Our second daily Comments Competition winner is theharmonyguy, for an insightful explanation of Googler Kevin Marks' "Social Cloud" theory. Congratulations theharmonyguy, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. theharmony guy argued that both OpenSocial and Facebook are "mainly creating a cloud for developers, not users." He explains more:
Though unsurprising, a new study released today by a consortium of big players in advertising found hard numbers to back up what you might have guessed. Specifically, that only 6% of people online are contributing 50% of the clicks to display advertisements. Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda and comScore performed the study.
Those people who click heavily have a number of other characteristics of note. "Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000," the study said, and they "are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."
Semantic web browser extension BlueOrganizer relaunched tonight with more of the most popular services on the web smartly integrated into an easier to use interface.
The company says its extension is intended to let users browse the web with context and that its semantic technology cuts steps out of search. The basic idea behind AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer is that it can tell what the web pages you're looking at are about and it offers you useful links based on the particular subject matter.
Whether or not you're a fan of the great website registration bypassing service BugMeNot, I think you're really going to like a new service from the same shop called PdfMeNot. (username: stateless password: systems until Thursday) It creates a Flash display of any PDF document! No need to download the document and launch another application to view it anymore - PdfMeNot lets you convert PDFs by upload, URL, bookmarklet or a script entered into a website's page if you're the publisher.
I've added the bookmarklet to my browser toolbar and may never download another PDF again.
One of the speakers at the LIFT conference - where Kevin Marks from Google also presented - was Gen Kanai, Mozilla's Director of business development in Asia. In his presentation Kanai talked about Mozilla's market share in Asia, plus the perception that Asia isn't contributing enough to open source projects.
Firstly there were some interesting factoids about Firefox market share. Firefox now has almost 28% market share in Eurpoe, 16-17% in US, and lower market shares in Asia -- it's 16.5% according to a recent post on Mozilla Links. See graphs below:
I love Twitter but even when it's not down it's got its limitations. Enter the API and a world of developers eager to engage with the active community of Twitter users. Twittershare is the newest truly useful development on top of Twitter; it lets you easily share files of up to 10mb in size.
Mac users can upload and post with a desktop widget, everyone can use the web interface and a cross-platform AIR app is forthcoming.
Add this one to your web office toolkit - LiquidPlanner is an online, hosted project management tool that lets you access and update projects anywhere you have an internet connection. The service offers you and your team a complete project environment, social networking and collaboration features, and a probabilistic scheduling engine which tells you the probability of completing each task - and ultimately the entire project – by a certain date. With everything organized into a centralized dashboard that can be customized for each team member, everyone on your team can stay focused on their tasks and how they relate to the project as a whole.
A new product from NuConomy Studio Insights promises to be a new way of measuring web analytics. Instead of the old model of page views and traffic, NuConomy proposes a way to measure engagement. With their product, you can understand your users' activities on your web site and how your users interact with your site's various features
Since last Spring when I first heard about it, I've been patiently waiting to get my hands on Livestation, a streaming television service from UK-based Skinkers, which is based on technology from Microsoft (who took an equity stake in the company in exchange for rights to the technology). Our digital lifestyle blog last100 previewed Livestation, which uses peer-to-peer technology similar to Joost, last July. Today, Livestation started granting beta access to people on the waiting list.
Three Firefox extensions were named winners of the Extend Firefox 2 awards this morning after being selected from a list of more than 100 submissions by a panel of tech celebrity judges . The Minimap Sidebar Extension (fast mapping), SamePlace (multiclient browser IM) and Shareaholic (multi tool bookmark submitter) were the award winners and 12 runners up were named as well.
Though basing a business on a browser extension might seem crazy, for the select few companies highlighted in Mozilla events like this it can lead to a big increase in user numbers, especially if support from Mozilla continues.
