Gainesville, Florida-based Grooveshark, a music sharing startup that we first profiled in August today launched their latest product: Grooveshark Lite. Lite is a slick, flash-based streaming music service that takes Grooveshark's huge catalog of uploaded music and makes it available to stream, no registration required. Grooveshark Lite is fast, easy to use, and free.
A new post on the Facebook blog announces the arrival of "a new way to share with friends" - that is, they're offering a way for you to import content from non-Facebook sites into your Facebook Mini-Feed and into your friends' News Feeds. This new option is being touted on the blogosphere as Facebook's "new lifestreaming feature." That is, by far, a grand overstatement of the service, which currently pales in comparison with its competitors.
Facebook has just launched a neat new trend mapping tool, called Lexicon. Similar to Google Trends, it allows you to create a trend graph for different words and (two-word) phrases on Facebook Walls. It has a surprisingly slick UI too, with the scroll bar enabling you to zoom in and out to get different views of the trend line. You can compare up to 5 different trends by separating words/phrases with a comma.
Many people love to check out automated blog meme aggregator Techmeme throughout the day for the latest in tech news - but a considerable number of other people consider it a self-promoting echo chamber that poisons the tech blog discussion with "me too" follow-on posts and props up a handful of elite sites. (For the record, I don't feel that way.)
Today RSS aficionado Rogers Cadenhead announced the launch of a project aimed to solve the echo chamber problem. Called Meme13, we'd like to respectfully submit that the site is fundamentally flawed and we'd like to offer an alternative solution.
ReadBurner was an RSS aggregator service which displayed the most popular URLs at any given time based on how many people had shared them through Google Reader's Shared Items. To much disappointment, the site shut its doors last month, when the site's owner Alex Marktl could no longer make time to work on it. However, shortly after ReadBuner closed, Adam Ostrow, of Mashable, along with Drew Olanoff (former technology evangelist at Pluggd) and Thomas Connors acquired ReadBurner with plans to bring it back online. Today, ReadBurner is back and brings with it several new features, too.
Open Calais, a semantic markup API from Reuters that we've written about on ReadWriteWeb before, has finally gotten the Wordpress plugin it has been looking for since January, when it started a bounty program seeking one. The new plugins come from developer Dan Grossman and represent one of the first public-facing applications of the API (as opposed to private uses like that of the Powerhouse Museum).
Microsoft watchers are all abuzz about an announcement the company is scheduled to make at the Web 2.0 Expo next week. It's believed that the event will be where Live Mesh launches (link redirects to boring login). A mysterious project believed to tie together a number of different technologies acquired in recent years - the best guess is that Live Mesh will let users sync files on multiple computers and mobile devices via the web.
Collaboration on documents may be a part of the product as well. It's expected to be a simple, but powerful, service. A number of questions remain, however.
Seattle PI tech beat reporter and frequent news breaker John Cook is reporting that the math-heavy travel price prediction service Farecast has been bought by parties unknown for $75 million. The Seattle company has refused comment on the acquisition rumor.
Farecast uses extensive historical observation and algorithmic analysis to search for cheap flights in the US and then advise whether the price is likely to rise or fall in coming days.
Former Yahoo! Mobile evangelist turned startup entrepreneur Russell Beattie announced today that he's calling it quits for his company Mowser because the market for mobile browsing is taking a fast turn for the worse. "The mobile traffic just isn't there," Beattie says, "It's not there now, and it won't be."
Beattie's announcement comes just two months after mobile blogger and consultant Michael Mace wrote a much discussed post titled Mobile Applications, RIP. "The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices," Mace wrote.
Traffic analysts Hitwise released new numbers today indicating that while online video sites as a category have seen a 7% drop in traffic year over year since March 2007 - YouTube has seen a remarkable 32% growth in visits during that period. YouTube's market share in the video sector is now at 73.18%, Hitwise reports.
That's significantly higher than Google's all-time market share high-point among search engines. Google saw an all-time high 67% of searches performed in March, also according to Hitwise.
