The SXSW extravaganza in Austin has been an application king maker for the last two years at least; Google's Dodgeball blew up there in 2006 and Twitter went from elite-chic to massively popular there in 2007.
Who's it going to be in 2008? We look at five possible contenders below, taking into consideration the special magic that is the SXSW experience. Lots of startups are hoping they'll go big next week in Austin, but in all likelihood only one, maybe two, actually will.
There is a set of tools that we generally use to determine how popular something is on the web: Google Trends, Blogpulse Trend Search, Technorati, del.icio.us, various social networking sites, etc.
We can now add another source to that list: Twitter, thanks to a new Twitter mashup called Twittermeter.
If you have photos, videos, music, audio, and blogs scattered across the web, you may not know how many people are viewing and responding to them. Now, with a new service called Traackr, you can organize and manage your content on the web. With Traackr, you can keep track of the popularity of your content, measure your influence, and interact with other content producers, too.
It's a pretty good bet that if you're not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you're probably making a lifestreaming application. Okay, so not everyone is into lifestreaming, but it is one of the hottest areas for development out there, and there are an overwhelming amount of services offering a way to aggregate all the little bits of your online life (which, for the purpose of this post, is the definition of lifestreaming that we'll use). Richard MacManus wrote an excellent primer on lifestreaming in January, but we touched on just 5 such services. The purpose of this post, rather than to review, is to just list the various options out there.
In an interview with Macworld, PayPal issues a dire warning to users of Apple's Safari browser: don't use it if you want to avoid online fraud. Apparently, Safari is not on PayPal's list of recommended browsers due to its lack of support for some of the anti-phishing features the other browsers have. Instead, PayPal is recommending the use of IE, Firefox, or Opera, because they are safer for the average user.
YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has confirmed that the service will use Google's vast resources to launch live streaming functionality this year, according to a video interview on Sarah Meyer's new show Pop17. (Placemarked interview embedded below.)
This appears to be the first confirmation of such plans. YouTube live is probably going to be very big.
Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog flipped the switch tonight on a major overhaul of user profile pages and now integrates activity data from other services around the web.
Less than a week after a small investment in the ex-Googler founded FriendFeed put lifestreaming on a lot of peoples' maps - the entry of a Yahoo! property could be a game changer in a market full of startups.
In her post Google Sites the Next Sharepoint? Maybe Not...., Sarah Perez argues that Google's strategy with Google Apps is to "subvert the IT department altogether and appeal directly to the worker." But commenter benkepes said that IT is still key to Google Apps' success: "any success Google has within an enterprise setting [...] would seem to be to be a comment on the efficacy of the IT department itself." It's a fascinating discussion and thanks Sarah and benkepes - and all our other commenters - for putting the Google Apps hype under the microsoft microscope. Congratulations bennkeps, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Here's his full comment:
The social networking market and ecosystem are in major flux and the early trailblazer LiveJournal announced today the formation of an Advisory Board that puts to rest any suspicion that the site will be fading away quietly after it was sold to a big Russian media company.
The new Board is made up of an all-star cast. Copyright and corruption fighter Larry Lessig, tech pioneer Esther Dyson and brilliant social network analyst danah boyd make up the group, along with Brad Fitzpatrick, whose work has been key in the development of LiveJournal itself, OpenID, social graph theory and the Google-led OpenSocial. That's hot.
The OpenID Foundation announced the launch of its first international chapter today to big accolades in Japan. The creation of the Japanese OpenID chapter was participated in by a host of big web companies there and made the front page of Google News Japan. Giant social networking site Mixi also announced that it would soon support OpenID.
OpenID Europe may become the next international chapter of the Foundation. See below for the presentation used to announce the Japanese chapter.
