Songbird, the little music player/web browser mashup that everyone has high hopes for, has just released a new version: 0.5RC1. This is their first official release towards their goal of having 0.5 Final out later this month. This latest version offers some new features and improvements over version 0.4, including MTP Device Support for Windows users, a new Device API, and a new feature called "Media Views."
YouTube's announcement tonight wasn't higher quality videos (yet), but a set of new APIs and expanded features. YouTube now describes itself as "an open, general purpose, video services platform, available for use by just about any third-party website, desktop application, or consumer device." There's a video embedded below with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and others talking about the new features - including right at the end a nice little Steve Ballmer impersonation by Chen! The new APIs announced on the YouTube blog were:
Today Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a less than favorable review of Twine, the semantic web knowledge management system that is currently in private beta. Marshall made some great points; and ultimately his post will serve as both excellent feedback for Twine's developers and a wakeup call that this Semantic Web stuff is hard. However Twine should also be encouraged that a couple of their early beta users jumped to the product's defence.
YouTube is making a mystery announcement tomorrow, Erick Schonfeld writes at TechCrunch. Schonefeld's guess is that it may be a partnership with Hulu, but the folks over at Mahalo have another interesting theory. They discovered a new link below a YouTube player today that flips playback over to a higher-quality copy of the video on this page. You can visit that page, for an Amy Sedaris interview with David Letterman, or see the screencapture from Mahalo, embedded below.
Today Alltop, an aggregator of RSS feeds, launched. It's a very similar product to one of my daily refreshes, OriginalSignal. Only Alltop covers a much broader range of topics, 40 in total. Alltop's selection of feeds is savvy and wide-ranging - and I'm not just saying that because ReadWriteWeb is the first feed listed in 'Social Media' (although I am very pleased about that!). The service is being positioned as 'RSS for the masses', because it makes it very easy for non-tech people to find new sources to read.
A month ago we wrote about Reuters launching an API called Open Calais, a technology that "does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events." I mentioned Calais in my Media08 presentation last week entitled Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It generated interest in the media-focused audience I presented to, so in this post we follow up with Reuters and ask what progress is being made. Specifically we look at what apps have been built so far on Calais and get feedback from Reuters' Tom Tague.
Wireless devices are everywhere these days. Wi-Fi hotspots are are popping up in more places and aircards protrude from the laptops of the mobile workforce. Computing is changing, too. Cloud computing will move applications and storage away from the desktop to remote servers. If anything, this drive to push data off the PC and onto the web has been in some part driven by the increasing mobility of internet users. Mobile access to the web is pushing internet adoption rates up while also providing more people the opportunity to work away from a stationary PC. So who is going mobile? Some new studies from PEW Internet & American Life Project and iPass shed some light on this topic.
Twine is the most hyped semantic app of the season and recently opened up for some press previews. General availability of this smart, social bookmarking and research tool may come in a matter of weeks.
If that's the case, it will probably be too soon. Twine has some major shortcomings that I think are going to drastically hinder the service's adoption. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those shortcomings come down to usability and performance. Hopefully these problems will be resolved, but it isn't going to be easy.
If your team is spread out over a wide geographic region, online collaboration tools are key to getting everyone on the same page. Something that dispersed teams haven't had much opportunity to use use are whiteboards, which can be really useful in brainstorming sessions. But now, with Twiddla, this year's winner of the Technical Achievement award at SXSW, comes a team whiteboarding service that offers a no-setup, online meeting web site for team collaboration.
Alex Iskold's post from last night, Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing, has generated over 70 comments as of writing. Many of them challenged the article - but it was also interesting to see some commenters fact-checking other comments ;-) The comment of the day comes from "IT", who was skeptical about "the level of 'Exchange Support' that Apple is really going to be able to build into the new IPhone."
