We've discussed before on Read/WriteWeb about how we've entered The Digestion Phase of the Web, a term that Alex Iskold coined. He defined it as "a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together." Tim O'Reilly has also been reflecting on how innovation has slowed down and consolidation is occurring.
But something doesn't sit right with me when we start talking about reflection and consolidation. Both of those things are happening, for sure -- and much of today's tech news and blog coverage is about M&A and how big Internet companies are integrating web 2.0 features. Which is precisely the problem! It's not nearly as interesting as Web innovation. I can't be the only person bored with the tech blogosphere these days. How can we - as bloggers, entreprenuers, businesspeople - get back to thinking about actual innovation?
A lot of the Web technology that has inspired me in recent months is Mobile Web apps and the Semantic Apps we're beginning to see blossom on the Web. Also, like Tim O'Reilly, I find myself increasingly interested in what is bubbling up from China and other international markets. It's not to say Silicon Valley isn't still fascinating (Google's OpenSocial and Android initiatives were both fine developments), but there are new innovations and markets that are in many ways far more interesting than what is happening in Silicon Valley.
So in an attempt to break through to the other side, I've set myself the task of investigating 'the next wave' of Web innovation. It's something all our writers look for - e.g. Marshall Kirkpatrick's superb analysis of the Twitter ecosystem (and Twitter is certainly innovative and something to watch), and Josh Catone's analysis of facial recognition platforms. So what else is out there in terms of Web innovation?
Tangos Chan of China Web2.0 Review posted a very interesting set of slides that he presented at an event organized by Orange Lab, called "Web 2.0 in China: What’s Next?". He first makes the point that China's Web scene is not just made up of copycat sites - he says that phenomonem is happening all over the world. Then Tangos reveals some areas of innovation in China:
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." Bill Clinton can rest easy knowing that he will soon have more verb options when updating his status on Facebook. Facebook announced to developers last night that it will soon be dropping the word "is" from status message updates.
The developer platform has already been updated so that external applications that update user status can avoid prepending the word "is." For now, status updates on Facebook still include the "is," but Facebook platform engineers promise that the change will be pushed to Facebook at large soon and make the lack of verb a default behavior rather than something you have to specify. "In a few, we will delete that parameter and change the default behavior to be that you must include your own verb," they wrote.
Though the update is aimed specifically at developers, and it is still rather hazy whether this change will only apply to external applications that update status via the API or to Facebook as a whole, it seems likely that the latter is true.
SprialFrog, the big music industry's experiment with free music downloads, is bleeding money and considering hiring bloggers to improve their public profile. According to financial filings required by the company's investors and dug up by Joseph Weisenthal at PaidContent, the company reported a Q3 loss of $3.4 million on revenue of only $20,400, leaving only $2.3 million in the company's bank account.
That's a whole lot of money to throw away but it shouldn't come as any surprise. The SpiralFrog model is awful. Users get free downloads of DRM laden songs that they can listen to in Windows Media Player, but they have to periodically answer survey questions and view ads in order to for the songs to continue playing. The site itself looks like one big ad with music appended to it. While some music execs have publicly changed their tune and said "going to war" with users was a bad idea - SpiralFrog's crazy plan is probably just a distasteful waste of money. The next step will be to annoy people with a marketing blitz.
Walt Whitman said that he liked to write in iambic pentameter because there is beauty in constraints. I think about that often when I use Google Custom Search Engine, which is at least once a day. Today, Google announced that its platform for searching inside a finite list of domains is now available for the first time in 40 different languages. (As UK semantic web developer Tom Morris pointed out, like all web projects CSE was always was international - it was just ignoring it.) See our in-depth write up of Google CSE's excellence in September.
Now people with non-native English reading website audiences can make their sites searchable in other languages . Now people around the world who are researching any particular topic can easily build a search engine, with an interface in their own language, that brings back results from only the key reference sites in their field. The Custom Search API, leveraged to build even more tools like the increasingly popular Lijit (disclosure: a sponsor, but also a simply fascinating service), can now be leveraged in multiple languages as well.
English may be the dominant language of the web, but there's no reason for it to be the only language of particularly useful web services. It certainly isn't the only language in which other forms of poetry are written.
Last night, Mozilla released the first public beta version of Firefox 3. You can grab version 3.01b from the beta download site. According to Mozilla, the new release has fixed over 11,000 bugs as well as made the move to the new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine.
My first impression of Firefox 3 Beta was, "This doesn't seem very different." After playing with a while, though, I started to notice a few changes -- mainly for the better. First on that list, Firefox 3 is fast. The release notes cite "major architectural changes" that have increased speed, and promise things will only get faster with each beta.
Pages definitely loaded much faster in 3.01b than they do in the current non-beta release of Firefox (2.0.0.9), to the point where I was actually surprised when some often slow-loading pages jumped right up. For me, the improved speed is probably the most noticeable change while using Firefox 3 for regular web browsing, and is certainly a welcome one. Other changes that caught my eye include the rewritten download manager that lets you resume downloads (hooray!), integration with anti-virus software and built in malware detection, the ability to save tabs when restarting the browser (no need to force quit to do that anymore), single click bookmarking, and a simplified password manager.
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When I first discovered Twitter, my reaction was much like many peoples'. I thought it sounded stupid. I, like hundreds of thousands of other people, have changed my mind. For all its downtime, UI awkwardness and challenges for the uninitiated, Twitter is a paradigm-changing communication platform that cannot be dismissed. Call it ambient intimacy as the video at the end of this post does, call it persistent social intelligence as I often do, call it the hive mind as I'm afraid it might be - there's something really powerful going on. World news is being reported first on Twitter, casual conversation being truncated and higher levels of involvement between people enabled - Twitter is poised to make a big impact on many peoples' lives.
