cap my thoughts on the previous conferences:
So there has been a progression over the past couple of years:
And now we come to the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit -- but this one is harder to to define. For a start, the cutting edge was even further away from the Summit than it was in 2006. The main themes that I picked up during this conference were:
Two interesting trends to be sure, but not the cutting edge of web technology.
AdaptiveBlue makers of the popular Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer, has launched a new version of their SmartLinks product that makes it easy for blog and web site publishers to include the links automatically within their pages. Previously, SmartLinks were only accessible via the BlueOrganizer. Now, web site publishers can add SmartLinks to their page and the service will parse them automatically.
SmartLinks are browser popups, similar to the Snap Shots product that we use on this blog, that add additional contextual information to certain types of links, including links to books, movies, music, stocks, and wine. AdaptiveBlue supports a large list of top web sites, automatically recognizing and augmenting links to those properties.
Though the comparison to Snap's product is inevitable, SmartLinks are fairly dissimilar. While Snap's product adds popups to every link on the page and offers just content previews, SmartLinks are added only to the links it understands and for which is has additional information it can add. The info contained in the contextual popups generally includes links to additional sources and basic information on the everyday item being linked to. For example, a music SmartLink will contain links to the album on iTunes, Last.fm, and Amazon, links to sources for lyrics, reviews, videos, and photos as well as a brief profile of the artist.
VoiceThread is the kind of application that your parents or grandparents might like. It's an interesting annotation system for photos and video. The company behind it recommends you use it to discuss your memories. I wouldn't recommend using it for much yet, though.
The gist of VoiceThread is this: you can upload photos and videos, leave voice or text comments on individual items in a slideshow and draw on the images. It's all in Flash. It's very simple, but the interface looks nice and I'm sure there's market demand for this kind of application. I don't know how many companies have started building something like this, but VoiceThread should finish the job - it's not done yet, in this case at least.
Inside Facebook reports that Facebook has added new metrics for app developers to track the spread of their application. The new "Application Adds by Facebook Referrer" displays how many application ads were a result of the app directory, the profile box, the news feed, the mini feed, Facebook search, or requests.
These stats will certainly be helpful for app developers to gauge the best way to market and promote their apps, and whether their marketing campaigns on Facebook ad networks like Social Media are worth their time and money. But just how most Facebook apps spread is likely to remain hazy until more data can be gathered from multiple app developers.
Denver, Colorado-based ManiaTV was launched in 2004 as a video destination based around quality, professionally produced content. When YouTube exploded onto the scene, though, ManiaTV tried to jump on the bandwagon by launching over 3000 channels of user generated content (UGC). Curiously, however, even while YouTube thrived and eventually grew to a $1.65 billion acquisition by Google, ManiaTV saw 80% of their visitors -- and 100% of their advertisers -- tune in for their professional content, reports BusinessWeek. The site will relaunch later today sans the UGC.
Even Google has so far conceded that it is not easy to monetize UCG. YouTube began placing overlay ads on select videos in August, but so far has not yet started advertising on user generated videos, instead opting to begin their ad program with professionally created content, which is a far easier sell to advertisers who have to worry less about offensive material being associated with their products.
The founder and some staff of a directory site called TV Links was arrested this weekend and the site was shut down by British police. Tv-links.co.uk listed links to other sites where visitors could find television content, often posted without permission of copyright holders.
It's one of those cases in which it's hard not to think both "I can't believe this happened" and "I can't believe it took so long" in the same mental breath. Crazed, uncontrolled linking has long been one of the biggest points of contention between people who use the internet and people who have no idea how it works.
John Pacchetti, an early innovator in the RSS space, has finally succeeded in selling his company RSSCalendar. Pacchetti put the company up for sale on for $50k on eBay this summer and didn't get any bids. This morning it was announced that the company has been acquired by Dallas, Texas based Lookout Software. Lookout Software provides a means for Outlook content to be shared without the purchase of Microsoft's Exchange.
At this point in the game, the most interesting thing about RSSCalendar may be Pacchetti's provisional patent application, which presumably covers the delivery of calendar items to a calendar by RSS. LookOut said this morning that Pacchetti would not be joining the company.
A little over a month ago, Facebook launched their updated "Flyers Pro" system that added per click bidding, and better ad targeting to their self-serve ad service. Today, Valleywag posted an analysis concluding that the Flyers Pro "system poses a direct threat to Google's AdWords and Microsoft's AdCenter." In their comments and on other blogs, people questioned Valleywag's conclusion, arguing that Google has nothing to fear because their ads are targeted based on searches -- for which the searchers already have the intent to find something.
Facebook Flyers Pro ads, on the other hand, are targeted by country, age, sex, keywords, relationship status, education, or workplace. "Google ads are part and parcel of Google SERPs!," writes Donna Bogatin this morning. "Facebook Flyers are part and parcel of Facebook 'social graph' [sic] ... In the simplest terms, Facebook Flyers 'target people' in their hghly [sic] personal space while Google AdWords fulfill people’s needs in their anonymous information space."
Bogatin seems to be forgetting, though, that Google's AdSense program -- which targets ads on third-party sites by keywords found in content, not searches -- accounted for 34% of the company's revenue last quarter, or $1.45 billion. It could be argued that Facebook's Flyers Pro is very similar to Google's AdSense program -- but with more precise targeting tools (and existing only on one site).
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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.
MySpace Evolves - Developer Platform Details, Partnerships, Growth Figures
This week News Corp chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, and MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, were the featured speakers at the Web 2.0 Summit. It is the two year anniversary of the News Corp acquisition of MySpace, so there was some discussion on the growth of MySpace and how it is evolving. The pair also discussed, in a roundabout way, aspects of the upcoming MySpace Platform.
It was revealed that MySpace will formalize relationships with the developer community and "roll out a new platform in the coming months".• The steps to MySpace's developer platform strategy will include:
