So-called "Black Friday," the day after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, is the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season, and this year online retailers saw traffic surge with shoppers spending over 4/5ths of a billion dollars on Thursday and Friday alone. According to comScore, shoppers plunked down $272 million online on Thursday, and $531 million on Friday -- an increase of 29% and 22%, respectively, over the same days last year.
IDG reports that price comparison sites also claimed a huge increase in traffic over the 2006 holiday shopping kick-off. PriceGrabber saw referral traffic up a reported 47%, while Shopping.com watched its referrals increase 61%.
When it's time to do some document creation, there are many reasons to look beyond Microsoft Office. Most of the software available outside of what Microsoft offers, though, can fall short of expectations. One service worth looking into is Zoho. Today, this increasingly popular online office suite implemented full offline functionality for the first of its many different services. (Disclosure: In case you hadn't noticed in the right hand corner of our site, Zoho is an RWW sponsor.)
Zoho Writer, the company's word processing tool, can now be used offline, using Google Gears. If you're someone who has grown dependent on the online functionality of Zoho, Google Docs or an other service - you'll find that it's very exciting to be able to go offline with Gears. It couldn't be easier for the user. If you've got Google Gears on your computer, you can download selected Zoho documents to your hard drive with just a click. The pages for those documents will then be accessible inside your browser, even with when you are not connected to the internet. Someday soon, the company says, the other Zoho apps will also be available offline as well. If you've tried Google Docs, you've probably noticed that it's ugly and awkward. Zoho is far less so, and now offers the advantage of being able to go offline as well. (Your collaboration partner probably trusts Google already, though, so it's not a clear case by any means.)
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.
By now most of you have probably seen the site 'Why Digg is Blocked'. For those that haven't come across it, the site is on a mission to convince webmasters and content producers to reject social media traffic. Here's a look at the incredibly flawed logic the site uses to justify its purpose.
The first argument that the site makes is that social media sites endorse the use of ad-blocking software which allegedly infringes on the rights of site-owners.This argument is flawed for several reasons. First, none of these sites endorses the use of ad-blocking software. Yes, there was a time when Digg used to be technology-centric and a majority of its user-base was tech-savvy enough to use ad-blocking software to improve their online experience. However, as the site has grown, and as social media sites in general (i.e. Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon and so on) continued to grow and develop a more mainstream acceptance, the demographic has expanded to the point where it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that a majority of the traffic from the sites is not actively blocking advertisements.
The NY Times has another of those 'Mobile Web isn't living up to the hype' articles that have become so familiar since, oh, the late 90's when WAP came onto the scene. The NYT quotes statistics from Rethink Research, stating that data will make up only 12 percent of average mobile phone revenue per user in 2007. Further, surveys by Yankee Group show that "only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web more than once a month, while 70 percent of computer users view Web sites every day."
I have to admit I've only just become a Mobile Web convert, after purchasing an iPhone on my recent trip to the States. I now use the Mobile Web frequently, to check RWW and other sites during the day when I'm out and about -- or simply when curled up in the sofa at the end of the day, trying to relax.
So with all that in mind, it'd be interesting to survey how many RWW readers use the Mobile Web. Please participate in our poll below:
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
Note: This is a shortened version of the Wrapup, due to Thanksgiving in the US.
Here is a sample of our best posts this week:
In 6 months time, will you have more business contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn?
Yes, Facebook will have more 26% (116 votes)
No, LinkedIn will still have more 68% (307 votes)
They will be even 6% (29 votes)
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
Indian company InstaColl today formally launched Live Documents, a mini-office suite of products similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Live Documents has already received plenty of press coverage, mainly because it was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia - the man who famously sold web mail service Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million in 1998.
Live Documents was built using RIA technologies including Flash and Flex, which the company claims gives it a "user experience that is comparable to native Office software applications." In its launch announcement, Live Documents is being heavily positioned as a Microsoft Office competitor - and complement. On the latter, the company says that "Live Documents is available as a optional desktop client application that wraps around Microsoft Office and embeds collaborative capabilities into these hitherto standalone software applications." There is also offline access.
It's also clear that Live Documents is leveraging the Microsoft brand - from the "Live" brand name, to the claim that it has a “Services plus Software” approach (Microsoft's calls this "software plus services").
Onaswarm is a new lifestreaming application from Toronto's David Janes and BlogMatrix. Lifestreaming is something people do with a growing class of services that let you display all your activities across different websites, through aggregating the RSS feeds from your accounts on one page. Onaswarm a smart, interesting service that combines groups, microformats and flashes of really good usability.
The service is in private beta, but readers here who request accounts and include the letters RWW in their entries to the request form will be given accounts promptly.
Reasearchers at IDC predict that this year the number of spam messages sent will eclipse the amount of legit email correspondence for the first time ever, reports USA Today. Approximately 10.8 trillion spam messages will have crossed through inboxes in the past year, compared to 10.5 trillion legitimate person-to-person email messages. The numbers indicate that spam is a growing problem, despite the promise of better filtering technology.
"Two years from now, spam will be solved," said Bill Gates in 2004 addressing World Economic Forum in Switzerland. But 2007 will go down as the worst year yet for spam, a trend that has held for the past four years, according to Rebecca Steinberg Herson, vice president of marketing at Commtouch, an email security firm.
In an interview last month with USA Today, Gates reminded that though the volume of spam has increased, more of it is being deleted by spam filters. "Sure, there's a lot [of spam] out there, but software is deleting 99.9% of that anyway," he said, though Microsoft has revised that claim to 85% - 95%.
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, today published a blog post about what he terms the Graph, which is similar (if not identical) to his Semantic Web vision. Referencing both Brad Fitzpatrick's influential post earlier this year on Social Graph, and our own Alex Iskold's analysis of Social Graph concepts, Berners-Lee went on to position the Graph as the third main "level" of computer networks. First there was the Internet, then the Web, and now the Graph - which Sir Tim labeled (somewhat tongue in cheek) the Giant Global Graph!
Note that Berners-Lee wasn't specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (a.k.a. layers of abstraction):
1. The Internet: links computers
2. Web: links documents
3. Graph: links relationships between people and/or documents -- "the things documents are about" as Berners-Lee put it.
The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:
"So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology -- it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer."
Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: "...at each layer --- Net, Web, or Graph --- we have ceded some control for greater benefits." The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected - for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google's OpenSocial aims to achieve.
At the risk of reporting rumors (ahem), I can't resist making a note of this one. For the past couple of weeks we have been analyzing LinkedIn and comparing it to Facebook. When I say 'we', I mean Bernard Lunn. But it's a topic a few of us have written about in the past here at RWW. Bernard wrote a post at the end of last week entitled LinkedIn and The Future of Business Networking. In that post he listed ways that LinkedIn could take advantage of the relatively untapped business networking market.
Some of the feedback on Bernard's post suggested that it's Facebook which will take advantage of business networking opportunities, moreso than LinkedIn. So at the beginning of this week, we ran a poll asking: In 6 months time, will you have more business contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn? The poll is still running (see bottom of this page), but the current results are in favor of LinkedIn:
Yes, Facebook will have more 27% (102 votes)
No, LinkedIn will still have more 66% (245 votes)
They will be even 6% (24 votes)
