Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

Skip to info about: Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Hakia: semantic search | Domain.ME: .me domain registrar | Codero: Managed hosting | Groupsite: Social collaboration | NaviSite: Managed hosting | Faroo: Real-time search | Search Engine Strategies: Conference | MyDomain.com: Domain registrar | Backupify: Online backup | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science.

Thank Crowd Science on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

Explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Thank Rackspace on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Thank Aplus.net on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Hakia

Hakia is a semantic search engine. It delivers a new search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. You can compare Hakia to Google and Bing here.

Hakia currently powers the contextual advertising link engine at ReadWriteWeb with its semantic advertising module, Contexa. Contexa provides page-level contextual analysis (in this case, of blog posts) on the fly and outputs keywords that represent the meaning of the page along with their meaning score. The Contexa system then matches ReadWriteWeb sponsors' requirements with the contextual representation of the page to provide relevant ads for readers. Contexa is offered as a service and can be integrated into any ad system.

Learn more about Contexa.

Thank Hakia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Domain.ME

.Me is a true phenomenon among TLDs. With its unforgettable meaning and limitless word combination possibilities, .Me gives a truly personal tone to your domain name. If you are looking for a name that speaks for itself .Me is your best choice. Let .Me speak for your online business or personal blog.

.Me potential is enormous and it simply asks for you to be creative and coin the name that suits you best. If you have a great, original idea for a domain name, register .Me before it's taken. To check out other ideas, explore the world of .Me.

Thank Domain.ME on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Codero

Codero is a former division of Aplus.net. Codero became a separate entity focusing on dedicated and managed hosting solutions after the acquisition of Aplus.net's shared hosting, web design, and domain registration services by Hostopia. "Codero" stands for collaboration, engagement, focus, reliability, and flexibility. It means a more secure computing experience for email, shopping, and data transfer.

Codero is a dedicated and managed hosting company focused on the real needs of today's small and mid-sized businesses. The company believes in supporting robust websites, storefronts and online communities that will grow and adapt.

Groupsite

Groupsite.com is a self-serve platform for creating social collaboration communities called Groupsites. Groupsites combine the most useful features of social networking and collaboration tools enabling groups large and small to communicate, share and network. Groupsites are currently in use by more than 30,000 groups as user communities, intranets, member communities, team workgroups and social networks. Each Groupsite can be branded and customized and includes discussion forums, calendaring, file sharing, member profiles (professional or social), activity feeds and full-featured sub-groups among other group-centric features.

Sign up and create a free Groupsite in minutes.

Thank Groupsite on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

NaviSite

NaviSite is a leading provider of enterprise hosting and application services for a diverse client base. Leveraging a diverse network of 16 enterprise-class data centers across the US and UK, NaviSite offers a predictable technology environment and a complete suite of infrastructure and application solutions.

NaviSite's product and service offerings include:

• Vast custom application development capabilities, including SOA solutions, eCommerce, and Web 2.0 applications.
• Full stack of enterprise hosting services for mid-market companies, including shared, dedicated, and complex hosting, SaaS enablement, and colocation.
• Best in class managed hosting, such as virtualization and utility computing.

Thank NaviSite on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Faroo

Faroo is a peer-to-peer Web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Search results are ranked based on distributed usage statistics of Web pages visited by Faroo users, which leads to more democratic, user-centric ranking.

Faroo protects the privacy of users by encrypting search queries and anonymizing its distributed architecture. The decentralized peer-to-peer architecture scales with Internet growth and requires no infrastructure or operational cost.

Thank Faroo on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

MyDomain.com

MyDomain is a leading ICANN-accredited provider of domain name registration and online business solutions. For over 10 years, MyDomain has offered low-cost domain names and free domain services including complete DNS management. Today, sub-$10 domains without the constant upsells you'll find at some competitors are the norm at MyDomain. MyDomain's complete range of solutions include Web hosting and VPS hosting, email, SSL Certificates and more.

Search Engine Strategies

From social media to local search to video SEO, Search Engine Strategies Chicago puts you in front of the experts who will help you sort which technologies and channel will take you to the next level and which are just hype.

Search Engine Strategies is the pioneer of educational conference series in search engine marketing. It's the venue where the industry visionaries and thought leaders gather each year to discuss the newest trends, share insights and present the strategic action plans you need to grow your business.

Thank Search Engine Strategies on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Backupify

Backupify provides reliable online backup services for a range of products, including Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, Delicious, Basecamp, Google Docs, Gmail, Zoho, Flickr and Photobucket. Backups are secure, automatic and easy to set up.

Thank Backupify on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's Movable Type.

If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

Thank Media Temple and SixApart on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

Let's not kid ourselves, dear readers. P2P's best use cases all revolve around the liberation of data, software, music, movies, and other copyrighted and rather expensive content. You may direct your angry emails to Rep. Edolphus Towns (NY-Dem.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

At the outset, the bill proposes the banning of P2P software use for government employees and contractors "and for other purposes." The bill mandates the long-term examination of "each open-network peer-to-peer file sharing software program" that might currently be in use by government and law enforcement personnel.

Towns cited the exposure of sensitive information via such networks as the reason for the bill. He cited the following leaks as proof of the need for stricter P2P regulations:

• Schematics for the President's helicopter, Marine One.
• Financial data on Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
• Location of a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family.
• Specifics of a House Ethics Committee document containing a list of ongoing investigations

But let us be realistic: Copyright claims, Creative Commons concerns, and IP violations are the molten core at the center of any legislation on P2P networks. And based on recent internationally agreed-upon efforts to uphold the claims and wishes of copyright holders, the U.S. government seems to be introducing yet more legislation to restrict piracy.

Are P2P networks truly responsible for such serious security breaches? Or are these claims merely politically motivated scapegoats for government to crack down on user behaviors - behaviors that may need more examination than legal discipline?

Most importantly, if this bill is made law, will it act as a precedent for stricter policing and eventual shutdown of P2P networks altogether? Or are we reactionary skeptics who need to calm down and quietly resume our download of our Hello, Dolly torrent files? Choose your own adventure in the comments.

"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.

Chances are that Amex is mostly interested in the P2P payment system that Revolution Money has developed. It will be interesting to see what the company will do with the Revolution Money card, which, even though widely accepted, hasn't exactly become a household name yet. Amex also plans to expand Revolution Money's reach beyond the US.

Lots of Participating Merchants - But How Many Customers?

The Revolution Money card is currently accepted at about 650,000 stores in the US, including Barnes & Noble and Whole Foods. Merchants have been drawn to Revolution Money because the company charges lower fees than credit card companies. The company didn't announce how many actual users it currently has, though just like GigaOm's Om Malik, we still haven't met anybody who owns a Revolution Money card.

This GPS app is built to work on the cheapest cell phones available. It brings to mind every petty-but-illegal transgression the casual user could commit and stretches the boundaries of the permissibility of tech's uses for plausibly illegal means. The next time you use P2P or bit torrent clients to download media or use an iPhone app to detect police radars, think about this mobile application and how it reflects on American law and the Internet.

On startup, the app finds GPS satellites. Once the user begins moving, the app acts as a compass that shows the direction the user is heading and also shows the direction a user must travel to reach a "safety site."

