Last week at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose, Yahoo! Researcher Peter Mika spoke in detail about the company's new SearchMonkey search platform initiative. Mika talked broadly about his work looking at metadata on the web, and how that led to the birth of SearchMonkey. This post is based on notes from that talk.
At tomorrow's Google I/O conference, the App Engine team will be making a number of announcements. In advance of the conference, we interviewed Paul McDonald and Pete Koomen, two App Engine product managers, on our podcast show ReadWriteTalk. Specifically, Google will be announcing:
Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google's platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example -- the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war according to Duncan Riley.
Bookworms around the world have something to rejoice about today. The Borders bookstore, a competitor of Barnes and Nobles, has launched an online version of their storefront. You may recall Borders partnering with Amazon.com for online sales. Now it seems Borders is ready to step out on its own. Here's a look at what you'll find in Borders online.
A new report put about by consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research has revealed some interesting information about the section of the U.S. population that's being called the "digitally savvy." These are the consumers who are more likely to own high-tech items like DVRs, satellite radios, and VoIP phones and are more likely to engage in Internet activities that include blogging, downloading music, and other web 2.0 activities. In other words - they're us.
Chris Albrecht has a post on NewTeeVee this morning asking for suggestions to help him break up with cable. Even though cable prices have gone up 77 percent since 1996, which according to the New York Times is nearly twice the rate of inflation, many people are having trouble kicking the habit. "I hate dealing with the cable company, but I just can't seem to break up with it," says Albrecht. There are plenty of options out there, how have you cut the cord?
Once upon a time, whenever anyone asked, "But are there any big applications built on Rails?" The answer was usually, 43Things, anything from 37Signals, or Odeo. But over the past year, there's no doubt that if there is a poster child for Rails, it is now Twitter. With such notorious bouts of downtime, a worse poster child Rails could not possibly hope for. But is Twitter even the largest application out there running on Rails? Does it even matter?
Viral marketing, user-generated content, online buzz: over the past few years, these terms have been representative of a new way of marketing to consumers that takes advantage of the current popularity of the social web. This new technique involves companies encouraging its customers to create content of their own in order to generate interest in the company's brand. Unfortunately, one of the potential side effects of this strategy is the potential for negative buzz. Despite this fact, a surprisingly low percentage of marketers are monitoring for negative responses.
Google I/O is the first event for web developers that Google has run. It happens later this week on 28/29 May and Google is expecting 2,500 people to attend. The I/O stands for "Innovation/Open" (i/o is also a programmer term input/output).
Recently I spoke with Tom Stocky, a Director of Product Management at Google, to discuss Google's sudden interest in web developers.
A couple of weeks ago we ran an interactive game on the topic of Data Portability. We had a great response, with 680 people playing the game.
Here now are the results, showing how RWW readers think 5 of the major players - Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, and the non-profit Data Portability Project - will play out the future of Data Portability.
