Remember Web TV? It's still around, believe it or not, now rebranded as MSN TV. With a set-top box and keyboard, you can browse the web from the comfort of your couch. For whatever reason, it didn't take off. From personal experience, after some initial oohs and aahs, our household quickly grew bored with our Web TV box. If you used the service, too, you probably felt the same.

Why didn't it work? Perhaps people didn't really want to use a keyboard in their living room. Or perhaps it just launched too soon. Its heyday was in the 1990's, a time when there wasn't as much compelling content to view. This was long before the launch of sites like YouTube and Hulu. Because of this and more, Web TV never became the revolution that it intended to be.

But today we're seeing a new attempt to revive the the goal of bringing the "internet to your living room." Instead of Web TV, what we're seeing instead are televisions being dubbed "connected TVs."

The New Connected TV

Sans set-top box, these new "connected" TVs have all the web-enabling components built right in. This apparently is what will be the reason for their success this time around...if you believe the hype.

One of the better integrations involves Netflix's deal with Korea's LG Electronics, Inc.Their partnership which will deliver a new line of high-def TVs with the Netflix service built directly into the set itself. With 12,000 titles to choose from at launch, this connected TV is one that's sure to become quite popular if the company can get the pricing right.

Other TV manufacturers including Samsung, Sony, LG, and VIZIO introduced sets with Yahoo widget technology integrated into their products. These widgets don't just provide Yahoo content like Sports and News, but rather deliver a platform on which widgets can be built. Says Yahoo, their platform allows developers to extend their "brand, services, and content" to new users by creating TV widgets using Yahoo's Widget Engine.

Yahoo Widget Engine, Now for the TV

The Yahoo Widget Engine evolved from the Konfabulator platform, a product that delivered some of the very first web-enabled apps that floated on your computer's desktop. These widgets give you quick access to information and news which you can see without having to keep a browser window open.

Now those same web-enabled widgets can be ported over to digital TVs. The Widget Engine provides an entry-level framework and Widget Development Kit (WDK) which allows developers to code for the constrained hardware capabilities of these new connected TVs. In addition, Yahoo's Widget Channel API will provide access to internet technologies including Konfabulator's JavaScript and XML as well as HTML.

There are already a few Yahoo! TV widgets available now and several more have been announced as coming soon. In the upcoming section, widgets from Showtime, Netflix, Blockbuster on Demand, CinemaNow, The New York Times, USA Today Sports, CBS Fantasy Football, Rallypoint Fantasy Sports, Acedo Funspot Games, Flickr, and, of course, Yahoo (News, Weather, Finance, and Video), have been announced.

Twitter from Your TV

Lest we forgot: there will also be a Twitter widget available. That widget alone could usher in a whole new area of interactive television. As we've already seen on channels like CNN, some reporters are currently using Twitter to gather real-time information about events from TV viewers. Imagine how many more people could participate if Twitter was enabled on the television itself. Outside of news, other shows could potentially use Twitter for entertainment purposes, enabling a live back channel where you could Twitter your thoughts or questions about the content you were viewing.

MySpace Brings Social Networking to the TV

Among the widgets available today, Yahoo has announced an eBay widget, a CBS Entertainment widget, and a MySpace widget. It's the MySpace one that's garnered the most press so far as it will enable two-way interaction with the social network and your friends while watching TV.

MySpace widget users will be able to receive dynamic updates from friends, read and respond to messages, browse friends' profiles, photos, and requests, and see status and mood updates. It takes the solitary act of watching TV and turns it into what could be a more social experience. It's easy to imagine groups of friends watching shows together, messaging each other throughout the viewing.

The MySpace widget, like several others, will be ad-supported. That raises the question if these new widgets could become a source of advertising revenue for content producers. As more people time shift TV shows for later viewing, skipping through the commercials with their remote, TV shows' advertising revenues have been affected. Now, TV networks could easily create and deliver widgets for their most popular shows, letting fans interact with each other whenever they watched, as they do on the numerous forum-like TV message boards found across the internet today.

Of course, we could be getting ahead of ourselves here with that last idea - nothing of the sort has been announced. Still, we think it would be a great idea. (Who wouldn't want to join a live backchannel of ABC's "Lost", for example? What is that smoke monster?)

Will Connected TVs Succeed?

