"You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kromer of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible.

Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will be cool once other people I know are using it."

With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google's implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it's more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data.

These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field - so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks.

Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see.

"Party Over Here" Bot: Automated Geo-Replies

Want to know when you're near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy's? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It's not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you "check in" at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you're interested in is near that location.

There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered.

These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind.

Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include...

Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who've Tweeted from the same place you're in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what's been on the reading list of each today?

News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool

Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They'd be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on.

Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed-in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm.

Cop Watcher

Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed.

Inventory Forecast

If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it.

Politics & Marketing

People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today's health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable.

How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on.

Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That's only a mater of time.

Flu Trends+

Think Google's use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there's an increase in messages about being sick in your area?

Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset.

What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data?

Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb - we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo's distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com.

Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. I disagree with him; I think this is a very valid Word of the Year. We make our cases below and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.

"I think that's an odd choice for word of the year, as all the trends indicate there has been more social networking activity this past year - not less, as 'unfriend' implies. Facebook and Twitter have both rocketed in popularity in 2009. I'd suggest that more people have left MySpace and migrated to Facebook, than unfriended people on Facebook.

"I also think that 'unfriend' is an ugly word, so for that reason it shouldn't be Word of the Year. What's more, I don't think my Mum or Dad would be familiar with the term 'unfriend.' Perhaps my father will pop into the comments and tell us for certain. But I look forward to the results of the poll!"

I think "unfriend" is a very appropriate word for the year as it fits with the way people are becoming more sophisticated in their social networking. People are deciding to do some editing of the friends lists they rushed naively into.

7 out of the top 10 searches performed on the Facebook Help Center page are about getting rid of your own social network profiles or your friends. Admittedly "unfriend" isn't one of those words, but you get the idea.

It's easy in this new web to sign up for things, getting overwhelmed and ignoring streams of information is par for the course. But choosing to cancel receipt of a person's updates? That's a meaningful move.

People fall for those "see who's searching for you" ads on social networks all the time. You'd better believe they appreciate the control that unfriending gives them. I'll bet that just about anyone online, no matter their level of technical knowledge, could tell you these days what it means to "unfriend someone."

What do you think?

The numbers paint a stark picture: blogging has changed, but the blogging scene is in some ways in better shape than it was three years ago.

Highlights from the report include the following:

• Total reader engagement has grown 30% year over year or 69% total for the top 1,000 feeds, which includes blogs and mainstream news sites.

For 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each of 2007, 2008 and 2009...

• Engagement on-site has grown in absolute terms but the share of total engagment that happens on-site vs. off-site has dropped 50%.


• Trackbacks have fallen from 19% of engagement to 3% of engagement.


• Engagement on social networks like but not limited to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook has grown from 1% to over 29% of total engagement. The Postrank staff admitted that this was a surprisingly low number but said that in aggregate there is still a whole lot of activity going on outside social networks.



• Segmenting from the last amount of effort required up to the most, reader engagement now looks like this: 29% is link-sharing on social networks, 29% is bookmarking or voting on sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit, 38.5% is comments on or off-site and trackbacks are now 3% of engagement. "Trackbacks are taking a nose dive," Postrank CTO Ilya Grigorik told us by phone, "bookmarking sites have consistently gone down over the last 3 years, but voting on sites like Digg or Reddit has grown."


• Perhaps most significantly, blog posts now have a longer life span. In 2007 tracked posts saw 94% of engagement within the first day and 98% of that first day's engagement happened within the first hour. In 2008 that number fell to 83% within the first day and in 2009 it was a mere 64%. Thus Postrank concludes that 36% of reader engagement in the top blogs happens after 1 day. "While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency," Grigorik says, "the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. People are worried that the real-time web will destroy their readership as everyone just gets distracted by the newest shiny thing on Twitter, but the numbers show something very different. It's so easy to spread information now that it lasts longer and finds more niches - this trend is helping content travel further."

"Time for me to try something new. I've handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I'm onto a new project."

The Problem

Apple's App Store is a mess for small and independent developers. Very few developers are making even a livable wage, and the approval process is a black box.

Let's start with making money. Pinch Media reports that the average iPhone application has netted (for the developer) a grand total of $8,500, and 80% of developers have made less than that. That's not per month - which would be a starting point for a two-person team - but rather total revenue earned.

