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Web Trends

Bits Of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business: Part 1

"Bits of destruction" is a phrase Fred Wilson uses to describe the destructive part of "creative destruction" brought on by digitization. We hear a lot about the destruction wrought on the newspaper business. A more interesting and nuanced wave is now hitting the book publishing business. Actually, it is three waves: the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand.

Breaking News Online: How One 19-Year Old Is Shaking Up Online Media

Michael van Poppel used to be like a lot of young people, trawling the internet for interesting news about the world. Just like many others have considered doing, he created a place where he could post the most interesting news he finds, as fast as he can. Today he's one of the most-watched movers and shakers in online news media - and he's not yet twenty years old.

Are You Over AIR Applications?

When Adobe AIR was first released, we were in love. These glorious rich internet applications let us interact with web services outside our browser. More complex than simple desktop widgets, these programs delivered the web to us in beautiful little packages. But recently, we've begun to question AIR's longevity. There's no reason why these apps couldn't just run in a browser instead...and that might even be a better place for them. 

Cross Reality Will Change Your Life, But at What Cost to Your Privacy?

Yesterday we explored an emerging trend called "Cross Reality", one term for when sensor networks meet online virtual worlds. As this trend becomes more common over the next few years (and it will, as both Web-connected sensors and virtual reality ramp up), what are the implications on how people use the Web? How will it change our interactions in both real and virtual life?

Facebook at 250 Million Users: Could it Be Too Big?

Facebook announced this week that it now has 250 million users, having added 50 million new users in just the past three months. If Facebook was a country it would now be the 4th most populous place on earth. But could Facebook be too big? It has centralized an incredible amount of power over a huge number of peoples' lives; the texture of Facebook now shapes the pattern of a substantial portion of human communication around the world.

Teens Not Into Twitter, TV, Radio, or Newspapers, Reports Young Morgan Stanley Intern

Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old intern at analyst firm Morgan Stanley recently helped compile a report about teenage media habits. Robson's report isn't even based on any sort of statistical analysis, just good ol' fashioned teenage honesty. He noted that teens aren't into traditional media (think TV, radio, newspapers) and yet they're eschewing some new media, too, including sites like Twitter.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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The Four Essential Apps for Distributed Teams

Distributed teams. Virtual work. Placeless offices. Whatever you want to call them, groups who work from geographically separate locations are more common than ever. Despite how widespread this mode of coordinating work has become, there are those still wondering just what tools are absolutely crucial to making a distributed team work. Here's a list of the four types of applications you'll need, and some examples of the popular places to get them.

ReadWriteStart

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

A Startup Movie: Never Mind the Valley, Here's Boulder

It's no secret that we at ReadWriteWeb have a lot of love for startups that make their homes outside Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. We've decided to make a few videos spotlighting some unique, unexpected locations where startups thrive, where tech scenes are vibrant, where cooperation outstrips competition, and where creativity runs rampant. One of the first cities we'd like to introduce you to is home to between 150 and 170 startups as well as a thriving entrepreneurial and creative community. Welcome to Boulder, Colorado.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

How Did it Get so Popular? Apple's App Store Hits 1.5 Billion Downloads and 65,000 Apps

This week, Apple announced that iPhone and iPod touch users have now downloaded over 1.5 billion applications. According to Apple, there are now also over 100,000 developers in the iPhone Developer Program and over 65,000 apps in the store. Given this huge success of the App Store, it is worth thinking about the factors that contributed to the App Store's success and what Apple could do to make the store even better.

See also: Using an Unlocked iPhone? Forget About Push-Enabled Apps

Siri: Virtual Personal Assistant Prepares For Debut

Siri, a "Virtual Personal Assistant" (VPA), has been getting a lot of hype over the past year. The product will launch end of summer U.S. time - starting out as an iPhone app, but later other platforms will be supported. The iPhone app will go into private beta July/August time period, then launch in Q4 2009 or Q1 2010. While Siri is still more promise than substance, we at least get to look at some real-life iPhone demos now.

Microsoft Launches Office Web Apps and Office 2010 in Limited Beta

This week at its Wordwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft Office suite has reached the 'technical preview' milestone. The interesting part of the announcement is that Microsoft is also releasing more details about the Office Web applications - which are lightweight, browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (Microsoft's note-taking tool).

Eighteen Streaming Music Resources

According to The Leading Question's recent research report, as many as 65% of UK teens are streaming music on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, file-sharing has decreased significantly since the Digital Britain Report consultation to address illicit P2P file sharing. While music sharing sites have come and gone, here are some of the streaming sites that continue to thrive.

One Time in Bandcamp: Challenging MySpace Music

Hitwise recently reported that MySpace has declined as a traffic generator for entertainment and music sites. MySpace was previously the most significant contributor of traffic to entertainment - multimedia sites, at an estimated 35% of traffic to that category. However that percentage now hovers below 10%, thanks in part to new storefront-style tools like Bandcamp.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

But recently, we've begun to question AIR's longevity. Now don't get us wrong - many of our favorite apps (TweetDeck, Tumbleweed, Yammer, etc.) are built using Adobe AIR. However, there's no reason why these apps couldn't just run in a browser instead...and that might even be a better place for them. 

When we think about AIR apps today, one of the top apps that comes to mind is TweetDeck, the multi-columned Twitter application which includes much sought-after features not built into Twitter.com's own web site such as groups, photo-sharing, and saved searches. Yet despite everything we love about TweetDeck, we wonder why it can't exist simply as an online application. What purpose does running TweetDeck in Adobe AIR serve? It's not AIR's cross-platform abilities - after all, web browsers are the original cross-platform apps -and it's not that AIR is notably faster than an online version either. Probably the only reason for TweetDeck on AIR is that when the app was first built, AIR was the hot new thing. Now that the company has settled on the platform, they're just sticking with it.

Yet on the flip side, another popular Twitter client and originally an AIR-only app has gone the other direction. TweetDeck competitor Seesmic, once solely an Adobe AIR desktop application, is now offering a web-based version. Not only is the online app more than functional, it's also being lauded as "the best Twitter browser interface yet." More importantly, it goes to show that you don't need a desktop application to have a speedy, pretty, and useful app.

Streaming Video: Yeah, We Can Do that Online

Outside of the Twittersphere, other AIR apps on our radar in the past have included video-streaming programs like Adobe Media Player, AOL Top 100 Videos, and the YouTube-streaming DeskTube. Incidentally, today DeskTube is launching a new beta of their application, claiming "performance improvements" that now make their player "netbook-ready."

This immediately got us thinking: why do we need netbook-ready AIR applications? Maybe I don't speak for everyone, but my netbook is currently running XP and the only "app" I've installed is Google Chrome. With this fast, lightweight web browser and its pop-out tabs, desktop apps all of sudden seem so passé.

Besides what does DeskTube do (or any of these video-streaming AIR apps for that matter) that the web cannot? In DeskTube's case, in addition to playing YouTube videos, it includes a search feature, top video lists, a built-in uploader, and it lets you share videos via Twitter and Facebook. All those things can be done via YouTube.com right now, so what's the benefit of AIR?

Is the Future RIAs or Just Better Browsers?

Adobe AIR launched back in February of 2008, a time when browsers seemed either hopelessly out-of-date (IE7) or bloated with a plethora of add-ons (Firefox). We saw these little internet apps that could sit on our desktop connecting us to web services as truly amazing creations. But then in September, Google launched their Chrome browser and nothing has been the same since.

At first, we railed against Chrome's lack of extensions and lack of support for RSS among other things, but after a while (and once we filled up our bookmark bar with add-on like bookmarklets), we got over it. Surprisingly, you can live quite well without loading down your browser with extensions. In fact, the only thing that Chrome desperately needs is a Mac version so our non-PC friends can dump the open-source Chromium and use the real thing.

You see, once you "go Chrome" it's hard to switch back. As much as we fear handing yet another bit of our online life to Google, Chrome is where it's at now. Firefox now seems heavy and so much slower than before. Instead, we're popping out tabs to watch sites like FriendFeed and Twitscoop update in real-time. We're switching from online mode to offline courtesy of Google Gears in our Gmail and Calendar. And we're wondering why on earth we need another AIR app.

Today, AIR almost seems like a stop-gap between the heavy web browsers of the past and the speedy WebKit-powered browsers of the future...browsers like Chrome and whatever else comes next.

But sometimes there's an issue with displaying the raw, unfiltered tweets in this way: they can be disruptive. All it takes is one Twitter user trying to be funny - or, worse, a troll saying something rude - to take the discussion off course. Now there's a new solution to deal with this problem: Paratweet.

Using Paratweet

After signing up for a Paratweet account, you create a new event, set up some keywords or hashtags to monitor, and you can even enter an onscreen question for the audience to respond to, if desired.

As the tweets begin to stream in, you simply approve or reject them by clicking the green plus sign or red X as necessary. If you don't want to manually moderate tweets, you can choose to auto approve them instead. After you have a few tweets approved, you hit the button marked "Live Display Control" to start streaming the approved tweets to the "Live Display Application."

This "Live Display Application" is an Adobe AIR app designed just for Paratweet and it's meant to be run on the computer connected to the projector, LCD, or CCTV. Also, because you log in to the AIR app with your Paratweet account to pull the relevant tweets, you don't have to perform the moderation on the same PC as the one being used for display, although you certainly could.

Why Paratweet?

Paratweet isn't the first application to deliver Twitter moderation functionality - Twubs, for example, also offers a live events app with this capability. However, Paratweet offers a couple of extra features which gives it an edge.

For one, it includes a profanity filter which you can turn on or off as desired - an item that was definitely on the wish list of pastors who wanted to use Twitter during their sermons or other church events, like youth group meetings. It also links the moderation app and display app via a secret code for extra security in order to make sure no one but those approved to do so can moderate the tweets. The code is unique to each event.

Unlike using search.twitter.com, Paratweet lets you track multiple search terms or hashtags at once. As the tweets come in, you can optionally play or pause the stream - helpful if the speaker wants to respond to something on the screen without the distraction of more tweets streaming by.

Unfortunately, all this Twitter goodness doesn't come cheap. Paratweet offers two pricing plans: $299 for 6 months and one event (which you can use over and over) or $599 for 6 months and 3 separate events. The $599 plan also includes the onscreen question feature, something unfortunately not found in the less expensive plan. Alternately, you can save by purchasing a yearly license for $999.

To try Paratweet for yourself, you can sign up here.