After Andy Baio co-founded and sold social events listing site Upcoming.org to Yahoo! he could have spent the rest of his days doing whatever he wanted. He spent a year and a half writing, but this month he decided to join another startup (Kickstarter.com), because he loves building social software.
Baio is a thinker, a hacker of big social patterns and an admirer of the collective intelligence that emerges from groups of people acting independently on the web. We sat down with him this week and discussed some of his ideas about what makes good social software grow.
In Part 1, we described the three big waves crashing down on the traditional book publishing business: Google Search, the Kindle and e-books, and print on demand. In Part 2, we indulged in some science fiction, envisioning the future of the major players in book publishing: readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors. In Part 3, we'll dig into one very specific business practice: returnability (a.k.a. "the curse of unsold inventory"). Some thinking outside the box on this 70-year-old business practice could possibly help an industry in turmoil. Unless e-books simply replace all physical books (which seems highly unlikely), some radical changes will need to be made to the physical book supply chain.
12seconds.tv, an online video service that lets users upload short video clips, just announced its new iPhone application. While the first 12seconds app could only send still pictures and audio, this new version can finally also send real video from the new iPhone 3GS to 12seconds' online service. To post a video, users of 12cast (iTunes link) simply record a new video in the app (no longer than 12 seconds), give it a title, and hit the send button. In addition, users can also send any pre-recorded videos right from their library to 12seconds.
Google's vision for Google Books obviously goes far beyond the controversial Google Book Search settlement with the Authors Guild and the AAP. The Google Books settlement mostly dealt with the past and out-of-print books. In a talk at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View last night, however, Google Books' engineering director Dan Clancy laid out a clearer vision of the company's plans for Google Books for the first time. Among other things, the company hopes to create its own electronic bookstore for in-print books. In Google's vision, publishers would partner with the company and offer all of their books through Google and through traditional retailers.
This morning on the Google Checkout Blog, the company announced the introduction of a new, embeddable gadget which you can place on any web site where you sell your products and/or services. An embeddable gadget like this is nothing new to the online shopping space - Checkout's major competitor PayPal has offered their own copy-and-paste code for years on end. But what's interesting about this new gadget is how it's tied to the Google Docs service for inventory management on the back-end. The gadget is also incredibly simple to set up and use.
Apple has never been one to be overly communicative with their developer community and the iTunes App Store is no exception. There is often little communication between Apple and developers when it comes to why an app is rejected or why its launch in the store is delayed. Now with the recent removal of all Google Voice related applications from the App Store - and again, with no explanations - at least one developer has had enough.
But lack of communication is only one of the issues with today's App Store approval process. O'Reilly Research is reporting today that the incubation period for apps is now trending upward - a figure that seems to speak to Apple's becoming overwhelmed by the number of submissions. And finally, courtesy of Apple's mysterious approval process, they've accidentally let yet another "adult"-themed application into the App Store once again.
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Whether you're Microsoft or Mel's Meat Market, the true power of social media and its impact on brands is really only beginning to be felt. As futurologist Ian Pearson stated in Gartner's Customer Relationship Management Summit earlier this year, the rapid pace of change in technology means that companies need to focus on agility instead of just optimization when it comes to integrating social media and CRM applications.
Technorati, the world's first blog search engine, just unveiled Twittorati - a site where the top 100 bloggers' tweets are featured and analyzed. The service allows users to view the links most tweeted as well as displays Technorati's original concept of showcasing the Internet's top trafficked blogs and content from its contributors. One interesting component of the site is the fact that users can view the pictures shared by today's Twitter and blogging elite.
According to the Mozilla Team and the Firefox Twitter account, the spunky orange browser will reach 1 billion downloads at approximately 3:45 a.m. PT tomorrow morning.
Because Microsoft's Internet Explorer is currently shipped on most Windows machines, IE still maintains its lead as supreme ruler in web browser land. But the very fact that Firefox requires users to recognize the existence of an alternative browser and actively install it, means that 1 billion downloads and 31% market share is a monumental feat.
An unconventional wedding march in Saint Paul, Minnesota, sent sparks across the web. Not only was it a celebration of couple
Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz's eternal union, but it was a shift in how copyright owners can interact with unlicensed content users. After being uploaded to YouTube only 12 days ago, an elaborate wedding dance routine to Chris Brown's "Forever" has already garnered more than 12 million views. And according to the YouTube blog, rather than blocking usage of their unlicensed property, Sony instead used Google's tracking tools to monetize.