And as reported a few thousand times, the approval process is a black box. For the most part, developers don't know whether their app will be approved or in what timeframe, making the entire experience a nail-biter.

Should Apple Care?

Well, of course, Apple should care. Apple should be inclusive of its community and encourage small developers to grow and make a living from developing for the iPhone. Apple rightly views the App Store as a competitive advantage and should continue striving to keep its developers in-house.

On the other hand, Apple is not responsible for marketing and selling for its developers. The App Store is a distribution medium, not a marketing and sales platform. Apple has a system in place for enabling customers to quickly and easily purchase and download software for their devices. And it has been a massive success, with over two billion downloads.

The difference, though, is that the apps that Apple needs in the App Store most - gaming and entertainment titles - are getting in. And they are being developed by some of the biggest brands in the world. After all, the iPhone and iPod Touch are, first and foremost, entertainment devices.

Note that these big brands do not face the same problems as the rest of the developer community. Many have contacts deep in Apple, are magically ushered through the review process in a few days and get great placement on Apple's virtual store shelves. Electronic Arts, for example, has no public rejection stories and currently has titles throughout the list of top grossing apps, suggesting that it is in the top 10% for App Store revenue generation.

And so, Joe Hewitt has quit the App Store. It's a great show of unity for small developers, but Apple has clearly linked successful applications to big brands, and those brands continue to clamor for iPhone presence.

Guest author: Elia Freedman is the CEO of Infinity Softworks, the leading provider of software calculators with over 15 million distributed. In its 13-year history, Infinity Softworks has developed applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows, Palm OS and Windows Mobile. Elia writes about tech, mobile and running a business on his blog, eliainsider.com and at Twitter as eliajf.

In this follow-up post, we look at the type of content that Demand Media outputs. It turns out that much of it is driven by advertising demand. Again we feel compelled to ask: is this good or bad for the Web's future?

Service Journalism

Demand Media claims that its content is not journalism. However, it does compare its model to service journalism (a.k.a. "news you can use"), a concept rooted in the 1960s and common in lifestyle magazines such as Good Housekeeping. This is content such as tips and feature articles about fashion, food and travel.

Demand Media told us that it aims for "useful, usable content." The content it produces has an "evergreen quality" to it, they say.

CEO Richard Rosenblatt told me at the Web 2.0 Summit last month that Demand Media will be syndicating content more to traditional media properties in 2010 and beyond. They see 'service journalism' content as being complementary to not only magazines, but large portal sites like Yahoo.

An interesting observation from Rosenblatt was that Demand Media content is "very similar to Associated Press content." In other words, it "helps fill the pages" for newspapers, magazines and other media properties.

Matching Content With Ads

What may be more controversial is that Demand Media makes no bones about their content being produced in order to put ads around it. OK, almost every online publisher has a similar objective: to make money with contextual ads. ReadWriteWeb makes most of its revenue from online advertising.

What's slightly different here is that Demand Media is custom producing content in categories where there is strong advertiser interest. A specific example of that is a YouTube ad program with Target that is currently running. In this channel based around holiday consumerism, content created by Demand Media is featured side-by-side with advertising. Below is a screenshot showing an eHow video entitled "How to Make Cornbread Stuffing," with a Target ad to the right.

Demand Media told us that advertisers are crying out for new content to advertise against. If a large media network like Yahoo is looking to "create content with ads," the next step for Demand Media is enabling their customers to "order content with ads." An example might be something like this: Demand Media produces a how-to article on playing tennis; then sells it to a Yahoo sports site accompanied by tennis equipment adverts placed around it.

Conclusion

Is what Demand Media is doing much different from mainstream media publications or blogs?

One difference is that ReadWriteWeb (along with many other online publications) is a journalism business, so we strive for editorial independence and there is a 'church and state' line with advertising. Demand Media isn't journalism in the traditional sense - that isn't the reason for its being and the company freely admits that. Demand Media produces content to make money, it's as simple as that really.

What do you think: is what Demand Media is doing just a natural extension of contextual advertising? Or is it crossing a line where content is too married to advertising?

In this follow-up post, we dive deeper into Demand Media's content production model - and ask questions about the quality of the output.

Will Demand Media Soon be a Household Name?

