Few companies have captured the world's attention online in recent years as much as Twitter has. Rapid, structured, public communication between groups of people is not only a personal paradigm changer for many who have seriously explored the service - it's also an incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation.
First the Web, then email, then instant messaging and SMS all helped speed up the world we live in. Twitter made that rapid communication public and easier than ever for machines to mine for connections. Just as Facebook will never be Twitter because of the lack of clear access it offers outsiders to social data, so too does Twitter have its own limitations. A service called Status.net will launch in May that could overcome some of Twitter's limitations and make a significant impact on the world we work in.
Microsoft's years-long-running multimedia CD-based encyclopedia product, Encarta, will be history by the end of the year. According to Ars Technica, Microsoft quietly announced the discontinuation date for Encarta to be October 31, 2009. Although the MSN press release doesn't go into too much detail on all the reasons why this decision was made, (nothing about Wikipedia for example), they do mention that the way people look for and consume information has changed substantially in the last few years, which seems like a fair assessment.
Setster is a new service, still in beta, that allows businesses to let their clients or customers book appointments with them directly through an online calendar widget. Setster supports working with multiple employee calendars (which they call providers) on the same login, as well as a catalog of services a client can choose from and a couple of different widget styles.
Reframe It, a social web annotation tool we first reviewed last Fall, just announced that it has added integration with Twitter and Facebook to its features today. Thanks to this, users can now syndicate their annotations to both Twitter and Facebook, where they can continue their discussions with friends who are not using Reframe It yet.
Reframe It also announced that it has added Lawrence Lessig, John Seely Brown, Terry Winograd, and Clay Shirky to its Advisory Board, which already includes an all-star line-up of Internet luminaries like Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Howard Rheingold.
Link shortening services are so common you can't throw a stone online without hitting one, but TinyURL is the undisputed champ. It's one of the oldest, its name says what it does and despite repeated outages - its downtime is small enough that millions of people keep using it.
TinyURL has also allowed incomprehensible amounts of value, both in terms of technology and in terms of money, to sit on the table unclaimed. For years. Now a group of some of the web's hottest investors are betting a few million dollars that a smart TinyURL competitor called Bit.ly can take advantage of being the conduit through which millions of people visit sites of interest to them.
One of the big trends on the web is more and more location aware / sensitive web applications. Increasingly powerful mobile devices are enabling this. In the latest episode of RWW Live, today at 3.30pm PST, we'll talk about how the Web is evolving to include more location aware applications and what barriers are still in the way. We'll also talk about privacy and other user concerns and what is being done to address them. We have special guests from Yahoo! Fire Eagle, Four Square and Outside.in on the show today.
MySpace just announced that it will bring its Open Platform to Windows Mobile phones. The new MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile will be built on top of Microsoft's Silverlight platform. In addition, MySpace also announced its MySpace Silverlight SDK, which will make it easier for developers to build OpenSocial applications using Silverlight.
MySpace also announced that LG will preload the MySpace Mobile application on the next-generation of its Windows Mobile 6.1 phones.
Early in 2008, Google, in cooperation with Chinese online music service Top100.cn, started a free music download service in China. Today, Google took the beta label off this service and also announced deals with the four largest music labels (EMI, Sony, Warner, and Universal). According to a report from Reuters, the service currently offers about 350,000 songs, but thanks to these new deals with the record labels, this number will soon increase to about 1.1 million songs.
Skype does not get the respect it deserves, because eBay not only publicly admitted to overpaying for it but is making a mess of its core business. Another reason may be that Skype flies in the face of conventional Valley wisdom that says it has to be all about social media. Or maybe the fact that Skype came from Europe, and we all know that Europeans are just lunch-eating dilettantes. Whatever the reason, a company that has $500 million in revenue, is profitable and growing, and has a shot at becoming the largest player in what is now a $2 trillion (yes, "t" for trillion) market, should get more respect.
It seems everyone and their dog is coming out with a netbook. Verizon and AT&T are the latest entrants in the race to produce the itsy-bitsiest, teeny-weeniest, underpoweredest laptop on the market.
Apple is the lone holdout, steadfastly refusing to cop to any plans to join the netbook stampede - although some have argued that they already have, thanks to the iPhone.
