Google's been the lone hold out among major search engines on RSS but the company quietly enabled feeds for web search results this week. The offering is pretty limited and frustrating, you have to go through Google Alerts to get an obscure RSS URL, but we offer a tutorial and some strategic advice in this post.
Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to at least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example.
When Google radically changed its iGoogle homepage a little while ago, many of its users were up in arms about these changes. By updating its homepage today, AOL ran a similar risk, but instead of making radical changes to the design of the page, AOL managed to include a lot of new functionality on the new homepage without shocking its users with a completely new layout. The new features of the AOL homepage are mostly centered around adding support for third-party social networking services.
Google just released a new beta version of Chrome, Google's first web browser, which addresses a number of issues we had noticed in earlier releases. Besides improving the performance and stability of a number of plugins, including Flash, Sliverlight, and Quicktime, as well as fixing some security issues, Google also finally added the ability to add words to the built-in spell checker.
Popular Firefox addon Read It Later has just introduced an updated version of their plugin which adds new functionality to Google Reader. With the new extension, which now works in both Firefox and IE, you can now get through your RSS feeds faster by checking off the items you want to read later in more detail. You can then access those saved items from any web browser, whether it's Firefox at home, IE at work, or even your iPhone.
Last week LinkedIn announced an additional
infusion of capital from strategic investors. The company has been
around since 2003 and
Bernard Lunn recently
wrote an in-depth analysis
of the LinkedIn business here on ReadWriteWeb. Most of us use LinkedIn a few times a week, yet almost
no one is emotionally connected to the company. Isn't it strange that a
brand
which at its core is about
connecting people, is rather bland and unexciting? LinkedIn as a company and brand has never paid attention to the human
factor.
It's hard to believe that it's been a year since Hulu - the joint online video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. - began streaming content. Its initial reception, after months of anticipation and a good helping of ridicule, was less than warm. Old media companies trying to take on YouTube? Were they serious?
Clearly, they were. Fast forward to today - a year after the company released its private beta - and you'll hear a completely different story about Hulu. How did we get here? Let's take a look back at Hulu's first year.
During the PC era, the technology stack was controlled by Microsoft Windows and Wintel - the "Wintel" era. We are now entering a new era, called variously 'Cloud' or 'SaaS' or 'Enterprise 2.0'.
In this era everything is different - the stack, the players and the potential for value creation. Let's outline the basic shape of this emerging era, in particular defining what makes up the new stack.
Our friends at Gigaom are running the second annual NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco on November 13, 2008. It's an event focused on the online video arena and we have one free ticket to giveaway. To be in to win, all you need to do is leave a comment here telling us what your current favorite online tv or movie service is - and why. Is it Hulu? Joost? TVGuide? Or something else. We'd love to know. We also have a special discount code below for RWW readers.
Guess which US state has Flickr users most likely to post their photos with privacy restrictions turned on? Utah. Think you can guess relative emphasis put on privacy by Flickr users in South America vs. South East Asia? How about Hawaii vs. Alaska? (That one might surprise you!)
I'm here at a small meeting of the Yahoo Product Advisory Council and while most of what's being discussed today has been put under Non Disclosure Agreement, the presentation by the Yahoo! Research Team can be blogged about and includes at least one really interesting visual about Flickr privacy levels around the world.
This is turning out to be quite a good week for OpenID, an increasingly popular mechanism for creating and managing a single identity across the Internet. On Monday, Microsoft announced that it would give every Windows Live user an OpenID account, and today, Google announced a very similar plan.
Google will allow web services to join a limited test of an API based on the OpenID 2.0 protocol that will give Google Account users the option to sign in to websites with their Google credentials and without having to sign up for a new account at those sites.
