Facebook application review site FaceReviews.com reports today that there are now more than 10,000 Facebook applications available for the first time. In related news, I now know "what Disney princess I am" thanks to the super-hot app "Which Disney Princess Are You?"
I've believed for some time now that Facebook apps are overhyped. Facebook itself is hot as can be, but I believe that's because of the news feed, privacy controls and the site's look and feel far more than it is attributable to the apps. Many of the apps live entirely on your public-facing profile page instead of the user-facing admin page where your friends' news feed is displayed and where users of Facebook spend their time. Think I'm wrong? Why are there less than 20 Facebook apps that are used on a daily basis by more than 25% of the users who have installed that app. The vast majority of these 10,000 apps are installed and forgotten about.
There are counter-examples of course, not every app is a an insipid/entertaining lightweight. Josh Catone covered his Top 10 Facebook Apps for Work here on RWW in July. Geek artist Clay Newton says "Scrabulous is the new golf," meaning I suppose, that serious people do it together for fun. (Newton says the golf concept was FaceReviews' Rodney Rumford's idea.) The Where I've Been app lets people map their travels and was rumored to have been acquired for millions of dollars - but that was just one more wacky rumor as far as I can tell. The Causes application has seen a lot of adoption in the nonprofit world. Curt Hopkins of the Committee to Protect Bloggers has used it to make membership in his loose organization, but says it is "buggier than the underside of an old carpet."
It's a heated debate. A lot of people agree with me that these apps are all hype, a lot of people ar almost personally offended that I would talk smack about their semi-high-brow diversions (it's not like this is MySpace we're talking about! It's almost like LinkedIn!) Facebook analytics site Adonomics offers valuations for Facebook apps and says in aggregate that the 10k+ apps have a total valuation of more than $500 million. Adonomics says, though, that the total valuation of Facebook itself is a far greater $16.8 billion. Marshall says, though, that those numbers are insane.
Love 'em or hate 'em - how do you feel about Facebook apps? Have you taken out loans against your house and kids to pay developers to build one that will make you millions? Will OpenSocial reduce this once great ecosystem to just a spec in the larger social networking universe? What does it all mean?
Earlier in the year, we posed the question, "are social bookmarking sites better at search than Google?" At the time, some people thought they already were. Our conclusion then was that social bookmarking data was better suited to augment or enhance traditional search results or rankings, not act as a main source on their own. We also noted that they generally seemed to perform best with technology related queries, because their users were skewed toward those who work in technology.
It would appear that the latter has not changed much over the past seven months. Yesterday, Yahoo! released the top 10 del.icio.us tags for 2007, and with they exception of "music" at #4 and "travel" a #8, they are exclusively related to technology (with slight license taken to include "photography" and "games" in with the tech crowd). Below is the full list:
Blockbuster has had a rough year, posting a loss last quarter of $35 million and closing over 500 stores in the past year, but a new report out by the US Office of the Inspector General of the US Postal Service may put heat on chief rival Netflix. According to an audit by the OIG, the type of return mailers that Netflix uses jam automatic mail sorters and cost the post office about $21 million per year in manual sorting costs, reports Wired Epicenter.
The result is that the OIG has recommended that the USPS impose a 17 cent surcharge on each mailer. This, according to Citi analysts Mark Mahaney and Tony Wible, would cut Netflix's operating income per subscriber by 67%. "If [Netflix] has to bear the full brunt of this increase (without other cost offsets), monthly operating income per paying subscriber would fall 67% from $1.05 to $0.35," wrote the analysts. Blockbuster's mailers, on the other hand, are not prone to the autosort jamming problem, said Wible and Mahaney.
Nielsen, the brand name synonymous with measuring the size of a crowd gathered around a handful of media outlets in the old broadcast model, has decided it needs to get relevant in the emerging media world and has begun to speak publicly about a new anti-piracy product it will release early in the coming year. Built in association with Beaverton, Oregon based Digimarc, the Nielsen Digital Media Manager will use both digital watermarking and media fingerprinting to track down illicitly reposted content. As the music industry finally approaches an understanding of online media and the futility of control, it's disheartening to see this company with a lot of potential grasp at straws and bring this kind of product to market.
It's not clear from the press release or any of the coverage how this product will differ from the numerous other watermarking and fingerprinting digital media tracking services already on the market. Video industry blog NewTeeVee tested some of the other leading fingerprint technologies this summer and found their performance sorely lacking.
Utah-based GroceryGuide is a local information site that aggregates grocery store sale circulars and local coupons from around the US and makes them searchable. The site also rates sales based on 19 years of grocery store sale data and displays a historical price chart (which goes back almost 2 years) next to each sale item so that you can see if the deal you're getting is really a deal -- according to GroceryGuide, just because something is on sale, doesn't necessarily mean you're getting your money's worth.
For example, the site told me to steer clear of a sale for "Empire Kosher Fresh Chicken" at my local supermarket, presumably because the price chart showed that just a couple of months ago the item was a full dollar below the sale price, and because the same item from other brands is priced lower this week by about two dollars.
Today Technorati, one of the leading blog search engines along with Google Blog Search and Bloglines/Ask.com, launched a re-design. I chatted with new Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra today about it. He noted that the new design is about "going back to our roots" as a site for bloggers - but he also told me it's about creating a "media look and feel" that will appeal to advertisers. The main new features are a revamped 'news aggregator' UI and a new resource page for bloggers.
