Popular but legally challenged MP3 search engine Seeqpod will soon start charging developers for access to its data, according to a source close to the company. A lot of interesting music discovery sites are about to go quiet, at least for a little while.
Seeqpod searches MP3 files uploaded independently all around the web; it's a great way to explore music and build playlists, and so far it's been a good way to pipe music into a wide variety of other websites. Starting next week, developers will be required to pay $3 for every 1000 search queries performed on their sites powered by Seeqpod. They will also have the option to put up $5k to license the Seeqpod crawler and index.
New research from Parks Associates found that many Gen Y TV viewers are ready for a change when it comes to their television-watching experience. According to a recent report, over one-fourth of users ages 18-24 are interested in having more social media features integrated into their TV. This data should come as good news to companies like Verizon and Yahoo!, both of whom have been pushing their new social networking widgets. But it also has broader implications that go beyond kids just wanting Facebook on their TV. The study found that there's a desire to use social networking as a platform to actually enhance the TV-watching experience through interactive chats with other viewers and to have the ability to recommend shows to friends.
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Web hosting has never been more affordable -- or more complicated. Rich media, social networking, and sophisticated eCommerce platforms are all making the Internet experience incredibly dynamic, interactive, multi-faceted, and profitable.
In yesterday's post about my recent trip to Mozilla HQ, we looked at where Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer, Chris Beard, thinks Firefox is heading. Mozilla's vision for Firefox is for the browser to help users navigate and manage an increasingly complex world - something akin to the concept of intelligent agents. Part of this vision is to enable users to easily and effectively browse the web on their mobile devices.
This is where Fennec, Mozilla's new mobile browser, comes in. In this post we look at Fennec's progress (it recently delivered its first beta) and Chris Beard gives us his thoughts on Fennec's strategy.
Google Docs just got an amazing new feature called insert drawing. With it you can now create and insert drawings directly into your Google documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The drawing creation tool is easy to use, and supports snapping to grid points and full free-form or constrained rotation and sizing of individual lines, shapes, or groups of composite items. The best part is that the entire insert drawing module is rendered in-browser.
Substance Labs has put together a new site called SXSW Lesson. This Twitter-powered mashup site listens for tweets with the hashtag #sxswlesson, archives them, and then throws one of them up when you visit. This is your lesson. You can then check comments on the lesson to see how others interpreted it, add your own comments using Twitter OAuth (which doesn't reveal your password), and look for other lessons.
The day appears to be fast approaching when Twitter will offer a paid level of service for some users. It could be just for corporate accounts, it could be just for people with more than a few thousand followers, it probably won't be for even a majority of users.
But imagine if it was required that you, dear reader, had to pay for your Twitter account. "All other things being equal" would be an absurd condition to put on the question; if we all had to pay for our Twitter accounts then we'd probably have fewer friends and the service would be worth less to all of us. As a psychological exercise, though: How much would you pay for your Twitter account?
Justin.tv, popular live video stream and chat destination, announced today that they are now in the top five online video sites world-wide with 21.9 million monthly unique viewers according to Quantcast. Justin.tv is beating other streaming video sites in this space, including Hulu at 15.7 million and Veoh at 11.8 million. Further, the service has shown impressive growth, measured at 1,800% year-over-year, according to their internal Google Analytics reporting.
By default, task managers are not necessarily the most exciting applications. ReQall, however, is not only one of the better iPhone task managers, but is also trying to make a business out of it by launching reQall Pro today. For $2.99 a month, reQall Pro users get a large number of new features, including Outlook and Google Calendar integration, geotagged events, SMS alerts, and integration with contacts that are already stored on an iPhone (iTunes link) or BlackBerry.
Today marks the 14th anniversary of the creation of the very first wiki, Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb. Cunningham described that site as focused on "PeopleProjectsAndPatterns in SoftwareDevelopment." The words that run together became links to other editable pages and the paradigm quickly spread all around the world.
Wiki, the collaborative editing of web pages named after a Hawaiian word for "fast," was kind of like the Twitter, or blogging, of its day. Wiki is just about as old as blogging and both belong in the same category of wildly disruptive technologies.
