Over the past year, all the major tech blogs have done round-up articles of great Greasemonkey scripts to use with Twitter (including us). What this says about Twitter's native functionality we aren't sure, but we know we've had upwards of 10 separate scripts installed and active at different times.
All that is going to end, at least for the next little while, as we have just found the GM script that does everything (and we mean everything). It's the innocently named, Troy's Twitter Script (created by Troy Thompson) that we first noticed written up over on TechRaga.
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After installing the script and visiting Twitter, we found so many useful tweaks to almost every Twitter view that it was almost overwhelming. Here's what it does broken down into three main functionalities:
Enhancement: Links in tweets are automatically expanded and replaced with the target page title if available. Media like YouTube videos and Twitpic images are included in-line. Hashtags are converted to Twitter search links. Auto-pagination is enabled as you get to the bottom of the current page. The 'definitions' area is hidden. Last but not least, replies are included underneath the latest tweet, indented and smaller (great for those of you still using the default "include all @replies" in your settings!)
Functionality: Hovering over a tweet shows default actions like star (save), reply, and retweet. Long URLs are automatically shortened if the tweet you are typing in exceeds the length limit. Twitter names get autocomplete launched by typing an @ in a tweet. Twitter bio text gets inserted into following/followers list.
New Hotness: A new search field added to Twitter sidebar. Any searches performed from sidebar get saved and added to the sidebar (removable). A tiny smilie face is added to the Twitter icon of those people who are following you. When viewing a specific Twitter user, their social graph is inserted in the bio area. Local time is added if the user's time zone is in their profile. Map to user's location is inserted if location or geo coordinates are in their profile. Finally, the most awesome addition:Groups support in your followers/following tabs, you can add people to groups that show up in the Twitter sidebar.
Troy's Twitter script, in our opinion, is crazy awesome. If you find yourself in a memory crunch and prefer not to use a standalone Twitter application, and use Firefox, this script is a must-have. In fact, it's too bad that Greasemonkey scripts really only work well in Firefox, because it sure would be great to have all these features in every browser out there. To that end, you can try using Greasemetal (covered here) for Chrome, or GreaseKit for Safari on Mac OSX.
Today, Apple announced that its customers have now downloaded a whopping one billion applications from its App Store. Here at ReadWriteWeb, quite a few of us have iPhones, so we thought that this would be a good time to feature some of our favorite apps. We download and test a lot of iPhone apps, but here are the ones that have stood the test of time for us. The App Store is now home to over 35,000 applications, so this is obviously only a small selection of applications, but these are the apps that we don't hesitate to recommend to our friends.
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We couldn't get feedback from everybody on the RWW team (and our BlackBerry users weren't very forthcoming with suggestions either), but here are the recommendations from Richard MacManus (R), Marshall Kirkpatrick (M), Frederic Lardinois (F), and Phil Glockner (P).
Pixelpipe (F) - upload your photos to over 70 different photosharing and social media services (we just posted a review of Pixelpipe's new Firefox plugin today)
Mobile Fotos (P) - browse and upload photos and videos on Flickr
YouNote (R) - note taking app, but also works with photos, drawings, and audio
Soonr (F) - access documents from your desktop on the iPhone
Chat / Voip
Skype (P, F) - our review ('It's Real and It's Spectacular')
Health
Diamedic (R) - for tracking glucose levels, insulin injections, lab results etc.
What are Your Favorite Apps?
These are the apps that we use every day, but you surely have your own favorites, so feel free to leave a comment and let us know which apps you prefer.
Most blogging platforms now feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on your blog, or even on other blogs on the Internet. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. LinkWithin is the newest contender in this market. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. Unlike similar plugins, however, LinkWithin doesn't just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors.
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The plugin is available for Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger, though LinkWithin will also provide you with a code snippet that you can use on other blogging platforms. We assume that LinkWithin does some semantic analysis in the background in order to arrive at its list of related stories, though we weren't able to track down any details.
In testing LinkWithin on our own WordPress blog, the suggested posts were always spot-on, but obviously, your mileage may vary.
A Few Caveats
Because LinkWithin does most of the computing on its own servers, it can take a little while before its results appear on your blog (usually around one hour). The plugin also doesn't play nice with every theme, though the team promises to fix any problem you might encounter within a few hours after you contact them.
Verdict
LinkWithin is still a bit rough around the edges. It would be great, for example, if you could actually customize how the related items are displayed on your blog. For now, you are restricted to showing three related stories, for example, and the related stories will appear on both your homepage and on individual posts.
If you are looking for a different way to showcase more of your blogposts on your blog, however, LinkWithin is definitely worth a try.
Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for telling us about this new service.
Posters on the wall, teen magazines, boom boxes playing the same stupid songs over and over again (automatically!) - that's not a sustainable situation, by definition. That's teenage living and that's what MySpace built its huge site on. Just like being a teenager, MySpace is something that most people grow out of. Today marked an important point in the internet's move beyond MySpace.
The company ushered Tom out the door today from President into an advisory role and replaced its CEO with former Facebook business exec Owen Van Natta. Increased revenue isn't really what MySpace needs, if it's to stay strong it needs to stop bleeding users. That's not likely.
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Michael Arrington has been following the business moves closely and reports a very sorry state of affairs behind the scenes at MySpace. Putting former Facebook businessman Van Natta in charge of a site that has made far more money than Facebook but has had its head handed to it in terms of user experience and now growth? That doesn't make a lot of sense to us. It's not a business problem that MySpace has, it's a core user experience problem. That's of more interest to us anyway.
