While SMS has already become one of the most important forms of communication in many parts of the world, the U.S. is only catching up to this trend slowly. Part of the reason for this is the high cost of using SMS, not just for users, but also for developers who want to use SMS for their applications. In contrast to other SMS service providers, Zeep Mobile offers developers a free SMS API without volume restrictions, though in order to monetize the service, it will insert ads into the SMS messages.
There has been a lot of speculation recently about an impending update to iTunes. Version 8.0, among other things, is supposed to finally bring a recommendation engine to the digital media player application. While that's interesting from a music discovery perspective, it is even more interesting to consider what this could mean in terms of an iTunes+iPhone based social networking experience.
iTunes (launched 2001) and the iTunes music store (launched 2003) have come a long way since they were first launched. The application has gone through various iterations, gaining significant features such as podcasts (2005), videos (2007), games, and applications (2008) along the way. In the process, selling billions of songs, millions of movies, and over 10 million applications in the first week of the app store's launch. Needless to say Apple has built an experience that with all it's parts combined is unparalleled in both its features and the breadth of its catalog of content.
RSS is the backbone for most things Web 2.0 but these days, it's not always fast enough. Politeness limits ping times to every 15 minutes at best in most cases, string a couple of applications together and information will sometimes not arrive where you're waiting for it for up to an hour.
A number of people are trying to speed up the feeds but today sees the first public mention of a new effort lead by the guys at popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed. FriendFeed is working on an open source add-on to RSS and Atom that will make it easier to discover when a feed has been updated. This could be a big deal.
For most companies, having to deal with one piece of bad publicity in a day is already bad enough. Apple, however, has to deal with three pieces of bad publicity today. In England, the Advertising Standards Authority, moved to ban one of Apple's ads for the iPhone because of misleading statements in it. Also, an embarrassing security hole in the iPhone firmware lets anybody bypass your security code, and Apple's move to ban a violent comic book from the App Store has also set off a minor firestorm of protests.
For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.
But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.
Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you've made that argument in conversation before (and we now many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you'd be wrong.
The official Google Blog made a post this morning following up on a New York Times story last week where the company claimed that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own when they find it using YouTube's new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.
Since our initial review of Yahoo! Buzz earlier this year, not much has changed about the service. At the same time, however, the perception, acceptance, and impact of the service has changed drastically. The service has shown that it can send enormous amounts of traffic (very talkative traffic), and has displaced Digg as the most active 'social news' community. In the process, they added widgets and rss, and most recently (and most importantly) have opened up participation to everyone.
Since they opened the submission process to everyone, the buzz surrounding the site has really been at a high. Desperate publishers and marketers who were previously locked out of the supposed 'traffic mecca' have joined the service in droves and have already started the practice of vote-begging in the hopes that enough votes will get them promoted to Yahoo's main page. Here's what you need to know about the current state of Buzz.
In yesterday's episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, our topic was online music and we had 3 very special guests on the show: Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of Imeem; Lucas Gonze, founder of Webjay and until recently a senior member of the Yahoo Music team; and Rob Williams, Senior VP of Music Software at RealNetworks. Also on the show were Sean Ammirati (host), Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick. The audio is archived below for your listening pleasure.
In this post we feature some of the highlights from the show, which included many interesting factoids about Imeem, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody. But more importantly there was a lot of fascinating discussion of online music trends and where the music industry is headed.
OAuth, the open authorization protocol standard that will let users give limited access to their data to third party websites without giving away their passwords, crossed an important threshold tonight.
All parties involved in building the spec have signed a covenant of non-assertion, meaning that OAuth can now be safely implemented anywhere without concern about Intellectual Property lawsuits. If you think this is too geeky for you - try out the live demo embedded below.
The internet is a whole lot of nothing without a search engine or two. While the staying power of search engines has never been in question, it's been interesting to see how they've evolved to the point of replacing the address bar.
With more information being published on the internet and different filters for interpreting this information being created, here's a look at a our picks of unique search engines that are making headlines and changing the way we search.
