At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative - which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It's an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today's update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly.
Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google's Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages.
Apple has released its latest iPhone operating system, iOS 4.0, and just as quickly, the hacker community has managed to jailbreak it. For the uninitiated, "jailbreaking" refers to the ability to open up a device in order to install unapproved, third-party applications. Given both AT&T and Apple's restrictions regarding the iPhone, this process is a must for many Apple device owners.
Jailbreaking allows for a plethora of new features, including turning the phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot, being able to fully customize the phone down to its icons and forcing Wi-Fi only apps to run over 3G. For those whose older devices don't support all of iOS 4's new features, jailbreaking offers some viable alternatives.
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend the Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, California, and it was there that I discovered some amazing uses being developed using AR technology. I've already highlighted how it is being used to help doctors save lives, and more recently how it could be used to level the battlefield for soldiers in the middle east. Another example has an even loftier goal: helping to fight the climate and energy crises and save the planet.
Imagine if Tom Paine, or Benjamin Franklin, or Emma Goldman had the power to cast their passing thoughts, while walking down the street, to thousands or millions of people all around the world, with ease, in minutes. They would expel the building material of a mason, wouldn't they?
That power is now in all of our hands, thanks to a new class of mobile applications that's maturing very quickly. Mobile podcasting apps are now powerful, easy to use, free and tied to big social networks for distribution. The latest to hit the scene is Cinch, from BlogTalk Radio, which landed in the Android marketplace this morning after several months on the iPhone.
Social media is going to rule the Web until at least 2012 - according to a post by Justin Kistner, a Social Evangelist at web analytics company Webtrends. Kistner also claims that Facebook has become the king of social media. In a panel at a Portland event today called Lunch 2.0, Kistner said that the current era of the Web "is Facebook's game to lose."
Data from Google Trends suggests that the term 'web 2.0' became popular in 2005 and peaked in mid-2007 (as measured by how many times the term was entered as a search term in Google). Towards the end of 2008 'social media' started to get popular and then rose steeply in 2009.
The Real-Time Web Summit in New York City is currently winding down, and by most accounts it's been a pretty incredible day. To quote Baratunde Thurston, Web editor at @theonion, "This #rwwsummit might be the best one-day conference i've ever attended." Earlier today LaughingSquid posted some great photos, including a few shots of the ReadWriteWeb crew. After the jump we've rounded up a few more photos of how the day went down.
One of the key aspects of the emerging Internet of Things - where real-world objects are connected to the Internet - is the massive amount of new data on the Web that will result. As more and more "things" in the world are connected to the Internet, it follows that more data will be uploaded to and downloaded from the cloud. And this is in addition to the burgeoning amount of user-generated content - which has increased 15-fold over the past few years, according to a presentation that Google VP Marissa Mayer made last August at Xerox PARC. Mayer said during her presentation that this "data explosion is bigger than Moore's law."
During my visit to Hewlett Packard Labs earlier this month, I spoke to Parthasarathy Ranganathan - a Distinguished Technologist at HP Labs - about this large influx of data onto the Web.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg just led a phone call for the press announcing a number of substantial changes to Facebook's fluid and controversial privacy policy. Today's changes were good for users concerned about privacy, but Zuckerberg's tone on the call was odd.
He said a number of things that seemed of questionable...truth. Those were: that settings weren't changed arbitrarily when all this began in December, that the changes weren't driven by advertising and business concerns and that Facebook makes its decisions based not on criticism but on metrics or its belief in what the right thing to do is.
The theme of our upcoming Real-Time Web Summit in New York City is use cases for the Real-Time Web. In the run-up to our June 11 event, we'll publish a series of posts exploring use cases across a variety of industries - finance, enterprise, science, education, and more. We aim to show just how much potential there is for real-time technologies in the real world.
By now most of you will be familiar with the technology of the Real-Time Web. It's about immediacy of content, presence information, efficiency and responsiveness. Twitter and Facebook have become the poster children for the Real-Time Web, however there's much more to it than those two products. To prove that, here's a list of five other use cases for the Real-Time Web.
ReadWriteWeb's first East Coast event - the Real-Time Web Summit - will be taking place on June 11 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. Be sure to register now as we are extending the $395 ticket price until Wednesday, May 26.
The Real-Time Web is a set of technologies that impacts almost every service, activity and application on the Web. Come to the summit to understand how it impacts you, your business and your next development.
