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.
This week the Facebook Beacon saga came to an end, after the company added a global opt-out to their controversial advertising system, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the way they'd handled the rollout. Earlier in the week Facebook's stance was:
We Don't Collect Info Unless You Opt-In, but by the end of the week it was clear that a global opt-out was the only thing that was going to make the controversy go away.
See also Alex Iskold's in-depth analysis of Facebook and The Myth Of Contextual Advertising, for a critical look at Beacon.
In other Facebook news, Facebook apps hit 10k in number - so the web app platform is still going strong, even if the advertising platform is a mess.
OpenID 2.0 finally launched this week, after what Marshall Kirkpatrick recently described as "a long, long time of political infighting over either semi-relevant minutea or deal-breaking technical details." The new version improves security and usability -- and will hopefully be the catalyst for more Internet companies to adopt it.
A week doesn't go by these days without some Google news. This week we heard that JotSpot will spawn Google Sites, an intranet and extranet site building tool. Also Compete provided data that showed Google Docs as clear leader in the Web Office market. Finally, Google announced that GMail is adding AIM.
In other news this week:
Multiply, a small but sophisticated social networking service with one of the most loyal userbases on the web, unvieled a long list of new features this afternoon. It might be because it's Friday night here in the US, but I'm feeling a little crazy. Since there's some healthy Facebook backlash developing, since social networking is not a one-size fits all phenomenon (demands for data standards excepted), and since Multiply's new features look so much like Facebook - it seems a good time to compare the two services. Facebook is a great place to go if you want to find a lot of people, particularly college educated people. There is a world of social networking beyond it, however.
Multiply has always had impressively flexible privacy controls; today it added greater precision over privacy, audio and video commenting, media import from other sites and more.
The NY Times reports today about Coca-Cola's new virtual world website. Coke has set up an island called CC Metro in the virtual world There.com (a similar site to SecondLife, but with more controls). NYT reports that at CC Metro, Coca-Cola customers can set up avatars, and "buy clothing and accessories for their avatars using reward points culled from codes on Coke bottle caps". The site also lets users upload videos, create music mashups and play games. You can access this at MyCoke.com.
As PaidContent notes, Coke has been busy tapping into social media over the past couple of years. It ran a YouTube-like video channel, The Coke Show (which closed last summer), began a $1 million branding campaign on MySpace, and is currently working on two marketing programs with Facebook. Also we've noted in the past on RWW how Coke has adopted web 2.0 trends - e.g. Coke Poland's 43Things clone.
NYT points out that "Coke was an early mover in the realm of virtual worlds, viewing them as ways to engage their customers and build their brands." Five years ago, the soft drink giant opened a world called Coke Studios on myCoke.com.
Interesting though, Coke has been using the Web as a 'virtual world' since the very beginning. In 2004 I wrote an article for Digital Web Magazine, noting that Coca-Cola’s Web site in 1996 was styled as a “virtual museum”. Back then Coke presented its Web site as a “world” of games and entertainment, a “place to be”. Screenshots after the jump...
Yesterday I requested some comparative data from Compete about Web Office products, as a follow-up to our 2007 review of the Web Office space. Specifically I wanted to know how Google Docs & Spreadsheets compared to Zoho or ThinkFree's word processing and spreadsheeting products. Also how Google Apps compared to Zoho, ThinkFree and others. The charts below answer both questions:
This shows that Google's word processing and spreadsheet products have a noticeable lead over what may be its nearest rival, Zoho. This is to be expected, seeing as Google is a big Internet company with a substantial 'built in' user base (via search). It does however prove that Google D&S is the market leader, at least with consumer use, something which a couple of commenters in our Web Office round-up questioned.
Microsoft says it's the first US company to file financial records using a newly released XML data standard this week, the GAAP (U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) taxonomy for XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language), according to a report by IDG News in London. XBRL is an XML standard that makes financial filings machine readable, potentially saving massive amounts of time formerly required for manual data analysis.
Just like any other data standard, XBRL could help in opening up significant analytical innovation on top of standards based information. Advances in adoption of XML based data standards are good news for everyone. This might sound like dry, but you will be glad it happened when free financial information is all the more available and 3rd party service providers are able to build more sophisticated analysis tools on top of well articulated, standardized financial data.
XBRL is being adopted all around the world, but here in the US a draft for the new GAAP taxonomy was just opened for public comment on Wednesday. That taxonomy would make financial reporting machine readable using tags based on GAAP financial terms. Presumably the GAAP standard will help make XBRL reporting make all the more sense for US based companies in particular by working with existing practices.