The app seems to originate from a hacktivist group out of UCSD - hardly a historical hotbed of technological innovation, but close enough to the US-Mexican border to have a significant impact on the politics of technology in that area. The group also advocates DDoS-like digital sit-ins to bog down the resources of websites it deems offensive.

In an interview with Vice Magazine, the app's creator, Ricardo Dominguez, said, "We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compass-like navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway - things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border."

Hundreds of would-be immigrants are killed each year while trying to enter the United States.

Check out this Border Patrol YouTube video on the newly installed double-layered fencing between the U.S. and Mexico, a fence that stretches between 700 and 800 miles along the Rio Grande.

The application is currently in an alpha state of development. Dominguez hopes that, through working with Mexican communities, churches, and other organizations, the app will be ready to use soon.

So, what do our readers think? Is this Dominguez a political dissident or a legitimate academic researcher - or both? And is a mobile app enabling illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S. a live-saving tool for those who seek better opportunities, or is it simply another law-breaking tool developed by tech hackers for life hackers, a workaround to cheat the system?

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO for all the details.

Skip to info about: Mashery: API management services | Rackspace: cloud computing experts | Aplus.net: Web hosting | Crowd Science: demographic data | Hakia: semantic search | Domain.ME: .me domain registrar | Codero: Managed hosting | Groupsite: Social collaboration | NaviSite: Managed hosting | Faroo: Real-time search | Search Engine Strategies: Conference | MyDomain.com: Domain registrar | Backupify: Online backup | Media Temple and SixApart: our hosts and blogging software

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science.

Thank Crowd Science on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

Explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Thank Rackspace on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Thank Aplus.net on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Hakia

Hakia is a semantic search engine. It delivers a new search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. You can compare Hakia to Google and Bing here.

Hakia currently powers the contextual advertising link engine at ReadWriteWeb with its semantic advertising module, Contexa. Contexa provides page-level contextual analysis (in this case, of blog posts) on the fly and outputs keywords that represent the meaning of the page along with their meaning score. The Contexa system then matches ReadWriteWeb sponsors' requirements with the contextual representation of the page to provide relevant ads for readers. Contexa is offered as a service and can be integrated into any ad system.

Learn more about Contexa.

Thank Hakia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Domain.ME

.Me is a true phenomenon among TLDs. With its unforgettable meaning and limitless word combination possibilities, .Me gives a truly personal tone to your domain name. If you are looking for a name that speaks for itself .Me is your best choice. Let .Me speak for your online business or personal blog.

.Me potential is enormous and it simply asks for you to be creative and coin the name that suits you best. If you have a great, original idea for a domain name, register .Me before it's taken. To check out other ideas, explore the world of .Me.

Thank Domain.ME on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Codero

Codero is a former division of Aplus.net. Codero became a separate entity focusing on dedicated and managed hosting solutions after the acquisition of Aplus.net's shared hosting, web design, and domain registration services by Hostopia. "Codero" stands for collaboration, engagement, focus, reliability, and flexibility. It means a more secure computing experience for email, shopping, and data transfer.

Codero is a dedicated and managed hosting company focused on the real needs of today's small and mid-sized businesses. The company believes in supporting robust websites, storefronts and online communities that will grow and adapt.

Groupsite

Groupsite.com is a self-serve platform for creating social collaboration communities called Groupsites. Groupsites combine the most useful features of social networking and collaboration tools enabling groups large and small to communicate, share and network. Groupsites are currently in use by more than 30,000 groups as user communities, intranets, member communities, team workgroups and social networks. Each Groupsite can be branded and customized and includes discussion forums, calendaring, file sharing, member profiles (professional or social), activity feeds and full-featured sub-groups among other group-centric features.

Sign up and create a free Groupsite in minutes.

Thank Groupsite on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

NaviSite

NaviSite is a leading provider of enterprise hosting and application services for a diverse client base. Leveraging a diverse network of 16 enterprise-class data centers across the US and UK, NaviSite offers a predictable technology environment and a complete suite of infrastructure and application solutions.

NaviSite's product and service offerings include:

• Vast custom application development capabilities, including SOA solutions, eCommerce, and Web 2.0 applications.
• Full stack of enterprise hosting services for mid-market companies, including shared, dedicated, and complex hosting, SaaS enablement, and colocation.
• Best in class managed hosting, such as virtualization and utility computing.

Thank NaviSite on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Faroo

Faroo is a peer-to-peer Web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Search results are ranked based on distributed usage statistics of Web pages visited by Faroo users, which leads to more democratic, user-centric ranking.

Faroo protects the privacy of users by encrypting search queries and anonymizing its distributed architecture. The decentralized peer-to-peer architecture scales with Internet growth and requires no infrastructure or operational cost.

Thank Faroo on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

MyDomain.com

MyDomain is a leading ICANN-accredited provider of domain name registration and online business solutions. For over 10 years, MyDomain has offered low-cost domain names and free domain services including complete DNS management. Today, sub-$10 domains without the constant upsells you'll find at some competitors are the norm at MyDomain. MyDomain's complete range of solutions include Web hosting and VPS hosting, email, SSL Certificates and more.

Search Engine Strategies

From social media to local search to video SEO, Search Engine Strategies Chicago puts you in front of the experts who will help you sort which technologies and channel will take you to the next level and which are just hype.

Search Engine Strategies is the pioneer of educational conference series in search engine marketing. It's the venue where the industry visionaries and thought leaders gather each year to discuss the newest trends, share insights and present the strategic action plans you need to grow your business.

Thank Search Engine Strategies on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Backupify

Backupify provides reliable online backup services for a range of products, including Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, Delicious, Basecamp, Google Docs, Gmail, Zoho, Flickr and Photobucket. Backups are secure, automatic and easy to set up.

Thank Backupify on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

ReadWriteWeb is hosted by Media Temple and is published using SixApart's Movable Type.

If you've ever wondered what ReadWriteWeb looks like behind the scenes, or if you've never seen the Movable Type publishing interface - that's it on the left. We recently upgraded to MT 4.23, which is the latest version. We got onto this release as soon as it was available - in fact our contacts at Six Apart emailed the actual code to us before it was up on their website. That's customer service for you!

Thank Media Temple and SixApart on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk.

Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support!

We're starting with online music. No industry, except arguably the newspaper one, has been rocked (pardon the pun) more by the Internet than the music industry.

The online music decade started with Napster, a music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning that operated between June 1999 and July 2001. Napster enabled people to freely share MP3 files over the Internet; however it quickly ran into major legal trouble. Napster was the subject of lawsuits in 2000 by touchy metal band Metallica and others. It was eventually shut down by court order, after several major record labels went after the service.

After Napster's demise, a P2P application called Kazaa became the most popular service for music file sharing. But it too eventually succumbed to record industry attacks.