The service itself is simple enough, but hundreds of other applications and interfaces have been built on top of the all-too often shaky Twitter API. We wrote about our 10 favorites over the summer, many of which were search engines and public message display tools. They keep coming - I just discovered PlusPlusBot today, for example. I get a significant number of leads on Twitter that turn into stories here on ReadWriteWeb, something I've written about here.
The 3rd party publishing interfaces alone could easily be the entire basis of an college class on contemporary interface design. I find myself talking at least once a week to other companies about lessons learned from Twitter-based third party interfaces.
A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to write a blog post comparing the top Twitter interfaces available. I found though that there were too many to compare and that my own judgment would likely be too arbitrary. Instead, I've taken a survey.
I've recorded the publishing tools reported to have been used in more than 700 publishing instances on Twitter over the last two weeks. I looked at the tools appearing on my with_friends page, on the same page of some of the most popular Twitter users and for every user appearing on the public time line at various times of day. If someone's with_friends page displayed 5 tweets in a row from the web by Robert Scoble, I counted that as 1 vote for the web interface. I saw a lot of Twitter messages in Spanish and Japanese.
This post took me a very long time to put together (everyone on staff will be glad that I'm finally done, I'm sure) but I don't want to call it scientific. I do hope you find this interesting and useful, though. If you're still unconvinced that Twitter is useful, see the short video from MIT's Technology Review at the very end of this post.
In 717 instances of publishing to Twitter I saw 19 different tools used more than once and 5 more just once. The top 8 methods used to publish are as follows:
According to my count:
Though that looks like a healthy, balanced ecosystem to me, it probably also indicates that there is little chance of any but a few of these apps monetizing themselves. If there are 500,000 Twitter users total and we extrapolate on these percentages, I'd guess that Tweetr has about 7000 users and Twitterrific about 70,000. Both estimates are probably very high since 500,000 is only the number of estimated total (not active) Twitter users.
Below are descriptions of these apps, screen shots, thoughts on the pros and cons of using them, as well as information about the 11 next most popular tools used.
A niche social network for people recovering from addiction, called SoberCircle, hit Del.icio.us popular this morning and it made me think - "my goodness, the market for niche social networks must be nearly infinite." SoberCircle has never been profiled on any of the top web 2.0 blogs and we haven't received any press releases announcing their support for OpenSocial - but the site is yet another social network that made a mark on the web today.
Most people who follow new developments in web applications closely contend that MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn are so dominant, and their tiny challengers so numerous, that launching Yet Another Social Network is among the most foolish things an entrepreneur today can do. I disagree.
What is a social network? Typically, it's just a website that offers users a profile page, the ability to publish to the web, to add other users as friends and to send user-to-user messages, or sitemail. That's simple but powerful stuff; it's functionality that countless real-world organizations will benefit from in the coming years as turnkey solutions become increasingly visible.
Here's my 6 reasons why I believe that SoberCircle and many of the other seemingly random, obscure niche social networks online are in fact viable businesses in a huge, untapped market.
Just a couple of weeks ago, CNET's Don Reisinger wrote that Blockbuster was doomed. After posting a quarterly net loss of $35 million, closing 526 stores over the past year, and seeing its stock price tumble, Reisinger predicted that the company would be out of business in 2 years. "The way I see it, Blockbuster has two options: sell off the company as soon as possible or spend huge sums of cash on research and development and strategic partnerships with distribution companies to make downloading movies a viable alternative to Netflix," he wrote. "But unfortunately, I simply don't see this happening. I think Blockbuster will try to stay the course in the hopes it can find a way out. It won't."
But Blockbuster CEO James Keyes doesn't see it that way. While he admits that pursuing Netflix hard with its Total Access service (by giving away free rentals that cost the company $29 million in the third quarter) was a mistake, he doesn't think the end is nigh.
If you have a fast broadband Internet connection, enjoy it while it's still fast. According to a study by Nemertes Research, video and interactive web sites will begin to overwhelm Internet service providers as early as 2010.
"Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it's back to the bad old days of dial-up," Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson told USA Today. "The cool stuff that you'll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won't do it."
According to the report, cable and phone companies, which provide 94% of the United States' broadband access, must invest about $55 billion to upgrade their networks to cope with the coming bottleneck. That is far more than planned, says Nemertes.
The link shortening and redirection service TinyURL went down apparently for hours last night (it's still down, in fact), rendering countless links broken across the web. Complaints have been particularly loud on Twitter, where long links are automatically turned to TinyURLs and complaining is easy to do, but the service is widely used in emails and web pages as well. The site claims to service 1.6 billion hits each month.
There are many free public alternatives to TinyURL, some with better ancillary features (see elfurl.com for just one example). The name TinyURL is very literal and memorable though. I use SNURL more often, myself.
It's not good when so much of the web runs through a single service. For some, politics could be a consideration as well as technical considerations. The man behind TinyURL, Keven Gilbertson, uses his hugely popular website to promote US presidential candidate Ron Paul, which I personally find somewhat distasteful, and encourages people to use TinyURL to obscure affiliate links on their webpages - which strikes me as extremely distasteful. Presumably a Paul supporter would want our redirects to run wild and free too, unbeholden to a centralized service provider capable of holding us under its thumb (I joke, but really.)
