Yesterday evening, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick was a guest on G4TV's "Attack of the Show" television program to discuss Google's OpenSocial platform. Marshall gave his thoughts on why Google formed a foundation with Yahoo! and News Corp. (MySpace) to govern the open source project, and what that means for users and data portability. He also spoke about why Facebook has stayed away from OpenSocial so far and offered thoughts on whether or not the platform will end up succeeding. An excerpt and video is below.
The blogosphere was abuzz today with the launch of Adobe's online photo-editing and storage platform, Adobe Photoshop Express. The new tool isn't so much of a web-based version of Photoshop as people had hoped, but more of a simple online photo editor, more on par with a service like Picnik. What's interesting about the Adobe offering, though, is more than just how well it crops and sharpens - it's the fact that Photoshop Express comes with 2 GB of free storage for your photos, which makes it less of just an online tool, and more of an online service.
OpenID is wildly convenient for users, which is good for vendors, but is that motivation enough to really spur its adoption? Cutting-edge social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia stopped issuing new user credentials last night and now requires new users to create a Ma.gnolia account using an OpenID from somewhere else.
Why? Because 75% of new accounts being created there lately have been created by spammers using automated tools. Spammers took over Ma.gnolia. Now, the company is using OpenID as a system of 3rd party verified identity and using the superior spam blocking skills of services like Yahoo! and AIM to clean up the Ma.gnolia ranks. Spamfighting could be the incentive that puts many other vendors over the edge to leverage OpenID.
A new startup called Zemanta launched in alpha mode today. The service integrates with blogging platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad to suggest pictures, links, articles, and tags related to your blog postings. Using proprietary natural language processing and semantic algorithms, Zemanta compares the words in a blog post to their pre-indexed database of other content in order to suggest related items which will display next to your blog post.
Microsoft's Silverlight may have one heck of a mountain to climb in order to take marketshare from Adobe's near ubiquitous Flash plugin, but Redmond is doing a lot of things right in their quest to spread their new technology. They've been making major deals left and right -- with NBC for their online Olympic coverage, with Major League Baseball, and with Nokia -- and yesterday they announced a pilot program to pay developers who use their Silverlight Streaming service, which in itself is a smart move.
This week has been good for SlideRocket, an online presentation application built on Adobe's Flex platform. The app had an ultra successful public debut at the Under the Radar Conference, where it won 3 out of 4 possible awards, and they also announced a $2 million Series A investment from Hummer Winblad. This morning I got a demo of the application from founder Mitch Grasso and came away duly impressed. 500 lucky ReadWriteWeb users can get a spot in the private SlideRocket beta by clicking here.
Our network blog Last100 has an interesting story about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's recent experiment with offering a legal torrent download of one of its original primetime television shows -- a first for a major North American broadcast network. The post was written by Guinevere Orvis, who is a Web Producer in Toronto, Canada and is currently working with CBC. It's an interesting read about how a legal torrent is made at major broadcasting network from idea to deployment.
Google announced this evening the immediate availability of a new video statistics package free for anyone with a YouTube account. The software, called Insight, gives users access to a range of statistics about the videos they upload to the site, such as where viewers are from, how often viewers in specific geographic regions viewed a video, or how long it took a video to become popular.
Today's winning comment comes from Alex Iskold's must-read post Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies. In the post Alex identifies the patterns that are beginning to emerge in the Semantic Web, classifies the different trends, and examines what the future holds. One of the comments to the post introduced us to the term "semantic marketing". Scott Brinker is curious about "how marketing will evolve to take advantage of the semantic web, whether it's in consumer or B2B plays."
Over the past couple of years, Microsoft's online office strategy has grown increasingly muddled, while Google has emerged has the clear leader in the web office space with their Google Docs product. Microsoft has been reluctant to cannibalize any of its cash cow desktop office software business by introducing a web-based version of its popular Office suite. Instead, Redmond has been trying to complement its desktop offering with web services. The latest attempt is codenamed "Albany."
