Recent performance would suggest: be just like Twitter. Well, of course Jaiku is going to be like Twitter -- they're very similar services. But I'm not sure if Google meant for Jaiku to be so much like Twitter, complete with a bunch of downtime and errors. I'm kidding, but seriously, what does Google have in store for Jaiku? Since acquiring the service three months ago, we hadn't heard a peep about the service from either company. Until yesterday when Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström posted an update on the company's blog.
The Data Portability Working Group is announcing today that key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and Twitter are joining the group. These new names are just the most visible part of a groundswell of new interest in the group coming since this week's news that key players at Google and Facebook have joined.
LinkedIn, the social networking code-word for "business," is a great addition to the discussion, lest anyone think these aren't serious matters.
Alright, who are you people? The people who still use MapQuest. You know who you are... my question to you is, why? According to the latest numbers from Hitwise, Google Maps is making significant inroads against market leader MapQuest. MapQuest still commands over 50% of the market, but Google is clearly the number two online map provider now, having passed and distanced itself from Yahoo! earlier this year. Shouldn't Google have taken over the lead a long time ago? What's the hold up?
According to a report by Justin Smith at Inside Facebook, the social network is planning to roll out three new features in the first quarter of 2008. The first, privacy filters for friend lists, is a welcome addition that we said needed to be added to the lists. The second, more localized versions of Facebook, is an obvious step to take as the site expands around the world. The third, though, is a bit more confusing: the ability to blast messages to large groups.
The Semantic Web has been in the making for some time and people think it is nearing maturity.
We have written about this trend extensively, with our two most notable posts being an analysis of the challenges of the classic bottom-up approach and the promise of the new top-down one. Regardless of how the Semantic Web will come about, for it to flourish
it needs to hit the mainstream. There is no way that consumers will appreciate the elegance and mathematical soundness of RDF and OWL. People don't care about math, they care about utility and even more, about fun. What the Semantic Web needs, then, is a killer app.
Forrester has released a new report into the use of virtual worlds in the workplace. The report makes the big claim that "within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today". But before we get too carried away, the report also notes that right now virtual worlds are not user friendly to the enterprise crowd - "you’ve practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools", Forrester notes.
The report, entitled 'Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds', states that Virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com, and "more business-focused offerings" are on the verge of becoming valuable work tools.
Wizzard Media, owners of the Libsyn, Switchpod and Blast Podcast networks, will announce tomorrow that it passed the 1 billion download mark in 2007. While online media consumption numbers are notoriously hard to verify, Wizzard's have some serious merit. They are ten times what several competitors claimed earlier this month.
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NewsGator, which offers the most complete end-to-end suite of RSS reader tools on the market and possibly the most widely used offline readers (NetNewsWire and FeedDemon), today announced that its most popular products would be set free. As in beer. According to NewsGator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker, the reason for going free is simple: "What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients [...] we want our clients to become ubiquitous."
Word association: P2P = Napster = disrupted the music industry. P2P technology certainly did that. Skype shook up telecoms and Joost may do the same for TV.
P2P (Peer to Peer) networks could be a lot more. They could be the last big disruptive technology online. The online world is increasingly getting divided into a few mega firms that can afford to invest billions in server farms (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay) and the rest of us. Start-ups may love to have that “pay as you go infrastructure”, but it does create a huge barrier between the big league and everybody else.