Will the new internet-connected TVs work where Web TV failed? It's possible. For one thing, this time we're not just transplanting the internet in its entirety to the living room, where many people already stash their netbooks and notebooks for the quick Google search or email check during their TV viewing.

Instead, the TV experience is simply being enhanced by the web-enabled technologies - which you can choose to use or not use as you wish. If you're just relaxing, you may want to just enjoy the normal passive TV experience. But for certain events - favorite shows, sports, breaking news - you may choose to interact with others via the widgets over social media like MySpace and Twitter. Other widgets like News and Entertainment listings will also be convenient ways to get bite-sized information without having to pull out the computer.

The key point here with these new connected TVs is that the widgets don't interrupt what people think of as the "TV experience." Explains Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist and director of the user experience group in Intel's digital-home group, people have extremely strong bonds to their TV sets. "Any effort to add internet content needs to be just as simple and not interfere with the experiences and behavior patterns the users enjoy." What that means, she says, is that the interaction needs to take place using a conventional remote control - not a computer keyboard or on-screen web browser.

The only question that remains is whether people will buy a new TV just for the widgets? Probably not. This is a fun addition, but not a major technology breakthrough like HDTV. Still, if you're out shopping for a new TV anyway, a connected TV may certainly make your list as one of the sets to consider.

As Robert Scoble points out, a journalist is supposed to "report the news, not make it." (Unless, perhaps, you're aiming for some sort of gonzo-style connection with your story -- but Fear and Loathing at CES this was not.) But making news isn't really what Gizmodo was doing, at least not according to Brian Lam. Their prank was not intended to give them something to report, rather says Lam, it was intended to demonstrate their independent spirit.

"When did journalists become the protectors of corporations? When did this industry, defined by pranksters like Woz, get so serious and in-the-pocket of big business?" Lam asked in his blogged response to critics of last week's prank. Though I think he is making a rather extraordinary leap (how is criticism of a sophomoric prank evidence of pandering to corporations?), Lam does make some very good points about integrity and journalism.

"You don't get more access by selling out for press credentials first chance you get, kowtowing to corporations and tradeshows and playing nice," he writes, "you earn your respect by fact finding, reporting, having untouchable integrity, provocative coverage and gaining readers through your reputation for those things."

All true! But that's where Lam loses it: when he uses his treatise on integrity in journalism as a defense for a prank that showed an utter lack of integrity (or if not that, at the very least it showed a complete absence of class). "Our prank pays homage to the notion of independence and independent reporting. And no matter how much access the companies give us, we won't ever stop being irreverent. That's what this prank was about and what the press should understand," claims Lam.

Sorry, Brian, that's not what the prank demonstrated. What it showed was that your employees don't know how to behave in a public, civilized setting. You can still ask the tough questions, demand the the truth, not publish corporate talking points, and check facts before publishing without acting like delinquents. Irreverence shouldn't mean classlessness, and independence shouldn't demand that you act like misbehaving children at professional trade shows.

In the long run, who will the prank hurt? Probably no one. CES isn't likely going to stop handing out blogger credentials (except to the single Gizmodo blogger they banned for pulling the stunt), companies aren't likely going to stop inviting bloggers to press events or take us off their press release lists or deny us any of the access we've gained (though some companies may take Gizmodo less seriously). And as Lam says, the TVs turn back on. But please, Mr. Lam, don't try to equate a silly prank with a show of journalistic integretity. Annoying people at CES doesn't make you a better journalist -- or a journalist at all, for that matter.

Toward the end of today's post, Lam mentions his blog's interview with Bill Gates. "We got the guy to open up and talk about Windows and its shortcomings like he never has before, not even on 60 minutes," Lam says. "If that's not journalism, I don't know what is. If we had been in the pocket of this industry, we never would have asked such a risky question."

That is the sort of thing that makes you a journalist. And what's wrong with letting the questions you ask prove your independent spirit? No amount of silly pranks will ever do so much to prove your integrity as will the actual reporting you do. That's something that any blogger who wants to be taken seriously as a journalist must learn. Actions might speak louder than words, but not if your actions are juvenile stunts that obscure your reporting.

