LimeWire has just opened their online music store in beta form at store.limewire.com. The store which is reported to currently have a catalog of 500,000 tunes, features DRM-free MP3s encoded at 256 Kbps. Although the store is currently a standalone web site, the help section of the store's web site states, "In the future, LimeWire will be releasing a version of our file-sharing software optimized for integration with the Music Store. Stay tuned!" But how will LimeWire, still under attack from the RIAA, succeed where Napster has failed?
Microsoft and Adobe today announced that Adobe Flash Player Lite and Reader LE software would be shipping on Windows Mobile (neither company has indicated when). This is somewhat surprising given Microsoft's desire to see their Flash competitor Silverlight succeed, but it is also a good move for both companies.
When Amazon introduced their e-book reader, the Kindle, Steve Jobs made a strong proclamation regarding the book industry that received a lot of attention: "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore... The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore." As it turns out, he was only half-right. People read, even those in the younger generation, they just prefer to do it online.
Last week was arguably a tipping point for FriendFeed, the lifestreaming app that aggregates all of your social feeds together. FriendFeed first came to our attention in early February, when Sean Ammirati interviewed the founders on our podcast show ReadWriteTalk. At the end of February FriendFeed officially launched, then at SXSW it gained momentum, and by the end of last week it was officially hot - when blogger Louis Gray noted that many "elite bloggers" were using it. So, let's run a poll to see how many RWW readers are using it.
Today's winning comment comes from Brad Garland, from our post Health Care at SXSW - Health Getting Hot With Tech Crowd. Brad asked an open question: "Why can't we do an OpenEMR system like we are doing for authentication (OpenID). Be able to transfer and control your medical record personally instead of having the doctors control it all?"
I'm all in favor of this, as my twitter musings this morning attest. The Web could be a prime enabler of giving the user (i.e. us!) control over our medical records.
Yahoo Buzz is a social media experiment by Yahoo! that is currently in a closed beta. We found out today what kind of boost Buzz is giving the current selected blogs and news sources - Muhammad Saleem wrote that it is giving publishers huge bumps in both traffic and comments. Muhammad, you'll recall, wrote on ReadWriteWeb just about the only positive review of Yahoo Buzz when it first launched. In case you missed it, let's revisit the reasons why Buzz is a game changer. And why Digg is in big trouble...
Recently on ReadWriteTalk, we interviewed Scott Switzer, the CTO and Founder of OpenX. Until recently they were known as OpenAds, but they've since rebranded as OpenX. Shortly after the interview was recorded, Google announced a competitive product called AdManager. Scott responded on the OpenX blog by saying that "Google’s announcement of a free ad server, Ad Manager, validates our marketplace". But he also cautioned: "as a publisher, I would find this a dangerous cocktail and I would worry that it may marginalize my revenue."
Increasingly people accept that Facebook serves a different function than LinkedIn. In simple terms: deals on LinkedIn, dates on Facebook. This simple reality was obscured for a while, because the Silicon Valley crowd use Facebook (as it is the new, new thing) and so they extrapolated incorrectly that the rest of the world will work that way too. It looked like a contest between the Facebook hipsters and LinkedIn suits. But the real race for business networking has two horses. LinkedIn is clearly one. The other is not Facebook, but Xing.
We have 2 comment of the day prizes to give out today, and they both come from our post Ten Sites for Finding Wonderful Things. Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick, it was a list of 10 "online bricolage" websites - i.e. the art of assembling diverse found objects. Sites like Kottke.org (which recently celebrated 10 years online) and BoingBoing are probably the most commonly known such sites. We received lots more suggestions in the comments, including from our 2 winners: Kris Hoet, who nominated Veerle's blog on webdesign, and Incognita Nom de Plume, who mentioned Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society and Pink Tentacle.
SXSW 2008 will most likely be remembered for the Zuckerberg interview controversy. But a more interesting phenomenon, that in some ways broke through at SXSW, was health care and tech. Specifically the movement to user (or at least employer) owned Web-based health and wellness apps and services.
One of the most popular sessions was 'Transforming Hospital Systems: The Digital Future of Healthcare'.
