Just a quick update to this week's poll, which is already rocking. The question is: What is your favorite online music streaming service? Right now last.fm and Pandora are nearly neck and neck in the vote, followed by Yahoo Music. But a couple of updates to the poll:
1) We added FineTune and Live365, as they were mentioned several times in the comments to the original post. So if one of those is your favorite, please go ahead and vote for it now.
2) We removed eMusic, as it is not a streaming service (apologies for that).
This week's poll complements our special series on Online Music. We're asking what is your number 1 favorite music streaming service on the Web. With this poll there are bound to be sites that aren't on the list, but which are somebody's favorite. We've included as many of the major services as we could remember, but do shout out in the comments if there's an obvious omission.
In Greg Linden's guest post defining Web personalization, he notes that Google Personalized Search uses technology acquired in 2003 from a small startup named Kaltix. He goes on to say that "the current version of Google Personalized Search learns from your search queries. Searchers do not have to do anything explicitly to use it; it is all implicit. The current Google Personalized Search likely is using the same Kaltix technology, building a high-level profile of you, then biasing all of your search results based on your long-term behavior."
With that in mind, it's curious that just under half (48%) of respondents in this week's R/WW poll haven't noticed any difference in their Google search results. Only 12% have seen an improvement, but perhaps of more concern is that 9% say their search results have gotten worse! You can test this yourself by going to googlonymous, which as the name suggests allows you to do an anonymous search on Google (hat tip Mind Booster Noori for the link).
This week's poll is part of our R/WW Files on Personalizing Google. We're asking if you've noticed much difference in your Google search results, now that Google claims you can "get more relevant search results" when signed into Google Accounts. Let us know what you think.
This week's Read/WriteWeb Files is investigating the 100 Days For Yahoo. In a recent earnings conference call, new Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said that "the next 100 days or so" will be spent mapping out Yahoo’s strategic plan. So we thought we'd help with the strategic analysis.
Yesterday I listed 10 top Web properties that Yahoo owns. But the real question is: how to tie all of Yahoo's properties together and utilize them better? Josh Catone wrote that the solution is to make My Yahoo into an open platform, a la Facebook or iGoogle. Josh explained what can be done to create a more useful and meaningful Yahoo! for users, one that can keep people on the site and drive them to use their search engine. His theory:
Yahoo! needs to realize that the web platform is getting more and more important. Google already has, and is building a platform around their start page, iGoogle, by encouraging developers to build "gadgets" specifically for it. For Yahoo!, a platform can unify their services -- which right now are scattered -- and add utility to their page that will keep users there long enough to conduct searches. Yahoo! controls some of the hottest and most useful properties on the web, but has not figured out how to tie them together. They've started to bring some of their acquisitions under the single Yahoo! sign-on umbrella, but that still doesn't bring my del.icio.us links, my Flickr photos and my fantasy sports team management to one central location.
The good news for Yahoo! is that they already have a property just waiting to be turned into a full fledged platform: My Yahoo!
This week we'll be exploring RSS products. To complement this focus, our poll is asking: how do you primarily read your feeds? We asked a similar question in January, so we're looking to see if the trends have changed since then. But this time we're also asking what is your primary means of reading RSS, because nowadays there are so many different ways - and I for one use multiple methods of reading RSS. Here is our poll:
This week is Facebook Week on Read/WriteWeb. Over the next 5 days we're going to focus on the most impressive Web Company of 2007 - analyzing it and reporting on its top third party apps. To 'launch' Facebook Week, let's review how this company turned itself into the leading web app platform on the Internet, in a matter of months.
To celebrate Facebook Week, we've set up a Facebook Group for Read/WriteWeb readers. It's open to anyone... even Australians :-) We're running a poll too, at the end of this post, asking how many 'friends' you have on Facebook currently. We'll run other Facebook-related polls over the course of the week.
Our poll this week asks: Which Web company impressed you the most over the first half of 2007? Mid-week, Facebook has a handy lead over Google. Facebook has 34% of the vote, with Google second on 27%. Apple is third with 15%, probably reflecting the recent iPhone launch. Note that we added Adobe and Mozilla after about 100 votes, so the others got a bit of a head start.
If you haven't yet voted, please participate in the poll below:
This week's poll is an extension of our 2007 Half-Year Web Technology Report, which reviewed the first six months of this year in web technology. In that report, I noted that Google and Facebook have been the two companies to impress me so far this year. But what do you think?
We've asked a similar question before, in December before we did our Best BigCo of 2006 post. At that time, Google got a whopping 54% of the votes, with Amazon the next best at 14%. Also, in Dec '06, Facebook weren't even in the running. But as I noted in the 2007 Half-Year Report, Facebook has virtually built itself into a BigCo over the past six months.
Alex Iskold has written a compelling post, arguing that iPhone is more than just a breakthrough mobile phone device. Alex says it's a strategy that may expand Apple's sphere of influence, from web browsing to social networking and even possibly search. So to complement Alex's post, our poll this week asks: what has Steve Jobs got his eye on next? Please take part in our poll below:
