Web Apps

The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg

If you're a fan of digg, you've probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.

Is it time to accept that Digg is no longer an equivalent to Slashdot, and that it is as much a mainstream news site as say BusinessWeek or People magazine?

SixApart's BlogIt Could Be the Start of Something Big

SixApart launched BlogIt by TypePad this week, a Facebook app that lets you post to SixApart blogs and other blogging software like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, to your Facebook Newsfeed and to Twitter all from one place. It's the kind of app that makes Facebook all the closer to being a one stop social media experience.

The service could be more fully developed but it's certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. This post lists a few reasons why we believe it's so interesting.

Grooveshark Launches Awesome Streaming Music Service

Gainesville, Florida-based Grooveshark, a music sharing startup that we first profiled in August, this week launched their latest product: Grooveshark Lite. Lite is a slick, flash-based streaming music service that takes Grooveshark's huge catalog of uploaded music and makes it available to stream, no registration required. Grooveshark Lite is fast, easy to use, and free.

When we reviewed Grooveshark last August, we called it "one part Last.fm, one part Limewire, and one part iTunes store." With the addition of Grooveshark Lite, the service is now also one part Pandora.

Battle of the AIR Apps: Twhirl vs. Alert Thingy

The battle between the two most popular AIR apps has begun. Earlier this week FriendFeed AIR app Alert Thingy, having only just launched on April 13th, was already getting an update - this one to include Twitter support via a built-in "Tweet" button. Not to be outdone, Twhirl wasted no time in providing an update of their own, seemingly crafting their updated version overnight. Now Twhirl includes FriendFeed support and Alert Thingy does Twitter, but are either of them really giving users what they want?

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Is the Mobile Web Dead? Some Mobile Entrepreneurs Say Yes

Former Yahoo! Mobile evangelist turned startup entrepreneur Russell Beattie announced this week that he's calling it quits for his company Mowser, because the market for mobile browsing is taking a fast turn for the worse. "The mobile traffic just isn't there," Beattie says, "It's not there now, and it won't be."

Beattie's announcement comes just two months after mobile blogger and consultant Michael Mace wrote a much discussed post titled Mobile Applications, RIP. "The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices," Mace wrote.

Be sure to check the comments of this post, there were some excellent counterpoints made on both sides of the argument.

Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media

Let's be honest here: we're all a bunch of social media addicts. We're junkies. Whether it's a new Twitter app, a new Facebook feature, or a new social anything service, we're all over it. But we may not be the norm. The truth is, being involved in social media takes time, something that most people don't have a lot of. So how can regular folk get involved with social media? And how much time does it really take?

Where's Our Real World Data Portability?

In a recent Slashdot thread, someone sought advice on an electronic cash register set up that would output sales data in an open format. While the asker was looking for information from the point of view of a shop owner, it got us thinking about data portability. There's been a lot of clamor over the past few months about who owns attention data and a major online movement has started with the aim of pushing companies into granting access to that data to the users who create it. But what about offline attention data? Should we demand access to that as well?

13 Seed Funding Options For Entrepreneurs

One of the most difficult parts of starting a startup for any entrepreneur is finding that small bit of seed capital to get things going. As evidenced by small seed funds like Y Combinator, a little can go a long way for startup entrepreneurs, but raising that chunk of change to get started can be tricky. Luckily, there are a number of different roads you can take to get from concept to Series A. This post lists 13 seed funding options for startup entrepreneurs.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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

Grooveshark is unique for a few reasons. After scanning a user's music library via the downloadable Sharkbyte client, the site puts that music online. Anyone can then download the music -- for a price. A cut goes to the artist, another to the user who uploaded the track, and finally to Grooveshark. One of the service's real strengths, though, is its Last.fm-style recommendations that we've always found to be very good.

Grooveshark Lite leverages all the various bits of the Grooveshark service -- streaming music, paid downloads, music sharing, and recommendations -- and packages them nicely in a gorgeous flash-based player. Lite extends Grooveshark firmly into Pandora territory with a service that lets users build streaming playlists and download tracks directly.

I was keen to see how Grooveshark Lite would integrate with the playlists and music I already had on the service, unfortunately I couldn't get it to properly access my library. The site did display a message today that it "may be unstable" as the company rolled out the new Lite service, so perhaps that was just a hiccup.

Conclusion

Grooveshark's service was very attractive this summer when options for DRM-free music were limited. At the time, Grooveshark was one of the few places people had access to major-label, DRM-free content in a presumably legal manner. Since that time, though, Amazon MP3 and other services have dramatically changed the music download landscape. Grooveshark is smart to extend their service into streaming music. The company also recently demoed their analytics suite for artists and labels, MoneyShark, which is another smart extension of their core product.