Earlier this week, Jason Calacanis offered 10 ideas he thought that the new CEO of MySpace should act on first. It's a very good list: focus on dominating mobile, build up gaming, start a virtual currency, etc. It's hard to think of better ideas, in fact. One source told VentureBeat's Eric Eldon that 'the only thing that can save MySpace now is buying Twitter.'
Those are all relatively daring, smart ideas. But none of them will work. That's ok, MySpace was an important part of the social web's early history. Its time has passed, though.
MySpace is an embarrassment for most people on the web. It's like a bratty kid sister with no class. Give most people another option and they are going to choose it. Social networking used to be just for teenagers, but those kids are growing up and everyone else is joining in the activity. Not on MySpace, though.
As Eldon points out in his coverage, recent Facebook redesigns have brought new focus on sharing content to that site. Twitter has captured the public's imagination as well and it is all about active sharing of personal news between contacts.
MySpace's core nature is to express yourself into a void and hope people come to visit your page and check it out. The relatively recent additions of status updates and news feeds feel tacked on and superficial. MySpace clearly hoped that many of its users would write long-form blog posts but the time investment required to use that feature is much more arduous than the quick and easy publishing on Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook and Twitter may or may not stick around longer than MySpace has. MySpace will probably always be able to serve a sizable constituency in between children and adults. But the momentum has left MySpace and churn in this market will probably keep Facebook from holding on to it for more than a few years as well.
None of this is news, MySpace went cold quite awhile ago. Tom hasn't updated his status message in a week and a half, he knows what's going on. Putting a business guy from Facebook in charge just makes it official.
We know that Oprah Winfrey's brought a lot of new users to Twitter in the U.S., but according to Hitwise, the popular microblogging service is currently seeing some of its most impressive growth outside of America. In Australia, where Oprah Winfrey doesn't command the same kind of daytime television audience, Twitter grew over 1,000% since the beginning of 2009, and its annual growth since last April tops 3,200%. In Australia, Twitter is now the 37th most visited web site.
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Twitter Loves Celebrities
According to Hitwise, 38% of the top 50 searches for 'twitter' in Australia include the name of a celebrity. Lindsay Lohan leads the charge, followed by Ashton Kutcher, Miley Cyrus, and Australia's own Hugh Jackman. While Kutcher's much publicized race to 1 million followers increased Twitter's share of daily visits in Australia by 10.6%, Oprah's first tweet only registered a 2.46% increase
Twitter is also seeing similar growth in other Asia Pacific markets. In New Zealand, the official home of RWW, Twitter's share of daily visits increased 305% in 2009, and it is now the 49th most visited web site there, and its growth rate in Singapore is comparable. Only Hong Kong is lagging far behind these other markets.
Twitter is Sticky
One interesting phenomenon about Twitter is that new users tend to stay on the service. In Australia, according to Hitwise, the single largest spike in visits came one day after the Queensland Election in March, and interestingly, Hitwise did not record a drop in numbers since then. This bodes well for Twitter, which, thanks to the hype around Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher, was able to pick up a lot of new users who typically wouldn't have been too interested in joining Twitter.
Despite the number of add-ons available in the Firefox ecosystem, it can still sometimes feel like there are only a few truly good ones out there. That's why when we find one that's actually worth using, we get excited. The latest add-on getting installed into our small but critical collection of extensions is Pixelpipe's new drag-and-drop uploader. This utility lets you upload media directly from your computer or the web to any of the 75 plus services you've configured at Pixelpipe.com.
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If you're not familiar with Pixelpipe, you should go get acquainted now. You can think of the service as sort of a Ping.fm for your media. Using their software, you're able to publish either text, photos, videos, and audio to any of the services supported, making it one of the easiest and quickest ways to distribute your content across the web. After it arrived last year, we quickly identified it as a winner when it worked exactly as advertised. Since that time, the company has grown and expanded, adding more features, more services, and even a handful of mobile applications. (We especially love that iPhone one!)
The latest addition to their collection of utilities is a new, experimental Firefox extension called the Pixelpipe Media Uploader 1.0. With this add-on, you can upload media all across the social web either through drag-and-drop or by selecting from a chooser.
After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, you'll see that there's a new orange 'P' button in your toolbar. Click that once and the Pixelpipe sidebar will display on the left side of the screen. The first time you go to use this tool, you'll need to sign in with your Pixelpipe account and authorize it to work in Firefox. Once that's done, you can then drag-and-drop any media into the sidebar to upload it to Pixelpipe which then, of course, shoots it out to any of the services you've configured. Alternately, you can right-click on any image on the web and choose the 'Upload image with Pixelpipe Uploader' option from the menu that appears.
One of the nice things about the uploader is that you can add the title, any appropriate tags, and set the privacy levels before you click 'Upload.' That way, you don't have to actually go visit the sites afterwards to configure these sorts of settings.
This new utility is just another reminder of how desktop software tools are slowly being replaced by browser-based services. Who needs the Flickr uploader anymore when you can drag photos to your browser and send them directly to Flickr, Facebook, and a slew of other sites with only a click or two?
Recently, business information solutions provider LexisNexis released the results of a study that examined how technology was used in the American workplace. The focus of the study was on the differing opinions between generational groups. Their findings? The generation gap at work is really wide with vast discrepancies when it comes to what the appropriate use of technology is - a problem that leads to increasing tensions in the workplace.
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The Findings: Boomers and Gen Y are Worlds Apart at Work
The survey compared technology and software usage among generations of working professionals, including Boomers (ages 44-60), Generation X (ages 29-43) and Generation Y (ages 28 and younger). The total sample size was 700 legal and white collar professionals with 250 coming from the legal profession.
