Feedly is much more than just another way to read feeds. Although it originally got its start as an alternative UI to Google Reader, today the service is part RSS reader, part social network aggregator, and part search utility. Since its launch in 2008, Feedly's developer Edwin Khodabakchian has constantly added new features including Twitter and FriendFeed integrations, a river of news view, search tools, Mozilla Ubiquity integration, a Feedly "mini" toolbar, and  so much more.

Once installed, a click of a browser button transports you to the Feedly start page where you can browse through the latest news, comment, star, share, discuss, and search through the articles displayed. As you read through the items, your activity is seamlessly synced back to Google Reader.

Although voracious RSS readers who subscribe to thousands of feeds may find using Feedly a bit slower than using Google Reader itself, a good many of the more casual consumers of RSS prefer Feedly's clean, easy-to-scan interface to Google Reader's more utilitarian look and feel.

Feedly for Chrome

The new Chrome version of Feedly is virtually identical to the one available for Firefox with only two major exceptions: there is no Gmail integration or Feedly mini toolbar available in the Chrome version just yet. The toolbar is one of Feedly's many innovative features which provides a floating bar that hovers at the bottom of your screen as you surf through blogs on the web. Toolbar buttons show you various pieces of metadata about the blog post you're reading, including number of Diggs and number of Google Reader shares. You can also save or share the post yourself in Google Reader or tweet a link to article, among other things.

However, according to Khodabakchian, Feedly mini's omission isn't due to any technical issues. Instead, he notes in the comments of a Feedly blog post that the mini toolbar is in the process of being redesigned and when the Firefox version is complete and stable, he will then look into building a toolbar for Chrome. The estimated timeframe for its inclusion into the Chrome beta is 6-8 weeks.

How to Install Feedly for Chrome

In order to run Feedly for Chrome, you'll need to first install a dev build of the Google Chrome browser. These dev ("developer") versions of Chrome aren't as stable as the public release but allow you to play with yet-to-launch features like Google Chrome extensions, for example. And for Mac and Linux users, the dev release is your only option because Google has yet to provide stable versions of Chrome for those two operating systems as of yet.

After installing the dev release, you'll need to add the new Feedly extension to the browser.

Here's how to get started:

1. Download and install the Chrome 4.0 Dev Channel: Windows | Mac | Linux 32-bit | Linux 64-bit
2. Restart Chrome to make sure that you are running the 4.0 version.
3. Load http://update.feedly.com/release/feedly.crx to install Feedly
4. Click on the Feedly icon on the chrome toolbar to load your Feedly.

After you have Feedly up-and-running, you can receive support through the company's Get Satisfaction page or by emailing feedly-chrome AT devhd.com. You can also tweet @feedly_chrome with questions, comments, and other feedback.

We're beyond excited to see Feedly on Chrome - although it was relatively easy to give up most of our Firefox extensions when we made the move to the Chrome browser, Feedly was one of the few that was sorely missed. However, if you're a more cautious user hesitant to install test builds of your browser and experimental extensions, you may not have to wait much longer before you can play with fully functional and stable versions of both. Yesterday, Google put out the call for developers to begin submitting their extensions for inclusion in the upcoming Chrome extension gallery, a step that signifies that this feature is closer than ever to launching. When the time comes, we're sure that Feedly will be among the top-rated extensions found there.

The new logos are just a preview of AOL's revamped look and are meant to replace AOL's swoosh triangle for good. The AOL "running man," however, will stick around the brand in some form, although the company isn't saying exactly where he will show up.

But the updated logos are a little off-putting to some. Noted technology blogger Om Malik of GigaOM posted his gut reaction Sunday night, calling them out as "lame," "ambiguous at best," and "as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie WALL-E." Ouch!

But it's easy to see where he's coming from. After all, some of the logos look more like the sorts of doodles you would find gracing high-schoolers' notebooks - like the hand doing the "sign of the horns" hand gesture. Really. "Rock on!," shouts the logo, but it reminds us more of a middle-aged heavy metal fan reminiscing about their youth than the young, hip company AOL desperately hopes to become.

Then there is the pink glob. The best way to describe this logo is a fluffy wad of bubble gum. A green scribble looks like someone had trouble getting their ballpoint ink pen going and a generic blue swirl seems to signify nothing but a lack of imagination. What content sites are these logos even associated with? Your guess is as good as ours.

CNET calls the goldfish logo "cute" (sarcastically?), but AOL isn't trying to build the next LOLcats empire, so maybe they should have forgone "cute" for something a little more meaningful and modern.

But that's just our opinion. What's yours? Let us know in the poll below.

In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted. In a follow-up post, we look at current statistics for online retail.

Recommendations Technology Advances

Over the past decade the online retail industry has seen great strides in the use of recommendations technology. Amazon has consistently led the field in this, with its sophisticated blend of personalized, social and item recommendations.

