Augmented Reality (AR) is when virtual graphics and/or data are overlaid onto real world objects. Many of you have seen this portrayed in movies such as Minority Report and The Matrix. It still seems a bit far fetched in 2009, yet there are apps that are beginning to make it a reality. One is Wikitude, an Android mobile app that mixes location imagery with information from Wikipedia. We first noticed it back in May 2008, when it was announced as one of the winners of the Android Developer Challenge.
Our good friends over at TechDirt discovered an interesting anomaly and enormous security hole in BayTSP's website today.
BayTSP, a Los Gatos, CA-based company, is best known for putting the cease-and-desist smackdown on peer-to-peer copyright violators. The site serves infringement information forms to offending parties on behalf of the copyright holders. Think of them as the online debt collectors of the BitTorrent universe, with all the information security risk that implies.
Our First Premium Report for Businesses
We're excited to announce the availability of ReadWriteWeb's Guide to Online Community Management, our first premium report. It's been in the works for more than four months and we believe it's unlike anything else you've seen. Businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web will find the guide invaluable in getting up to speed on the state of the art and making sure their employees have the foundation they need to be effective.
The end product is in two parts. Part one is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. Part two is a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. Read on to see what's included in the guide, how to purchase it and what early reviews have said.
Imeem, the popular but financially troubled streaming media and music discovery service, launched its iPhone and Android application today. The new app (iTunes link) allows users to stream songs they have uploaded to Imeem's servers while on the go, something that only very few of imeem's competitors can offer right now. The app, which is available for free, also allows users to create custom radio stations and it features a small set of preset stations, including a list of the top 100 songs on the service.
This morning, Google announced two enhancements to their OpenID API. For end users, they have rolled out a popup-style interface for simpler logins with fewer redirects and less confusion. They also extended their Attribute Exchange to include more user data, such as first and last names, preferred language, country, and other, more personal information available via the Google Data API.
At the OpenID blog, David Recordon wrote this morning, "This means that Google users signing into sites... now have a much better user experience, one on par with Facebook Connect." The screenshots below show the new login in action.
According to the latest data from Nielsen Online (PDF), overall online video usage in April declined slightly compared to March (-2.3%), and all the major players, except for Youtube (+0.2%) and Hulu (+7.1%) saw the number of video streams on their sites decline. The real winner here, though, is MTV, which streamed 15.7% more videos in April than in March, and which has grown 359.6% year-over-year.
Interestingly, Disney-owned ABC.com, which just struck a deal to syndicate its videos on Hulu, saw the largest decline in streams since March, with a 15.9% drop in total streams.
We have seen our fair share of failures from web based products, but this morning, for a large number of users (at least in the U.S.), it looks like every Google service has been either wiped off the Internet or is running extremely slow for a large number of users. Even Google Search is only creeping along slowly right now, and YouTube, Google Reader, Blogger, Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Apps are pretty much unavailable as well.
Typically, these outages have never lasted for long, but once again, this outage shows how dependent we have become on Google for so many of our daily tasks.
Today, enterprise-class wiki and collaborative portal MindTouch announced the release of Desktop Suite, a collection of tools for making any Windows document or file web-based, searchable, editable, and shareable through one-click publishing from any application with improved drag and drop capabilities and rapid indexing of content.
In a word, the release allows Microsoft-rooted corporate networks to keep information in a shared, collaborative environment rather than locked in individual PCs' "application silos." The suite includes Aurelia Reporter (for publishing and sharing versioned documents), Desktop Connector (for dragging and dropping files or directories into the MindTouch environment), and Microsoft Word and Outlook Connectors (for one-click publishing of documents, threaded conversations, and attachments). These tools enable working via web browsers and permit collaboration without installed software.
I've been following a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent "Web 3.0" concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web. Greg's series is probably the best explanation I've read all year about the way these trends are converging. In this post I'll highlight some of Greg's thoughts and add some of my own.
Less than 24 hours after making a major change to the way that Twitter works, the company has reversed the change and thanked users for "helping us discover what's important!" The new new policy may be just as confusing as the old new policy, but we offer a chart below explaining just how this all works. (Update: See below, this may actually not be a substantive reversal.)
This is no small matter - this is a fast unfolding story about the technical and social texture of the real-time social graph. To read our original coverage of the issue, and why it's a big deal, see our post Twitter Puts a Muzzle on Your Friends: Goodbye People I Never Knew. For our speculation on the technical and social rational behind the change, see our post from this morning, Is This Why Twitter Changed Its Replies Policy? For a chart explaining it all with arrows and a picture of a drunk bird, see below.