Curiously, both Napster and Kazaa were recently reincarnated as law-abiding services. After years of re-launch attempts, Napster was acquired by Best Buy in September 2008 and was born again in May 2009. Meanwhile Kazaa turned into a legit music subscription service in July this year.

iTunes / iPod: Digital Music Goes Commercial

While Napster and Kazaa tried to skirt around the commercial imperatives of music, like paying artists, Apple took on the record industry in an entirely legal way. In January 2001, Apple launched a digital music player for music called iTunes. Then in April 2003, the iTunes Store was launched. It offered the ability to buy songs for 99 cents each, which had a major impact on the music industry.

Soon after Napster's demise in 2001, Apple launched what was to become a revolutionary device in the music industry. The iPod was launched in October 2001 and it became the most popular portable music player since the Sony Walkman in the 1980s.

Fast forward to 2009 and iTunes continues to evolve. In January Apple announced that iTunes would go DRM-free. In September 2009 Apple launched version 9 of iTunes, which included a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and 'iTunes LPs' - a feature that brings liner notes and artwork to digital albums.

MySpace: Music & Social Networking

MySpace was launched in August 2003 and soon became a popular hangout for local bands, especially indie rockers. MySpace provided a way for those bands to promote their music and reach a wide network through social networking.

As ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez wrote last month, it was a virtuous circle for MySpace. The bands' presence on MySpace "began to attract a young, hip crowd of users who were interested in following pop culture, and, in particular, the up-and-coming artists they discovered while browsing through the network. Only eight months after its launch, MySpace began to experience exponential growth, as its users created profiles and friended others who would then, in turn, invite more users to join the social network. Thanks to the "network effect," MySpace soon became the place to be online. Everyone was there."

However by 2008, MySpace had ceded the social networking crown to Facebook. In 2009, MySpace is once again trying to reclaim its heritage as a music service. In October MySpace launched "Artist Dashboards" and integrated its music video vault with recent acquisition iLike.

Pandora & last.fm: Online Music Discovery

Online music services have flourished in the 'web 2.0' era, when the ability to find new music and share it with others via the Web became increasingly sophisticated.

Two services in particular stand out. One is Pandora, a free online music discovery service. Pandora was founded in 2000 and continues to grow, despite various legal issues over the years. As ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois noted earlier this year, Pandora derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes.

Last.fm is another online music discovery service. It was founded in 2002 and was sold to CBS in 2007. It continues to innovate in 2009, for example in May this year last.fm announced combo stations, allowing a user to create a station with up to three artists or tags.

Conclusion

This post and series was inspired by one of my favorite blogs and podcasts, NPR's All Songs Considered. They're currently looking back at the decade in music and much of the discussion is about how the Internet helped define it.

And it's true, when you think of music at the end of 2009 you think of iTunes, Pandora and last.fm - MySpace even. The record industry is still coming to terms with these and other changes.

Tell us your online music memories of the past 10 years. What's been your favorite online music product or service during that time?

If you'd like to join us on-site you should go buy your ticket now. We need to know how many people are going to be there in order to get enough food and be prepared - so tickets will go up from the current price of $270 on Wednesday at Noon PST. After that time the price will go up to $495. You can see who's coming already on the list below and see what kinds of things will be discussed here, here and a big picture here.

If you're going to be joining us for the event, you're also invited to a no-host pre-event gathering the night before. We'll be at St. Stephen's Green an Irish Pub on Castro in Mountain View at 7:15. We hope to see you there, too!