Many of the retail recommendations in use today rely on implicit user data. These systems typically track user data, which is then analyzed with a set of usually proprietary algorithms. The end result: recommendations for users. Earlier this year we looked into Baynote's recommendation system:

"Baynote observes real-time user behavior on a site and looks for implicit, emergent patterns. It uses collective intelligence and an affinity engine to analyze the data. Common behaviors which it tracks include page refers, queries, mouse movement, time spent on a page, peer behavior."

Other similar recommendation technologies we've profiled include MyBuys, ATG and richrelevance.

Social Media Takes Retail to Blogs, Social Networks

As with nearly every other industry, shopping sites have increasingly used social media to promote their wares.

According to Shop.org's recent eHoliday Study, 47.1% of retailers surveyed will be increasing their use of social media this holiday season. Specifically, more than half of retailers have "added or improved their Facebook page (60.3%) and Twitter pages (58.7%)" this year. Nearly two-thirds (65.6%) have "added or enhanced blogs and RSS feeds" over the same time period.

One result of this has been a big increase in implicit social recommendations data across social networks and blogs.

Another trend with ecommerce sites is distributed sales. Anyone can embed an Amazon store into their blog or social network these days. As Kurt Collins of social commerce vendor Cartfly told us in December, this won't replace "end destination e-commerce" - but it will "augment sales tremendously" at the edge of the network.

Mobile Commerce Arrives, Albeit Slowly...

The growth of mobile phones has been a big trend this decade. However, as Sarah Perez wrote in September, mobile commerce in the U.S. market has struggled for momentum.

According to data from eMarketer, more than 70 million U.S. mobile phone users will access the internet from their devices this year. Despite this, the m-commerce market remains immature. In an April 2009 survey by RIS News, privacy and security concerns are still at the forefront of both shoppers' and retailers' minds.

There is some promise that mobile commerce will finally gain traction in the coming decade. Mobile payments firm Billing Revolution found that on-the-go consumers are happy to purchase small ticket items like pizza and movie tickets, for example.

One market that has shown strong signs of mobile commerce growth is Japan, according to Morgan Stanley.

See also our analysis of mobile payments.

Conclusion

New recommendations technologies make it easier every year for consumers to find what they want, social media has driven a lot of retail activity to small websites and social networks, and mobile commerce has slowly but surely gained a foothold in e-commerce.

These are just some of the trends in e-commerce over the past 10 years. While Amazon.com and eBay continue to be the giants of online retail, the Social Web and advances in web technology have both had a big impact this decade.

See also:

• Online Retail Thriving: 8% Growth Expected This Holiday Season
• Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music
• Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapup by RSS or by email (form below).

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Web Trends

Obama: "I Have Never Used Twitter"

Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students this week at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse's Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July. President Obama has never used Twitter, despite his account being the most followed there.

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.

How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years (Stats)

Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.

Unfriending: Are People Online Shedding Friends? (Debate)

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year this week. Its selection? unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook. Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. Marshall Kirkpatrick disagrees with him. Both make their cases in this post and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.

The Top 10 Mobile Applications of 2012

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Google Sites Offers Templates; Claims It's Easier Than Sharepoint

Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting this week, Google will provide templates that make it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets. Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Future of Music Coalition's Brian Zisk: The Do's of Streaming Music

In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they'd been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today's music environment.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

The Google Chrome OS Press Event

Google held a press event this week outlining more details about its Google Chrome OS. Google plans to launch Chrome OS next year. Google is positioning Chrome OS as "just a browser" - that is, all of your data is in the cloud. Chrome OS will be focused on speed, simplicity, security; every application on Chrome OS will be a web application. Google sees Chrome OS as targeting 3 trends: netbooks, cloud (everything is a web app today), phones getting computing capabilities.

Twitter.com Is Still the Most Popular Twitter Client - TweetDeck a Distant Second

Twitter's own homepage is still the most popular tool for users to update their status on Twitter. Around 46% of all updates are made directly on the site. Social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos analyzed 500 million tweets it collected over the past 5 months and found that TweetDeck is the most popular third-party client. TweetDeck has a comfortable lead with a 8.48% share of the market, followed by Tweetie, Twitterific and Seesmic.

A Central Nervous System for Earth: HP's Ambitious Sensor Network

HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). It's a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors."

Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects

Microsoft Live Labs' latest creation has just launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks impressive and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.

Droid Becomes Fastest-Selling Android Phone to Date

The Motorola Droid is the newest smartphone on the market to compete for the iPhone's crown. Released by Verizon Wireless on November 6th, the Droid's advertising campaign has been a full-frontal attack on the popular Apple smartphone with a heavy focus on what the iPhone doesn't do. "iDon't run simultaneous apps, iDon't have a real keyboard, iDon't take 5-megapixel pictures," taunts Verizon's Droid ad.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Just as Johannes Gutenberg's printing press brought books to the mainstream public in the 15th century, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web brought commercial publishing to the people.