According to the survey:
Two-thirds of all Boomers agree that Personal Digital Assistants (like the Blackberry, for example) and mobile phones contribute to a decline in proper workplace etiquette, and believe the use of a laptop during in-person meetings is 'distracting,' less than half of Gen Y workers agree.
Only 17% of Boomers believe using laptops or PDAs during in-person meetings is 'efficient,' while more than one third of Gen Y do.
Only 28% percent of Boomers think blogging about work-related issues is acceptable, while forty percent of Gen Y workers do.
Yikes! Phones and PDAs are distracting and inefficient tools? Blogging is unacceptable? Who are these people? Unfortunately, they're the people who still have a lot of power when it comes to the decisions being made at the workplace. Baby boomers are the executives, the CEOs, the bosses, etc. while Gen Y is just now getting their foot in the door. But it's clear that these two generations strongly disagree on how technology is to be used.
More Findings
Another issue being faced is the blurring of boundaries between work and home. Gen Y workers generally don't see a problem accessing personal web sites from work - like Facebook and blogs. In fact, 62% of Gen Y professionals access a social network from work, but only 14% of Boomers do. That discrepancy could have something to do with the fact that Gen Y spends a lot more of their day online - they spend 10.6 hours per day accessing social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and multimedia sharing sites versus only 5.6 hours reported by Boomers.
The study also found that Gen Y workers multi-task at higher levels, but it's here that the numbers get kind of confusing. According to the report, Gen Y workers spend an average of 22.9 hours per day using email, web browsers, IM, productivity applications while Boomers reported 10.3 hours with the same programs. But seriously, 22.9 hours? That begs the question: when does Gen Y eat or sleep? Who even stays up for 22.9 straight hours? The problem apparently comes from how the question was asked. Respondents were asked to report on how much time they spent on each of four types of applications in an average work day. The average time reported for 'using' each application every day added up to a total of 15.9 hours, much longer than the standard 8-hour work day.
What this actually means is that workers are keeping many applications open at the same time and accessing them concurrently. (They're not staying up 20-some hours each day to work). However, we think that data could have been presented in a more straightforward manner. Still, the end result proves that Gen Y switches back and forth between applications far more than the Boomers do.
Wait, So Do Boomers Get Tech or Not?
The last time we wrote about Boomers' and their use of social media, we got a lot of heated responses in the comments about how 'not all Boomers' are out-of-touch, so stop saying that! But actually, at the time, we weren't. We were instead sharing data from Forrester which stated that over 60% of Boomers were using socially created content. Yet that study seems to be a bit in conflict with this one. How can the hip-to-blogs (and videos, and podcasts, etc.) Baby Boomers of the Forrester study exist in the same world as those interviewed by LexisNexis? Which study is right? Or maybe in a way, they both are. Maybe the stuffy old lawyers interviewed for this latest study don't care for blogs, but there are plenty of Boomers out there who do. We know from the comments of the last post, there are certainly plenty of Boomers who read this blog, at least.
When Google has an idea for a fun or useful project based on one of their established properties, they will often categorize that project under the heading of Google Labs. Google Labs have been created on everything from search, to Gmail, to Picasa. And today, a new Labs opens its doors: Google Toolbar Labs.
Limited to the Internet Explorer 6 web browser (for now), Google Toolbar Labs debuts with two toolbar variations with different goals. One toolbar includes enhanced location detection and the other optimizes the toolbar for the Chinese character set.
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Both toolbars are based on the standard IE Google toolbar and support the different standard features like Google Rank, toolbar buttons and more. But what they offer in addition is interesting:
Google Toolbar with My Location: This toolbar includes an advanced feature that can determine the general area the computer is in by IP address. It then uses this information in its enhanced Google search by area feature. If you are using a laptop with Internet Explorer already, this feature can come in handy by letting you quickly search the local area for the resource you need, even if you don't know exactly where you are.
Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar: This toolbar is pretty clearly geared toward Chinese IE users. It features a space-optimized layout better suited to the Chinese language and features a new sidebar mode for managing bookmarks. It also has built-in buttons for translating foreign-language web pages in to Chinese.
Google Labs promises that these are just the beginning for this new offshoot of their now widespread domain of Google properties. We hope so, because honestly we don't spend a whole lot of time in Internet Explorer any more, and it would be interesting to see if a new killer app toolbar came out for a different browser like Firefox.
Digg, which has spent four years trying to level the playing field and democratize media, will soon receive a facelift. According to Kevin Rose, Digg's founder and chief architect, the site, which hasn't changed much since its inception, will be putting a 'stake in the ground this year and making some big changes.'
Speaking to the Ad:Tech audience in San Francisco today, Rose talked about Digg's future saying ads need to be more interactive, print can't be saved, online publishers are in an incredible position and the importance of power users may be underestimated.
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Rose on Digg and Advertising
Digg's advertising needs have changed. At the beginning, 'we had lots of servers falling over,' Rose explained. The deal with Microsoft saved the day, allowing Digg to outsource ad sales while continuing to work on the product. However, Digg is now four years old, and banner ads are no longer enough. It's ready to build its own sales team, which currently stands at 2-3 and Rose estimates it could grow to 10-15 over the next year.
The site will focus on larger ad campaigns, and according to Rose, turn to its users. 'If anything, Digg has users that like voting,' Rose explained, 'and I would love to see a world that if something is really crappy, it gets destroyed or thrown off the site.' Either that, he said, 'or we charge people more for crappy ads,' he added with a grin.
While he says he can't 'guarantee' this type of social advertising will make it to Digg, it's certainly an attractive ideal. Rose explains that Digg is looking at ways that people can engage with ads, 'so the second [an ad] goes up, it's not just about click-throughs; it's more about watching and seeing what [people] think.'