• Pierce Lamb, Marketing Manager, GemStone Systems, gemstonesystems@
• Russell Okamoto, Marketing Manager, GemStone Systems, GemStone Systems, @gemstonesystems
• David Spark, Founder, Spark Media Solutions, Blog, @dspark
• Zach Copley, Developer Relations, StatusNet, Inc.
• Brion Vibber, Senior Software Architect, StatusNet, Inc.
• noam bardin, CEO, waze , Blog
  @waze
• Kevin Mokarow, VP, Strategic Communications, nomee, @nomee
• Kristin Kelly, VP, Strategic Communications nomee, @nomee
• Mike Nimer, VP, Strategic Communications, nomee, @nomee
• [[http://www.julianonsoftware.com|Julian Harris], Technical Account Manager, Google, @julianharris
• Dylan Casey, Google
• Ericson deJesus, Founder, [[http://particlebrand.com|Particle]
• Jean-Paul Cozzatti, Technical Director | [[http://lifestream.aim.com
  |AIM Lifestream, AIM]], @jeanpaul
• John Furrier, Founder, SiliconANGLE.com [http://www.twitter.com/furrier|@furrier]]
• Jeff Prellwitz, Pheedo, Dlvr.it, @jeffprellwitz
• Soren Macbeth, CTO, StockTwits, Blog,@sorenmacbeth
• Joseph Boyle, @josephboylejosephboyle
• Robyn Tippins, Community Manager, Yahoo!, Personal Blog, @duzins
• Jack Menzel, Group Product Manager, Google
• Eran Hammer-Lahav, Director of Standards Development, Yahoo!
• Nicolas Bertrand, Director of Product Management, ShareThis, @nickbert
• Chloe Caviness, Event Producer
• Brett Bavar, Software Engineer, Google
• Rhianna Richards, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, TIBCO Software Inc.
• Rourke McNamara, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, TIBCO Software Inc.
• Sriram Chakravarthy, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, TIBCO Software Inc.
• Kaliya Hamlin, Identity Woman, Internet Identity Workshop, @identitywoman
• Anselm Hook, Community Dev, Waze, Blog, @anselm
• Kevin Marks, VP Web Services,  BT/Ribbit, @kevinmarks
• DeWitt Clinton, Google @dewitt
• Tobias L¸tke, CEO, jadedPixel Technologies Inc, #
• Justin Kan, Co-Founder and President, JustinTV
• Michael Seibel, Co-Founder and CEO, JustinTV
• Will Kirkpatrick, Producer, JustinTV
• Evan Solomon, VP Marketing, JustinTV
• John McCrea, CTO, Plaxo
• Joseph Smarr, CTO, Plaxo, @jsmarr
• Laura @Pistachio, One Forty
• Anthony Priore, Chief Marketing Officer, Biz360, Inc., Blog,
  @tpriore
• Scott Beale, Laughing Squid, @laughingsquid
• Jack Moffitt, CTO, Collecta, @metajack
• Robert Reich, Founder, OneRiot
• Baratunde, Thurston, The Onion // Science Channel // Myself @baratunde
• Beth Kanter
• Jake Stutzman, Creative Director, Elevate, @jstutzman
• Ed Lucero, TerraTacks
• Laura Merling Founder, Stretta Group @magicmerl
• Jason Shellen, CEO, Thing Labs Blog, @thinglabs
• Michael Lee, CEO, Thoora, #
• Srinivasan Venkatachary, Software Engineer, Google Inc #
• Mathew Honan, Contributing Editor, Wired magazine, Blog, @mat
• Nathaniel Cohen Director of Product and Strategy kgb_web @nathanielcohen
• Tikva Morowati Director of Product and Strategy kgb_web / @tikkers
• David Levitt Senior Software Engineer Evectors @dlevity
• Christina Allen, Executive Director Platform Product Management, Linden Labs @allenleechris
• Heidi Nobantu Saul, Documentation Expert @nobantu
• John Bergmans Principal Engineer Bergmans Mechatronics LLC, @jbergmans
• Kristie Wells, President and Founder, Social Media Club, @kristiewells
• David Price Co-Founder, CEO, Black Tonic, Blog, @blacktonicapp
• Philippe Blanc Co-Founder, CEO, Black Tonic, Blog, @blacktonicapp
• Steve Woodward, CEO, Nozzl Media Inc. nozzlsteve
• Chase Reeves Dir. Marketing, Iterasi, Blog, @chase_reeves
• Tom Quiggle, Principal Architect, Yahoo! Inc.
• Stephen Garcia, Product Director, Yahoo!, @sgarciaDev
• Benjamin Diggles, Senior Manager Web Marketing, Webtrends, @mrdiggles
• Kovas Boguta, CTO, Infoharmoni,  Blog, @infoharmoni
• Paulius Jurgutis, CTO, Infoharmoni,  Blog, @infoharmoni
• Mark Jeffrey, CTO, Mahalo.com, Inc., @markjeffrey
• Patrick Chapman Director of Business Development Evri, @1trick4all
• Will Husinger Director of Business Development, Evri, @1trick4all
• Dan Chiao, Director of Engineering, Fliptop
  Dan Chiao
• Jeff Oh, Manager, SK Telecom @dirby5
• Phil Wolff, Prime Suspect, Under Indictment, Skype Journal, @evanwolf
• Adina Levin, Developer  Socialtext
• Adrian Chan, Owner gravity7  blog
• Aki Hashmi,  Allvoices
• Alex Kohlhofer, Technical Director, Electronic Arts
• Adina Levin, Developer  Socialtext
• Adrian Chan, Owner gravity7  blog
• Aki Hashmi,  Allvoices
• Alex Kohlhofer, Technical Director, Electronic Arts
• Allen Hurff, Entrepreneur, @allenhurff
• Amanda Krantz, President, notify.me  @amandakrantz
• Andrew Braun
• Andrew Weissman, COO betaworks
• Angela Kyle, co-founder, the realtime project @realtimeangela
• Ashish Kelkar Principal - Mergers & Integration Google Inc.  @askelkar
• Ben Metcalfe, Founder, Lead Consultant Swordfish Corp, blog @dotben
• Ben Tesch Lab Manager, msnbc.com,  blog   @magnetbox
• Bernard Moon, Vice President, Lunsford Group  @bernardmoon
• Bill Arconati, Product Marketing Manager, Atlassian blog @barconati
• Bill Flitter, CEO, Dlvr.it  @dlvrit
• Bill Johnston, Chief Community Officer, Forum One Communications Online Community Report  @BillJohnston
• Bill York, Wowd
• Bipul Sinha, Vice President, Blumberg Capital @bipulsinha
• Bjorn Milton CTO Twingly Blog @bjomi
• BorislavAgapiev, Founder & CTO Wowd Inc. Blog
• Brad Fitzpatrick, Software Engineer, Google @bradfitz
• Brett Slatkin, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
• Brian Hendrickson, Co-founder & Lead Developer, Nozzl Media, Inc Blog, @BrianJesse
• Brian Oberkirch, Managing Director, Blinksale, #
• Brian Zisk, Co-Founder, Collecta, Blog, @zisk
• Carson Kelly,  Business Development & Sales, Visual World, Inc., @carsonkelly
• Charlie Cauthen, Vice Pres, Cliqset Blog, @ccauthen
• Charlie Davidson, Attensa, Blog @charliedavidson
• Chris Haase, Community and QA Manager, YourVersion Blog @testjj
• Chris Saari, Technical Yahoo! Yahoo! @chrissaari
• Chris Yeh, VP Marketing, PBworks, @chrisyeh
• Damon Horowitz, Co-Founder and CTO, Aardvark, Blog