The so-called Blog Council, a group formed by AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo in order to create and promote "best practices in corporate blogging," launched on Thursday and is already taking a ton of heat in the blogosphere. I was going to write about this yesterday after I heard about it one of my favorite political blogs Scholars and Rogues, who put together what is still one of the best posts about this topic so far. Instead, I decided to wait and let my thoughts percolate overnight.
In theory, the Blog Council is a good idea -- getting corporations to blog and communicate on a more personal level with customers and the new media (i.e., bloggers, podcasters, etc.) is a good thing. So is getting corporations to better understand and deal with the fact that their employees are going to blog, and that firing them for saying something that doesn't toe the corporate line isn't necessarily the best tactic. But the execution on day one doesn't leave me with high hopes for the future of the Blog Council initiative. Most strikingly, how can a council that plans to promote best practices for business bloggers do so while not blogging?
The New York Times reports today that starting next week United Airlines will begin to roll out tests of a new Internet service on its planes. On Tuesday, JetBlue will begin offering free email and instant messaging service on one of its planes, and American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines have plans to offer full fledged Internet service for about $10 per flight. (CrunchGear reports that American Airlines' program will be free.)
Though Internet service will still not be available during take off and landing (you know, when you can't use your laptop), once at cruising altitude getting online while enroute will eventually become the norm on plane flights. "In a few years time, if you get on a flight that doesn’t have Internet access, it will be like walking into a hotel room that doesn’t have TV," Henry Harteveldt of Forrester Research told the Times.
In a move further differentiating themselves from countless other platform plays, web-IM service Meebo will announce tomorrow that they have partnered with VideoEgg to offer Meebo platform participants a 50/50 revenue split from the high-profile video and overlay ad network. While other platforms take a hands-off approach to partner advertising, Meebo is delivering it themselves. I've always wondered just how Meebo would be financially viable. Ads inside or around text chat have not seemed promising, but tonight the whole plan is coming together.
Unlike most other platforms in the news these days, the Meebo Platform is a closed one. More than 300 companies have registered to build applications but only 39 have been accepted into the program to date. Most are multiperson gaming apps, the rest video and voice chat apps. Several more will be announced tomorrow. You cannot zombie-poke someone on the Meebo platform, though, no matter how much you might want to. Gigaom covered the platform launch well. Companies chosen to participate in the Platform work closely with Meebo to assure high-quality integration of their applications, the company says. Now, participating services and Meebo will split VideoEgg revenues.
MingleNow, the nightlife-focused social network that launched last October, is closing down on 7 January according to a statement on their blog. No reason was given, but Read/WriteWeb has learned that Yahoo may be behind the closure. Yahoo bought BlueLithium, an ad network, in September this year - and BlueLithium owns MingleNow.com. So our source tells us that Yahoo probably asked MingleNow to close down.
Interestingly the MingleNow blog post is telling users: "Feel free to take your photos and friends with you to other communities such as Flickr, post your events on Upcoming or find your favorite bars and clubs on 123out.com". Both Flickr and Upcoming are Yahoo! properties. As for 123out.com, it was a nightlife photography website but the URL re-directs to MingleNow currently. A July '07 blog post by MingleNow noted that they had merged with 123out.com - perhaps the latter will reappear as a standalone site after 7 January.
There's nothing untoward about all this, but if Yahoo has pushed for the closure - why isn't it being revealed publicly? One wonders what the MingleNow users think of having to move all their content to other (preferably Yahoo) sites?
PayPal competitor FirePay notified members today that will begin the process of shutting down later this month. The UK-based online money exchange service will begin shutting its doors on Monday, December 10, 2007 when it will no longer allow users to add funds to their accounts or transfer money. Users will have 150 days following that date to withdraw funds from their account or review account statements.
Like many PayPal alternatives, FirePay never really caught on. Though the service claims 1.5 million users, it barely registers on Alexa and Compete compared to PayPal -- which, incidentally, has 153 million accounts. Nevertheless, FirePay's merchant page lists some fairly big fish who will no longer be able to accept payments via the service, including Sony Online Entertainment and Club Penguin. Some of the merchants listed, however, don't appear to actually accept FirePay (such as Skype), so take all that with a grain of salt.
The full letter sent to FirePay subscribers is after the bump.