Blogging

Blogging not only allowed anybody to publish easily to the Web, it ended up shaking up the print media world.

Blogging began in the 90s as a form of online diary - Rebecca Blood wrote a good pre-history in 2000. One of the early popular blogging services was Blogger.com, launched by Evan Williams (who subsequently became a co-founder of Twitter) and Meg Hourihan in August 1999. The service was acquired by Google in February 2003, a couple of months before ReadWriteWeb began. At that point, 2003, blogging was still seen as an informal diary-type of publishing.

Around 2004-05, blogging started to become accepted as a legitimate news source. This was around the time that ReadWriteWeb began to publish tech news, as well as analysis.

By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers - proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years.

RSS

Blogging software was one part of the democratization of media. RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") was another. There were and still are different versions of RSS, created by Dave Winer and others. But whatever the flavor, syndication has had a major impact on media.

Basically RSS allowed people to subscribe to updates from blogs and other publications. Using RSS Aggregators, people could read news from a selection of niche and general news publications.

Blogs were the first to utilize RSS, but mainstream media followed during the 2005-06 period. Today it is very rare for a major news website - whether it be the New York Times or a leading blog - not to use RSS.

Twitter & The Real-Time Web

The next major development in news media occurred towards the end of this decade. It was of course Twitter and the Real-Time Web.

To be fair, this has challenged not only traditional media - but blogs as well. Now anyone, whether they're a writer or not, can publish 140 characters to the Web. And it might end up as breaking news, as the Hudsen River plane crash proved earlier this year.

Media in the Next Decade

There is much talk of the mainstream media "dying" and blogs usurping traditional media companies like the New York Times. While it's true that blogs sometimes report breaking news stories or analyze them better than newspaper websites, I'm a big believer in the power of brand. Washington Post, Wall St Journal, New York Times - these are all powerful brands and they reach a much wider audience than the vast majority of blogs.

The challenge of course for mainstream media is to (drastically) reduce their costs, because few people want to pay for content these days - news or otherwise.

However, in my view the traditional news media industry is in much less danger of extinction than the music industry. Musicians can bypass record labels completely nowadays, but there will always be a need for news to be questioned, put in context and analyzed. The best media publications of the next 10 years will do that and be successful, the ones that don't will fade away.

See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music

Standardized legal documents for technical specifications may not seem like the sexiest thing in the the world - but this is actually pretty exciting news. Developments like this could be a key part of the foundation that online service providers need to move forward on a long list of great ideas for ways to serve their users.

People come up with crazy ideas for making the web work better all the time. This agreement aims to provide an easy way to make it safe to implement those ideas. The companies participating have spent large amounts of time and money negotiating the agreement, now anyone can take advantage of the fruits of that labor at no cost.

Existing specifications that will be placed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement, per the announcement today, include:

• Syndicated media delivery spec Media RSS (currently controlled by Yahoo!)


• Secure 3rd party authentication spec OAuth Core and Wrap (from Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft)


• Real-time feed protocol PubSubHubbub (Google)


• Comment aggregation protocol Salmon (Google)


• Web Slice Format (Microsoft)


• And several others.

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?

You've hit the one billion downloads mark and captured a truly significant percentage of Internet browser users. And you've got a hardcore community of open-source developers and fans who contribute to the thousands of extensions, plugins, and skins that make the user experience so customizable. But most importantly, you helped pave the way for the creation and mainstream proliferation of a bunch of nifty alternative browsers and provided impetus for aggressive improvements to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Moving forward from the motivational fanfare, Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard at the Hacks.Mozilla.Org blog has a rather in-depth and interesting post on the rise of modern web browsing, the triumph of standards in web development, the hackable goodness that is browser UI customization, user generated content and geeky stuff like RSS, APIs, and JSON

He concludes, "Mozilla has been at the heart of many of the issues of the Internet over the last five years. We've vastly improved the browsing experience for hundreds of millions of people around the world. We've managed to keep Microsoft honest and forced them to release newer versions of their browsers. Firefox's presence was a large factor in Apple being able to ship a browser to its user base as the Mac came back to the market. We've made it possible for third party browser vendors like Google to enter the market."

He noted that future releases of Firefox with deal with issues such as users' sharing data with websites, more open video codecs and improvements to mobile browsing.

Over at the Mozilla blog, the company's flack Melissa Shapiro shares some interesting stats. Since Mozilla's auspicious one-million-downloads-in-four-days start, she writes, "that number has swelled to over 330 million users worldwide; almost a quarter of Internet users worldwide choose Firefox. Today, Firefox ships in more than 70 languages and offers users more than 7,000 add-ons to help customize their browsing experience."

In fact, some websites report that nearly half their visitors are Firefox users. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg writes that Firefox users represent nearly 46 percent of Wordpress' blog stats as opposed to Internet Explorer users, who comprise around 39 percent. "This is the first time I've ever seen Firefox pass IE in market share for a mainstream audience like WordPress.com has," said Mullenweg.