Social Advertising?
Rose pointed to the Chevy SUV campaign that invited visitors to create and share their own ad copy on video clips. 'It's going to happen,' Rose said, and 'I'm happy to push it and make it happen sooner.'
The caveat of course is that Rose doesn't want Digg to be a platform where the only discussion involves comments like 'that ad sucks.' 'I'd hope [conversation] would be deeper,' he added.
And although he likes the idea of user involvement when it comes to advertising, Rose noted that there are two problems with these forms of social ads; people are generally conservative and scared to expose their brand in that way, also, the tools aren't there to foster discussion.
But tools could be coming. And they could be coming to Digg. Last week, in an interview with Mike Arrington, Rose explained that Digg is completely revamping its site and expects it will be seen as a 'ballsy move' when unveiled.
Rose on Cool Hunters
Rose, who removed the Top Users list from Digg two years ago, today said that they may soon make a reappearance - but in a different form. 'We have these amazing users who have an eye for what the masses will enjoy,' Rose said, and 'it's important to highlight those people because they are valuable.'
'In reality, he said, 'their take on what is cool - they're very good at finding high quality content that other people will enjoy and I don't mind [emphasizing] that'
'I think you'll see us expose that data in the future,' Rose added, saying you'll likely get to see who the 'tastemakers' are turn up under specific categories.
Note: If you're interested in seeing Digg top users, Social Blade, which is not affiliated with Digg, maintains a list.
Rose on Dead Tree Media
'Dead tree media is...dead,' said Rose, who believes we are entering a world of the personal brand, much like Gary Vaynerchuck described [video link].
The landscape has changed. 'It's not necessarily about destination site,' Rose continued, like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, 'it's about the person writing the article.' Walt Mossberg, for instance, will continue to grow his audience, regardless of where he is published, and Rose sees that as power. 'He can move his fans and readers in any direction.'
And with the transformation taking place in the world of media, it's an important distinction.
Asked whether Digg can help save the newspaper industry, Rose gave a quick, but succinct 'no.' Although Digg can't help save print, Rose believes it can absolutely empower the sites. 'We can help them understand where their traffic is coming from, let them know more about their users and what they like.' 'And if you know what people like, you can serve better quality ads.'
Whether you're a blogger working in your basement or a journalist at the New York Times, it makes no difference. If your content is good, it will get noticed by Digg's cool hunters. Yet not every social site can do this. While many have tried, (Reddit, Mixx, Yahoo Buzz etc.), Digg has always been the leader in consistently leveling the media playing field.
Why Digg? Well, we can't quite put our finger on it, but as Rose told Arrington last week, 'I just feel that we're heading in a different direction than them.' And at ReadWriteWeb, we agree. What do you think?
WordPress, on their official blog, made a short announcement that Wordpress.com blog owners could now enable reply by email support for comments made to their blog. With a couple of simple configuration changes, blog owners can get the convenience of being able to directly reply to new comments via their preferred email address instead of through the Wordpress admin interface.
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Replying to comments by email isn't that new - there are a lot of other comment systems that support it. In fact, there is at least one plugin for stand-alone WordPress blogs that enable this ability as well. But the key to new features appearing on WordPress.com's free hosting site has always been rigorous usability and load testing first, then a full roll-out of the feature.
The way reply-by-email comment support will work is pretty straightforward. After enabling support for emailing comments, and then turning on 'Enable sending comment replies via email' option (both found on the Settings > Discussion page), you are set. The next time you get a comment, you will be notified by email, and you can respond simply by replying to the email with your text above the original comment.
23 Apr 2009 21:34:56 | Richard MacManus | Analysis
Yahoo has announced that its website creation service GeoCities, which it acquired for $4.5 billion in 1999, will close later this year. Existing customers are being encouraged to "upgrade" to Yahoo! Web Hosting, which offers a site-building service and a personalized web address. The closing of GeoCities is the end of an era. Last June we profiled the rising of 'GeoCities 2.0' services, i.e. website creation tools for the Social Web. Many of them will attempt to pick up GeoCities's customers - although as Yahoo! itself indicated in its closure message, website building is mostly a 'feature' nowadays rather than a separate product. So is this a viable business now for the likes of Weebly and Yola?
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Vinny Lingham, founder of Yola (formally SynthaSite) argues that the GeoCities closure proves that the advertising model for 'free websites' doesn't work. Lingham says that premium add-on services are the key to making money in this niche now - he refers to it as a "freemium" business model. He makes a strong argument that the market has changed and GeoCities simply did not keep up:
"Web users, and particularly small businesses, don't just want an online presence (which was Geocities key value proposition), they want a professional-looking site that they can quickly and affordably build and the tools to help themselves and/or their businesses succeed (online marketing, commerce capabilities, etc.) - and that's what we're about."
Example Yola website
However the same argument can be turned back on his business, and others like it such as Weebly (a Y Combinator company), Sampa (our coverage), SiteKreator and Webon (owned by another Web 1.0 surviver, Lycos). The online presence that people and small businesses want are increasingly being provided by both web hosting companies and large Internet bohemiths like Yahoo! and Google. Google has Google Sites, which evolved out of one of Google's acquisitions, JotSpot, and is available for free both as a standalone product and as a part of Google Apps.
Not to mention there are free blogging platforms such as Wordpress.com and Google's Blogger. Yet another type of 'free website' is a DIY social network like Ning.
However, as we noted in our round-up post last year, services such as Yola do target a specific type of user. They're aimed at people who just want a regular website; for example people who want to chronicle their wedding or holiday, families who want to track their family history and growth, or retailers who want to build a web presence.
