According to the China Internet Network Information Center there are 162 million Internet users in China - a number that has grown by 140 million users in just the past 7 years. 7 million of those users already call Zhanzuo.com, China's largest social network, home.
The Times of London is reporting that Facebook has made an $85 million offer to purchase Zhanzuo.com. The Times reports that Zhanzuo.com CEO Jack Zhang and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have engaged in talks but that no deal has been completed. Facebook is denying the report.
I used to write a blog about ebooks - some of you may remember eBook Culture (alas I let the domain name slip and so it was gobbled up by a squatter). Anyway, as a lover of both books and the Web, the vision of an Internet-connected eBook Reader has been one of my obsessions over the years. And now it looks like Amazon has, finally, taken the always-nascent eBook industry to the next level. This week, wrote Steve Levy in a rapturous article in Newsweek, Amazon will release the Kindle - an e-reader that uses E Ink and will have Internet connectivity. The latter point is what will differentiate the Kindle from its chief competitor currently, the Sony eReader that was launched in 2006.
Kindle image via Engadget
Levy wrote in Newsweek that the Kindle " will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish." He unleashes other doozies of hyperbole too: "the iPod of reading" and "the first 'always-on' book".
The Kindle will cost USD399, which is $100 more than the Sony eReader. But the wireless Internet connectivity easily makes the increased price worth it. The wireless is via a system called Whispernet - which according to Newsweek is based on the EVDO broadband service offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere and not just Wi-Fi hotspots. Here's Levy's description of what the device looks and feels like:
"It weighs but 10.3 ounces, and unlike a laptop computer it does not run hot or make intrusive beeps. A reading device must be sharp and durable, Bezos says, and with the use of E Ink, a breakthrough technology of several years ago that mimes the clarity of a printed book, the Kindle's six-inch screen posts readable pages. The battery has to last for a while, he adds, since there's nothing sadder than a book you can't read because of electile dysfunction. (The Kindle gets as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two hours.)"
The Kindle will be able to hold 200 books, with new releases being offered for just $9.99. Also, apparently blogs will be part of the service - at a cost of either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog. Matthew Ingram was appalled that he'd have to pay. I'm awaiting details on this, because it sounds like premium content deals have been made with the likes of paidcontent.org. Either that or Amazon will try to make money from bundling feeds. It may be attractive to mainstream people who haven't gotten into RSS Readers yet, we'll have to wait and see. Like Matthew, I wouldn't pay unless there is a 'premium' offering (in which case I would certainly consider paying).
Most of the comments and trackbacks from my post on LinkedIn confirmed that LinkedIn has momentum as a business social network. However some Facebook fans believe that LinkedIn is only enjoying a temporary time in the sun.
For example Stowe Boyd, a man who knows a thing or two about social media, had this to say:
“Bernard Lunn thinks LinkedIn is in a great spot because 80% of his contacts are there, and Facebook isn’t real for business yet. Wait six months, Bernard.”
I am not sure what Stowe is predicting in six months. However I am interested in prediction markets, so how about we define a specific prediction and then revisit it in six months? If Facebook and/or LinkedIn were public companies, we could test our predictive powers in the stock market with real money. However because they are private companies (for now), we can just do this for fun and bragging rights. Anyway public companies are now all boring, predictable enterprises; we have to recreate the fun in the private markets.
So the prediction, we think, from Stowe is this:
“In 6 months Facebook will have more of your business contacts than LinkedIn”.
We'll check back in 6 months whether that prediction comes true. But for now we'll run a poll to see whether RWW readers think LinkedIn can hold off the Facebook challenge in business networking. Please take a moment to vote in this poll:
Our friends from Polldaddy, the online polling service we use here at RWW, have launched a new version of their site. The new features:
Co-founder David Lenehan [disclosure: David is an occasional writer for RWW] told me that "the main thing about this launch is what it allows us to do in the future". The original PollDaddy, according to David, was an experiment - so the code for the original site was not built to scale. With the new version, they've re-written the entire application from the ground up. So PollDaddy version 2 is, said David, "a starting point to launch PollDaddy as a full blown professional application."
So what can we expect in the future from Polldaddy? Surveys are the first new feature, and in the coming months Polldaddy will build a platform for "collecting data from the web" - which means services such as forms, quizzes, and other user-requested services. David told me that Polldaddy hopes "to build a system eventually that will ask our users what kind of data they want to collect and provide them with a selection of ways to do it."
Polldaddy has 2 full time developers, including David. Their polls are registering 70 million impression per month and they seem to be the biggest online poll provider (but please let us know in the comments if you know of bigger poll services). Polldaddy has around 70,000 registered users at present.
In terms of Polldaddy's integration within social networks, David said they are working on integrating with Google's OpenSocial "before Christmas." Apparently 20% of their polls are used on social network profiles. The other 80% are made up of blogs and websites, such as RWW.
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.
It was a relatively quiet week in Web news, after all the kerfuffle the last couple of weeks about Google's OpenSocial and Facebook's nascent advertising network.
This week Google followed up on its Mobile Web platform, Android, by putting up $10m in awards for Android Mobile Developers.
In other news, online advertising was up 25% in Q3 - but Marshall Kirkpatrick wondered if 80% of it is Google. Yahoo! announced a Distributed Computing Academic Program. And IBM announced this week that it will be rolling out cloud computing services for corporations in the Spring of 2008, under the name Blue Cloud.
A big Thanksgiving thank you to our sponsors for supporting Read/WriteWeb. We have an amazing line-up of sponsors, all supporting RWW's mission to provide quality analysis about Web Technology.
