Adobe is today announcing the "Open Screen Project" which will seek to create a consistent runtime environment for rich media across a myriad of devices. In other words, Flash on the web, mobile, desktop, television, and other consumer electronic devices. As part of this initiative, Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format. In the future, the project will be expanded to include AIR.
What's more stereotypically trivial than shoe shopping? Using Twitter, of course! Online shoe retailer Zappos does shoes and social media remarkably well. Scores of bloggers, lots of video blogging and 198 employees on Twitter help keep the company's profile high and humanize the folks behind the shoe sales.
Of all the different types of social media the company uses, none are as interesting as its use of Twitter. Twitter may sound cliche, but it's not just about Twitter as one single service. Twitter is symbolic of rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations. Zappos has bitten off a big chunk of that paradigm.
A study that will appear in tomorrow's New Scientist magazine found that social media sites, blogs, and instant messaging services were better at connecting people and providing warnings during emergencies than traditional sources of such information, according to the Telegraph. Dr. Leysia Palen, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, led a research team that studied uses of social media during last fall's wildfires in California and last spring's shootings at Virginia Tech for the report.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt made big promises of mysterious, highly-interactive new methods of monetizing YouTube in a CNBC interview today. "We believe the best products are coming out this year," he said. "And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying."
As all established media (not just newspapers) face a growing challenge from the internet, with its on-demand, highly personalized and infinitely interactive social connections - can TV, and TV on the internet, learn keep up with the times?
The idea behind BlogRize is that the "wisdom of the crowds" works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize's solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most...blogs like the one you're reading now, for example.
The mainstream media backed social news site Mixx announced today the availability of its new Application Programming Interface and the offering gives developers an opportunity to do things that no other social news site has done so far. The API will allow news items and media to be viewed, submitted and commented on from any other site around the web.
Mixx is a service that lets users vote on top news stories. Though far, far smaller than Digg, Mixx has innovated at a pace that makes Digg look like it's standing still.
Scrnshots, currently in private beta, is meant to serve as a community for designers to share their screenshots of interesting or beautiful designs. However, the service, which allows you to upload shots which others can use via an embed code, has the potential to be more than just a niche community for artistic types.
Last July's Democratic CNN-YouTube debate was mostly well received (though November's Republican follow up was met with less critical acclaim). This fall, Google and YouTube hope to replicate that success with a third presidential debate to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana. The "Presidential Forum" is sponsored by Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal and Democratic New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and will take place September 18, 2008. No media partner has been announced.
German social bookmarking startup Mister Wong yesterday afternoon announced the acquisition of Lifestream.fm, a lifestreaming start up that's something like Friend Feed without the interactivity and using Twitter's design. While "lifestreaming" still barely registers on Google searches according to Google Trends, it is one of the most talked about new phenomena in the blogosphere (see this BlogPulse trend graph). Though Lifestream.fm isn't one of the top players (Friend Feed gets all the press), it is a very capable basic lifestream aggregator.
Since the Web 2.0 Expo last week, two parallel questions are being asked about the current era of the Web:
a) Are we about to enter into a recession, and if so does that mean an end to the current 'web 2.0' era of innovation in web technology?;
b) Why aren't we (meaning startups) tackling the "big, hard problems" with web technologies?
