Is Amazon supporting Open Social? If they are, that would be big news. If they have decided not to, that would be big news too. We reported last night that Amazon was announcing support for the Google-led protocol, along with a number of other smaller announcements.
We've been on the phone and email with Amazon's PR department all day today. It's been a great example of the challenges any of these huge companies face in trying to be either Open or Social, much less both.
The long and short of it is this: Amazon has nothing to say; they told us they did, but they don't. If they do have anything to say they would like to say it through words put into my mouth. Thanks, Amazon. I don't think you've got much Openness to bring to my Social even if that is what you intend to do.
Here's the time-line.
This week we ran a contest asking you to tell us your favorite Mobile Web apps. We got over 50 comments and there were 5 Mobile Web apps that clearly stood out, with multiple mentions. Here then is the top 5, which will be useful to people new to the Mobile Web and wondering what all the fuss is about! We've also listed all the other Mobile Web apps mentioned in our contest post, at the bottom of this page.
1. Gmail Java app for mobile phone: this was noted by 18 people in the comments of our original post. This app is a Java-based version of Gmail for mobile, which features IMAP sync, attachment viewing. Phrases that were associated with Gmail for mobile by our readers included: "just works", "simplicity", "functional", "useful", "a joy to use".
Commenter "mr white" said of the Gmail java app: "This *is* clearly the path of the future. All your e-mails, all the time, everywhere. No more tedious synching with this outlook / that outlook and the webmailer. Now bring on calendar and contacts."
Nathan commented: "A very nice frontend onto a very nice service, and it does a rather nice job of reformatting files for the tiny screen. That's the sort of feature you don't actually appreciate until you're out in the countryside with nary a hardline in sight and need an address that was wrapped up in a .doc in your inbox that you forgot to print."
2. Google Maps for Mobile: mentioned by 11 people. This too is a Java app, which Google released in December 2006. There is also a full-featured version, including GPS Integration, which can be used on Windows Mobile PocketPCs and smartphones. According to our readers, utility is the key factor for this app.
Phil commented: "...my favourite app has to be Google Maps for mobile (on my Sony Ericsson k800i). I use it a lot, from finding my way about places (I've lived in London a year and still have no idea where I'm going most of the time) to turning to the satellite view and impressing friends with the detail I can get on my mobile. The clarity of the maps, one of the main apps benefits that really shines in the mobile version, negates my need for a real map any more, though any time I'm stuck without signal I'm probably also lost too. I'd recommend Google Maps to anyone (with an unlimited or generous data plan and 3G, the maps can be pretty big!)."
YouMonitor.Us is a distributed peer-to-peer monitoring service that puts your web site to work monitoring other sites for downtime, while other sites keep an eye on yours. The service is free, provided that you volunteer some CPU cycles and bandwidth from your server to monitor other sites, and YMU provides detailed downtime reports and instant notification of outages via SMS or email.
The way it works is fairly simple. Once you've signed up, you're prompted to install a script on your web server (they offer it in PHP, JSP, ASP and Perl). The script receives monitoring tasks from the YMU Control Center, and pings other web sites about 10 times per minute. Other web sites in the network will ping your site up to 5 times per minute. If anything is amiss on your site, a text message or email will be dispatched, and you'll also get regular reports about your site's activity over time.
Peter Rojas, the man who was present at the founding of both of the two most linked-to blogs on the internet (Engadget and Gizmodo), launched the online music site he's working on today. Called RCRD LBL (record label without the vowels, you know how unhip vowels are, why not get rid of them all?) the site hasn't been accessible since it went live. Update: Rojas stopped by to leave a comment saying the site was back up and sure enough it is. I'm getting a musical education already.
None the less, here's the details. RCRD LBL will provide free, DRM-free music for download and streaming. It will be ad supported and the company simply asks on its site that you not reuse the music for commercial purposes. We'll see how well that works, but there's really no viable alternative. "In a world where many people get their music for free," the folks behind the experiment say, "we wanted to create a site where bands we loved could put their music out there for free AND get paid for it."
Music can be downloaded, it can be streamed and it can be listened to through a widget embedded on any web page or on the OSX dashboard.
Comparisons to the awful SpiralFrog, another ad-supported music site that was more or less born dead, fall short; SpiralFrog is thoroughly locked down with DRM and it's full of bands you've heard of before.
At RDCRD LBL's launch 10 record labels are participating so the selection is limited. I'm not hip enough to have heard of more than just a few of these bands, but I'll check them out once the site is up.
The RCRD LBL site, bless its overworked little heart, was designed by New York's Gelo Factory, who have worked on a variety of projects ranging from the Rhizome art community blog to the social site of the AARP.
Earlier this week, I posted lamenting the lack of a good office/groupware collaboration tool in Facebook. Many of the commenters wondered why I would ever want such a thing. "I don't see the point of office style apps inside facebook. Your only going to get side tracked by being attacked by a Pirate, Ninja, [INSERT ANY OBJECT]," quipped reader Darren Stuart. "If you look for productivity in a social-networking site, you would not find it," said Joseph Pally. But I still think it's a good idea, and in this post I will attempt to defend why I think that and review a recently launched Facebook groupware app.
The reason I gave in Monday's piece was convenience. Right now, I have Basecamp projects open with four different groups, meaning I have to remember passwords to four different Basecamps. That is in addition to the hundreds of sites I already have to remember passwords for for other things I do online. The more you can get the things you do under a single umbrella, the less work you have to do get to work.