Quintura uses advanced visualization techniques to enhance the search engine user experience. Check out the Quintura Cloud on our network blog AltSearchEngines as an example (where Quintura is a lead sponsor).
Hakia is a leading semantic search engine and also a lead sponsor of our AltSearchEngines site. Hakia recently released Meet Others, a social networking feature where you can meet people searching for the same topics as you.
Lijit offers excellent search tools and widgets for your blog. Using Lijit, you serve as a filter for search results for your readers. You also get detailed stats to help you understand your reader community.
Etelos CRM for Google Apps is an impressive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application that leverages the Google Apps platform. There are four editions: Personal, Professional, Enterprise, and Developer.
Zoho is a leading Web Office suite, with IMO the most comprehensive product range of all the online office suites. This week Zoho launched a major upgrade to Zoho Writer, featuring Pagination Support, Headers/Footers Support, and Spell Check in 43 languages.
Compete is an online competitive intelligence service that combines site metrics and search analytics in one site. Compete's recently released Search Analytics is a great way to build search marketing campaigns.
Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities. As well as instant messaging, Webmessenger 2 has a Presence system that allows sites to display and leverage online user “presence” anywhere. Check out the new Flash-based Userlist, which lets users easily manage buddies, find online users, and launch IM’s.
AdaptiveBlue is developing personalization technologies that leverage semantics and attention. Check out their SmartLinks, which we use here at RWW to display our network blogs (see sidebar).
Eurekster is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it. I use it myself nearly every day, to research RWW articles!
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW - and has also been a huge help moving us from MovableType 3 to MT 4, and to a new server. So thanks (mt) and also SixApart for that!
If you would like to enquire about sponsoring Read/WriteWeb and/or our network blogs last100, AltSearchEngines and Read/WriteTalk, please email the editor for a Media Kit.
Pic: Elevated
It's the weekend - another hectic week has gone by. In this era of quick news fixes, PR regurgitation on tech blogs, and the 'quantity over quality' maxim most tech publishers follow, the blogosphere usually overlooks the longer, more meaningful blog posts. So with that in mind, here are 5 'must read' blog posts from the past week on Read/WriteWeb. These are posts you may not have had time to read when they were published, but they will hopefully provide food for thought over the weekend.
Hyped New Platforms: Explaining the Difference Between One and the Other - Marshall Kirkpatrick compares and analyzes 5 recent new social networking platforms: Facebook, OpenSocial, Android, Box.net, Bebo.
A Look at Mugr's Facial Recognition Platform - Josh Catone looks at Mugr, a facial recognition search site which has a developer platform.
Yahoo! Says the Future Will be Modeled on Facebook - Marshall analyzes the notion that the future of both email and start pages is in social networking. Much of the discussion, says Marshall, comes back to Facebook.
MyOffice: Full Featured Groupware Tool on Facebook - Josh has been looking for an elusive full-featured office service on Facebook. He may've found a contender here!
Who is Blogging and Why? Is the Blogosphere in a Digestion Phase? - Alex Iskold gets to the heart of the changes happening in blogging currently. Settle back with a beverage of your choice and read this, it'll get you thinking!
In the heyday of the Facebook hype (it seems so long ago now!), Facebook was going to eat LinkedIn’s lunch. Based on recent experience, I don’t think so.
I recently had reason to use LinkedIn seriously, using my existing network to tap into a market that I had not previously been exposed to. I had not used LinkedIn since the early days, so this was my first serious update.
I have NOT used Facebook seriously. I registered out of curiosity about the phenomenon and found that the only network I could join was based on zip code - and that was useless. Then Read/WriteWeb set up a group on Facebook, but I looked once and left. When I want the Read/WriteWeb network, I go to the site itself. So please take my comments on Facebook with a large lump of salt; but Fred Wilson too has made a more determined effort to use Facebook and he has been disappointed. If there are technology entrepreneurs on Facebook, you would think they would respond to an ad from one of the leading VCs in the social media space saying “be my friend”.
The US real estate market may have fallen on hard times recently, but people still need to live somewhere. As a result, the rental market has recently experienced a revival, as many home owners who can't sell are being forced to become landlords to make mortgage and tax payments. Over 90% of the residential property rental market is controlled by small time owners -- i.e., those with under 50 units.
These people are often small investors or casual landlords who do not have the resources to easily keep track of tenants, bills, expenses, advertising, etc. Investment Instruments is a web application provider that creates tools that make life a lot easier for small time landlords. Their premier tool is iiProperty, a full management suite for rental property owners.
Toronto, Canada-based Moola has been operating an invite-only beta for a little over 18 months and will on Friday open their site to the public (they'll be officially launching at the TechCrunch Meetup in Boston). Moola has created a multiplayer online game network in which people compete head-to-head for real money. That's nothing new, but Moola's hook is that the site is completely free. You can't deposit money into Moola, instead you earn your starting funds by looking at ads before playing games. Moola is calling their creation a Massively Multiplayer Rewards Game (MMRG).
Here's how it works: Moola fronts users a penny to start, which puts you at the bottom rung of a thirty step ladder. Every time you win a game, you double your money, every time you lose, you fall all the way to the bottom and start over with a penny. If you win 30 times in a row, you walk away with $10.7 million (though you can cash out at any time, so risking a few thousand in an online head-to-head game at the middle levels is probably not that smart).
Moola has grown to 175,000 users since it launched the invite-only beta in 2006. Moola CEO Arlen Ritchie told me that recently the site has been getting a lot more traffic to their home page than they have registered users, which indicated that there is interest from people who don't have invites. So, now seemed like the perfect time to open the doors to the site.