In our previous posts, we've noted that Demand Media is rapidly rising up the comScore list of the top 50 web properties in the U.S. - in July it was #24, in September it was #15. At this rate, Demand Media will soon be one of the top 10 Web properties in the U.S. - right up there with Amazon, eBay, Apple.

Think about that: how many of you had heard of Demand Media before this year? Amazon, eBay and Apple are all household names. Demand Media (along with another fast-growing mega content site, Answers.com) could be a household name soon too, if its current growth rate continues.

Behind this remarkable growth is a very large output of content each and every day, fueled by thousands of freelance writers and content creators.

So how does Demand Media produce so much content every day? 4,000 new articles a day is a quantum leap above the 20-30 new posts a day that the most feverish of professional blogs pump out.

About Demand Studios

Demand Media produces so much content with a system it calls Demand Studios. It's a proprietary editorial system which is part human-processed and part automated.

The system starts with an automated process, crunching data and running it through an algorithm to identify story ideas that have the best chance of success. The algorithm factors in audience type, ability to attract advertising and potential for traffic.

For a written piece of content, human editors will then check the top story contenders. Potential titles are placed into a pool for writer selection. Once a writer picks up a story, it gets written up, goes through a fact checking and copy editing process (including a plagiarism check), and finally the editorial team approves the completed article. The article is eventually published and the writer gets paid.

This is a simplification of the Demand Studios process, which happens 4,000 times every day! The system appears to be an efficient mix of automation and human labor. As we'll see on Page 2 of this post, the editorial process isn't foolproof. But even so, the scale of this system is impressive.

As at the end of October, Demand Studios had created more than one million original pieces of content, both text articles and videos. There are more than 6,000 active Demand Studios freelance creators - including writers, filmmakers, title proofers, copy editors.

In my meeting with Demand Media executives at the recent Web 2.0 Summit, I was told that an average of 11 people - and 15 unique roles - touch a piece of content as it flows through Demand Studios. The company argues that this, along with community rating of content, produces quality content.

But does it, actually?

Next Page: The Quality Question...

Demand Media: Is This Really Quality Content?

Demand Media is sensitive to criticism of the quality of its content. It's a question that ReadWriteWeb has raised a few times and which Wired picked up on in its October profile.

At the end of that article, Wired noted that Demand Media is "trying to place a new emphasis on quality." However it concludes by saying that Demand Media is "not moving far from [the] Henry Ford model."

I asked Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt about this criticism. Bristling, he responded by pointing to two things.

Firstly Rosenblatt claimed that many of Demand Media's content creators are professionals. He said that 75% of them have been published in magazines or newspapers, 25% have written a book, and 25% have held professional marketing roles.

Example of Demand Media content, on Yahoo! network site 'Shine.'

Secondly, Rosenblatt noted that Demand Media content creators have choices in the market - but they choose to work for Demand Media.

What's more, Rosenblatt said that "quality is based on relevance" - a quote he attributed to Wired editor Chris Anderson, who wrote the books The Long Tail and Free.

Who then are these people that write and shoot video for Demand Media? They're professional freelancers and they're paid anywhere from $15-30 per piece of content. This isn't a great deal of money for a freelance article. But according to Demand Media, there are hundreds of such freelancers earning thousands of dollars per month from Demand Studios (although this would be the top of the range).

4,000 New Articles Per Day - What Percentage is High Quality?

The trouble with the term 'quality' is that it's both variable and subjective. I've seen examples of Demand Media work that are poor - e.g. this eHow article about how to get Twitter followers.

Step 3 reads as follows:

"Engage in discussions. If someone on your timeline says something interesting or says something that you can put input into, do it. There's nothing worse than Twitter followers who follows for no reason. Even if you don't get responses some of the time, it doesn't hurt to try and the people you're following will know you're attemption to converse and are more likely to follow you back."

There are a couple of bad typos in that paragraph (where were the copy editors?), but worse is that the advice is mediocre. It's relevant content to many people, but is it good content? Apparently it was to the people who've read it, as it has 5 stars...

UPDATE: Demand Media contacted us to explain that above article is what they call a "user-generated article." This is marked in the screenshot below as "user submitted article," whereas a Demand Studios article would have "eHow Contributing Writer" as the attribution. Demand Media advised that "this UGC does not flow through the full Demand Studios editorial process - and is not counted in our 4,000 pieces of content."