Highlights this week: Our coverage of CES, including Web product and strategy announcements from Microsoft and Yahoo!; Google and Facebook join DataPortability Workgroup; a review of the latest Web adventure for television show Lost; an analysis of the 'killer apps' for the Semantic Web; some new, stunning, stats from the world of podcasting; Newsgator releases its premium products for free; and predictions for next week's Macworld conference.

This week CES, the famous consumer electronics tradeshow, was held in Las Vegas. As we do every year, ReadWriteWeb covered the big Web Technology announcements made at CES.

One of the highlights was the keynote of Bill Gates (his last at CES), which is traditionally a showcase of the latest in Microsoft technology. This year there were a slew of products and partnerships announced, including a deal with NBC on an Olympics '08 website built with Silverlight technology. Overall Gates and co's presentation was less futuristic vision this year; and more about beta products and what's coming in 2008. In other words, it was much less about Internet-connected fridges, and more about what you can do now on your Xbox 360. Read our full review to find out where Microsoft is headed on the Web in 2008.

In related news, this week Microsoft announced a $1.2 billion takeover offer for Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer.

Yahoo also were active at CES. Yahoo! announced last Sunday night that it will be turning its mobile service, Yahoo! Go, into an open platform for 3rd party developers. Unlike Google's Android OS, the Yahoo! Go platform will work on more than 250 mobile devices that Go already works on. The following day Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang was on stage at CES, showing a fascinating glimpse into the future of Yahoo. Yang outlined a product strategy that takes the simplicity and all-in-one portal approach that Yahoo! is famous for - and pushes it into the digital life arena by utilizing email, social networking, mobile and widgets. In Yang's words, Yahoo! aims to be the "most essential starting point for your life".

Also see Marshall's post about Flickr enabling OpenID.

Our network blog last100 had a great round-up of the Internet TV announcements at CES. Steve O'Hear saw a lot of products that bridge the gap between the PC and TV, or bring Internet content directly to a television. Highlights included the SlingCatcher (Sling Media), D-Link’s newly launched PC-on-TV Player, TiVo Desktop 2.6 (TiVo), and Internet-connected TVs from Sharp, Samsung and Panasonic.

Other Web News: Google and Facebook join DataPortability Workgroup

We broke the story this week that Google and Facebook had joined the Portability Workgroup. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, this announcement may turn out to be a very important one in the history of the internet.

Later in the week, The Data Portability Working Group announced that key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and Twitter are joining the group too.

Trends

15 Questions for an Early Facebook User

Alex Iskold's sister Julia was one of the first users of Facebook. She is now a senior at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University and will be graduating in May. He thought it would be interesting to interview her about the Facebook and her experiences with it over the years. In this post is the revealing 15 question interview.

Related: Reported Upcoming Facebook Features: Good, Obvious, Confusing and Hide Facebook Apps: Official Tool Coming Soon

The Obama Bump Felt on Facebook

Ah, what a difference a caucus makes. In November, when ABC and Facebook announced their partnership for US political coverage we, like many other tech pundits, expressed skepticism. We noted that polls on the Facebook politics section were drawing just around 1,000 participants -- "a microscopic number" compared to the 17 million US members of voting age on the site (now over 18 million). But just over a month later, things seem to have turned around completely.

Wizzard Media: 1 Billion Downloads in 2007, Podcasting Far from Dead

Wizzard Media, owners of the Libsyn, Switchpod and Blast Podcast networks, announced that it passed the 1 billion download mark in 2007. While online media consumption numbers are notoriously hard to verify, Wizzard's have some serious merit. They are ten times what several competitors claimed earlier this month.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Web Products

Semantic Web: What Is The Killer App?

The Semantic Web has been in the making for some time and people think it is nearing maturity. We have written about this trend extensively, with our two most notable posts being an analysis of the challenges of the classic bottom-up approach and the promise of the new top-down one. Regardless of how the Semantic Web will come about, for it to flourish it needs to hit the mainstream. There is no way that consumers will appreciate the elegance and mathematical soundness of RDF and OWL. People don't care about math, they care about utility and even more, about fun. What the Semantic Web needs, then, is a killer app.