Firefox is sharing its official, worldwide celebration with users everywhere via their special anniversary site, where folks can share pics and videos from their Firefox parties or submit commemorative poster designs.

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Web Trends

The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media

Two companies that produce massive quantities of new content every day, Answers.com and Demand Media, are rapidly moving up the list of top U.S. web properties, as measured by comScore. Answers.com has risen from #26 to #13 in just two months, and Demand Media has risen from #24 to #15 in the same time period. Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web?

As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

Amazon Turns Twitter into a Marketplace - Are You Concerned?

This week, Amazon sent out emails to their Amazon Associates members touting the latest addition to the company's affiliate program: a new feature called "Share with Twitter." According to the email, participants can generate "tweetable" links to any Amazon product after first logging into their Associates account. After updating Twitter, any person who clicks through on the link and makes a purchase will earn the participant referral fees payable through the Associates program.

Thanks to Mozilla, Web Gets Less Ugly, Good Type Gets Machine Readable

Recently, a consortium of type designers and web designers have gathered around a new font format specification called Web Open Font Format (WOFF). The format would allow more typefaces to appear across the web and to be readable by both humans and search engines. With support from Mozilla announced with the release of Firefox 3.6, the question of web fonts might be satisfactorily resolved in the near future.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Enterprise 2.0: Declaring War Does Not Work

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week, Andrew McAfee made a few points about the approach to enterprise technology and how it might be changed. McAffee, of the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, is considered the father of Enterprise 2.0. His views reflect how Enterprise 2.0 is evolving but still with a fair degree of resistance for its adoption.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad: Newbies Take the Stage

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, we witnessed some of the enterprise community's brightest new stars. Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad offered early-stage companies a chance to shine. In a gong-show like presentation series, the four finalists took to the stage to battle it out for the title of best newcomer.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Discovering Great iPhone Apps: 5 Recommendation Services Compared

The iPhone App Store is a blessing and a curse. It's one of the best things about the mobile platform, but it's so popular that finding great new apps to download can be a real challenge. Where there's a monetizable pain-point, services will flower! Enter a variety of new iPhone app recommendation services that aim to point you toward your next download and pocket the affiliate fees for paid apps.

Below we've posted a chart comparing the features of 5 new services for iPhone app discovery.

The New MSN: Will More White Space and Local News Make You Visit It?

Microsoft announced this week a radical redesign of its MSN homepage. Today's MSN homepage for the US market is a busy mix of ads, hundreds of links and some customizable local news and weather widgets. The redesign, MSN's first major redesign since 2004, puts a new emphasis on search, local news, video and integration with social networks. The new page features more white space, a tabbed design and a new MSN logo.

The Very Strange Story of the Startup That Says It Made $10m Before Launching

Ben Behrouzi came from the shadowy Lead Generation business, but some people in that field said he played too dirty. Now he's got a real-time search engine that just came out of beta today, called Leapfish, and he says the company will already report $10 million in revenue this year despite having barely launched to the public. This is a strange story, so consider suspending your disbelief so you can see what Leapfish has to offer.

PayPal's X: A Platform to Pick Your Pocket

After waiting for two months for PayPal to release its much-anticipated platform, the day finally arrived for PayPal X. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's announcement in late July and this week, at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition Center, developers and press people waited with baited breath to see what was earlier described as a "platform as ubiquitous as the electrical outlet."

Ribbit Launches Google Voice Challenger

Ribbit announced this week the launch of Ribbit Mobile. Ribbit Mobile is a cloud-based VoIP telephony service that brings together web-based calling, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions. It is hard to look at Ribbit Mobile without comparing it to Google Voice. Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users a new phone number or they can use call forwarding. Ribbit Mobile also has quite a few features that Google doesn't offer, including the ability to make calls from within the browser.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Below we've listed 13 different tools that let you create your own iPhone applications, none of which require knowledge of Objective C, the programming language used to build apps for the iPhone OS .

What it Does: Sweb Apps offers an online service which lets anyone build their own iPhone apps even if they don't know how to code. Designed with small business owners in mind, the company offers pre-created templates which you can customize with different background images and your own custom icons if desired. Otherwise, you're welcome to use the graphics provided by the company's own image library. After picking the category for your app (Restaurant, Retail, Business, etc.), you choose the buttons you want to include (Menu, Directions, Map, etc.). You can even create a mobile storefront where Sweb Apps manages your inventory. 

How Much it Costs: The company offers four-, six- and eight-button packages, which all include a one-time set-up fee of $50 per button. Then there is a $25 monthly hosting fee applied to every application going forward

Our coverage: Build Your Own iPhone App with New Service from Sweb Apps and Sweb Apps 2.0: Build Your Own Mobile Storefront for the iPhone

2. AppIncubator

What it Does: Think you have a great idea for an iPhone app but not the skills to build it yourself. Like Apple says: "there's an app for that!" The AppIncubator iPhone App from MEDL Mobile lets you submit your ideas which the company's development team will then build into apps for you. App submissions can be sent in via the iPhone app or by way of the company website. Once received, you go online to use the company's "storyboard" tool to sketch out in more detail how you imagine the app working.

How Much it Costs: Using the service or downloading the iPhone app itself is free, but MEDL Mobile takes a cut of the profits after the app goes live in the iTunes App Store. 25% of the total revenue is shared with you and the company keeps the rest.

Our coverage: This iPhone App Helps You Make iPhone Apps

3. Kanchoo

Kanchoo is another platform that allows content producers to create native iPhone applications, this one is designed for news organizations. To use the service, you provide the company with an iPhone application icon, a splash screen (in .png format) and a description of your application which will be used in the iTunes App Store. Then, using their online tools, you build your app by uploading the content which can consist of either photos or news articles.

How Much it Costs: Basic account holders pay $88 for creation of their iPhone application and submission to the iTunes App Store along with a $28 per month fee for bandwidth and hosting.

4. AppBreeder

What it Does: AppBreeder is another DIY app builder service, similar to SwebApps. Where SwebApps offers categories to choose from, AppBreeder offers "App-Kits." These are pre-defined collections of app settings which include gadgets, icons, and behavioral elements. There are kits for a wide range of industries including everything from real estate to legal and bands to restaurants. You use the kits as a jumping off point to start building your app and then add or remove gadgets as your needs require. After building your app, you can then publish it to the iTunes App Store. However, AppBreeder isn't just limited to the iPhone - it also lets you publish apps for Blackberry and Android devices as well. (Note: the company's website says that "due to sudden demand spike" AppBreeder's build and publishing tools will be unavailable until Nov. 30th.) 

How Much it Costs: AppBreeder offers different packages depending on whether your app will be ad supported or ad-free and which platforms you plan to distribute it on. Ad supported apps are free, iPhone web apps are $9.95 - 14.95, native iPhone apps are $29.95, and the iPhone/Blackberry/Android app package is $39.95 - 49.95.

5. MyAppBuilder

What it Does: MyAppBuilder is a service that creates iPhone applications designed to help you sell your content. Whether that's books, music, videos, etc., the service turns any content into an app. You can also use MyAppBuilder to create custom quizzes, apps that are fed by Twitter pages, or you can turn your blog into an app by way of its RSS feed. To use the online app builder, you login to the service's "Control Panel" where you submit details about your app including content, features, flow, and image files. The company then uses this information to create an app for you which is sent back to you for review. After you approve the app, MyAppBuilder submits it to the iTunes App Store on your behalf.

How Much it Costs: The service is available for a fee of $29 per month. There is also a $20 processing fee to compile your data, put it in the appropriate format, and submit it to the App Store for review.

6. BuildAnApp

What it Does: BuildAnApp is another DIY cross-platform app builder designed for small businesses, community groups and professional service organizations. Using the web-based service, you can pick and choose from the company's customizable templates to create apps for the iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile platforms. As with Sweb Apps, creators can use their own graphics or choose images from the company's own online gallery. A special feature of this service is its ability to house an email distribution list that will notify end users to download the application once it becomes available. (Note: this service is currently in private beta testing right now. You can sign up here to be notified when it's available).

How Much it Costs: The company says pricing has not yet been determined but will be "competitive" with similar services.

7. eBookApp

What it Does: The eBook App Maker is a service specifically designed to create iPhone apps from eBooks. The app builder supports nearly all digital formats including PDF, Doc, Zip, CHM, HTML, TXT, FB2, PDB, PRC, Mobi, PDB, MHT, RTF. eBook creators can also specify various fonts and sizes, can add images and notes, can lock the orientation to landscape or portrait, and more.

How Much it Costs: The company's site doesn't publicly list its pricing but offers a "request a quote" form instead.

8. GameSalad

What it Does: GameSalad is a downloadable tool for creating games without needing to know programming or scripting. Using the company's visual editing software, you can create games which can then be published to both the web and to the iPhone. GameSalad offers a suite of "interactions" and attributes which you can add into your game to create the action. You can also drag-and-drop art files and sound files from your computer into the game builder, too. As you create the game, you can tweak the various elements during the building process and can preview what the game looks like before compiling it. 

How Much it Costs: The company offers a basic, free version of GameSalad which lets you publish to the web, but not the iPhone. For iPhone games, there are two versions available: the Express version for $99/year and the Pro version for $1999/year.

Our coverage: Gendai Games Launches GameSalad Beta

9. MobileRoadie

What it Does: Mobile Roadie is an application builder that lets bands create their own custom iPhone applications which can include content like photo galleries, streaming music files, YouTube videos, upcoming concert listings, lyrics, news, Twitter and RSS feeds, and even interactive features like a "wall" where fans can post comments and photos.  The app can also link to Ticketmaster and LiveNation ticket sales information and to the band's album(s) on iTunes.

How Much it Costs: There is a $499 set up fee for Mobile Roadie followed by a $29/month fee for the first 100 installs. To get rid of the 1 cent per install fee, bands can choose to host their own content instead.

10. MobBase

What it Does: Similar to Mobile Roadie, MobBase is also an app creation tool designed for bands. Without needing programming skills, musicians can create apps that include videos, images, bios, band news, streaming playlists, concert schedules and links for music purchases. The tool, offered by MixMatchMusic,

How Much it Costs: Applications are $20 dollars to activate. Free apps are priced at $15 dollars a month for the first 500 installs with $5 dollars per additional 1000 downloads. Paid apps cost $20 dollars per month for the first 500 installs and $6 dollars per month for each additional 1000. MobBase does not take any application sales fees in regards to revenue share. The company also receives 5% of purchased music downloads.

11. Rhomobile

What it Does: Rhomobile does require that you know how to code, but only HTML and Ruby, not the Objective C required for building iPhone apps. Developers can build any application and then use Rhomobile to deploy their app anywhere - including the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, or Android marketplaces.

How Much it Costs: The Rhodes framework is free for developers who open source their applications under GPLv3. Commercial Rhodes licenses are also available at $500 per application and commercial RhoSync server licenses are available based upon the planned number of users connected to the server.

12. PhoneGap

What it Does: Like Rhomobile above, PhoneGap is also an open source development tool for building mobile apps. Also like PhoneGap, you do need to know how to code, but this time, you just need to know HTML and Java as opposed to the iPhone's Objective C. With this tool, you can build apps for iPhone, Blackberry, and Android while also taking advantage of the phones' native features like geolocation, the accelerometer, sound and more.

How Much it Costs: PhoneGap is completely open source and free to use.

Our coverage: PhoneGap: People's Choice Winner at Web 2.0 Expo Launch Pad

13. RedLaser

What it Does: Red Laser is an iPhone application that lets you scan barcodes with your iPhone in order to compare the in-store price with other online deals. However, with the latest version of the application, RedLaser 2.2, you can create your own custom barcode scanning apps. To do so, first download the updated application from the iTunes App Store, then visit www.redlaser.com/apps from the iPhone's web browser. Follow the instructions on the page to set up your own application - you'll need to fill in data like the URL of the site you want to compare prices with, the URL for the app icon, etc. When complete, tap the "build app" button. The completed app can then be added to your homescreen. Although this app is designed more for personal use and not resale, it's still worth checking out if you want to create your own barcode scanning application without needing to know how to code.

How Much it Costs: RedLaser is available on the iTunes App Store for $1.99.

Update!

While this post was by no means meant to be a definitive list, it's amazing the response it's received in both the comments and via email. So many people have asked "how could you forget.. this company or that?" OK, Appcelerator was an oversight, but as far as the others, they just weren't on my radar. Here's a few of the ones that received multiple mentions:

• TapLynx: A DIY solution for building apps without coding.
• MobileAppLoader: Another DIY solution for building iPhone apps without code.
• MobileStoreMaker: A DIY solution for making a mobile storefront for iPhone.
• Appcelerator: Like Rhomobile and PhoneGap, you do need to code, but you don't need to know Objective C. Instead, you can build iPhone apps with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Python, PHP and Ruby instead.

• MobiOne: An iPhone emulator that lets you build iPhone apps by coding them using your web development skills.
• Appanda: A system that lets you build apps through RSS, links and manual uploads. Still in beta.

However, there are tons of others, too. Really - tons! Hop into the comments section to see even more suggestions from their users and fans.

As the number of real-time feeds available around the web has rapidly grown over recent months with the rise of real-time publishing technologies, the big question has been: when will a major feed reader consume these feeds? Google Reader may be too complex and too slow-moving to be first; that Netvibes is going to steal the show should be no surprise.

Code named Wasabi, the version will go into private beta later this week and will launch to the public at December's Le Web conference in Paris, where the theme of the event is the real-time web.

Support for real-time feeds has so far been much stronger on the publisher side than the consumer technology side. With blog publishing services WordPress, Blogger and Typepad all adding Pubsubhubbub or RSSCloud feeds to their offerings, there are now hundreds of millions of real-time feeds available in those two formats. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer's own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds. Real time didn't come up in interviews this week with the creators of NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Google Reader implemented very limited support for PubSubHubbub in August, just pushing a Hubbub feed of "shared items" from Reader to the now-Facebook owned FriendFeed. In that case Google Reader was playing the part of the publisher and FriendFeed was the reader. Google's Brad Fitzpatrick has told us that when PubSubHubbub support allowed FriendFeed to wait for updates from Reader, instead of polling regularly to check for updates, traffic between the two services was cut by 85%.