• Dan Miller, Sr. Analyst, Opus Research Blog, @dnm54
• Dan Olsen, CEO and Founder, YourVersion, Blog, @danolsen
• Daniel Freeman, Director of Product Marketing ,Atlassian
• [[http://danschmidt.soup.io|Daniel, Schmidt], Senior Product Manager, CNET News, CBS Interactive @danielfschmidt
• Daniela Barbosa, Dow Jones/Dataportability Project, @danielabarbosa
• Darian Shimy, VP of Technology, Biz360, @dshimy
• Darius Dunlap,  Managing Director, SupportUX, @dariusdunlap
• Darren Bounds, Pres, Cliqset Blog, @dbounds
• Dave Badley, Web Developer, YourVersion, Blog
  @badave
• Dave Merriwether, Senior Director, Yahoo
• David Hardtke, Founder, Stinky Teddy, @stinkyteddy
• David Recordon, Senior Open Programs Manager, Facebook, Blog, @daveman692
• DavidShen, Betaworks Blog
• Deep Dhillon, CTO, Evri, Blog, @zang0
• Donovan Jones, CEO, VentureDeal, Blog, @venturedeal
• Doug Camplejohn, CEO, Fliptop, @fliptop
• Dustin Norlander, Chief Architect, Trendrr
• Eduardo Arriagada, Professor, [[http://www.uc.cl/fcom|Catholic University of Chile], Journalism, Blog, @earriagada
• Eran Shir, CEO, Dapper, @eranshir
• Eric Marcoullier, CEO, Gnip 2.0 Blog, @bpm140
• Eric Woodward, President, The Nambu Network Inc., @ejwc
• Erik Benson, Managing Director, Voyager Capital
• Etesh Mangray, Founder, Vinolist
• Ethan Gahng, CEO, Lazyfeed, Blog, @lazyfeed
• Evan Prodromou, CEO, StatusNet, Inc., Blog @evan on identi.ca
• Fabien Degaugue, Founder CEO, PeerPong, Blog, @fabien
• GabeWachob, Developer, Socialtext, @gwachob
• Gabriel Ortiz, CEO, Rarefied Technologies Blog, @signalnine
• George Joy, Dev Lead, Microsoft
• Gerry Campbell, CEO, Collecta, Blog, @gfcampbell
• Ginsu Yoon
• Greg Biggers, Chief Instigator & CEO, Ewakening,  Blog, @bigs
• Gregory Foster, Web Developer, Consumers Union, @gregoryfoster
• Hideaki Tanioka, Senior Software Engineer, Fujitsu Labs of America
• Iein Valdez, Director Product Development, Google Platform, Blog:Appirio, @iein
• Ilya Grigorik CTO PostRank, Blog, [[http://www.twitter.com/igrigorik|@igrigorik
• Jai Choi EIR Partech Int.
• Jason Hoyt, Director of Research, Mendeley, Blog, @jasonhoyt
• Jason Sattler Social Media Consultant, F-Secure, primarily, @jasonsattler
• Jay Simons VP Sales and Marketing, Atlassian
• Jeff Eastman, President, Windward Solutions Blog
• Jeff Eddings
• Jeff Hsu, Group Planning Manager, Microsoft, @jeffhsu
• Jeff King, Sr. Director, Search, eBay
• Jennifer Zeszut, CEO, Scout Labs, @jenniferland
• Jeremy Hylton, senior staff software engineer, Google profile
• Jeremy Hylton
• Jim Meyer, @purp
• Jim Murphy, VP Dev, PostRank, Blog, @jimmurphy
• John Borthwick, President and CEO, betaworks
• Tony Haile, General Manager, Chartbeat
• John Panzer, Google,  Blog, @jpanzer
• John Pozadzides, CEO, iFusion Labs http://woopra.com @johnpoz
• John Yamasaki, Community Evangelist Seesmic, Blog, @jyamasaki
• Jon Knight, Founder, Gimmee dot net, Blog, @gimmee_dotnet
• Julien Genestoux, Founder, Superfeedr, , Blog [@julien51
• Karan Gupta, Sr SW Engineer, Sony Computer Entertainment America
• Karla Leibowitz, Tech Liminal
• Ken Fromm Consultant Fromm Worldwide, @frommww
• [[http://www.kensheppardson.com|Ken Sheppardson], @kshep
• Kim Gaskins, Director of Content Development, Latitude Research, Blog, @latddotcom
• Kim-Mai Cutler, Reporter, VentureBeat, @kimmaicutler
• LA Lassek, Principal, L.A. Lassek Marketing Communications, @notinla
• Laura Forrest Marketing PeerPong
• Leah Culver, @leahculver
• LJ Rose
• Louis Moynihan, CEO, Dlvr.it, @divrit
• Lucas Thomas, Verdiggo, Inc., @Verdiggo
• Marcus Trevisani, CTO, Bintro, #, @trevisani
• Mark Cramer, CEO, Surf Canyon, Blog,
  @surfcanyon
• Mark Drummond, CEO, Wowd, Inc, Blog, @wowd
• Mark Williams, Senior community manager, LiveWorld, @markwilliams
• Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Martin Kallstrom, CEO, Twingly, Blog
  @martinkallstrom
• Marty Betz, Vice President, Technology, FirstRain Inc.
• Mary Hodder, founder, wellness mobile, @maryhodder
• Mary Trigiani, Spada Inc, @marytrigiani
• Matt Hodges, Product Marketing Specialist, Atlassian
• Megan Soto, LaunchSquad, @megansoto
• Monica Keller, Activity Streams Group Architect, MySpace, Blog, @ciberch
• Naveen Sanjeeva
• Nick Koudas, CEO, Sysomos, Blog, @sysomos
• Paul Pedersen, President, Co-Founder, Factery, Inc
• Petter Palander, ambadoo, Blog
  @ambadoo
• Pradeep Elankumaran, Director of R&D, Intridea, Inc. Blog, @pradeep24
• Raj Vemulapalli, Senior Director of Engineering, Yahoo! Inc http://www.yahoo.com
• Ravikant Cherukuri, Software Engineer, Microsoft Blog
  @rkdeexit
• Rebecca Povio, Marketing Manager, TextWise , Blog, @textwise
• Richard Hockley, Vice President, Morgan Stanley
• Richard Lusk, CEO, Miio
• Rob Cottingham, President, Social Signal, Blog, @RobCottingham
• Robb Miller, Vice President of Business Developmentl, KickApps
• Roland Osborne, Cofounder, Olark Blog, @olark
• Ron Sandel, strategy & business development yahoo!
• Sam Cece, CEO, StrongMail
• Samir Mehta Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger Yahoo! @mehtaman
• Sanjay Sood CTO, Allvoices, @sanjaysood
• Scott Hoffman Founder Cliqology, [@cliqology
• Scott Roberts
• Sean Gaddis COO FactoryLabs
• Shinichi Nagakura Managing Director Transcosmos Inc.
• Stephanie Bergman@StephanieBamBam
• Ted Roden Creative Technologist New York Times,  Blog, @tedroden
• Tim Marvin, Grassroots Organizer, Consumers Union, Defend Your Dollars, Not in My Food, Blog @pastoralvelo
• Tobias Peggs General Manager, OneRiot, Blog
  @tobiaspeggs
• Tom Hughes-Croucher, Yahoo! Inc., Blog, @sh1mmer
• Tom Whitnah Software Engineer Facebook, Blog
• Trey Ratcliff, Monkey with Camera, Stuck In Customs, @treyratcliff
• Ty Amell #
• Vasanthi Holtcamp, Principle Group Program Manager, MSN / Microsoft
• Wesly Michel, CEO, The Local Index
• WeslyMichel Will Palmeri @wpalmeri
• William Mougayar, Founder & CEO, Eqentia, Inc., Blog, @wmougayar
• Wilson Lau, Software Architect, Orange Labs
• Wolf Garbe, CEO, FAROO Limited, #, @faroo_p2p
• YY Lee, COO, FirstRain, @thisisyy
   

This data comes from a new report put out by Arbor Networks, who has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990's.

The biggest trend to come out of Arbor Networks' report is clearly that of the Internet's consolidation. Today's Internet is "flatter" and "more densely connected" than ever before, reveals Arbor Networks' Chief Research Officer Danny McPherson. Not only is Google the largest traffic source, there are only 30 large companies in addition to Google and including sites like Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube which now account for a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.

According to Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, this shift represents the Internet's move into a second phase where it's no longer "all about contacting websites." Rather, "over the past two years larger organizations have been buying up the smaller websites and by July 2009, 30 per cent of the internet was owned by a few large sites." The acquisitions, the result of billions of dollars spent by large companies snapping up smaller ones, has created a new Internet core of "hyper giants," a coin termed by the report.

The other companies making the list of Internet giants include names like Akamai, Limelight, BitGravity, Highwinds, and Gravity - hardly household names, and certainly not big telco providers. Instead, these content delivery networks (CDNs), are the new Internet backbone that help move large amounts of data across the web.

So Long P2P, Hello Streaming Media

Consolidation is not the only trend revealed by the new findings, however. The report also discovered a sharp decline in peer-to-peer traffic, which only two years prior peaked at 40% of all traffic worldwide. Today, while still a hefty number, P2P traffic has dropped down to 18%. Why the change? For the most part, the file-sharing that took place on networks like Limewire and Napster back in the late 90's and early 2000's, has now been largely replaced by streaming video thanks to to sites like YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix. Given easier and less technical ways of accessing media, consumers have begun to shift away from the headache of P2P to these new and often free or ad-supported sites. Today, as much as 20% of web traffic is video, Labovitz estimates.

As far as Internet traffic in general, more than half (52%) is web-based, up from 42% in 2007. The remaining traffic comes from email and private networks.

A "Dramatic" Shift?

"Saying the Internet has changed dramatically over the last five years is cliché - the Internet is always changing dramatically," notes Labovitz. "However, over the course of the last five years, we've witnessed the start of an equally dramatic shift in the fundamental business of the Internet." He adds, "as content is getting faster and better quality it will change the face of the internet."]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_accounts_for_6_of_all_internet_traffic.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_accounts_for_6_of_all_internet_traffic.php Google Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:38:11 -0800 Sarah Perez We're in the final days leading up to the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. People are coming from around the world to Mountain View, California this Thursday to talk about building and leveraging the diverse set of technologies referred-to as the real-time web.

