According to the results of a new survey by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Google's users are extremely happy with their search engine. Google scored 86 points out of a possible 100, followed by Yahoo with 77 points. It is important to note, however, that this survey was conducted before Microsoft's Bing arrived on the market, so the current numbers would probably look different. In this survey, Microsoft's Live Search received 75 points. However, while the numbers might be a bit old, they clearly show the problems Bing faces in a marketplace where most consumers are perfectly happy with Google.
A company called Sweb Apps has just launched a new service which lets anyone build iPhone apps, even if you don't have a technical background. The service is aimed primarily at small to medium-sized businesses who don't have an in-house or on-call engineering team capable of developing mobile applications. Instead, using the Sweb Apps website, business owners can create their own iPhone application themselves in as little as five minutes, says the company.
Xmarks, the bookmark-syncing service which began its life as a Firefox add-on, is now adding yet another browser to its supported list. Already available for Firefox, IE, and Safari, the company announced yesterday that it will now support Google Chrome, too. The feature is currently in closed alpha testing, meaning there are a limited number of spots available, but you can sign up to get your name on the invite list now.
Click through to read information about how you can get immediate access.
Facebook is a social networking site that is enormously popular, but it can be a frustrating user experience. The design of Facebook leaves a lot to be desired and there are almost too many choices for things to do on Facebook. Also some of the more popular Facebook activities are trivial instead of useful - throwing sheep is an oft-quoted example.
Having said that, there's no doubt that Facebook is a powerful social networking tool. So how can you best utilize it and find the good apps? In this post we aim to find out. We'll be focusing specifically on social activities, rather than the many other potential uses of Facebook (work, brand management, etc).
Y Combinator's getting pretty fancy with their very detailed Request for Startups idea, which was somewhat like their "Startups We'd Like to Fund" post of yesteryear. Basically, rather than suffer through the dissatisfaction of loving the apps they're with, the good folks at the aforementioned accelerator program decided to give developers a little insight on what their startup wishlist might look like.
Never ones to be outdone, we at ReadWriteWeb have labored intensely and discussed among ourselves to produce this app wishlist. We can't offer funding, but it would make us picky little Internet geeks terribly happy if someone developed any of the six apps listed below. You know, while we're waiting for the flying cars and food replicators.
Regator, the popular blog directory and feed reader, just launched its iPhone application (iTunes link). The app, which is available for free, allows users to browse stories from over 500 topics, ranging from travel blogs to pop culture and sports blogs - with a bit of beekeeping and local news from around the world thrown in for good measure. Every one of these topics is curated by Regator's staff, which ensures that only high-quality blog feeds make it into the app. Every topic also comes with its own memetracker-like 'popular' view and a list of currently trending terms within each category.
Google announced bookmark sync to the Chrome browser in a blog post earlier today. Chrome users can sync their bookmarks across various machines and store them alongside Google Docs. While the feature is not a new concept amongst browsers, the significance is that yet another player is storing your data in the cloud with the ability to distribute it across networks. As predicted by ReadWriteWeb and Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang, it appears that your social data is converging with the browser with potentially huge implications for data portability.
A month ago, Canada's privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddard announced that Facebook did not satisfy Canadian privacy law on several counts. After an investigation prompted by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), Stoddard identified several areas where the company could better address privacy gaps for 12 million Canadian users (roughly 85% of Canadian netizens). The complaint raised concerns about "default privacy settings, collection and use of users' personal information for advertising purposes, disclosure of users' personal information to third-party application developers, and collection and use of non-users' personal information." The company was given 30 days to comply with recommendations and if Stoddard is not satisfied with Facebook's response she can go to the Federal Courts for enforcement. Today is Facebook's deadline.
In this fourth part of our investigation into the ongoing changes in the book publishing business, we look at the author's point of view. What are they getting today? What would they like to get? What can they reasonably expect to get as this drama unfolds? Authors are the creative juice of the whole eco-system. If they don't create material that people want to read, no one will make any money.
Their struggles in the old model have been well documented (of course, we should have expected them to write about their experiences): the starving writer up in the garret who uses rejection letters from publishers for wallpaper is an established literary hack. In the new world of print on demand, e-books and social media marketing, the author takes center stage. Those with an appetite for it can really take control of their work and commercial fortune.
Updated at 12:45 PM PST with a response from Bit.ly
After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im just announced that it's open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time. Founder Eric Woodward will spin the project out from his core company Nambu, will cover operational costs personally and will work with anyone who wants to help make Tr.im a community-owned alternative to what Woodward says is a data-hoarding monopoly in Bit.ly and Twitter.
Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. The new Tr.im may be the most exciting thing to happen in URL shortening since now market leader Bit.ly itself launched.