One of the arguments made against the idea a productivity app in Facebook was that Facebook is for socializing, not work. That may be true, but work is social, and it is clear that Facebook has designs on professional networks like LinkedIn and Xing. In the past few months they added "Networking" to the looking for options, and some people have already started using Facebook for professional networking. More useful work and productivity apps will likely find an audience at Facebook among those people.
IBM announced this morning that it will be rolling out cloud computing services for corporations in the Spring of 2008. More than just a beautiful turn of phrase, cloud computing is a paradigm that leverages a distributed architecture to carry out massive processing tasks online, instead of on a single computer. The program, called Blue Cloud, is set to compete at least indirectly with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2.
In theory, cloud computing will usher in an era wherein innovation based on massive data processing becomes affordable for almost any company, no matter how small. The possibilities are exciting; I think of the huge benefits we've seen from the network effect of users aggregating their activities online and the thought of leveraging a related paradigm for processing power seems fantastic. I hope we'll get to see the direct application of such an approach, but cloud computing could remain an activity of big, stuffy organizations only. Any semantic web companies interested in both heavy processing and avoiding investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm that's ubiquitous in the semantic web sector, might appreciate improved cloud computing options. IBM's hardly got a perfect record historically, either, but nobody's perfect.
LaunchBox Digital is a new early-stage investment firm that opened its doors yesterday in Washington, D.C. Founded by Julius Genachowski, former Chief of Business Operations at IAC, Sean Greene, founder of the Away Travel Network, and John McKinley, former CTO and President of Digital Services at AOL, the company will make small, seed investments in the style popularized by Y Combinator and TechStars. LaunchBox Digital will invest between $15,000 and $30,000 in fledgling Internet companies in exchange for a 4-8% stake.
Like the investment firms it is modeled after, LaunchBox Digital will offer startups more than just cash. Startups chosen for investment during their initial investment cycle, will be required to spend 12 weeks in Washington, D.C. and will have access to business advisors and the chance to trot their businesses out in front of angels and venture capitalists who can invest in the companies further. Unlike Y Combinator, startups participating in the LaunchBox Digital program will be required to find their own accommodations while in D.C.
Last week Marshall and I attended the Blog World Expo conference.
The gathering, held in Las Vegas, drew over 1,500 bloggers from different parts of the country and overseas. The conference lasted just over a day and a
half and had sessions that focused on a wide range of topics interesting to bloggers - from tools to money making.
It was a good conference and we had several interesting conversations, but I walked away with a strange feeling. Somehow it seemed that blogging just isn't that hot anymore. The feeling has been exacerbated by the latest slow down in news. My feeds just do not update that often these days. Can it be that the digestion phase applies to blogs just as it applies to startups? In this post we'll investigate whether the blogosphere is going through a digestion phase.
Update: Since the publication of this post, Amazon's PR people have contacted me a number of times to request that we remove this coverage based on a draft press release they sent us last week. I said I would not remove the post or all references to Open Social (their Plan B) but that I would post a clarifying statement if they wanted to send me one. The following is what they sent.
"Since the publication of this post, an Amazon spokesperson contacted me to clarify that no announcement was made in regards to support for Open Social. The Amazon spokesperson went on to say that Social network developers have been using the Amazon Associates Web Service to merchandise Amazon products (and earn Associates commissions) for some time. She indicated that Amazon would continue to provide developers with tools that allow them to choose the platform that makes the most sense for them regardless of the Social networking site they are building on. She pointed out that Social network developers continue to use Amazon’s infrastructure web services, Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, to create and scale applications on popular Social networking sites."
And now, the original post in question...
Amazon is announcing tonight the addition of some of the hottest items in its catalog to its widely popular affiliate program, its support for OpenSocial and a new level of support for RSS.
Specifically, the thousands of full-length movie downloads offered by the year-old Amazon Unbox and the millions of DRM-free MP3 songs in the new Amazon MP3 service will be purchasable through affiliate links anywhere on the web. There's a whole lot that you can buy and sell through affiliate links to Amazon, but until now digital assets like movies and DRM-free MP3s were not among them.
Unbox affiliate sales have been available for weeks and MP3s for a month. Affiliate program participants are receiving 20% commission on movies and up to 20% on MP3s during the initial introductory period.
Though there is already a thriving trade in physical goods using Amazon affiliate links, these digital assets are likely to be much hotter selling items.
On our network blog last100, Natalie Fonseca is covering the NewTeeVee Live event. One of the panels today featured VCs talking about funding for the Internet TV market. Depending on who was talking - and the panel included VCs who have backed online video startups like Veoh and Heavy.com - the outlook for VC investments "varied from treacherous to less treacherous", reported Natalie. She wrote:
"Entertainment-lawyer-turned-VC Dennis Miller of Spark Capital warned that there are already investors who are becoming “roadkill” and there will be more roadkill ahead. George Zachary of Charles River Ventures generally agreed that there aren’t a lot of Google-like opportunities in video now that will pay mega-dividends to early investors. Instead, Zachary thinks the money isn’t in the content but in the social networks that are built around content.
Mike Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners was more optimistic about the possibility for at least a few companies to reach the critical mass needed to really take off — and to pay off for VCs who’ve taken a chance on them."
Other NewTeeVee Live coverage on last100:
