We've been taking a look recently into the troubles at online auction and ecommerce giant eBay. Ten days ago we took a look at reasons why many sellers are leaving eBay, and yesterday we covered an Australian ruling that barred the company from forcing sellers to use PayPal as their only online transaction method. Despite the problems the company is facing, their total listing numbers appear to be on the rise. But could they be artificially inflating that number?
If you're a blogger, think back and try to remember how you got introduced to blogging - did you start off with a MySpace blog or LJ journal? Maybe a tech-savvy friend set up WordPress for you and showed you how it worked? Or perhaps you just had to figure everything out all on your own? If you were in that last category, then you can really appreciate what Patrick DeVivo is trying to do with his latest project, The Youth Bloggers Network. This site is designed to be a center point of communication for young people who need support and encouragement as they try to enter the blogging world.
Rogers Cadenhead, a controversial but long standing figure in the RSS community, has disclosed a DMCA take-down letter he's received from the Associated Press demanding the removal of small excerpts of AP content on his community news site Drudge.com. It's hard to take anyone too seriously who's built a site by squatting on some other sensationalist's name for ten years - but that's what we've got here, a legal spat between a smarmy little social news site and the biggest purveyors of news in bulk in the US (AP). The AP's move could impact a lot of innovation all around the web, however.
MySpace announced tonight that a new design will be launched next Wednesday. The army of MySpace haters is sure to kick into high gear, with exclamations that it's about time - even though they're unlikely to be satisfied with the changes. When Newscorp bought MySpace nearly three years ago for $580 million, people laughed at the acquisition. It's now recognized as a steal and yet people still complain. It's for user-experience reasons, though, that they should stop complaining.
In Web 1.0 there were a number of browser-based website creation platforms - e.g. Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, Homestead and Brinkster (I myself used nearly all of those, back in the day). These apps were very popular in the mid to late 90's, because they made web publishing relatively easy. The most successful one, Geocities, was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 1999. Do these tools still exist, in the Web 2.0 era?
I have been a total skeptic on proprietary messaging within social networks. After all, who on earth would want a proprietary tool when e-mail reaches everybody? I love it, though, when circumstances change a deeply ingrained opinion. The technology business has a way of doing that. You've likely heard the expression, "I live in Outlook." Well I used to. Now I hop rather awkwardly between Outlook and Gmail. Could I soon live in LinkedIn? Could you?
Andrew Romano over at Newsweek wrote earlier this week that US presidential hopeful John McCain's new blog, written by former Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb, is an entertaining read compared to Barack Obama's corporate-like campaign blog. To Romano, this indicates that McCain is stuck in "insurgent mode." "Team McCain has concluded that the only way to stay competitive is to stay lean and 'human' and hope that the candidate's accessibility and charm earns him free coverage," said Romano.
Update: Yahoo! and Google have indeed announced a partnership in the form of a non-exclusive deal allowing Yahoo! to run Google advertising alongside search results. The press release is here.
The clumsy $44 billion mating dance that began in February between Microsoft and Yahoo! officially came to an end today. Yahoo! and Microsoft each issued statements saying that talks had been concluded, though Microsoft left the door open for non-outright-acquisition partnerships. Meanwhile, multiple sources are reporting that Yahoo! and Google are set to announce some sort of search deal, perhaps as early as today. So what's next for both companies?
Today, at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, Nic Covey, Director of Insights for Nielsen Mobile, spoke on the subject of m-commerce (commerce that takes place via the mobile device). In his presentation, he covered what retailers must do to make their sites ready for the mobile web as well as discussing some stats on who uses the mobile web, what prompts them to shop online, and what concerns they have today about the mobile shopping experience. Additionally, Covey reported that, based research done by Nielsen Mobile, nearly half (49%) of mobile data users have said they expect to participate in mobile commerce in the future. It looks like this is one trend about to take off.
Prominent Israeli tech blogger Orli Yakuel has just installed the first Google Friend Connect widget we've seen yet in the wild. The service lets visitors to a website with Friend Connect enabled see the friends of theirs from other social networks who are also members of that website's community. It's like a cross network MyBlogLog, but hopefully even cooler.
We were highly critical of Friend Connect when it was originally unveiled, but it's exciting none the less to see the thing go live. The program still requires publishers to request access, but the slow roll out to approved publishers appears to have begun.