The bigger question is: there are surely many examples of good Demand Media content on the Web, but how many of the 4,000 articles it produces every day aren't?

As we posited in our previous article, the concern with fast-growing content factories like Demand Media and Answers.com is that quality is taking too much of a back seat to quantity. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

In our next post, we will look into the type of content that Demand Media is producing - and what it plans to do with it next.

See also: our follow-up analysis of Demand Media, Ad-Driven Content - Is it Crossing The Line?

"What we want is to see people use this to build web apps," Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer told us today. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps - and you've got a web app."

This is particular, extracted data though - not the full text of Tweets. "We're trying to be careful," Kromer says, "we are not yet exposing the contents of tweets." And this data isn't cheap if you want the numbers broken out by the hour instead of the month.

This is a very big move because most developers struggle to get access to a large quantity of data from Twitter.

Here's what InfoChimps is putting on sale:

1. Hashtags, links and smiley emoticons used across Twitter on an hour-by-hour basis.


2. @ messages, RT and favorites and who they came from: 1 billion relations, making what the company calls a "conversation metric."


3. A useful if less exciting set of data that will help developers map user ID numbers from search.twitter over to the different ID numbers used in the primary Twitter API. These systems were never merged and it can require a lot of API calls to merge user data.

The company believes it is capturing about 10% of the total data on Twitter right now, but Kromer says that he believes he can ramp that up to 30%.

Data as a Pot of Gold

InfoChimps is a bulk data marketplace with more than 5000 data sets in its catalog so far. The vast majority are free and were added by the company's own staff, but not all. The decades-old polling firm Zogby International, for example, is selling some Iraqi polling data through InfoChimps. Cross-reference that polling data with publicly available data about civilian casualties in Iraq and you can see some interesting patterns, InfoChimps' PR rep Josh Dilworth told us. (Dilworth is known as the most data-savvy PR guy in the Web 2.0 world and also represents Wolfram Alpha and Twine.)

The company hopes that it can sell the data derived from sitting on the Twitter API as a demonstration of the value that this and other data sets have. InfoChimps says it can help companies monetize data that they'd otherwise be paying to serve up through repeated API calls, if at all.

From sentiment analysis (not yet an option with the current InfoChimps data set) to social graph discovery (definitely an option), we've written extensively here before about the impacts that social data could have on business, social and political policies in the future.

John Zogby, founder of polling firm Zogby International, spoke to us at length (in a separate phone interview several months ago) about the value of using online social networks to measure public opinion. "We've been particularly known for innovating and polling new technologies," he said.

"83% of all households are online today and 92% of likely voters, so with online polling we are today about where the country was with telephone penetration when telephone surveys started. Social networking is not as representative as online access [in general] yet, but I'm comfortable with caveats: that you can do a random sampling, so long as you claim that's what your universe is, as long as you don't extrapolate to all Americans, etc. It has tremendous, tremendous value.

"I know that the landline era is coming to an end - not today or tomorrow but we've got to find new and different ways of doing our work. It's the same kind of crossroads as the '70s, when we moved away from the door-to-door and mail-in results to the landlines.

"Online, frankly just like telephone, doesn't have the minority population, but for market surveys you may be looking for a different kind of consumer.

"We know that the landline phone is pushing us away; we know that we can't use the cell phone in the same way; and we know that we've got to reinvent this industry [of measuring public opinion]. What's happening are simultaneous new technologies and at the same time growing penetration of these new technologies. We're riding a bucking bronco."

Use Cases

The conversation metric data that InfoChimps is selling is the most exciting to me. Imagine a third-party app using historical social-conversation data to filter Twitter or other messages based on the strongest social connections that I or other people have. Imagine, for example, social Q&A service Aardvark combining the Twitter Lists API with this InfoChimps data set for a scenario like this: "You have a question about stock options? How would you like us to find a person who knows about that, is regularly conversed-with by people on Robert Scoble's Twitter list of Venture Capitalists and is available right now?" That sounds pretty great to me.

The possible applications are many. "I see Twitter as a data acquisition device for what people talk about and how they relate to each other," InfoChimps' Kromer says.

Right now InfoChimps is selling the hashtag and link dataset for $8,000 and the social metric data set for $9,500. Eventually the company will likely move to a subscription model.

