A 17-year-old Dutch teenager was arrested by very real police for allegedly stealing over $5800 worth of virtual furniture to trick out his pad in online world Habbo Hotel. Five other teenagers were questioned in connection with the virtual crime spree, according to the BBC.
Habbo, which attracts more than 6 million users in over 30 countries each month, is comparable to Second Life in that people use the service to create a virtual likeness to inhabit an online world. A lot of real money changes hands in Habbo in order to purchase virtual goods used by people to personalize their online experience. That real money was involved is what got the police interested in the theft.
"It is a theft because the furniture is paid for with real money. But the only way to be a thief in Habbo is to get people's usernames and passwords and then log in and take the furniture," said a Habbo spokesperson.
As more and more sites launch their own development platforms, we've been slowly starting to see a trend of applications trying to make the jump outside of the platform to which they owe their roots and try to make it as standalone sites or multi-site applications. We saw the Where I've Been Facebook application make the jump to MySpace in September, and attempt to build an external travel destination site.
Last night, the Clever Hippo search engine, a Facebook application that helps search and rate other Facebook applications (see AltSearchEngine's coverage) soft-launched the new version of their vertical search engine at CleverHippo.org. The site has expanded beyond the friendly confines of Facebook, and now searches applications from a wide variety of web platforms. The site currenctly indexes apps for Facebook, OpenSocial, HTML (i.e., MySpace, Netvibes, iGoogle, etc.), iPhone, and Windows and OS X desktop. It looks like Clever Hippo currently indexes 31,166 applications.
Lifestrea.ms is a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that you'll want to keep an eye on. It is a real testimony to the potential of the new web that anyone would even try to create something like this company has. Currently in private beta, I hope the company will fix its usability issues and launch soon. Send an email to beta@lifestrea.ms if you want on the list for an account.
Lifestreaming aggregates all your inbound and outbound activity online, see Tumblr or FriendFeed for other examples. For more on Lifestreaming check out our recent interview of David Karp, CEO of Tumblr, over at Read/WriteTalk.
If everything under the covers at Lifestrea.ms can be made as good as the front page of the site, then we'll be in great shape. That page alone is a marvel to witness. I've been on the other side of login, though, and don't want to go back until some things have changed.
Leveraging every open data standard and API I've ever heard of, Lifestrea.ms wants to serve as your dashboard for all your reading, writing and discovery online.
VibeAgent is a just-launched hotel search site based in Charlottesville, Virginia. There's a number of things worth noting about this startup; travel search may be a crowded space but the web is young and the game is not over yet.
Arizona-based img surf, LLC is an angel-funded startup that was formed in July 2007 to develop Mugr, a facial recognition search site designed to show off their developer platform that let's outside sites integrate image based search into their services. The site opened last month in limited beta. We were able to get our hands on some invites for Read/WriteWeb users, so the first 100 people who visit this link will be able to join Mugr and try it out for themselves.
Like the Eyealike, which we profiled on Monday, Mugr is more of a tech demo for the platform than a really useful destination site. On Mugr, users are encouraged to enter at least 3 clear, head on face shots to train the engine to understand who they are. They then fill out a painfully simple user profile that consists of links to various social networking or other web sites and tags that describe them, and can form connections with other users.
Israeli digital crafts social network eSnips launched a new feature tonight that could change the social networking game. Called Social DNA, it's essentially a collection of personality quizzes that can serve to connect like minded users and create incredibly accurate targeting for the site's advertisements. Never heard of eSnips? The site sees more than 14 million unique visitors monthly - that's almost 3/4 of Digg's 20 million monthly uniques.
While Digg users fall primarily into the cliche 15 to 35 year old male market demographic - the fact is that they don't click on very many ads. They also don't come to the site to shop. Quite the opposite is true for eSnips users. They may be made up of the "unwashed international types" that US advertisers are said to look down on (70% of the audience is international), but they also come to the site with a willingness to buy and are a less tech savvy audience than Digg users. The less savvy people are, the more likely they are to click on ads.
More importantly, the new Social DNA feature should carry individual and aggregate eyeballs right into the hands of the eSnips ad sales team, ready to place them directly into the gaping maws of just the right advertisers. I wrote earlier today about the way that people give up their valuable personal info to MyBlogLog in exchange for a chance to see the faces of their blog's readers. Similarly, eSnips is using peoples' desire to connect with interesting strangers to access info about their users as well.
