News.me, the stealthy social news project being developed by Betaworks in conjunction with The New York Times, has just started accepting invite requests. As part of the partnership deal, The New York Times took an equity stake in Bit.ly, a URL-shortening service from Betaworks, the technology incubator behind several notable social Web companies, including Twitter dashboard TweetDeck, real-time analytics service Chartbeat and audience engagement platform SocialFlow.
How exactly Bit.ly will be used in the upcoming News.me service is still unknown, but we do know that it will debut in the form of an app for the Apple iPad. And now you can request to be first on the list to try it out.
Every year since 2004, ReadWriteWeb has selected a best 'little company.' In past years we've given this honor to Flickr, 37Signals, YouTube (in 2006, the year it was acquired by Google), Twitter (in 2007, before it went mainstream), Zoho, and Aardvark. As you can see, many of these companies have gone onto much bigger things. When we select the Best LittleCo winner each year, we look for small companies (less than 100 employees) that have set the online world alight.
This year there was plenty of competition. Foursquare won the battle of the check-in apps, Flipboard created an innovative iPad app that caught our imagination, Instagram burst onto the scene with a mobile photo app. The LittleCo that impressed us the most though was New York-based Tumblr.
What do you call a 12 inch by 12 inch by 16 inch box that can print 3D objects of your design, continuously for hours at a time, for just over a thousand dollars? That's the new MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, the latest and greatest in automated home 3D object printing. MakerBot has just begun sending the first shipment out its doors.
MakerBot says the Thing-O-Matic prints higher-quality items than its other 3D printers but the real differentiator here is the automation: give this thing enough plastic to chew on and it will print the same or different objects one after the other after the other, clearing itself out each time before beginning anew. Can the Thing-O-Matic self-replicate - be used to make more Thing-O-Matics? That line was crossed by the old school MakerBot last June, so perhaps it's just a matter of time.
One of the more subtle trends of 2010 has been the way that our reading habits have changed, due to a convergence of other Web trends: mobile apps, real-time Web (mostly Twitter), and social networking as a way to track news (mostly Facebook). In the previous era of the Web, the so-called Web 2.0, RSS Readers and start pages were all the rage. Over 2010, though, more people used tools like Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Flipboard, LazyWeb, Feedly and TweetDeck, to track news.
Nowadays I'm more likely to find stories to read via a vertical aggregator (the media-focused Mediagazer is my current favorite) and save them to Instapaper for later reading via my iPhone or iPad. I still use Google Reader, but in all honesty I now use it more to scan than to read.
There's a new tool that online marketers, brand managers and social media experts should be aware of: Research.ly, a new social search platform for researching Twitter conversations and tracking the associated analytics. But this is not your average Twitter analytics tool.
Research.ly uses parent company PeopleBrowsr's proprietary server technology to surface a historical analysis of Tweets, going back three years, thanks to its access to Twitter's full feed, a data stream often referred to as the "Twitter firehose." Not only that, but Research.ly has built custom indexes on top of this database of Tweets, including indexes for things like gender, sentiment, location, degrees of separation and more.
Flipboard, the iPad "social" magazine which launched to a barrage of press back in July, has just announced the addition of several more publishing partners, the first to test Flipboard's new framework called Flipboard Pages. This framework automatically converts traditional Web content into an iPad-friendly format, featuring full-screen, paginated, magazine-like pages.
When readers tap content from these publishers shared by friends on Twitter or Facebook within the Flipboard app, they're now taken to this new magazine-like reading experience instead of a traditional Web page. And for publishers, the result of the tap is the same as a Web hit on their end.
Flipboard Pages, however, isn't the only big news coming out of the company today.
Hulu, the partnership between NBC, ABC and Fox experimenting with high-quality, ad-supported, professional online video content, is aiming to break out of its US-only limited service.
Jessica Vascellaro and Sam Schechner reported in the Wall St. Journal this afternoon that Hulu CEO Jason Kilar told them the company is looking to expand internationally and may be willing to take on additional investors to do so.
The Y Combinator-powered Hacker News has finally grown into a four-color paper-and-print magazine called Hacker Monthly. Their parents must be proud.
What started as a side-project by Netizen Media's Lim Cheng Soon seven months ago has grown into a 3,000-paid subscriber supported, three-dimensional magazine.
One of the big themes of 2010 has been the increased simplicity of posting content to the Web. Whether it's Facebooking with your family, tweeting with your online buddies, or sharing a favorite video, photo or quote on Tumblr. All of these activities have given millions of people an opportunity to add their voice to the Web.
Tumblr and similar services are sometimes termed light blogging, as they enable people to publish 'found' things very quickly and at the click of a button. Tumblr is the market leader amongst such tools, followed by Posterous, Soup.io, Noovo and others. Tumblr has grown the most in recent times, but Posterous has fought hard. Let's review the fast-moving and often entertaining moves in this market over 2010.
OpenStreetMap is a global map edited by volunteers, like the Wikipedia of the mapping world. Founded in 2004, the project is a fascinating collection of local knowledge and is a lot of fun to participate in. Last month OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast announced that he was leaving for-profit Cloud Made, the primary company behind OSM. Today he announced where he's going next: to be a Principal Architect at Bing Maps. Reaction in the mapping community has been mixed but this is a move that will be talked about for a long time. With the rise of location-aware mobile devices and platforms for processing massive amounts of data, including location data, geo technology is poised to grow far more important than it already is today.
Coast is a giant figure in the mapping world. In 2009, readers of leading geo publication Directions Magazine voted him the 2nd most influential person in the geospatial world, ahead of the Google Maps leadership and behind only Jack Dangermond, the dynamic founder of 41-year old $2 billion GIS company ESRI. Coast will turn 30 years old next month.
