When I first reviewed Plurk for ReadWriteWeb, I had only been using this new lifestreaming service for a little while. After using it for much longer, I've realized that there is really just one major difference between Twitter and Plurk - but it's that one difference that makes Plurk so much better.
How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that's what we're trying to do these days - but all these new applications and services don't have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember.
Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.
Maybe to counter some of the bad news around YouTube today, Google just announced the acquisition of the Y Combinator funded video annotation and mashup company Omnisio. According to Google, the acquisition of Omnisio will allow them to keep pushing the envelope of what is possible with online video. Neither Google nor Omnisio have commented on the price of the acquisition, but it is clear that the Omnisio team is going to join YouTube.
Once again, a major media company is suing Google because of alleged copyright violations by users on YouTube, Google's popular video sharing site. Today, the Italian media company MediaSet filed a lawsuit against YouTube in Italian courts for about $800 million (500 million Euros) in damages. In a statement, the company announced that it found 4,643 videos and clips that it owned on YouTube on June 10. MediaSet claims that it lost the equivalent of of 315,672 broadcasting days because of this.
Balsamiq, an application mockup creation tool built on Adobe AIR, has generated more than $10,000 in revenue less than 6 weeks after the $79 tool launched. The one-man company was profitable within 3 weeks after launch and the application itself is quite remarkable.
It's a great story of a creative entrepreneur using new technology to address a key market need and finding a healthy number of customers willing to pay for software. Balsamiq lets users drag and drop a library of common design elements around a work space, then export their final product in PNG or into a Confluence wiki. It seems like something that could cut design work headaches down substantially. Demo video below.
Sometimes social media users inside big businesses just need to talk about their feelings. More often, they need to share valuable metrics, anecdotes and insights that can help them advance the use of new collaborative tools inside their companies. Where can these conversations go on? Check out ClearStep, a powerful new online community provided by Jive Software.
We were very impressed with Jive's new collaboration service ClearSpace, the technology that powers ClearStep, when it launched in April. Making the feature set there available to the public to discuss the use of social software inside the enterprise is a very good idea.
In a quick succession of announcements, Amazon released a set of hosted e-commerce payment services, as well as an update to its Mechanical Turk service. The payment service, Checkout by Amazon, will allow online retailers to use Amazon's one-click checkout system, calculate shipping costs and tax, as well as allow their customers to track shipments. The updates to the Mechanical Turk are mostly meant to streamline the creation of new tasks by guiding businesses through the process more efficiently.
In May, we discussed many different ways that social media could be used for social change. One company that has been using the medium for doing social good is SocialVibe. In the past, we described this company as "an online popularity contest that turns corporate advertising into money for charity." With SocialVibe, you get to choose a brand to endorse, which earns you both brand perks and points. The points are then turned into funds for the charitable cause of your choice. The situation is somewhat of a win-win - companies get valuable social media promotion and individuals get to raise money for charity. The only question was whether or not the idea would work. Apparently, it does: SocialVibe is announcing that they've now raised more than $100,000 for charitable causes.
The selection process for DEMOfall 08 (RWW is a media partner) is coming to a close and Chris Shipley has been blogging her thoughts about it. She's identified a number of trends in the 'class of DEMOfall 2008', one of which is this claim: the Web 2.0 cycle has come to a close. She also makes a case for an end to the 'free' model for web businesses.
I'm not sure that I buy either argument.
Online reputation company Rapleaf has released a new study of 49.3 million people, revealing gender and age data about social network users. On most of the main social networks - including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 - women outnumber men by a considerable amount. On Facebook, the 18-24 age group is largest, with 1,685,029 women in that age group compared to 977,753 men. In MySpace, the same age group dominates, with 7,091,214 women and 5,226,788 men.