From decreased server costs to an improved experience for users to increased time-on-site, the benefits of real-time feeds can be many. Can Netvibes pull off integration of real-time feeds into its existing dashboard product? Some developers experimenting with these new real-time feeds elsewhere have reported stumbling blocks in the process, and Netvibes hasn't had a perfect record of service for users in all locations around the world, either. Long caching of feeds has been an issue for Netvibes, though, and this update will cut down substantially on the delays that users see after feeds of interest have published new content.

Invitations to the private beta will roll out later this week, giving a few hundred users an opportunity to see the new Netvibes for themselves.

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Web Trends

Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

Mobile Web's Explosive Growth

Mobile ad firm AdMob has revealed the dramatic changes the mobile industry has seen in their latest Mobile Metrics Report. It was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone in America. One year later and half of the top ten are touchscreen devices, six include Wi-Fi capabilities, and six have mobile application stores. And as you would expect, this new crop of super-powered phones are making heavy use of the mobile web.

Why Aren't VCs Backing Augmented Reality?

Some people believe that Augmented Reality (AR), the class of technologies that place images or data on top of other views of the physical world, could be the web browser of the future. AR has rocketed out of the research labs and is catching mass market interest fast - e.g. mobile phones displaying restaurant reviews when you look through your phone's camera. Why then are VCs not investing more in Augmented Reality? Here are three reasons why we think investment in this sector has been slow so far.

Facebook Announces Roadmap for Developers

This week Facebook published a developer roadmap outlining upcoming relevant changes and a rough timeline for each. Changes include developer access to user emails, more prominent app displays on user profiles, all-new homepage dashboards for apps and games, and improvements to Open Graph and Analytics APIs. Read on for details and screenshots of the new faces of Facebook apps.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Calendaring, Scheduling Meetings: Timebridge CEO Interview Reveals Strategic Importance of This Space

We have looked at Calendaring many times (such as in our round-up of 10 players). In our own work, we have started working with both Tungle and Doodle. To understand more about why this market is strategically interesting, we recently spoke with Yori Nelken, CEO of Timebridge (see our previous coverage here).

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Paul Graham: Priority Access to Twitter Is Practical Necessity

If hardcore hackers had any doubts whether the real-time web was a legitimate development environment, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham is dispelling them. In an interview with Graham, ReadWriteWeb learned that the entrepreneur-turned-investor issued a "Request for Startups" (RFS) asking for ideas from companies utilizing Twitter and Justin.tv's live video API. Groups who are accepted to Y-Combinator and fall under these categories will be given "priority access" to Twitter and Justin.tv.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Google Wave Use Cases: Education

Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a 'Preview' product shortly after and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September. Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? We started this series by looking at the education sector.

What are Hulu's Mysterious Plans?

Everyone is looking to Hulu as the future of Internet TV. A joint venture between several major networks, Hulu delivers free, ad-supported programming via online streams - an untested model for long-term profitability, at least when it comes to television. While consumers have been enjoying the service since its launch in 2007, recent statements by a News Corp exec have people wondering: can Hulu make the ad-supported model work? Or does the company have other plans?

Google Launches Music Search: Partners with MySpace, Lala, Gracenote and Others

This week Google announced the launch of Google Music. This new service is powered by Lala and MySpace's iLike. Other partners include Gracenote, iMeem, Pandora and Rhapsody. Google has also partnered with the major music labels: EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. Through Lala and iLike, Google will also be able to feature music from a large number of independent labels.

Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs

Social Search went live in Google Labs this week. Google announced that it was working on this Social Search feature at the Web 2.0 Summit last week. Social Search taps into a user's social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user's own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.

Brizzly Adds Facebook - Aims to be The Blogger.com of Social Media

Brizzly wants to be to microblogging what Blogger.com was to blogging five years ago. Currently, Brizzly offers a user-friendly browser-based interface for Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook integration went live this weekand more social media applications will be added as the product evolves. Brizzly shares much of the same philosophy as Blogger. It's simple to use and aims to make microblogging easy to understand and use by a mainstream audience.

Currently Brizzly is in private beta, but ReadWriteWeb has scored 2000 invites for our readers to test it out! (see the post for the code).

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Real-Time Web Crawling in the Future?

Although only briefly mentioned in the post, Google hinted that they may begin looking into other mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub, an open protocol that provides near-instant notifications of change updates. No further details were provided beyond the one sentence, but the announcement clearly shows that Google has seen the writing on the wall and knows that the real-time web is the future. This is one trend the company isn't planning to ignore.

The real-time web, heavily influenced by the speed of Twitter and other other rapid-fire social networking updates, has created a desire among internet users for faster access to information. This desire has, in turn, led to the creation of new real-time protocols such as the above mentioned PubSubHubbub and its counterpart RSSCloud. If Google began to use these technologies for scanning the web, their search results wouldn't just be updated faster - they would be updated in real-time. That means information would become available in the search results listings as soon as it was published to the web.