As the chart below shows, there's still a long way for Yola and Weebly, which appear to be the two frontrunners in this market, to catch up with GeoCities. But it will be interesting to see how many new users they pick up now that GeoCities has dropped out.
Google Sites and the free websites provided by web hosting companies tend to be bland and not very customizable. Yola and the like are obviously hoping there is a big enough market for people to want a more professional looking and stylish web presence. So the 'add-on' premium service model probably does have legs. Weebly is also using the affiliate model, so it hasn't eschewed advertising completely.
As we noted a year ago, website builder platforms in the web 2.0 era - where mashups and open data are common - typically offer ways to integrate with 3rd party apps. This can take the form of widgets, or even utilizing other sites' APIs. This is probably the biggest difference between GeoCities 1.0 and the 2.0 era web publishing platforms. These platforms also usually offer the ability to add blogs, RSS feeds, multimedia, privacy controls, and more. For example Webon supports the OpenSocial API "for thousands of add-ons and widgets (such as iGoogle gadgets and Google FriendConnect), with no HTML or CSS knowledge needed, as well as OpenID to enable DIY social network connections."
Another common feature in the new website creation tools is use of Ajax to build sites. They often have rich functionality and the ability to drag n' drop ajax widgets.
We think Yola, Weebly and others have a good business model - although we also think it's a crowded niche market, even without GeoCities, and some of these startups will inevitably fall by the wayside. For most people, the basic service that Google Sites or web hosting companies provide will be 'good enough'. So Weebly, Yola and others are scrapping for the small percentage of users who want a premium quality website.
Unless you lived in an exceptionally dark cave in the last two weeks, you probably weren't able to escape the Susan Boyle phenomenon. According to some metrics, over 100 million people have watched the immaculately edited video of the 'frumpy' 47-year-old's performance on Britain's Got Talent (BGT) by now. While this is most definitely an interesting cultural phenomenon, the Times today also reports that neither ITV, the network that shows BGT, nor YouTube have really been able to directly profit from this huge hit because the network and YouTube have been arguing about the terms of their advertising agreement.
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ITV, according to the Times Online, wants to run pre-roll ads before its videos, but YouTube, even though it is still highly unprofitable, is still resisting this move because, unsurprisingly, its research has shown that pre-roll ads are very unpopular with its users. Interestingly, on its own site, ITV features a sponsored player, but no pre-roll ads.
It is also noteworthy that the most popular version of the video (with about 41 million views so far) was uploaded by a fan, BritainsSoTalented, and ITV doesn't even seem to have its own YouTube channel.
So how much money did ITV lose so far? About $1.87 million according to the Times Online's Dan Sabbagh, based on the assumption that a TV network could get about $20 to $35 per 1000 viewers, which is not completely unreasonable, though we have also seen far lower numbers around $12 and less. Using those numbers, ITV probably lost about $1 million, which is still quite a lot of money, especially considering that this is just pure, additional profit for the network. But then, few people have ever been able to turn a YouTube hit into direct income - mostly, the rewards come later, in the form of recording contracts or endorsement deals.
In a new report, Nielsen Online takes a closer look at how social media and video sites have reshaped the web and the online advertising market over the last few years, especially in the context of the current economic crisis. According to Nielsen, since 2003, the time spend on video sites has increased by over 2,000%, and the number of Americans who visit online video sites like YouTube and Hulu has climbed 339% over the same time period.
With regards to the economy, a number of sectors, including retail, and the auto and financial services industries have obviously made dramatic cuts to their online spending, while, on the other hand, the pharmaceutical industry is actually spending more on online ads today.
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Online Video and Social Networks
According to Nielsen, the current trend towards watching more online video should drive more advertisers towards this medium, while for social media, according to Nielsen, 'a monetization formula continues to elude the globe's brightest marketers.' Nielsen, however, is also very positive about how Twitter and other social networks have broken down the feedback barriers between brands and consumers.
Looking at the current buzz around social networks, Nielsen found that MySpace now trails Facebook and Twitter, and conversations around Twitter even surpassed Facebook in March.
The number of new social media users is actually dwarfed by these numbers for online video, but according to Nielsen Online, there are now 87% more social media users than in 2003, and they devote 883% more time to these sites.
Nielsen also found that the number of users who are accessing social networks through mobile devices tripled during 2008 - a trend that the new MySpace CEO will surely try to exploit to gain back some momentum on the social networking market.
Focus: New Mothers Love Social Media
According to Nielsen, new mothers exhibit a couple of interesting traits. More than any other group (including experienced mothers), new moms are drawn to social networking sites and blogs, and they are also more likely to publish their own blog posts.
In this context, Nielsen also took a closer look at the 'Motrin Moms' phenomenon we described last November. Motrin's ads, which many mothers considered to be condescending, quickly changed how consumers described the brand. After the ads appeared, Motrin was suddenly closely related with Twitter, blogging, and moms, but also with negative terms like 'backlash' and 'offensive.'
23 Apr 2009 16:57:39 | Marshall Kirkpatrick | Mobile Services
Google announced this morning that Google Product Search is now tightly integrated with mobile search results on the iPhone and Android. The new interface should make it easier to find price comparisons and customer reviews while on the go.
I'm not a big shopper but I have struggled while standing in stores to find product reviews on my phone for tennis racquets, vacuum cleaners and power tools within recent memory. Natural search results and Amazon listings only worked so well. Unfortunately a lot of shopping searches I tried this morning didn't have Product Search results. When they are available, they are pretty good though.
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The best thing about the new inclusion of Google Product Search may be its availability in Google Voice search as well. That's handy, or hands-free as the case may be.
Google Product Search is the new name (as of two years ago) for what used to be called Froogle. That product never gained much traction, but speaking as a likely user of this new feature - I hope it continues to improve.
Oracle is buying Sun, and bankers are looking forward to the next wave of consolidation. To somebody who remembers the innovation and excitement of earlier enterprise hardware and software start-ups, this is a bit gloomy. CHOI (Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM) does not spell 'choice' for buyers, employees, or investors. Choose your behemoth. If consolidation means lower prices -- and it will -- buyers will be happy. But it all sounds like cost-cutting, layoffs, and less innovation to me.
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Parallel Universes
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe call cloud computing and SaaS, start-ups are starting and growing, innovation is happening at a staggering pace, and it all looks rather fun and fast-paced.
Are both types of companies living in the same universe? Clearly, they are. Could the boom on one side and gloom on the other be connected?
Is it possible that the cloud and SaaS are the backdrop to all this consolidation?
'There are people who really believe that SaaS is a passing fad, just Service Bureau 3.0. These people are like Eeyore, the old gray donkey from Winnie the Pooh. They think the Tigger types who are constantly running around excited about new technology are just, well ridiculous. There are others, like Piglet, who are just scared of anything new and big. The Wisdom Of Pooh, is just humbly asking questions.
'But the guys running large enterprise IT vendors are smart. They are just putting on the Eeyore act to appeal to Eeyore clients to keep buying the old stuff as long as possible.'
Behemoths Selling to Behemoths
'Ah, but surely, mate, you understand that this stuff ain't enterprise-ready.' That is what the enterprise veterans tell the SaaS startups. Well, at least they do until one accepts the offer from that fast-growing SaaS startup.
If you set the agenda as being whatever passes muster with the internal IT department, then yes, the CHOI behemoths will always win. But a much bigger wave of change is happening, a more radical wave, which we described in our post 'Enterprise 2.0: The Nature of the Firm.'
In this world, SaaS wins. The CHOI vendors know this. They are only pretending to be Eeyore. They are bulking up so that they can defend the declining part of their business while investing in the SaaS future.
Profile options are already being changed in response to popular requests; a new section of contact information that you can expose only to selected groups of people has just been added, for example. This opportunity to influence how Google describes you via your profile could be a very important one, it's worth your while to take a look at the discussion and cast some votes for and against ideas. As we write this, only 600 people have so far.
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Google Social Graph API creator Brad Fitzpatrick, for example, posted a request to add rel='me' markup to the profiles so that the smart applications (like this one) can tie together all the accounts from various websites people list on their Profle pages. Several other people asked to have music playlists or GTalk IM status messages included in Google Profiles. Others asked that Google Profiles by tied to Gmail contacts for easy viewing in other applications.
There's a lot of optional fields you can fill out in a Google Profile now. You're asked to list where you work, where you went to school, where you've worked in the past, what your 'superpower' is and other information. When Google Profiles got pushed to center stage yesterday, we voiced a concern that most peoples' concern about what shows up when people search for their name on Google is too much information. Being told that the answer is to give Google even more info about ourselves in order to have any influence on our public appearance seems ironic at least.
The Potential For Innovation
The potential for innovators to make use of these profile pages if they are marked up well and made available is really incredible. Just imagine: Dear Google, please show my software all the people you know with Google Profiles who have listed their Delicious accounts, have bookmarked in Delicious more than 10 links around the web with one of 10 common food-related tags, who live in California, Oregon or Washington and who have YouTube accounts as well. I want to gather a list of the videos most popular this week with food lovers on the West Coast.
That might be a pipe dream, but it certainly wouldn't be technically difficult if markup was good, the data was exposed well to developers and Google Profiles caught on well enough to build a large data set. Imagine the incredible variety of potential permutations of profile fields, cross referenced with data found on linked-to third party websites, that such a scenario would offer.
There are simple issues and there are complex ones that come up when public profiles become important on the biggest information discovery site in the world. There are privacy concerns and their are wishes and hopes for data-centric innovation. And who doesn't have thoughts about how they would like to be described to the world? Now's your chance to vote on it.
After delivering her report to President Obama last Friday, Melissa Hathaway, the Acting Senior Director for Cybersecurity for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils, today gave RSA Conference attendees in San Francisco a glimpse - what she called a 'movie trailer' - into the state of U.S cybersecurity.
According to Hathaway's 60 second trailer, the key to a cyber secure future lies in cooperation between the public and private sector and a united effort on both a hyperlocal front as well as globally.
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A Manhattan Project to Defend Cyber Networks
Melissa Hathaway came across our radar recently when President Obama tasked the former Bush administration aide with leading a 60-day review of Bush's Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative; a largely classified, purported $30 billion, multi phase plan to address cybersecurity issues that Hathaway was involved in developing. The initiative was promptly dubbed 'a Manhattan Project to defend cyber networks' by the then Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.
The CNCI, which began as a directive from President Bush in January 2008, received much criticism and in part led to Obama attacking the Bush administration during his campaign for not efficiently addressing cyber threats. 'As president, I'll make cyber security the top priority that it should be in the 21st century,' Obama said during a speech in July.
Unfortunately, as pointed out by Siobhan Gorman in the Wall Street Journal, the decision to hold a 60-day review suggests that any big move in the field of national cybersecurity was once again put off. Or was it?
Who is to Blame for Internet Security Problems?
'Despite all of our efforts,' Hathaway began, 'our global digital infrastructure, based largely on the Internet is not secure enough or resilient enough for what we need today and what we need for the future.'
