Portland social mapping startup Platial has acquired old-school favorite Frapper, another social mapping service, it was announced today.
If the announcement had been made yesterday it would have warranted inclusion in Om Malik's post Startups Should Team Up to Grow. Is this a case of small companies merging for the sake of survival in the face of a crowded market and comparable features offered by Google? Platial says that's not a bad way to understand their announcement, but I don't think that tells the whole story here.
One of my favorite parts of the Web 2.0 conferences run by O'Reilly/CMP is the 15 minute quickfire presentation done every year by Mary Meeker. There is always a wealth of fascinating data about Web trends and products, which Meeker hits you with at a mllion miles an hour. Luckily in this case her presentation was up on the Morgan Stanley website when she came on stage, so I got to listen instead of frantically typing soundbotes. This year there were 48 slides (a record for Meeker at Web 2.0!) and you can download them here.
Along with the usual trends such as mobile uptake and China growth (which are present in all Meeker presentations at Web 2.0), here are some of the lesser known trends that I learned about:
We're now in two cycles in the "Cloud" age - broadband and wireless. This is seen in new products like Apple iPhone, 3 Skype Phone, Amazon Kindle, the upcoming Google ‘GPhone’. Also Meeker noted that there will be a "critical mass inflection point" for 3G in 2009. Meeker predicts a "new generation of Internet leaders to capitalize on growing access to fast Internet access on mobiles".
Some interesting data points this year about the growth in Enterprise web 2.0. Slide 12 notes that the "next wave of corporate productivity gains should be paced by Web 2.0 driven collaboration tools that use the network as the platform to enable users to connect ‘any device to any content over any combination of networks’ (John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems, 5/22/07)". Related to this, enterprises may be coming out of a "relative purchasing funk" (slide 13).
At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that the company is working toward shifting all of their apps online, but that it would probably take about 10 years for a complete shift. While the web as the computing platform of the future is currently a popular idea, and while prognostication 10 years out is rarely a good idea, I'm skeptical that Adobe could pull off a full shift of its software catalog to Internet apps.
Adobe has launched stripped down online versions of some of its apps, already. Premiere Express, which powers the video mashups at sites like Photobucket and YouTube, is one of the nicer online video editors, but still falls well short of Adobe's software offering. Two week's ago at the Adobe Max event, Adobe showed off the latest version of their Photoshop Express web app -- again, it appeared to be one of the nicer online offerings, but still well short of their traditional software package.
Reports are flying all over the blogosphere today about "China blocking" more US based websites, including search engines, and in some cases redirecting traffic in China to Chinese search engines instead of Google and Yahoo.
The truth of the matter is probably not nearly so simple. As I understand it it's almost never as simple as "China is blocking X.Y.Z websites". It depends on which ISP you're using, there are technical obstacles to good service and there's a maze of face-to-face meetings that go on in order to plan and enact any such censorship, redirects, etc. It's highly unlikely that there is any nationwide policy suddenly put into place that effects internet users all across that huge nation. There are certainly a few big policies that are self-enforced by online service providers, but many of the comments being left on today's China coverage denying nation-wide censorship are probably the honest truth.
Today's news coverage itself deserves some serious scrutiny.
This evening 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.
Here are some of the highlights of the discussion, with thanks to MySpace for a lot of the background information. Also see TechCrunch's coverage, as they have been following this news since the rumors first surfaced a few weeks ago.
Tonight MySpace confirmed they will launch a developer platform in the "near term". DeWolfe and Murdoch cited the "original openness and personalization of the MySpace community" as being integral to MySpace's success to date. They also noted that MySpace helped develop the widget eco-system. During the discussion, DeWolfe seemed a little cagey about the concept of openness, but (under pressure from the mighty Marc Canter's questioning) admitted that it is "largely a good thing for users." In the end DeWolfe caved to Canter's persistent questions and said that yes they'll open up! But of course it remains to be seen whether they will, truly.
It was revealed tonight 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:
Matt Mullenweg announced today that Automattic, the maker of ultra-popular blog platform Wordpress, has acquired universal avatar service Gravatar for an undisclosed sum. Gravatar, which stands for "globally recognized avatar," provides centralized hosting and web serving for 80x80 avatars, which can then be called from any participating blog, forum, or web application that taps into the Gravatar API. The theory is that users can have one web avatar that they manage in a single location, but which represents them automatically anywhere they post online.
Automattic has already moved the Gravatar operation to the Wordpress infrastructure, which they say has resulted in gravatar serving that is 3 times faster -- which is good, because one of the reasons I was initially cold the service when it launched was that it often seemed to hang forum and blog pages that used it.
I'm here at the Web 2.0 Summit 2007 in San Francisco, the third year I've been to the conference. Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle started out with an overview of web 2.0 now; and one thing they noted is that social networking has moved from an 'edge' technology to a center technology. John Battelle then invited founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, onto the stage to discuss this topic. Mark came across as an awkward young man (and to be totally fair, he is very young), so the first 5 minutes didn't offer much insight. Eventually though Zuckerberg warmed up, especially when Battelle asked him to define 'social graph'. Zuckerberg said "it's the set of conenctions that a person has in the world" and that Facebook is simply trying to map this. He said it's about exposing peoples connections, but respecting peoples privacy.
Battelle asked about the Facebook platform. Zuckerberg said that "it's incredibly humbling to see all these people build on top of a platform that's still early stage". He said it might take "tens of years" before the platform is mature, so launching the platform this year was a "quick start" (i.e. they just wanted to get it out there and iterate). Battelle asked how can developers be sure that their apps won't be taken offline in the future? Zuckerberg said that the site is evolving very fast, so they need to make sure there's enough flexibility in the system. That didn't answer the question, so Battelle persisted with the topic - noting that Microsoft essentially built a platform too, but they went on to "colonize" it. So will Facebook do the same? Zuckerberg said maybe with ads (!) He said that Facebook "reserves the right to build apps on the platform".
For the past two days, AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight has been attending the Search Marketing Expo: Social Media conference in New York City. He's been live blogging every session from the conference and there is some really great stuff in his notes, all of which have been posted to the ASE blog. Definitely don't miss any of his excellent and all inclusive coverage:
Microsoft has been sharing with bloggers today some screenshots of the forthcoming Microsoft Office Live Workspace. The company made its most recent major announcement about the online collaboration suite that integrates with Office at the end of last month. Interested users can now pre-register for the free service's launch later this year.
Obviously a major challenge to Google Docs and other online office and collaboration tools, Live Workspace looks great to me in these screenshots. I haven't investigated to see if it will be cross-platform compatible but if not I'll fire up Windows just to test it out when released. Richard MacManus wrote at length here about Workspace earlier this month, calling it a "weak me-too offering." I'm not so sure. In case you haven't noticed, Google Docs look, export and print dog-ugly. There's certainly room for competition, as even Adobe signaled with their acquisition of a Buzzword this month.
Screenshots below, click these preview images to view them in beautiful full size.
Ars Technica reported late last night that the Free Flow of Information Act, which would grant protection of sources and documents at a federal level to journalists, including professional bloggers, easily passed the US House of Representatives by a vote of 398-21. The bill, which was cosponsored by Reps. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Mike Pence (R-IN), still may never become a law should it reach President Bush's desk.
According to Ars, the Bush administration views the FFIA "as carte blanche to leak government information without penalty," and released a statement yesterday in opposition citing the "overriding imperative to protect national security," as a reason for their objection to the measure.
