Pluribo is a Firefox plugin that displays short summaries of product reviews on Amazon.com. Pluribo scans through reviews customers on Amazon have left and automatically creates a one sentence summary that is somewhat akin to a Zagat review. While Zagat uses human editors to compile its reviews, though, Pluribo is fully automated. Right now, Pluribo only works for the electronics section of Amazon's store, but the developers are planning to expand this to the rest of Amazon's offerings soon.
Collaborative Filtering (Wikipedia definition) is a mechanism used to filter large amounts of information by spreading the process of filtering among a large group of people. Unlike mainstream media where there is either one or very few editors setting guidelines, the collaboratively filtered social web can have infinitely many editors and gets better as you increase the number of participants.
Today, Google announced that it is rebranding DoubClick's Performics Affiliate as the Google Affiliate Network. Google acquired DoubleClick in March 2008 for $3.1 Billion. The Google Affiliate Network is not yet integrated into Google's AdSense and will continue to be hosted at ConnectCommerce.com for the time being. Companies currently featured on the network include Target, Kohls.com, Citibank, Circuit City, Zazzle, Bank of America, Verizon, and Barnes & Noble.
Microsoft is announcing this morning the release of thousands of pages of technical documents concerning its most prized software, with the stated goals of facilitating interoperability and data portability. Office, Sharepoint and Exchange are all covered in the documentation, which should make it easier for 3rd parties to write applications that can extract, read, write to and transform Microsoft-published user data.
Is this what data portability looks like? Or are these steps just being taken to fend off legal challenges concerning unfair monopolistic practices? Does that matter, really, if the effect is the same?
Real Networks' Rhapsody music service, which had only been a subscription service so far, is joining into the every expanding fray of music services selling DRM-free MP3 files. Real has signed deals with Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI to sell songs at $.99 cents a song and $9.99 per album.
By embracing DRM-free MP3s as its format of choice, Rhapsody is driving yet another nail in the coffin of DRM'd music.
Google is getting some serious press, support, and power from Hollywood today. According to the New York Times, Google will be bringing on Seth MacFarlane, creator of the hilarious TV series "Family Guy", to work on a secret animated series called "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy." While that's nothing short of exciting, Google's distribution plan for the project is causing heads to turn.
The popular social music service Last.fm features an API that lets anyone build their own programs using Last.fm data, whether those programs are on the web, on the desktop, or on a mobile phone. In the past, we've listed some of the best mashups built using this API from MusicPortl to LastGraph to Yahoo Pipes and more, but now we're anxiously awaiting the arrival of a whole new crop of applications. Why's that? Because Last.fm has just launched a new version of their public API. Yes, there's now a Last.fm API 2.0.
Blogs just got a whole new audience: the casual reader. There has been some concern as of late that mainstream web users don't really read blogs, but a new Facebook app called "Blog Networks" aims to change that. The easiest way to describe this app is by calling it MyBlogLog for Facebook (as the headline says), but besides the ability to build a community around your blog, the two apps are rather different. If anything, Blog Networks may have the power to reach an entirely different demographic than MyBlogLog, whose community made up of a lot of blog owners and serious blog readers. The Facebook app, on the other hand, will appeal to casual readers by providing them with an easy-to-use blog directory and a simplified feed reader.
Recently I had the great pleasure to hear the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, give the keynote at the Tetherless World Conference organized by Rensellaer Polytechnique Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY (see RWW's live blogging of the event). He is such an entertaining and thought-provoking speaker that it is hard to isolate one nugget, but after a few weeks I am still thinking about one comment he made about start-up entrepreneurs conducting social science experiments.
The launch of the 3G iPhone is a little over a week away. With all the promotion that Apple and AT&T are getting, other carriers and mobile handset developers have been releasing touchscreen phones like crazy. From Blackberry to LG, there are tons of touchscreen handsets that will hit the market this year in order to take ground from the iPhone. However, they're missing something very important. It's not about the touchscreen guys, it's mainly about the mobile apps.
