Yesterday morning the web's largest web tech blog added video comments courtesy of of live video startup Seesmic. About 24 hours later, video comments had turned into a mini-trend with another 80 blogs installing them. While adding them at TechCrunch was a smart move by founder Michael Arrington -- who is also an investor in Seesmic -- because they've clearly already paid small dividends in spreading the product, I wonder if they're really adding to the conversation. Below are 5 reasons why I don't particularly care for video comments out of the gate.
Edit: We've added a poll. Please vote below.
Yahoo! announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo the availability of the first program in its large vision for a dramatic overhaul of the company across all its properties. The Search Monkey developer platform will let site owners alter their search results listing, including through semantic markup. Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch has an in-depth review of that platform.
Search Monkey is just the first of many steps that Yahoo! discussed today. CTO Ari Balogh said that the entire company was rewiring, across all its properties, in the spirit of the social graph and data portability. Flickr's influence was tangible. Here's a high-level overview of some of the biggest changes.
Earlier this month, we opened up and shared with readers the different ways we're pitched by companies wanting coverage. We mentioned our favorite way (hint: RSS) and have been enjoying the feeds that have been sent in since. We also noted the arrival of the twitpitch - the new trend of pitching via Twitter. Meanwhile, another company had a completely different idea: pitch via mail. Yes, postal mail.
If Twitter is anything, it's a platform for communication. Tweet and reply. Follow and be followed. As Robert Scoble recently pointed out, "the secret to Twitter is how many people you are listening to, not how many people are listening to you." If that's the case, then someone needs to tell Hillary, who is using Twitter as a platform for being heard and following 0 people. Meanwhile, her competitor, Obama, follows 25,588. And John McCain? He doesn't appear to be using Twitter at all.
MySpace officially opened its Application Gallery to all users this morning after launching it in public beta last March. In that time over 1,000 applications have been approved and added to the gallery and there have been over 2.1 million application installs across the site. Today, MySpace began promoting applications to users by adding an icon for the gallery on MySpace.com and a link on user control panels.
The ReadWriteWeb team is at the Web 2.0 Expo. Tim O'Reilly opens the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes with a discussion on the opportunities in web 2.0 today. Here are some real-time notes on his session. His main message is to "not follow the headlines" and the hot consumer apps, but go after "big, hard problems".
Big Opportunities:
1) web 2.0 in enterprise; "turning themselves inside out"
2) web 2.0 evolving into cloud computing
3) ambient computing (mobile phones and ubiquitous sensors)
For awhile we've been pushing the idea of Facebook evolving to support business social networking alongside the "social" social networking. But in order for that to work, the site needs to find a way to shed its image as a beacon of college hooliganism -- Facebook is a place to post party pictures, not product pitches. But even so, the appeal of leveraging Facebook's social graph for business is too good to pass up. As we've noted in the past, there are already huge business networks on Facebook -- 30,000 Microsoft employees, 8,500 Googlers, etc. Those relationships are ripe for exploiting for business networking, but there is a prevailing feeling that that's not what Facebook is for.
We're here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and are getting inundated with press releases about new APIs and developer platforms, many from companies we've never even heard of in the first place. How long ago was it that the forward-looking thinkers argued that APIs and platforms would soon be available everywhere?
That time is clearly fast approaching and it makes us wonder: now that this matter is settled, what comes next? We asked a variety of people here and around the web what they thought will define the next frontier, what will build on the emerging foundation of ubiquitous APIs. We got some interesting answers.
IBM has just announced the introduction of a new server designed specifically for Web 2.0 sites. This rack-mounted server is designed for running popular and heavily trafficked web sites like MySpace, Facebook, or any other site that requires the computing power of a massive data center with tens of thousands of servers.
Russia, which is home to almost 30 million of Europe's 350 million Internet users may begin to extend its strict media censorship laws to the Internet, according to a report in the AFP. State newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported today that Russia's prosecutor's office wants to toughen its "anti-extremism" laws on the web. Most newspapers and television are already under some form of governmental control, which makes the Internet one of the last places for free press in the country. New proposals would begin to erode the last bastion of press freedom in the country.
