It was no secret that Microsoft was getting ready to roll out a new search engine, and today, the company began the official roll-out of Bing - the successor of the company's less than successful Live Search efforts. Formerly known as Kumo, Bing, which should become available worldwide by June 3, is Microsoft's latest attempt to steal market share away from Google. According to Microsoft, Bing, while providing a good general search experience, wants to focus on providing an especially good user experience in four verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business.
During the Google I/O conference this week, one of the presentations from Day 1 was on the subject of Google Chrome's extension system. The long-awaited feature will finally deliver what Firefox and IE users have had for ages: a way to add more tools, services, and additional features to the browser.
Social web aggregating iPhone app Zensify launched yesterday with a wave of tech blog coverage. Early reviewers were excited not just about the app's ability to display updates from friends on multiple networks in one interface - the big innovation is that Zensify creates a "hot words" tag cloud showing what topics are trending among your friends alone.
Unfortunately Zensify doesn't work as well as we hoped it would. Its problems may be instructive to similar projects elsewhere or they may point to trouble inherent in this kind of social network user experience. Here are three interesting problems we see so far with this new app.
Reportage is a brand-new Twitter client for the iPhone which, according to the company, turns Twitter into a radio tuner. In this case, they're using the phrase "radio tuner" as an analogy to describe how the client operates - it doesn't actually play music. Rather, it lets you "tune in" to the people you follow on Twitter as if they were each their own radio station.
The latest implementation of OpenCalais, the Semantic API by media company Thomson Reuters, has just been announced. It's with 'new media' stalwart CNET, which has signed up to use OpenCalais for semantic analysis of its tech product reviews, news, and blog posts. CNET has also joined Thomson Reuters as one of the first commercial media companies to publish its data to the Linked Data community on the Internet. This basically means that external companies can use that data for their own purposes. While CNET won't be releasing all of its commercial data, it will expose certain sets of product and editorial data.
A couple of weeks ago we launched our first premium report, on the topic of Online Community Management. In an era of the Web where separating signal from noise is difficult, there seems to be a market for in-depth commercial content that goes beyond the daily free news cycle. Our friends at GigaOM launched a new product today that is worth checking out, as it aims to offer premium content for an annual subscription. Could we be seeing a return to 'paid content' in online media? It wasn't so long ago that the Wall St Journal was ridiculed for its refusal to close its paywall. Now it seems it's ok again.
Every now and then, you're alone going through a stranger's Flickr stream, and you see something so laughable, so obnoxious, that you feel the urge to start a new meme but can't be troubled with the effort of registering a domain name and trying to get all your friends on board. Perhaps you're reading a blog and feel the need to comment, but don't want to expose your brilliance to the entire reading world. Or perhaps it's just late and the signup process for comments is ludicrously complicated.
Zingr allows you to spread your insights - and share those links - with your Facebook fandom, all with the click of a button. It's a Firefox add-on, and it's magical.
In a report covering web analytics from 2008 to the present day and forecasting the industry's future into 2014, tech research firm Forrester said this area is in an adolescent phase, working through critical changes and preparing for significant growth.
"Forrester forecasts that US businesses will spend $953 million dollars on Web analytics software in 2014, with an average compound annual growth rate of 17%," the report reads. "Growth will emerge from unexpected places as the value proposition of Web analytics technology oscillates for sophisticated analytics users and becomes more welcoming for new entrants. Ultimately, Web analytics will become part of a broader array of integrated services supporting marketers."
When the Google-led OpenSocial campaign launched in October 2007 it aimed to give developers a common environment that application publishers could publish widgets to with one set of code, deployable across Google sites, MySpace, Hi5 and numerous other social networks.
A directory of OpenSocial Apps launched today and the reality is even further from that goal than we expected. Out of 12,456 apps listed, only 83 are running on two or more "containers." That's 0.7% or one out of every 1500. Update: See this reply below from Google's Kevin Marks. Marks says that cross-network presence was counted manually and is actually larger than it appears in the directory.
StatPlot is the newest project of sports statistic aggregator StatSheet and you're likely to enjoy it whether you're a sports fan or not. The site makes it easy to assemble attractive, dynamic charts for sports statistics in minutes. Navigate through the long list of options by point and click, autocomplete, cut and paste and you're done. Loads of data is already there and available for your use at no charge.
It's a fun site to use. Basketball, football and NASCAR are supported initially - hopefully baseball and hockey will be next. There's OpenID integration, the image selection is really nice and it's just great. It's still a little rough around the edges but given that the service just launched today - we're impressed. This is the kind of democratized data visualization that any field could benefit from with enough open data and a good user interface.