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. From the online criminals who steal our information to the mass bandits that have the ability to damage portions of our internal infrastructure, such as the recent ATM scam that law enforcement sources claim is one of the most frightening and well coordinated heists they'd ever seen. 'In a single 30 minute period,' Hathaway said, '138 ATMs in 49 cities around the world were illicitly emptied of their cash.' And this can't continue she explained. 'Our goals depend on trust and that cannot be achieved if people believe they are vulnerable to these types of threats.'
The Trailer for the Path to National CyberSecurity
We need an agreed way to move forward Hathaway noted, that involves shared responsibility if we are to have 'trustworthy, resilient, reliable' cyberspace.
Describing cyberspace and its security as 'a fundamental responsibility of our government that transcends the jurisdiction of individual departments and agencies,' Hathaway explained that although each government agency has a unique contribution to make, no single agency can see the overall picture; they'll need to work together.
Additionally, the private and the public sectors need to join forces as they are 'intertwined' when it comes to cybersecurity. 'While it is the role of the government to protect its citizens, it is the private sector that in the main designs and owns the majority of the digital infrastructure,' she said.
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. 'We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,' she added. It requires 'leading from the top' from the White House, to government departments, to the private sector, the C-Suite, and even deeper, to the local classroom and library.
Hathaway's report, the culmination of a 60-day comprehensive review to assess U.S. cyberspace policies and structures will be made public in the next few days, she said, after the administration has had a chance to review the data.
Any good webmaster knows the cardinal rules of website optimization. Yahoo! wrote them all up years ago on their Developer Network site. And the more of these rules you can adhere to, the faster your site will load for your visitors. But, more and more often as sites turn to using asynchronous technologies like AJAX to make their sites more responsive and act more like applications, the old rules lose their effectiveness.
Today, the website wizards behind Digg have revealed a new technology they MXHR, or Multi-Part XML HTTP Requests, as a method for optimizing delivery of Digg's complex AJAX-enhanced site. The implementation of MXHR is an addition to Digg's User Interface Library, called DUI.Stream. While still in a fairly rough early stage, Digg believes that MXHR will eventually give it a huge boost in un-cached page rendering efficiency.
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There's a couple of problems that Digg has with using traditional optimization techniques. First, the site violates the first rule in a big way, since it uses multiple HTTP connection requests in order to render all parts of the page. Dialog boxes, comments, user icons and more all have to be delivered quickly and with equal priority, and multiple requests was the only way to go until recently.
Second, it can't rely on too much caching to help speed page load times. Digg is a discussion board as much as it is a news site, so caching is a huge problem. Active stories can sometimes have hundreds of new threaded comments being created every minute, and caching would cause huge discrepancies on how much of the conversation each client would actually see from moment to moment.
These issues are what MXHR is designed to optimize. Utilizing DUI.Stream to open only one HTTP connection between server and client, the separate 'page objects' such as dialog boxes, CSS and more can be bundled and sent through the same open connection. By eliminating, in some cases hundreds of separate HTTP connection requests for a page render, they can approach the rendering speed of a fully-cached page. Plus, this allows the server to control the order in which each page element will be built, resulting in the page appearing almost instantaneously for the user, with the the hidden framework being backfilled as needed.
Digg provides two examples of the DUI.Stream library in action, the first being an un-cached text demo, and the second an un-cached image demo. While the first example isn't too amazing - from what we saw the new library performs on par with traditional rendering - the second example with icons is stupidly faster. It's absolutely no contest that MXHR is the clear winner there.
Code is provided in the post for you developer-types out there to play around with along with a GitHub repository of examples. They are looking for feedback and suggestions on how to improve on this so please go take a look! We can't wait to see this tech get deployed so that we can have all the bells and whistles of Web 2.0 architecture plus all the speed of a well-optimized site.
Tweetmeme, a memetracker that tracks popular retweets on Twitter, just launched a real-time version of its service that displays tweets that are currently in heavy rotation on the popular microblogging service. In order to filter this constant stream of messages, Tweetmeme users can choose to only see messages that have been retweeted at least twice, though the default setting is for five retweets and can go up to twenty.
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Seeing every tweet that has only been retweetedtwice is not for the feint of heart, as the stream scrolls by extremely fast, but once you filter it down to at least five retweets, the stream becomes quite manageable. Tweetmeme's Founder Nick Halstead tells us that Tweetmeme uses the same polling technology as Friendfeed, and that the company plans to implement these real-time updates on other parts of the site as well.
Channels
In addition to these real-time streams, Tweetmeme is also focusing on providing channels about specific topics, including this one for Earth Day, for example. Thanks to this, it might soon be a lot easier to filter out the noise during a big conference, for example, where it is usually impossible to keep distinguish between high-value tweets and random invitations for lunch.
Sadly, these channels don't yet feature the new live streams, which is really a shame. It would also be great if we could create custom channels based on keyword searches that are then filtered by Tweetmeme, and presented in a real-time stream. We can't imagine, however, that the Tweetmeme team isn't working on something like this already (and maybe even implementing real-time updates in the mobile version as well).
Twitter and real-time clearly go hand-in-hand. Just in the last few weeks, we saw the launch of two new real-time Twitter search engines, Twazzup (our review) and Tweetmi, and, of course, there is also Monitter, the grandfather of Twitter real-time services. Tweetmeme's new real-time stream looks like a great compliment to those, and from what we've heard, the team still has a lot of great ideas about how to make the service even better.
Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for alerting us to this new feature.
Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home's energy usage stats to Twitter. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast's system also sends his home's energy data to the web, but it's not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts which are annotated by family members then tweeted for everyone to see. If you want to do the same for your home, we've got the info.