How They Got the Data

How did InfoChimps get the data? The company hits the Twitter Developer API 20,000 times an hour (the standard for developers) but takes big swaths of data each time it does. "I have a priority queue," Kromer told us.

"I can set a search term, and for each search term I can get 1500 tweets per API call. If I get 1500 tweets at a time, then the number of wasted tweets at the end of a series of searches is the smallest. If I'm searching for a term and get less than 1500 results back, then I forecast how long it will take to fill that number of results back up to the maximum and move it down the priority queue accordingly. On the lowest priority I have searches for RT or http. There will always be 1500 results for that. It's only API calls that limit me. As is, it's like a fisherman setting nets: what matters is that dinner is tasty."

Does that sound so hard? Worth thousands of dollars? Here's what Kromer says:

"It's not magic. If you talk to people who use Hadoop and do social networking analysis, this is underwhelming. You take 30 million users, 1 billion links, adorn each link with info at the end of the link and acrue it with the person at the head of the link. That breaks conventional databases; the plumbing is hard. The math is easy but when you do it a billion times, it starts to get interesting. You have to be careful and clever. We plan to do stuff that is structural - a clustering co-efficient true pagerank."

Ultimately it's about specialization and data as a service. "The people we need to come in and connect this info with human beings," Kromer says, "aren't the people who should be wasting their time on the math. And the guys who are good at doing these things should not be building Web apps."

But Can They Get Away With It?

There's some question whether Twitter will allow InfoChimps to sell data based on Twitter data. Kromer says he'd much rather resell the data on a commission than have to do all the work he's done to set up the extraction system. But it was a year ago that InfoChimps caught the eye of people who love data: by releasing a large collection of scraped Twitter data.

The InfoChimps blog post for that read: "Big huge thanks to twitter.com: they have given us permission to share this freely. Please go build tools with this data that make both twitter.com and yourself rich and famous: then more corporations will free their data."

But then Twitter founder Evan Williams asked InfoChimps to take those data sets down until a Terms of Service for them could be figured out. That never happened, and communication between the two companies hasn't progressed very far over the last year.

InfoChimps does not have Twitter's permission to do what it did today, but Kromer says Twitter hasn't contacted them either. No one from Twitter headquarters has responded to our request for comment yet.

"We talked to our lawyer about this a lot," Kromer told us, "we are on absolutely solid ground with regards to copyright, user privacy and use of the API. This is clearly for the benefit of their community."

That's nice that Kromer feels so assured, but his attitude seems a little unrealistic.

We asked technology journalist Robert Scoble what he thought of the dilemma, and his opinion is pretty clear. "If Twitter wants to be a platform, they have to behave like a platform," he said. "Don't be king-makers. Let the marketplace choose the winners. If they are going to say nobody should study the data because we're going to sell that, that's not being a platform. Twitter tries to pick the winners and it pisses me off. They admit that they are king-makers. All that does is make everyone vote against them and hope a competitor comes around."

Perhaps time will tell. But these are very early days in what looks to be an era of widespread innovation built on top of social data analysis.

Wait a minute...the two social media companies with some of the most valuable, interesting data on the web made a deal and what do we get? Spammy Twitter streams clouding up our LinkedIn feeds and an occasional uptight Tweet on Twitter that was born inside LinkedIn? We're still waiting for the meaty announcements everyone says are coming someday soon - that Twitter and LinkedIn are open for business.

But is business just about broadcasting your marketing message? What about the listening part of doing business, thoughtful analysis, responding to actionable information and market conditions? Conversations with your customers and business partners?

Twitter is arguably better for listening than it is for broadcast and conversion of marketing messages. This kind of cross-posting deal falls short of the huge potential latent in the data both of these companies control and instead appeals to the craven broadcast-model of marketing. Challenging that broadcast-model is where many people believe social media derives its meaning.

What could this look like? It could look like an option to view the employer and job title of anyone you see on Twitter or through a 3rd party Twitter interface. It could look like Twitter opening up its fire hose for unfettered 3rd party analysis and development - then you'd see social graph and content analysis done that gave a big boost to the User Experience on LinkedIn. ("This LinkedIn user has been conversing with friends on Twitter who were talking about 'mobile,' 'Wisconsin' and 'gaming' over the last 2 weeks.")