The questions asked by the quizzes are not particularly enlightening, they range from humorous to insipid, but the self-categorization they enable is good and the potential is large.
Given the size of the audience, the availability of user profiling info and the commercial-friendly atmosphere on the site - if eSnips doesn't monetize better than Digg then something is wrong with eSnips.
Saul Hansell at the New York Times gets some people talking at Google and Yahoo! for a write up today on the future of the inbox. It's a good article, based mostly on words from Brad "Peanut Butter" Garlinghouse at Yahoo! The gist of what execs from both companies say is this: the future of both email and start pages is in social networking. Much of the discussion comes back to Facebook. Hansell's post looked far into the development future of existing products - and it's a fun read.
I would contend that what's really at issue here are two concepts that Hansell and the execs didn't name explicitly, but which will be familiar to most of the readers here. RSS and Attention Data.
In the future, Yahoo! mail will include a feed of info about your friends' activities, just like Facebook.
Cloud computing platform service provider Joyent is today announcing the availability of 3500 free hosting accounts for Facebook application developers. Joyent has partnered with Dell to offer Facebook developers the free one-year accounts, which include 500GB of bandwidth, 512MB of RAM, as well as 10GB of storage. The accounts retail for $75/month, making the total value of the accounts Joyent is giving away about $3.2 million. Facebook developers can sign up for the program at this link.
After the free year is up, Joyent will offer developers the accounts at a discounted rate of $45/month, no strings attached. I was told that the account that Joyent is offering as part of this promotion should be able to handle most apps up to 10,000 users -- i.e., the majority of Facebook applications. Anyone whose app grows larger will be offered an upgrade path by Joyent.
Because what Joyent is offering are on-demand virtual appliances ("accelerators") operating in a cloud, they can be deployed almost instantly with very little hassle. That means that scaling both vertically and horizontally to handle increased load can be done rather painlessly within minutes by purchasing more accelerators. Joyent is hoping that a small percentage of apps created on its free accelerators will become popular enough to need to scale larger on their hosting platform.
Platforms here, platforms there - everyone's launching a platform it seems. Today's newest platforms, a content storage platform from Box.net and a content publishing platform from social network Bebo, are just the latest. Facebook, OpenSocial, Android - who can tell them all apart?
What is a platform? It's a technical welcome mat that allows developers from outside of a company tie their software to the software offering the platform. How's that for an explanation? Feel free to share your one-line explanation, too.
Each of the platforms above has a flavor and in order to clarify all the talk about platforms, I decided to make a chart. These are the things I look at when trying to understand where a new platform lies in the landscape. All of this is so new that it's hard to know how to compare them for sure, but I think most of the following is from a user's perspective. It's also mostly prediction as almost none of these platforms are live yet. These comparison charts are always a challenge, and they're usually pretty subjective - but please let me know of any details I've gotten wrong and I'll correct any mistakes.
The Google-lead but open-standards based initiative could be huge, or it could just be for cross-site widget publishing. It's all about the applications, it appears so far. It is open to any participant and many companies are announcing that are building apps that leverage OpenSocial to travel freely from one social networking site to the next.
Earlier this year MyFootballClub.co.uk was launched with the intent to gather together a crowd of football-obsessed Internet users to pool resources and buy a minor English football club. About 50,000 members paid £35 (US$72.42), creating a fund of about £1,375,000, and today the site announced that they had parlayed that cash into a deal in principle to acquire a majority stake in English minor league football club Ebbsfleet United for US$1.45 million. The site's members will have the option to buy the entire club in the future at a fixed price.
"MyFootballClub members will own the club, vote on team selection, decide which players to buy and sell and guide the club up the leagues," proclaimed the web site this morning. According to Reuters the club welcomes the fan involvement, with management looking forward to using the influx of cash to expand the club. "During and after matches, Ebbsfleet supporters often give me their opinion on which players should or shouldn't start games. Now they can have their say," Coach Liam Dash told the BBC. But the excited Brits need only look Stateside to see that the wisdom of crowds is not always so wise when applied to professional team sports.