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Just in time for Earth Day, Troast hooked up a TED device to the junction box in his basement and rigged it to transmit data to the net. That real-time data can be viewed online at www.energycircle.com/ted_display.php. By using Google's Visualization API, he was able to create a graph from the data source that's connected to the web - in this case, that's the TED energy-monitoring device. As there are spikes and dips in the graph, a family member annotates those occurrences and those notes are automatically tweeted to a special Twitter account at Twitter.com/EnergyCirclekw.
Since the Troasts started using the device six months ago, they've decreased their energy use by 15%. Now they're wondering - will it drop even more with the world watching their energy consumption online?
Developers, Want to Make Your Home Tweet?
Although not everyone will want to make their data as public as the Troasts have, we know there are probably a few 'do-it-yourselfer' developers who have been waiting for a fun project like this to at least hold them over until Google gets their PowerMeter rolling.
Non-developers, try the Tweet-a-Watt system, instead.
Here's how to create your own real-time TED-tweeting home like the Troasts did:
You'll need a wireless router that has a USB Port and was capable of running an OPEN Wrt operating system. The Troasts went with the ASUS WL 500G Deluxe.
Replace the router's existing operating system with the OPEN Wrt operating system (Here's how.)
A customized script (customized software) has to then be put into the OPEN Wrt operating system. OK, so this is the hard part, Troast says the developers will post the script online at the EnergyCircle blog in a couple of days if there's interest. So if you're interested - please says so in the comments! Without this key piece of the pie, you're left writing your own script. (And if you do, share!)
Plug the TED into the wireless router using TED's USB port.
Write the ability to add an annotation to the data into the web site database so that you can annotate the data in the database.
Write the data display page using the Google visualization API, which enables you to take the data and annotations and make a chart like the one that you see the EnergyCircle site. (Specifically, they used the Annotated Time Line feature in Google's visualization API).
Note - How the Data Streaming works:
The script reads output from the TED every second and records it in a file located on the OPEN Wrt router.
Each minute, the router posts the output into the Energy Circle Database.
Over the past year, all the major tech blogs have done round-up articles of great Greasemonkey scripts to use with 
After installing the script and visiting Twitter, we found so many useful tweaks to almost every Twitter view that it was almost overwhelming. Here's what it does broken down into three main functionalities:
New Hotness: A new search field added to Twitter sidebar. Any searches performed from sidebar get saved and added to the sidebar (removable). A tiny smilie face is added to the Twitter icon of those people who are following you. When viewing a specific Twitter user, their social graph is inserted in the bio area. Local time is added if the user's time zone is in their profile. Map to user's location is inserted if location or geo coordinates are in their profile. Finally, the most awesome addition: Groups support in your followers/following tabs, you can add people to groups that show up in the Twitter sidebar. 
Today, Apple 
Most blogging platforms now feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on your blog, or even on other blogs on the Internet. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. 
Posters on the wall, teen magazines, boom boxes playing the same stupid songs over and over again (automatically!) - that's not a sustainable situation, by definition. That's teenage living and that's what MySpace built its huge site on. Just like being a teenager, MySpace is something that most people grow out of. Today marked an important point in the internet's move beyond MySpace.
We know that Oprah Winfrey's brought 
Despite the number of add-ons available in the Firefox ecosystem, it can still sometimes feel like there are only a few truly good ones out there. That's why when we find one that's actually worth using, we get excited. The latest add-on getting installed into our small but critical collection of extensions is 
Recently, business information solutions provider 
Another issue being faced is the blurring of boundaries between work and home. Gen Y workers generally don't see a problem accessing personal web sites from work - like Facebook and blogs. In fact, 62% of Gen Y professionals access a social network from work, but only 14% of Boomers do. That discrepancy could have something to do with the fact that Gen Y spends a lot more of their day online - they spend 10.6 hours per day accessing social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and multimedia sharing sites versus only 5.6 hours reported by Boomers. 
When 
Google Toolbar with My Location: This toolbar includes an advanced feature that can determine the general area the computer is in by IP address. It then uses this information in its enhanced Google search by area feature. If you are using a laptop with Internet Explorer already, this feature can come in handy by letting you quickly search the local area for the resource you need, even if you don't know exactly where you are. 
Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar: This toolbar is pretty clearly geared toward Chinese IE users. It features a space-optimized layout better suited to the Chinese language and features a new sidebar mode for managing bookmarks. It also has built-in buttons for translating foreign-language web pages in to Chinese.
Yahoo has 
Unless you lived in an exceptionally dark cave in the last two weeks, you probably weren't able to escape the 
It is also noteworthy that the most popular version of the video (with about 41 million views so far) was uploaded by a fan, 
In a 
According to Nielsen, the current trend towards watching more online video should drive more advertisers towards this medium, while for social media, according to Nielsen, 'a monetization formula continues to elude the globe's brightest marketers.' Nielsen, however, is also very positive about how Twitter and other social networks have broken down the feedback barriers between brands and consumers. 
According to Nielsen, new mothers exhibit a couple of interesting traits. More than any other group (including experienced mothers), new moms are drawn to social networking sites and blogs, and they are also more likely to publish their own blog posts. 
Google 
Oracle is buying Sun, and bankers are looking forward to the next wave of consolidation. To somebody who remembers the innovation and excitement of earlier enterprise hardware and software start-ups, this is a bit gloomy. CHOI (Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM) does not spell 'choice' for buyers, employees, or investors. Choose your behemoth. If consolidation means lower prices -- and it will -- buyers will be happy. But it all sounds like cost-cutting, layoffs, and less innovation to me.
Yesterday 
After delivering her report to President Obama last Friday, 
Any good webmaster knows the cardinal rules of website optimization. 
Tweetmeme's backend is sponsored by Sun through the company's 
Peter Troast, founder of 