ABC's Web Adventure for Lost - The Future of Entertainment

It begins with billboards spotted in exotic places like Knoxville, Tennessee and Ames, Iowa and posted online by curious Lost fans. The billboards advertise a URL, "FlyOceanicAir.com." Upon visiting the website, you are sucked into an adventure involving multiple websites, video diaries, photos with text hidden among the pixels, clue hunts, and strategy games. You can even call a toll-free phone number and get progress updates about the search for missing Oceanic Flight 815. Interesting characters and mysteries keep web players engaged and new content is posted at seemingly random intervals, forcing frequent check-ins to see if there's anything new.

So begins Lost's second Alternate Reality Game, which new RWW author Sarah Perez investigated...

The Many Faces of Hulu

Part of Hulu's strategy is to not only be a destination, but also a hub for the distribution of content from NBC Universal and News Corp. They do this in two ways: 1. by letting ordinary users embed clips elsewhere on the web, and 2. by partnering with major media sites to deliver commercial content. The result is that consumers have a number of choices for where they can view the content on Hulu.com. In this post we took a look at a handful of Hulu-powered sites, including Hulu itself.

NewsGator Sets RSS Readers Free - Will Desktop Readers Make a Comeback?

NewsGator, which offers the most complete end-to-end suite of RSS reader tools on the market and possibly the most widely used offline readers (NetNewsWire and FeedDemon), announced that its most popular products would be set free. As in beer. According to NewsGator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker, the reason for going free is simple: "What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients [...] we want our clients to become ubiquitous."

We ran a poll based on this news, asking: What type of RSS Reader do you use the most? Here are the results:

Web-based (e.g. Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo) 42%
Desktop (e.g. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire) 39%
Email-based client (e.g. Thunderbird, Newsgator) 4%
I subscribe to emails from individual blogs 1%
Start page (e.g. Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle) 11%
Portal-based (e.g. MyYahoo, ThePortNetwork) 1%
Browser (e.g. Firefox Live Bookmarks, IE, Flock) 2%
Other (please comment) 1%

Related: AideRSS Raises Money To Attack Information Overload

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Macworld Predictions

While CES was raging in Las Vegas, many were wondering what Apple has in store for their own annual expo, Macworld, which kicks off this coming Monday. We've combed through some of the top Mac rumors sites to pick out our favorite Macworld predictions and assigned a percentage of probability to each.

Last year it was the iPhone, two years ago it was the Intel iMac, the year before that the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini. While clearly, not every year is as exciting as the last, Apple always has something in store for us.

Related: Poll: What Will Be Announced at Macworld?

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

The service, however, is not usable yet. Try logging in to an OpenID enabled site using your Flickr URL and you'll get this message: "Hey there! You have stopped by a bit sooner than we had expected. This feature is still being tested, so please check back in a few days. " So Flickr is set to become one more of a long list of accounts you can use to login to a relative handful of websites.

Yahoo! probably has more adherents than G*d, so meaningful OpenID support company wide would blow the doors wide open. That's not likely to be what happens.

Update: See also https://me.yahoo.com/ - all the more reason to be optimistic. I never give people enough credit when writing posts like this!

Is this all there is?

When big vendors offer to authenticate your identity to the mostly tiny sites around the web that accept outside OpenID credentials, it's hard to get excited about that anymore. I've got an OpenID account and would like to use it to login to Yahoo! services.

To be fair, I said it was a let down when Google recently enabled OpenID login to the commenting on their beta version of Blogger and it was only a week or two until all of Blogger allowed OpenID from any other provider. That's still a small start but it is something and it's a major vendor acting as a relying party instead of just an authenticating party. That's where the big turn in the road is.

I sure hope Yahoo! is going to announce more than slow experimentation with being an authenticating party at CES. Remember AOL's big OpenID announcement? It's good for nothing but PR - they haven't done anything with it, haven't educated their users about it, nothing. It's good PR for OpenID advocates too, but otherwise it's a let down.

These major vendors also don't seem to do much beyond simple authentication. Check out our coverage of SpreadOpenID for a discussion about what kinds of awesomeness are possible. Let's see some awesomeness around OpenID at CES, can we Yahoo!?

Maybe I'm being an unappreciative jerk though. Maybe this is plenty of cause for OpenID supporters to celebrate.

Products, Products, Products

Let's take a closer look at exactly what was announced...

