An alternative search engine launched last night. It's called Cuil and, if you're a reader of tech blogs and/or the New York Times, you've no doubt been hammered with the news all day. We checked Cuil out and had a mixed user experience, as did most of the commenters in the post. So it's a pretty average search engine, although like many before it Cuil claims to be a Google competitor. But why did it get so much PR upon launch? The results showed that Cuil is no different to the hundreds of alternative search engines we track every day.
MySpace and Oodle today announced that MySpace's classifieds section has been re-launched and is now powered by Oodle. The MySpace Classifieds section highlights ads from MySpace users, but also features listings from other Oodle powered sites as well as from other sites Oodle scrapes for listings. Interestingly, Facebook announced a cooperation with Oodle back in 2007, only to then have Facebook launch its own Marketplace just a few days later.
Last Thursday, we reported that Yahoo Music was going to shut down its store and DRM licensing servers on September 30, which was basically going to leave anybody who ever bought music from the Yahoo Music Store without a license to play their music. Now, however, Yahoo has announced that it will issue a refund to its customers for the full value of their purchases. According to a report on CNet, Yahoo is also looking at making copies of the music its customers bought available to them as MP3s without any DRM.
Last night, the new search engine Cuil launched out of stealth-mode. As some had predicted, it seems Google's announcement about the size of its search index was a preemptive move to take some momentum away from one of Cuil's main features: the size of its index with 120 billion pages. As Cuil's team features quite a number of Google alumni, comparisons with Google's search are inevitable. In our tests, however, Cuil performed nowhere near as well as Google.
On July 24th, Microsoft held their annual Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM), an event where many of Microsoft's top executives come together to talk about the company's progress and achievements. At this year's meeting, Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie hinted at Microsoft's cloud initiatives, a part of their Software + Services (S+S) strategy. While Ozzie did not reveal either codenames or ship dates during his speech, there is still some information we can piece together to help determine what Microsoft's cloud will look like.
One of the software programs mentioned at this year's IORG conference (see our coverage here) was SmartDesktop. This program uses machine intelligence to automatically organize your information by project so you can quickly find what you need. In addition to organizing your emails and files created by desktop software, the beta version of this program also works with Google Docs and Zoho. These items appear in Smart Desktop as a "web resources," which allow you to quickly retrieve online documents without having to hunt through your browser bookmarks to find them.
If there's a hot new social media trend happening, you can bet that companies are trying to find a way to use it too. It happened of course with blogging, it happened with Twitter, and it is now happening with FriendFeed and other lifestreaming apps.
UPDATE: On August 16, 2008 ReadWriteWeb was sent a letter from the lawyers of a company named Fricken, which states that Fricken owns a trademark for the term 'brandstream'. Accordingly we acknowledge here that Pheedo did not coin the term, as we initially thought.
Indeed RSS vendor Pheedo has coined a neat term for this: brandstreaming [Update: Brian Solis notes in the comments that Pheedo probably didn't coin it]. Pheedo defines a brandstream as "a consistent flow of content created by a brand".
To back up its case for brands using lifestreaming tools, Pheedo points to a recent Universal McCann report stating that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher's site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.
Earlier this week we reported that Google had opened up Knol, its Wikipedia competitor, to the public. It had announced a private beta of the service last December.
Now that Knol is public, it makes us wonder who you would rather party with: Knol experts, Squidoo lensmasters or Wikipedia editors?
One of the biggest problems with the iPhone is that you can't run multiple applications in the background. When it comes to IMing friends, this could be a huge problem. Currently there's only one application available that lets you connect to all your IM networks, saving users the time and pain of switching between clients. Here's a look at Palringo on the iPhone.
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the changing face of the blogging landscape. On one hand many bloggers have turned to the likes of FriendFeed and Twitter to express themselves, instead of their blogs. On the other hand we have a group of professional blogs that are becoming more and more like 'old media'. But interestingly, in both cases, there are complaints about how 'social media' is failing them.
Media in general has been undergoing a seachange ever since the Internet arrived on the scene in the 90's. But this year, 2008, that change has intensified. Everyone is racing to adopt and adapt to social media - the read/write web as some of us call it. But social media is not a panacea; in fact it produces just as many problems as solutions.