Whatever the case may be, both occupational data (LinkedIn) and social messaging data (Twitter) are rich green fields for mashups and analysis - but these two companies are holding back the tide of innovation by refusing to offer a clear path to their data by outside partners.

LinkedIn partners with next to no one. Only large, established organizations like Business Week, the New York Times and now Twitter get access to LinkedIn data. Other services all around the web will tell you stories about reaching out to LinkedIn for API access and getting the cold shoulder.

We wrote about this concern three weeks ago ("LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Users; Still a Roach Motel") and the company told us then and today that big changes are coming to its API soon. That's great. That's something to look forward to, if cautiously. We're years into the LinkedIn Platform today and there's only a select few partners doing anything there so far.

Likewise, Twitter is fabulously open with its data in some ways (on a per-item basis) - but it's leaving a substantial number of outside developers frustrated because they can't get their hands on the full feed of Twitter data (the fire hose) to analyze. Startup companies that do appear to have relationships with Twitter tell us things like "We won't describe our relationship with Twitter to you and neither will anyone else who has one." That's charming. It's unclear whether anyone but Google and Bing have access to all the Twitter data.

Twitter investor and real-time web guru John Borthwick told us in another conversation today that he believes Twitter is just in its early days as a company, that there's nothing mysterious going on. "I'm hoping there will be a click-thru EULA [End User Licensing Agreement] to the firehose [someday]," he wrote. (Emphasis added.)

That sounds good.

So everybody's working on the wide-open web that so many of us want to see? Standards and APIs and open platforms to facilitate a new era of innovation are right around the corner?

Sounds great. For now though what we get is a little cross-network message broadcasting. Hopefully it's just the beginning.

First, AdMob is a very strong company in a sector (mobile advertising) that everyone expects to become much more important in the future. Second, this is a chance to make a big move towards monetizing on Apple's iPhone platform while making sure that no one else does something similar to Android in the future.

AdMob is Strong in an Early Market

Apparently Google's mobile apps ad platform hasn't been doing so well, at least not compared to AdMob. AdMob has been growing fast. VentureBeat's Matt Marshall did some back of the envelope math and estimated that the company was pulling in $40m+ in annual revenue 18 months ago, which was just 18 months after it launched.

That was in a radically different time for the mobile market. As our own Sarah Perez wrote two weeks ago in a post about AdMob's latest mobile metrics report:

Believe it or not, it was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone here in the U.S. while the iPhone was the only touchscreen device to even make the list of top ten handsets. Only a year later, and so much has changed.

That was durring the RAZR era that AdMob was at a pace that Matt Marshall said "looks headed to IPO-type revenues within three years."

Newspaper guy turned real-time, mobile content delivery founder at NozzlMedia Steve Woodward puts it like this:

"Google now has a way to extend its advertising dominance into mobile, which is growing faster than any other medium. Together, they have the delivery system, the analytics and the know-how to capture not only high-end advertising but also the medium and smaller business advertisers that Google caters to. It will be interesting to see how online publishers react, since a Google-AdMob network could sell ads at lower CPMs than its competitors, driving down revenue for publishers."

Planting a Flag on the iPhone, Protecting the Android Inventory

Now the iPhone rules. AdMob's own numbers claimed that mobile traffic from the iPhone and iPod touch grew 19X over the last year. AdMob is making a strong play on the iPhone. TechCrunch reported this Spring that the company claims to be the biggest mobile app ad network on the iPhone and is working on a traffic exchange system for app promotion similar to what's been done on Facebook.

Now move those efforts over into the Google column and Google is making money off of the free apps on Apple's platform. That's probably not something Apple feels great about.

Meanwhile, Google's own Android mobile OS is no slouch, either. Admob reported this Fall that Android now accounts for the 2nd largest share of mobile web traffic (far) behind the iPhone, at 17% in the US, beating RIM and Windows Mobile.

Does Google want to see someone else leading the ad monetization on its own mobile OS just like it is now poised to do to Apple? No way. The answer? Buy AdMob.

It's a very smart move. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google's share price rose this morning to its highest point in almost 18 months.

I've always been a big believer in learning from history as we look to the future. So let's re-visit this interview from five years ago and see how prescient the father of Web 2.0 was.

In 2004 the leading Web 2.0 companies were Google, Yahoo! and Amazon. But what of the dominant software company of the previous generation, Microsoft? I asked Tim O'Reilly back in November 2004 whether Microsoft's core strategy of software lock-in would survive in web 2.0?