This year Gates' keynote mentioned the following products:

• Vista - according to Gates, Microsoft has sold more than 100 million Windows Vista licenses to date.
• IPTV (Internet TV) - British Telecom, TNT and CNN have developed apps for Microsoft Mediaroom Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform; e.g. TNT has enabled users "to view NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races from the driver’s vantage point by choosing from a series of in-car cameras". CNN is also doing an app for the US presidential elections. Microsoft says Mediaroom is running on 1 million set-top boxes worldwide. It also announced a new offering called DVR Anywhere, allowing users to watch their recorded programs on multiple TVs in the home, and a partnership with Samsung for HD content streaming from TV to PC.
• XBox (see below)
• Zune - since the November launch of Zune Social, currently in beta, Microsoft says that "more than 1.5 million people have joined the music-focused social network", which it says is proof that "Zune is tapping into consumers’ desire to share their musical passions with their broader community." However, Zune is clearly well below sales of the iPod - so probably not too much can be read into this. It is though encouraging to see Microsoft trying to extend online music experience past the 'closed shop' of iTunes; that may compel Apple to open up their iTunes platform a little more (we can only hope!).
• a new GPS-powered version of Tellme, Microsoft’s "voice-and-visual mobile service" that enables people to use voice commands on their phone as input, then receive output back visually on their phone screen. The example given was that "a person can “call” the Web on a mobile phone and say “movies” and the software will recognize where the person is located and send to that mobile phone’s screen a list of the theaters closest to that location."
• the Surface touch-screen computer; it's UI was Gates' main focus, but he also showed how Surface can send images directly to its social network product, Windows Live Spaces. Gates told the BBC that "in five years we'll have many tens of million of people sitting browsing their photos, browsing their music, organising their lives using this type of touch interface."
• Voice-activated technology for the car; including Sync, an "in-car communications and infotainment system for mobile phones and digital music players that has been available in select Ford models since September."
• 3D mapping - according to Webware "Gates predicts 3D environments will go with you: In the store, on the street, and so on. Devices will, of course, know your location."
• Windows Live users: 420 million worldwide

Digital dream becomes reality: Gates and Robbie Bach jam with Slash; photo by jidnet

Partnerships: NBC, ABC, Disney, MGM

As is now customary with Microsoft, there were a lot of partnerships announced with big media and electronics companies.

The most notable is a deal with NBC on an Olympics '08 website built with Silverlight technology - Microsoft's cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering online video. The site will host more than 3,000 hours of live and on-demand video of Olympic events. It will be ad-supported, with Microsoft and NBC sharing revenue. The site will be at NBCOlympics.com on MSN; and it's being touted as "the official U.S. online home of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing." Users will be able to get custom feeds of just the events they're interested in.

Another big partnership was with ABC and Disney Channel, for their programs to appear on Xbox Live Video. In other 'big media' action, Microsoft partnered with MGM to bring the latter's movies to Xbox LIVE. Both of these partnerships aim to bolster Microsoft's Internet TV ambitions for Xbox 360. Already Microsoft claims more than 10 million Xbox LIVE members, so the content deals will undoubtedly make the Xbox 360 platform more attractive - especially as they are high-definition. The company boasted that it will have twice the on-demand content than any cable or satellite provider. Clearly Microsoft is targeting Apple TV, although Xbox 360 is also fighting a double front - with Sony in gaming. Xbox 360 registered 17.7 million consoles this holiday season, more than Microsoft expected.

Conclusion

Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet remarked that this year's Gates keynote was less futuristic. I actually see that as a good thing, because it means we're seeing more actual products and services. Sure, we heard the usual talk about Windows software "connecting people", enabling rich UIs, device integration, and so on. But the number of real living products on display, and the equally impressive roster of big company partnerships, shows that Microsoft is delivering circa 2008. Although you could also fairly argue that Vista is still far from a success story and Zune is the poor cousin of the iPod still. Not to mention the Windows Live branding debacle.

Overall though, Microsoft's attack on the Internet front is paying off - particularly with Xbox 360 and its various Internet TV initiatives. Mobile is starting to look stronger too, with leaked info about Windows Mobile 7 showing support for an iPhone-like gesture interface. And Gates said in his keynote that Windows Mobile got "over 10 million new users last year, and we'll double that next year."

Microsoft is talking the talk, after years of the futuristic fridge taking center stage. Now, a Web-enabled fridge that plays Xbox games while sharing music with the Zune - that would be something...

Top photo: Joakim Baage