You should join us! If you can't, though, please plan on checking out selected sessions throughout the day live video broadcast here on ReadWriteWeb, thanks to Justin.tv. If you can make it though, you should. Check out this incredible list below of people registered so far; these are people working on the real-time web and this week is your chance to put your head together with theirs.

You should register right now, because ticket prices are going to go up substantially on the day of the event.

The Latest List of Participants

• Baratunde Thurston, The Onion // Science Channel // Myself @baratunde
• Beth Kanter, nonprofit consultant
• Jason Shellen, CEO, Thing Labs Blog, @thinglabs
• Michael Lee, CEO, Thoora, #
• Srinivasan Venkatachary, Software Engineer, Google Inc #
• Mathew Honan, Contributing Editor, Wired magazine, Blog, @mat
• Daniel Freeman, Director of Product Marketing, Atlassian
• [[http://danschmidt.soup.io|Daniel, Schmidt], Senior Product Manager, CNET News, CBS Interactive @danielfschmidt
• Daniela Barbosa, Dow Jones/Dataportability Project, @danielabarbosa
• Nathaniel Cohen Director of Product and Strategy kgb_web @nathanielcohen
• Tikva Morowati, Director of Community Experience, kgb_web
• David Levitt Senior Software Engineer Evectors @dlevity
• Christina Allen, Executive Director Platform Product Management, Linden Labs [[http://www.twitter.com/allenleechris|@allenleechris]
• Heidi Nobantu Saul, Documentation Expert @nobantu
• John Bergmans Principal Engineer Bergmans Mechatronics LLC, @jbergmans
• Kristie Wells, President and Founder, Social Media Club, @kristiewells
• David Price Co-Founder, CEO, Black Tonic, Blog, @blacktonicapp
• Philippe Blanc Co-Founder, CEO, Black Tonic, Blog, @blacktonicapp
• Steve Woodward, CEO, Nozzl Media Inc. nozzlsteve
• Chase Reeves Dir. Marketing, Iterasi, Blog, @chase_reeves
• Tom Quiggle, Principal Architect, Yahoo! Inc.
• Stephen Garcia, Product Director, Yahoo!, @sgarciaDev
• Benjamin Diggles, Senior Manager Web Marketing, Webtrends, @mrdiggles
• Kovas Boguta, CTO, Infoharmoni,  Blog, @infoharmoni
• Paulius Jurgutis, CTO, Infoharmoni,  Blog, @infoharmoni
• Mark Jeffrey, CTO, Mahalo.com, Inc., @markjeffrey
• Patrick Chapman Director of Business Development Evri, @1trick4all
• Will Husinger Director of Business Development, Evri, @1trick4all
• Dan Chiao, Director of Engineering, Fliptop
  Dan Chiao
• Jeff Oh, Manager, SK Telecom @dirby5
• Phil Wolff, Prime Suspect, Under Indictment, Skype Journal, @evanwolf
• Adina Levin, Developer  Socialtext
• Adrian Chan, Owner gravity7  blog
• Aki Hashmi,  Allvoices
• Alex Kohlhofer, Technical Director, Electronic Arts
• Adina Levin, Developer  Socialtext
• Adrian Chan, Owner gravity7  blog
• Aki Hashmi,  Allvoices
• Alex Kohlhofer, Technical Director, Electronic Arts
• Allen Hurff, Entrepreneur, @allenhurff
• Amanda Krantz, President, notify.me  @amandakrantz
• Andrew Braun
• Andrew Weissman, COO betaworks
• Angela Kyle, co-founder, the realtime project @realtimeangela
• Ashish Kelkar Principal - Mergers & Integration Google Inc.  @askelkar
• Ben Metcalfe, Founder, Lead Consultant Swordfish Corp, blog @dotben
• Ben Tesch Lab Manager, msnbc.com,  blog   @magnetbox
• Bernard Moon, Vice President, Lunsford Group  @bernardmoon
• Bill Arconati, Product Marketing Manager, Atlassian blog @barconati
• Bill Flitter, CEO, Dlvr.it  @dlvrit
• Bill Johnston, Chief Community Officer, Forum One Communications Online Community Report  @BillJohnston
• Bill York, Wowd
• Bipul Sinha, Vice President, Blumberg Capital @bipulsinha
• Bjorn Milton CTO Twingly Blog @bjomi
• Borislav Agapiev, Founder & CTO Wowd Inc. Blog
• Brad Fitzpatrick, Software Engineer, Google @bradfitz
• Brett Slatkin, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
• Brian Hendrickson, Co-founder & Lead Developer, Nozzl Media, Inc Blog, @BrianJesse
• Brian Oberkirch, Managing Director, Blinksale, #
• Brian Zisk, Co-Founder, Collecta, Blog, @zisk
• Carson Kelly,  Business Development & Sales, Visual World, Inc., @carsonkelly
• Jake Stutzman, Creative Director, [[http://www.elevatevc.com|Elevate], @jstutzman
• Ed Lucero, TerraTacks
• Laura Merling Founder, Stretta Group @magicmerl
• Charlie Cauthen, Vice Pres, Cliqset Blog, @ccauthen
• Charlie Davidson, Attensa, Blog @charliedavidson
• Chris Haase, Community and QA Manager, YourVersion Blog @testjj
• Chris Saari, Technical Yahoo! Yahoo! @chrissaari
• Chris Yeh, VP Marketing, PBworks, @chrisyeh
• Damon Horowitz, Co-Founder and CTO, Aardvark, Blog
• Dan Miller, Sr. Analyst, Opus Research Blog, @dnm54
• Dan Olsen, CEO and Founder, YourVersion, Blog, @danolsen
• Darian Shimy, VP of Technology, Biz360, @dshimy
• Darius Dunlap,  Managing Director, SupportUX, @dariusdunlap
• Darren Bounds, Pres, Cliqset Blog, @dbounds
• Dave Badley, Web Developer, YourVersion, Blog
  @badave
• Dave Merriwether, Senior Director, Yahoo
• David Hardtke, Founder, Stinky Teddy, @stinkyteddy
• David Recordon, Senior Open Programs Manager, Facebook, Blog, @daveman692
• DavidShen, Betaworks Blog
• Deep Dhillon, CTO, Evri, Blog, @zang0
• Donovan Jones, CEO, VentureDeal, Blog, @venturedeal
• Doug Camplejohn, CEO, Fliptop, @fliptop
• Dustin Norlander, Chief Architect, Trendrr
• Eduardo Arriagada, Professor, [[http://www.uc.cl/fcom|Catholic University of Chile], Journalism, Blog, @earriagada
• Eran Shir, CEO, Dapper, @eranshir
• Eric Marcoullier, CEO, Gnip 2.0 Blog, @bpm140
• Eric Woodward, President, The Nambu Network Inc., @ejwc
• Erik Benson, Managing Director, Voyager Capital
• Etesh Mangray, Founder, Vinolist
• Ethan Gahng, CEO, Lazyfeed, Blog, @lazyfeed
• Evan Prodromou, CEO, StatusNet, Inc., Blog @evan on identi.ca
• Fabien Degaugue, Founder CEO, PeerPong, Blog, @fabien
• GabeWachob, Developer, Socialtext, @gwachob
• Gabriel Ortiz, CEO, Rarefied Technologies Blog, @signalnine
• George Joy, Dev Lead, Microsoft
• Gerry Campbell, CEO, Collecta, Blog, @gfcampbell
• Ginsu Yoon
• Greg Biggers, Chief Instigator & CEO, Ewakening,  Blog, @bigs
• Gregory Foster, Web Developer, Consumers Union, @gregoryfoster
• Hideaki Tanioka, Senior Software Engineer, Fujitsu Labs of America
• Iein Valdez, Director Product Development, Google Platform, Blog:Appirio, @iein
• Ilya Grigorik CTO PostRank, Blog, [[http://www.twitter.com/igrigorik|@igrigorik
• Jai Choi EIR Partech Int.
• Jason Hoyt, Director of Research, Mendeley, Blog, @jasonhoyt
• Jason Sattler Social Media Consultant, F-Secure, primarily, @jasonsattler
• Jay Simons VP Sales and Marketing, Atlassian
• Jeff Eastman, President, Windward Solutions Blog
• Jeff Eddings
• Jeff Hsu, Group Planning Manager, Microsoft, @jeffhsu
• Jeff King, Sr. Director, Search, eBay
• Jennifer Zeszut, CEO, Scout Labs, @jenniferland
• Jeremy Hylton, senior staff software engineer, Google profile
• Jeremy Hylton
• Jim Meyer, @purp
• Jim Murphy, VP Dev, PostRank, Blog, @jimmurphy
• John Borthwick, President and CEO, betaworks
• Tony Haile, General Manager, Chartbeat
• John Panzer, Google,  Blog, @jpanzer
• John Pozadzides, CEO, iFusion Labs http://woopra.com @johnpoz
• John Yamasaki, Community Evangelist Seesmic, Blog, @jyamasaki
• Jon Knight, Founder, Gimmee dot net, Blog, @gimmee_dotnet
• Julien Genestoux, Founder, Superfeedr, , Blog [@julien51
• Karan Gupta, Sr SW Engineer, Sony Computer Entertainment America
• Karla Leibowitz, Tech Liminal
• Ken Fromm Consultant Fromm Worldwide, @frommww
• [[http://www.kensheppardson.com|Ken Sheppardson], @kshep
• Kim Gaskins, Director of Content Development, Latitude Research, Blog, @latddotcom
• Kim-Mai Cutler, Reporter, VentureBeat, @kimmaicutler
• LA Lassek, Principal, L.A. Lassek Marketing Communications, @notinla
• Laura Forrest Marketing PeerPong
• Leah Culver, @leahculver
• LJ Rose
• Louis Moynihan, CEO, Dlvr.it, @divrit
• Lucas Thomas, Verdiggo, Inc., @Verdiggo
• Marcus Trevisani, CTO, Bintro, #, @trevisani
• Mark Cramer, CEO, Surf Canyon, Blog,
  @surfcanyon
• Mark Drummond, CEO, Wowd, Inc, Blog, @wowd
• Mark Williams, Senior community manager, LiveWorld, @markwilliams
• Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Martin Kallstrom, CEO, Twingly, Blog
  @martinkallstrom
• Marty Betz, Vice President, Technology, FirstRain Inc.
• Mary Hodder, founder, wellness mobile, @maryhodder
• Mary Trigiani, Spada Inc, @marytrigiani
• Matt Hodges, Product Marketing Specialist, Atlassian
• Megan Soto, LaunchSquad, @megansoto
• Monica Keller, Activity Streams Group Architect, MySpace, Blog, @ciberch
• Naveen Sanjeeva
• Nick Koudas, CEO, Sysomos, Blog, @sysomos
• Paul Pedersen, President, Co-Founder, Factery, Inc
• Petter Palander, ambadoo, Blog
  @ambadoo
• Pradeep Elankumaran, Director of R&D, Intridea, Inc. Blog, @pradeep24
• Raj Vemulapalli, Senior Director of Engineering, Yahoo! Inc http://www.yahoo.com
• Ravikant Cherukuri, Software Engineer, Microsoft Blog
  @rkdeexit
• Rebecca Povio, Marketing Manager, TextWise , Blog, @textwise
• Richard Hockley, Vice President, Morgan Stanley
• Richard Lusk, CEO, Miio
• Rob Cottingham, President, Social Signal, Blog, @RobCottingham
• Robb Miller, Vice President of Business Developmentl, KickApps
• Roland Osborne, Cofounder, Olark Blog, @olark
• Ron Sandel, strategy & business development yahoo!
• Sam Cece, CEO, StrongMail
• Samir Mehta Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger Yahoo! @mehtaman
• Sanjay Sood CTO, Allvoices, @sanjaysood
• Scott Hoffman Founder Cliqology, [@cliqology
• Scott Roberts
• Sean Gaddis COO FactoryLabs
• Shinichi Nagakura Managing Director Transcosmos Inc.
• Stephanie Bergman@StephanieBamBam
• Ted Roden Creative Technologist New York Times,  Blog, @tedroden
• Tim Marvin, Grassroots Organizer, Consumers Union, Defend Your Dollars, Not in My Food, Blog @pastoralvelo
• Tobias Peggs General Manager, OneRiot, Blog
  @tobiaspeggs
• Tom Hughes-Croucher, Yahoo! Inc., Blog, @sh1mmer
• Tom Whitnah Software Engineer Facebook, Blog
• Trey Ratcliff, Monkey with Camera, Stuck In Customs, @treyratcliff
• Ty Amell #
• Vasanthi Holtcamp, Principle Group Program Manager, MSN / Microsoft
• Wesly Michel, CEO, The Local Index
• WeslyMichel Will Palmeri @wpalmeri
• William Mougayar, Founder & CEO, Eqentia, Inc., Blog, @wmougayar
• Wilson Lau, Software Architect, Orange Labs
• Wolf Garbe, CEO, FAROO Limited, #, @faroo_p2p
• YY Lee, COO, FirstRain, @thisisyy
   