O'Reilly argued that Microsoft would have to change: "I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change."

This has turned out to be the case. Over the past 5 years, Microsoft has slowly rolled out a "software plus services" strategy under the catch-all phrase 'Live.' While the Windows OS and desktop software such as Office continue to be Microsoft's mainstay products, some of the functionality gradually moved into the cloud - e.g. syncing over devices. Vista, the current generation of Windows, began that transition. In 2009, Microsoft is even taking steps to put Office online.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think O'Reilly nailed it in 2004 with this statement: "Microsoft will continue to dominate on the PC, but the PC is going to be a smaller and smaller part of the entire business."

The Mobile Web, for one, has taken attention away from Microsoft. Which is where Apple comes in...

Apple and Web 2.0

At the inaugural 2004 Web 2.0 Conference, Apple was a no-show. In talking about Apple's position in the Web industry back then, O'Reilly said that "Apple is in a position they've been in a lot of times before. They're like Moses showing the way to the promised land, but they don't actually go there."

Although Apple never did open up, as O'Reilly foresaw, nevertheless they went on to create the most successful new gadget of the past decade: the iPhone. Apple also created a thriving iPhone app ecosystem.

So in the case of the Mobile Web, Moses (a.k.a. Steve Jobs) actually did lead us to the promised land!

Facebook and Data Lock-in

In 2004 I noted that "a lot of what Web 2.0 is about is users producing content and not just consuming it." I pointed to O'Reilly's own example at the time: Amazon compared to the Barnes & Noble website. However, I said that "the other side of that coin [...] is the 'data lock-in' of users, where users may not necessarily have control over their content." I asked O'Reilly if that was something for users to be concerned about?

O'Reilly replied, in November 2004, that "there are companies that are trying to use data lock-in as a competitive tool - and there will eventually be a recognition that this is a problem."

This has indeed happened - and data lock-in is nowhere more of a problem than on the world's most popular social network circa 2009, Facebook. Over the past few years we at ReadWriteWeb have written many articles about Facebook's 'walled garden' approach to user data. Users can't take their personal data elsewhere. What's more, there have been bungled attempts to use that data for commercial means.

Remember that Facebook had just launched in February 2004 and was confined to some selected American Universities (Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and Yale). It had yet to reach the 1 million users mark. While O'Reilly couldn't have known that Facebook would turn into the juggernaut it now is, he did accurately predict that data lock-in would become a major issue:

"I believe that data lock-in of various kinds is going to be one of the key tools of business advantage in the internet era. I think that as companies realize this, they will figure out how to be evil - so to speak (to use Google's terminology) - and I predict that we will in fact have some major battles in that area."

Conclusion

It is remarkable how much can change in the Web industry in five years. Back in 2004, Facebook was a baby and Twitter wasn't even a glint in the milkman's eye. Among the big companies of that time, Apple hadn't yet given birth to the revolutionary iPhone and Microsoft was entering its mid-life crisis.

On reflection, Tim O'Reilly did extremely well in his 2004 predictions - considering how fast the Internet evolves. And I'm still grateful to him for giving an interview to an unknown New Zealand blogger. How times change...

Image credits: Niall Kennedy; Shht!; Alex Eckford

MySpace users of Causes were encouraged to post links on their MySpace profiles asking cause supporters to join the cause on Facebook instead. In abandoning MySpace, is Causes abandoning nonprofit groups organizing online with poorer users and people of color? Or are neither MySpace or Causes any big loss for social change organizations?

The Politics of Politics

Amy Sample Ward writes today on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog that she's concerned. "Causes leaving MySpace," she writes, "means that no users there will be able to continue promoting the causes, organizations or sectors that they care about via a process that's already been established, adopted, and networked.

"[The] Causes' About statement says, 'The goal of all this is what we call equal opportunity activism. We're trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals to change the world.' The removal of Causes from MySpace where there are active communities of supporters means 'equal opportunity activism' is defined by only certain communities - we know that social networking platforms have very different demographic user groups."

So Sample Ward argues that Causes is being hypocritical by allowing equal access to tools for social change to be defined only by the more economically powerful demographic groups on Facebook.