Of most interest to me was the "Percolator" - a.k.a. the new frontpage news aggregation. In a blog post, Percolator architect Ian Kallen described it like this:
"The Technorati Percolator combs the sea of posts and other media flowing through our systems to find the ones that are emerging as significant at any given time. Finding the needles in a fast-moving haystack and organizing them into topical groupings isn't easy. Items in the Percolator are sampled from our update stream, primarily ranked by the age of the item, the authority of its source, the authority of the referring blogs and the density of recent links to it. We found that by taking all of these factors into account, an effective algorithmic filter and magnifier emerges. A lot of great applications have already appeared on the landscape that try to solve this kind of problem. From what we can tell, those applications started with a small corpus of blogs and grew their coverage from there. Technorati has come at the problem from the perspective of starting with broad coverage, sampling it and winnowing it down to the good conversations. Of course, if you want to explore the social connectivity, Technorati's search systems are there to help."
It's fairly obvious that Techmeme was an influence in the new UI, along with sites like Topix and the new NY Times Tech frontpage. But Jalichandra told me there were many other influences too - plus user feedback. Nevertheless we can see that Technorati now wants to be some kind of news aggregator; and overall it's a sensible move, given that many professional blogs these days are media operations. Allen Stern has a video overview, along with a number of concerns about the "confusing" UI -- all are valid points.
So would you use Technorati now as a news aggregator that you visit daily? Many RWW readers probably use Techmeme for that purpose already (I know I am a Techmeme addict, and I'm not afraid to admit it!). But the new Technorati doesn't appear to have that same 'stickiness', to use an old school Web term. The results I see on the Technorati Tech page seem almost random to me - for example there is a story currently on the page entitled "Orcs & Elves". The next story down is "KILLSWITCH ENGAGE: New Audio Interview With HOWARD JONES Posted Online". Neither were 'sponge worthy' (i.e. worthy of a click) for me as a geek wanting to know the latest tech news.
Google announced this afternoon that its users can now login to their AIM accounts and chat with both Google Talk and AIM buddies at the same time. Chat transcripts, contact list sorting by frequency of contact and other GMail chat features will be included seamlessly. I don't see this feature yet myself, but I only saw the new colored labels for GMail an hour ago so perhaps I'm among the last to get everything.
I don't know that this can be called interoperability, but it's a nice touch. No corresponding announcement about logging into Google Talk through AIM has been made yet by the AIM team - who apparently haven't been up to much since announcing their quiet support for OpenID more than a year ago. I tease, but come on guys, can we get some fireworks occasionally?
Social news site Digg is a love-it or hate-it phenomenon. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love Digg, but I've got to admit that new competitor Mixx is worth a real close look. Mixx announced today that it's taken a strategic investment (meaning a small one with a bunch of influence anyway) from the giant newspaper the LA Times. It's just the latest in a series of deals that the little company has signed with outfits including USA Today, Reuters.com and The Weather Channel. This deal is a strange one though, because in addition to Mixx functionality being live on the Times site, LA Times stories will now be favored in the Mixx search results. That's the first thing I don't think I like about Mixx, but there's a lot that I like about it very much.
Mixx was clearly built by people paying attention to user demands at Digg. Its popularity algorithm is said to be a simple one, according to Matt Marshall's coverage of the LA Times deal today, but there's a lot that's interesting about the site.
Here's my list of favorite features that you'll find at this very compelling site...
This is a guest article by Stephen Ward. He writes for DailyBits.com, a blog focused on web development, software and online marketing.
So you're interested in a career in web development. You already know a thing or two about HTML and CSS. Maybe you've created a few static websites. You're interested in learning more, but there are so many different directions you could take. What's the next step to really get your web development career off the ground?
If this sounds like you, or if you're just interested in improving your existing job prospects, here are 10 web development skills that you can learn to boost your marketability. They apply both to corporate environments and web startups. Update: a note that these skills are listed in alphabetical order.
What are they? ASP is a server-side script processor developed by Microsoft. VBScript is the programming language most often used to power it.
Why are they important? When it comes to server-side programming, ASP enjoys popularity comparable to PHP due to Microsoft's heavy market share. VBScript, in addition to its use with ASP, can also be used client-side in much the same way as JavaScript, although support for this is spotty outside of Internet Explorer. Additionally, VBScript can be used to create desktop applications for Windows. Because of these varied uses on Microsoft products, VBScript is very handy for developers who work in Microsoft-centric environments and large corporations.
Where can I learn more?
What are they? C# and VB.Net are general-purpose programming languages. Both were developed by Microsoft as part of its .Net initiative.
Why are they important? As part of the .Net framework, C# and VB.Net are often used for code-intensive projects that simpler runtime languages aren't well-equipped to handle. In usage and syntax, C# is very similar to Java, whereas VB.Net strongly resembles Visual Basic. Learning either is a good path to heavy back-end development and software houses that focus on web development.
How do you navigate a nearly infinite world of digital data to find the best content for your tastes and needs? Our collective answer to this question is in its infancy, but Oregon based recommendation service MyStrands has now raised a whopping $55 million to build on the existing science of recommendation.
In a world at risk of information overload, where the line between content producers and consumers is no longer clear and where the pace of everyday life is increasing rapidly - I'd say the recommendation engine business is a very smart one to be in. There is ample precedent and this startup is moving into a relatively established field. Richard MacManus lauded the company's previous multi-million dollar investment and our enthusiasm here for this project continues.