In case you're counting, there's not quite 200 people on that list yet - but add on the almost the entire RWW staff flying in from around the world and registrants still coming in this morning and we'll be past that number.

Want more info or to register? Click on over, right here. See you Thursday!

In fact, the Twitter fire hose may be less valuable than outsiders might think. We've been having extensive conversations with a wide variety of real-time web companies in preparation for the Real-Time Web Summit next week and we're lead to question the value of Twitter links for two reasons.

First, there aren't really that many links that get passed through Twitter. The service may be the most visible example of real-time communication but there's a whole lot more going on around the web in real time outside of Twitter. Twitter may see between 3 and 5 million links shared through it each day. Those are heavily biased towards the relatively small number of active content creators on the site and much of it is spam or republished RSS feeds.

Almost every real-time search company we've spoken to has chosen to supplement the indexing power of Twitter with other, larger data sources. OneRiot, for example, says it collects 4X more links from the click-streams that its toolbar users have opted-in to sharing than it does from Twitter. Faroo and Wowd both rely on P2P clients to power indexing far beyond what they can get from Twitter. Implicit behavior offers a lot more data than explicit behavior.

AllVoices uses a whitelist of trusted Twitter users to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and Evri watches trends on Twitter to trigger the building out of their index of the much larger web outside Twitter.

Evri also does some really interesting semantic parsing of the contents of those tweets, adding links as pivot points to the news entities people mention in text. Almost all of the companies we talked to had to do extensive text analysis of Tweets and the pages they linked to. That may not be difficult for Google or Microsoft, but is quick discovery of a few million new links a day challenging enough for them to be worth a big price tag?

You want real-time web links? There are probably already more blog posts being pushed out in real time for free consumption using Pubsubhubbub and RSSCloud than there are links shared on Twitter. As we discussed in our recent post Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action, there's a lot more going on around the web outside of Twitter. Much as we love Twitter, most people suspect its growth is slowing. The rest of the real-time web is believed to be at the beginning of an explosion of growth that will take over the entire internet - eventually almost all information online may be pushed to those who want it, in real time.

Why else do we question the value of the full fire hose? Business Insider reports today that Twitter is already selling access to startups for up to $3k per month. It's hard to know how credible that number is but that's a really low price.

We do know that many startups feel they can get a representative sample of Twitter activity from the company's free API. Twitter may be having a hard time up-selling to the full feed if what's already available is good enough and its crown jewels can't be proven to be that much better.

We love Twitter and with some serious clean-up it may provide big search companies a handy little bundle of high-interest links to advertise against. Is it valuable enough for Google and Microsoft to pay big money for, though? We're not so sure.

Come join us and some very smart people from throughout the diverse real-time web industry to discuss this and related topics next week at the Real-Time Web Summit.

If you can't make it to Mountain View, California in eight days, get ready to watch selected sessions streamed live online (thanks to Justin.tv). This isn't going to be talking-heads pushing their products on stage, this is going to be a high-value brainstorming, networking and collaborative learning. Check out the companies below; they are bringing financial support to this important gathering to talk together about the future of the internet.

Now check out these fabulous sponsors.

Enterprise

TIBCO

TIBCO's technology digitized Wall Street in the '80s with its event-driven "Information Bus" software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the '90s. Today, TIBCO's infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions.

Filtering

PostRank

PostRank offers a website and developer tools that make sense of social engagement data on the web. Want to discover the bloggers with the most reader-engagement or the blog posts that are hottest, in any niche? PostRank will do that for you, in real time. Whether you're a very large company or an individual blogger, PostRank can do things for you that no one else can. We at ReadWriteWeb like and use PostRank a lot.

Search

Faroo

Faroo is a P2P real-time search engine that combines explicit and implicit data to power its indexing and ranking technologies. The company specializes in difficult real-time analysis of international content, like breaking up long strings of Chinese characters for text analysis.

Publishing

WordPress

WordPress is one of the world's leading blog publishing services and software. WordPress made free real-time updates from millions of blogs available last month.

Aggregation

Nomee

Nomee is an application to manage the most important parts of your digital life. The Nomee desktop client aggregates activity updates from more than 120 different sites that your friends and favorite public figures are using, filters those streams and lets you view media in a beautiful interface.

These sponsors have made an important move in supporting the Real-Time Web Summit so please check out their products. If you're interested in sponsoring the event as well, it will be worth your while. Contact sales@readwriteweb.com for info.

Please join us for this important conversation on October 15th in Mountain View, California and streaming live online.

Flash-based P2P Video

For TinyChat, the ability to route these videos around its servers means reduced bandwidth costs. Once this feature becomes part of the default TinyChat setup, only calls with more than 2 participants will have to go through the company's servers and as TinyChat's founder Dan Blake told us earlier today, the experience of switching between the P2P chat and the server-based version should be completely seamless.

Unlike other P2P solutions, TinyChat is able to leverage a plugin that virtually all users already have on their machines and users don't have to download another plugin. All a user needs is a webcam and a microphone. Currently, when you are chatting on the P2P server, your privacy is also protected, as the service simply won't allow a third user to listen in or join the call.

We want to take a moment to highlight five international companies that will be at the Summit. We really appreciate the distance they are traveling to help make this event an important one. You can learn about more highlighted participants signed up so far on this page and you can sign up to join us here.

Faroo (UK)

Faroo is a P2P real-time search engine that combines explicit and implicit data to power its indexing and ranking technologies. The company specializes in difficult real-time analysis of international content, like breaking up long strings of Chinese characters for text analysis. Faroo is also a sponsor of the Real-Time Web Summit, so they are helping it happen as well as helping its international relevance!

PostRank (Canada)

PostRank provides social media analytics on top of traditional web content analytics. We've written about PostRank over and over again here (we're going to again later today) and we use their technology every day. We're very excited that PostRank is going so strong that it's a major sponsor of the Summit as well.

Mendeley (UK)

Mendeley Research Networks is a fascinating real-time citation tracking, recommendation and organization tool for scientific research papers. It's backed by founders of Last.fm and Skype. It's like Last.fm for scientific research. The company believes it is on a pace to have the largest online repository of academic articles in the world sometime next year.

Twingly (Sweden)

Twingly offers blog search, trackback discovery and comment aggregation in real time. The company already has a thriving business providing real-time inbound links for European newspapers and just launched a new product called Twingly Channels this week. (Watch this space for a review later today.)

Sysomos (Canada)

Some of these companies are bringing multiple representatives and we hope that even more international participants will sign up in the next two weeks leading up to the event. To register to join these companies and many more at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, please visit this link. Feeling unable to make it? Make sure to put the event down on your calendar anyway, we'll be broadcasting select discussion sessions live via Justin.tv. See you on the 15th!

Indeed it will.

Within the SELFMAN project, there are four key areas determined to be vital in order for a distributed application to have the ability to manage itself: self-configuring, self-tuning, self-healing, and self-protecting.

To configure itself, an application needs to track all of its components, update them when needed, and make sure that all the different pieces are able to communicate with each other. Within the SELFMAN system, an individual component can be queried for this information, such as its version number and which other components it interacts with. If the version number is out-of-date, it would be automatically updated.

The self-tuning piece of the system involves having the application automatically adjust to changing loads as well as changes taking place among the various nodes on the network. To do so, it uses a load-balancing algorithm that detects overloads, node crashes, and other disruptions.

What was more challenging for the researchers was the self defense aspect of the SELFMAN system. They discovered that the safest systems were not those in which nodes are directly linked, but those in which nodes can communicate with other nodes in just a few steps. Within these sorts of networks, dubbed "small world" networks, the SELFMAN security service can automatically detect abnormal behavior and eject bad nodes as needed.

Results So Far

Already the team has had promising results. For example, Scalaris, an open-source scalable transactional storage for Web 2.0 services won first prize in the IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge 2008. Peer-to-peer video streaming application PeerTV uses SELFMAN to quickly test an evaluate new P2P components. There's also a demo of a distributed Wikipedia that can handle more queries than the current version and a graphics program that lets multiple users collaborate on a design.

Van Roy believes that SELFMAN represents the first step towards an internet filled with "unbreakable" applications. "Right now we're just scratching the surface," he says.

For more information about these applications, stay tuned to ICT Results, a European research tracking firm, which will soon highlight the various applications in more detail.