Comcast sees the writing on the wall: cable-based TV will not survive the next decade. Its value is fast eroding because it can't compete with on-demand, Internet-delivered TV across all screens. Unlike their music counterparts, TV executives have pulled their heads out of the sand in time and are working hard to survive this monumental shift. To do so, however, they need to choose the right battles to fight.
In the immediate wake of the announcement of Bing's indexing Twitter updates, Google has announced it will be doing the same.
Taking the wind out of the sails of many a real-time search engine, Google's and Microsoft's announcements further put to rest a maelstrom of rumors swirling around the startup's possible acquisition and partnerships. Marissa Mayer wrote today on the official Google blog, "We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months."
Microsoft has just announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that its search engine Bing now includes Twitter search results. Facebook messages posted by people with public profiles will roll out next, at a date to be determined.
Twitter can bring a new level of up-to-the-minute information to web search, but can Bing add value to Twitter search? We asked three User Experience experts for their opinions about what Bing would need to do in order to succeed in this integration from a UX perspective. They agreed that there was exciting potential here but that the implementation was rudimentary.
Yesterday we wrote about Mary Meeker's annual overview of Internet trends at the Web 2.0 Summit. In this post we do a deeper dive into the Web themes that Meeker explored. In particular we'll analyze mobile social networking, compare 2009 to previous years and look at the impact of Apple and Facebook on current trends. You can also skip to the conclusion for the main points.
Meeker's presentation noted that financial markets have rebounded and that the technology sector is now "relatively impressive." Let's start by explaining how 2009 is different to previous years.
Twitter use and status updates in general are on the rise among Internet users overall and several specific user groups as compared to 2008 and earlier this year, according to research just released from the Pew Internet Project.
In December 2008 and April 2009, the organization's studies showed that around 11 percent of Internet users were using a microblogging or status updating service. That number has now risen to 19 percent, one out of every five Internet users. The three major growth areas driving this increase are social network users, mobile web users and users younger than 44 years old.
Yahoo! started out as a hand-curated directory of links and will now recognize the value of manual curation again in a new project to be run by respected online journalist Andrew Golis. That according to Golis himself, who comes from Talking Points Memo - a site widely recognized as one of the best examples of new journalism online.
"The site will be a combination of curation and original reporting," Golis wrote this morning on his personal blog, "with gregarious linking and sharp, smart writing. In other words... I'm going to be building a team to bring the most popular news site in the United States into the news link economy."
IPhone app sharing service AppsFire (our review) has announced a contest to highlight the best still-unlaunched iPhone apps under development and ReadWriteWeb will be part of the judging. Called the App Star Awards, the contest will evaluate 30-second videos about apps under development.
The iPhone app environment is absurdly overcrowded and hard to navigate - AppsFire is one of my favorite solutions to that problem. The service lets you email links to apps you want to share on your phone. It's simple but so useful! A contest to start the hype for apps before they get buried in the app store is smart.
A recent study by industry group the Participatory Marketing Network has unearthed some surprising data on Gen Y behavior. Apparently, the members of this young demographic (ages 18-24) would rather give up their social networking accounts before they would abandon their email. Given that this generation is typically viewed as "plugged in" digital natives who don't have any use for email, the study raises many questions. Have the previous reports about Generation Y's disdain for email simply been wrong? Or has Gen Y grown up a bit now and has learned the necessity of the medium?
Office Web Applications, the browser-based versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, are now being made available to more users according to a post on the Windows Live Team blog. The online office suite, which began its initial alpha testing (in Microsoft terms, it's called a "Technical Preview") in mid-September, was originally made available to only a limited number of users. Today, the Technical Preview is opening up, allowing more people to try the Web Apps, Microsoft's first attempt at porting their desktop Office software to the cloud.
JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux sees the Internet as a digital brain, a network of nodes and synapses firing signals through pathways in relays of ever-increasing speed and intelligence.
At the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, he talked to us about how the synaptic web, as he calls it, relies on real-time communication and distributed networking to tie together our communal body of online knowledge. In this interview, Loux talks about the new school of online reputation management, the essence of distributed social networks, and how the synaptic web shapes and heals itself as users collectively contribute to the dataset.