Grooveshark is an exciting company in the P2P music market. Along with services like Amie Street, and Last.fm (which was acquired by CBS last spring) small companies are having a dramatic influence on how music is distributed and consumed.

The Radiohead In Rainbows contest is being run a bit differently in that they've partnered with an independent video site, are focusing on animation, and are using a tiered voting approach that allows fans to be involved with picking the winner. Further, any song on the album is eligible for being turned into a video, which means fans will in many ways get to define the band's first single.

Until April 27th, anyone can submit a storyboard or clip to Aniboom detailing their idea for a Radiohead video. Users will vote on the 10 best, who will then each be given $1,000 to create a one minute version of their concept. The band will choose the winner, who will receive a $10,000 budget to make the full video for the band in June.

Check out the storyboard example below:

However what really differentiates Grooveshark is its payment model. It not only pays artists for their musics, but users too. The company splits profits with users 50/50, after royalty payments to artists, publishers, and other rights holders.

A new as yet unreleased feature is an analytics suite, which will allow all artists, labels and others who have signed up to Grooveshark to be able to keep track of who is purchasing their music, where they are coming from, and other types of analytics. This feature is slated for launch in a few weeks time.

MoneyShark demo

Another upcoming feature is one that will allow users to share their songs by broadcasting them on Twitter.

Grooveshark

RWW Promotion: $1000 Worth of Vouchers to Giveaway

Grooveshark has 200 $5 vouchers to give away to ReadWriteWeb readers. All you have to do is email Steve Spalding of Grooveshark with 'ReadWriteWeb' somewhere in the subject line.

Though basing a business on a browser extension might seem crazy, for the select few companies highlighted in Mozilla events like this it can lead to a big increase in user numbers, especially if support from Mozilla continues.

The Winners

The most sophisticated winner may be the most niche-targeted, and that's the Minimap Sidebar Extension, by Tony Farndon from the UK. This extension lets users do all kinds of things by dragging and dropping map and location data in their browsers. Whether it's just text identifying a location or a whole KML file, Minimap lets you quickly view map data in a wide variety of platforms - from the big online mapping services (G/Y/M) to Google Earth of map mashup maker Platial. User created sidebar maps can also be saved for later reuse. Many readers might not have a daily use for this extension, but I know I might find myself working on a particular project for which this cool tool would be perfect.

SamePlace IM is an XMPP based multiclient IM service with a sidebar display or flyout client. It was built by Massimiliano Mirra in Italy. You can drag and drop images and text into conversations, play games, sketch together and extend SamePlace with an internal scriptlet editor. There's Twitter and OpenID support, too. While Meebo isn't intended for power users, SamePlace clearly is.

Finally, Jay Meattle's Shareaholic lets you quickly post any URL to 13 of the coolest social bookmarking services online. From Ma.gnolia to FriendFeed to Tumblr. It also lets you easily email a link to friends and see how many times it has been tagged in Del.icio.us and Dugg.

I appreciate all of the above, but personally I only foresee myself using the Minimap extension, and that only rarely. It might be a good idea for me to use Shareaholic, too, so that I can get the superior features of Ma.gnolia but participate in the public space of Del.icio.us. I really like the Ma.gnolia submission tool, though. Don't forget to check out the runners up, too, if you love Firefox extensions.

Details will be posted soon for the next contest, Extend Firefox 3 , kicking off in early March.

Have complaints about the products and services at Twitter? Join the club - at Get Satisfaction! More old-school than that, a user of HP's photosharing service Snapfish, perhaps? You too can vent your gripes with the cool kids at Get Satisfaction. These are just two of a wide range of companies that have chosen to answer questions and complaints publicly on this website.

More than just a question and answer service, Get Satisfaction includes a bunch of smart, fun and helpful features.

Companies can opt-in to participating and be identified explicitly in conversations. Customers can signal that they share some one else's problem or question and get an email if it is answered.

To learn more about the thinking behind Get Satisfaction, check out this October interview with CEO Thor Muller at SocialMediaToday.

The API

"Get Satisfaction is superclose," the company wrote tonight, "to releasing a RESTful API (including some very cool OAuth support) through which you can access almost all of our current features and functionality." They've already offer the ability for customers to broadcast their questions and complaints out onto Twitter or Facebook, and for companies to stick a Satisfaction RSS widget on their websites. What on earth could come next? Satisfaction has the ear of some of the most cutting edge Web 2.0 heads online, so there's probably some very interesting stuff on the way.

OAuth support means you'll be able to access user data on a wide variety of other systems, including most if not all that support OpenSocial, without asking for username and password.

Does that mean we'll be seeing the option to shoot your complaint thread about a company out to all your friends on MySpace or GMail? I wonder how many of the company's absent today will be showing up soon, post-API.