That, of course, would lead to a whole new series of challenges for the search engine - most notably, how to rank the real-time results? Given that Google's search algorithm has been built on top of the concept of PageRank, a way to determine the relevance of a website by what other sites link to it, ranking search results that are so fresh that there is an absence of links could prove a difficult feat. However, Google is already doing this to some extent now. Over time, the PageRank algorithm has evolved and can now reward sites with fresher, more fitting content and rank them higher than sites with more links on some occasions. And if anyone can figure out the proper algorithm for mixing in real-time content and ranking it appropriately along with static pages, it's got to be Google. In fact, we'll probably soon see exactly how they plan on addressing this issue, when they incorporate Twitter search results into their index, as announced last week.

...But Until Then, Google Delivering Faster, Fresher Results Instead

Although the PubSubHubbub mention may have been the most exiting part of the announcement, real-time search results aren't here just yet. In the meantime, we have to just be content with sped up results instead. The post advises website owners who are blocking Google's search bot software known as Googlebot from crawling their RSS/Atom feeds to unblock it via their robots.txt file. If unsure, webmasters can test their feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools, as the post recommends.

Conversations are distributed and fragmented; a blog post's comments will almost surely appear on a number of sites other than the author's blog. Considering factors from Facebook shares, likes, and posts to comments on Google Reader or even content curators such as Hacker News, site owners have found it increasingly difficult over the past year or so to efficiently and effectively collect all the sentiments, media, entities, and data associated with any given piece of content. Salmon is a protocol that addresses this specific issue, and engineer John Panzer has begun an open-source project to help unify the conversations of the synaptic web.

After the Summit, Panzer chose to expand Salmon's presence to include an open-source project and a Google groups-powered mailing list.

In order to increase the visibility of aggregated content and interactions to the original source of web content, content creators can include a Salmon link in RSS or Atom feeds. Readers or aggregators then realize the feed is Salmon-enabled and remembers the URL. When a user comments to the feed item, the aggregator then posts a version of the comment to the endpoint. Panzer and others cite real-time notification protocol PubSubHubbub as the ideal push mechanism for this process.

According to the protocol summary, "The usual result is for the salmon to be published along with other comments on the source's web page. Note that sources are not obligated to actually publish the salmon - they may moderate them, spam block them, aggregate, or analyze them instead. However, if the source does publish the salmon in a comment feed, it has to maintain certain fields to make the protocol work end-to-end."

In an influential blog post, Louis Gray writes, "PubSubHubbub essentially works as a middle-man conduit, taking information from a data's source passing along changed data to downstream destination sites. The proposed Salmon Protocol would similarly watch both source and destination sites for comments, and upon discovering new comments, it would send the new comments to the site which is lacking the full conversation. If multiple downstream destinations are designated, the Salmon Protocol will also populate these multiple sites."

In this way, Salmon reflects the aims of such commenting services as Disqus and JS-Kit's Echo, both of which attempt to gather and push distributed data around blog content.

Right now, the project site contains the Python/Google AppEngine source code for the Salmon demo. Writes Panzer, "I also intend to host the actual spec text there for the moment, along with the reference implementation code, and develop both in parallel based on discussions on the mailing list."

Interested developers are encouraged to join the mailing list and contribute to the conversation.

Unless you subscribe to the unlimited plan, the only issue with Deep Dyve's new plan is that you can rent articles but not print them. This is a minor issue, however, because most users are just looking at these articles for a few facts or a bibliography and don't need them for extended periods of time. At $19.99 per month, the unlimited plan is cheaper than buying one article from a journal per month, so the price of the service won't be an issue for most of the service's target audience anyway.

Target Audience: Knowledge Workers

Depp Dyve says that its target audience is the 50 million knowledge workers in the US. This is a somewhat optimistic view. After all, how many of these knowledge workers need access to the latest articles from the Journal of Leukocyte Biology? Still, there clearly is an untapped market here, and no one but Deep Dyve is trying to exploit it.

Disruptive or Just an Extension of the Publishers' Business Model?

Deep Dyve offers users a plethora of features, including persistent searches, email, RSS alerts and the ability to bookmark articles. What is most interesting about the company, however, is this new and potentially disruptive business model. The company has indexed over 30 million articles from thousands of journals. Most of these weren't easily available to the public until now. Few users would buy an article for $30 when confronted with a journal paywall. $0.99, though, is a far more palatable price.

According to the company's CEO Bill Park, the publishers that are working with Deep Dyve believe that this new model will help them expand their market without cannibalizing their current business model, which is mostly based on selling institutional subscriptions anyway.

It will be interesting to see how users react to this new service. We think this has the potential to be a very disruptive service, especially if Deep Dyve continues to expand its database and partnerships at the current pace.