Causes told users it was pulling out of MySpace because of a lack of activity, but the MySpace App Gallery says there are almost 190,000 active Causes users right now, making it the third most popular app in the politics and causes category.

Housing rights nonprofit exec Justin Massa concurs with Sample Ward and takes the critique a step further: "Causes' justification sounds an awful lot like what financial institutions and the real estate industry used to say about poor and minority neighborhoods. I'm planning a longer post on this subject early next week, but in the meantime wanted to label this for what it is: social network redlining. " [Our link added for clarity.]

On MySpace

Not everyone thinks that MySpace provides a meaningful opportunity to effect social change, though. In an interview four years ago on the topic of nonprofit promotion on MySpace, Pete Cashmore of social network tracking blog Mashable articulated what's now a widely-held belief. He said he believed MySpace was really just filled with young, drunken, hyper-sexualized, attention seekers. "You've been there...it seems crazy for organizations to invest time and resources there," he said, "but it's popular!"

Not everyone sees it that way. The Humane Society, for example, posts daily to MySpace about animal welfare issues for its 65k+ friends.

Causes co-founder Sean Parker poses sitting with crossed legs in his photo on the company profile page; his mission statement begins with the words "According to the historical Buddha..." It's hard to imagine a beneficent religious figure that would ditch MySpace for Facebook, isn't it? Perhaps "the historical Buddha" would choose to pull up stakes from the 11th most popular website in the world if the people were too shallow and go to the hip social network where the money-raising action is.

The Loss of Causes

Perhaps even more cynical are some of the attitudes around Causes itself. This Spring the Washington Post reported that despite big expectations from many nonprofit organizations, posting a Causes app to a Facebook profile and waiting for the money to roll in is a sure path to disappointment.

"Only a tiny fraction of the 179,000 nonprofits that have turned to Causes as an inexpensive and green way to seek donations have brought in even $1,000, according to data available on the Causes developers' site. The application allows Facebook users to list themselves as supporters of a cause on their profile pages. But fewer than 1 percent of those who have joined a cause have actually donated money through that application."

Widely respected nonprofit technology consultant Beth Kanter says that Causes is like a one-night stand. "Where's the opportunity to cultivate and get to know those joiners and move them up the ladder to donation?" she asks, "Where's the relationship building?"

So by pulling out of MySpace, is Causes abandoning some of the people who need it most? Or is MySpace a bad place to do political organizing anyway? Or, is Causes just not a great way to organize and fundraise?

There's a lot of negative feelings around this news, but maybe that's what happens when the struggling nonprofit technology sector puts too much stock in the dalliances of a big-named Silicon Valley baron like Sean Parker.

Kanter brings a twinkle of optimism to the conversation: "This sounds like a great opportunity for other fundraising applications," she says.

The International Symposium on Augmented and Extended Reality this month had major sponsors from all around the world, including Qualcomm, Volkswagon, Intel and Nokia. Despite all this energy, media darling startup Layar is reported to have raised...a mere $1 million investment from venture capitalists. Why are VCs not investing more in Augmented Reality? Here are three reasons why we think investment in this sector has been slow so far.

Total Immersion, the company that made those awesome interactive 3D baseball cards (video below) has raised two rounds of funding over the last eight years. Metaio has forthcoming consumer apps but is a major B2B business in AR already - it wouldn't be a surprise if they've raised some money.

But for all the hype, this doesn't seem to be a field that investors are rushing to fund. Why is that? There are a number of theories.

AR is Just Hype, It's Not Useful

Lots of people are excited about AR, but is it just eye-candy? Mobile AR, the implementation most accessible to consumers today, is a little disappointing to use once you get past the initial Wow-factor.

Not everyone agrees, though, that there's no utility here. IT analyst firm Gartner named Augmented Reality one of its Top Ten Disruptive Technologies for 2008-2012.

It is early days. People have been hoping that AR will help with things like auto repair for years and the US Marines have seen big efficiency gains in tests of AR vehicle repair with an Android phone hooked up to a pair of goggles.

Advertising and marketing seem like the low hanging fruit but there's interest in medicine as well. Imagine anatomical models you could hold in your hand, turn around to look at and interact with or read about.

"The real impact of AR on business," consultant Tracy Sheridan says, "is money saved in manufacturing, training, etc. [and that] has been overshadowed by its role in digital marketing."

It's a Feature Not a Product