OpenID provider JanRain has launched an interesting project called Demand OpenID, which lets users click a bookmarklet whenever they are on a website that they want to request OpenID support on. It's a handy, if a touch rude, way to demonstrate user demand for OpenID on popular websites.

Right now the most popular services for users to demand OpenID are Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Amazon and Google.

JanRain's Brian Ellin says the project was inspired by blogger Aaron Hockley's recent oath to no longer comment on tech blogs that fail to offer OpenID login. Way to go Aaron!

Bumps in the Road

Unfortunately the service doesn't check to see if there's OpenID login already available on the site you're on - so my apologies to photo sharing site Zooomr, for example, if I made them feel at all defensive in testing.

It would also be nice if there was some way to know that the vendors were made aware of the demands. One way I can think of would be to publish a feed of each demand and ping the blogsearch engines with that feed. Then each demand would get picked up by company PR monitoring blogsearch feeds for mentions. I could set that up myself using a scraping service and FeedBurner, but that might not be so nice.

Early shortcomings aside, Demand OpenID is a great and simple idea.

Until now I've been twittering every time I get angry about the lack of OpenID somewhere. Now I'll use the bookmarklet. You should too, everyone should. Demand OpenID is built on the Google App Engine, so it can take the kind of click quantities that the lack of OpenID adoption around the web warrants.

Thanks to the Vidoop blog, a great place to unearth all kinds of OpenID related news like this.

Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.

If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am in heaven. Read on for screenshots and some critique.

Below is a screenshot of the live ticker, paused when an item is clicked. The scrolling is really smooth, story order is randomized. When you click on an item, the full text will appear if it's available in the feed. The link at the bottom of the pop-up will take you to the full post.

You can have Snackr running at the top, bottom, left or right margin of your screen. I clapped my hands and jumped up and down like a little school girl upon seeing each different view for the first time.

The idea is not to read every item here, but to give your eye some opportunity to catch items it might not otherwise. I love it.

Wishes

So far I've only got two requests for Snackr development. The site supports authenticated feeds (password protected, something Google Reader can't do) which is great. When I click on an item from a particular filter's RSS feed in my GMail account though, the popup window prompts but doesn't allow me to log-in. I wish that were different.

Second, once I uploaded an OPML file, I ended up with some feeds I wanted to unsubscribe from and had to do so one at a time. Bulk feed management would be nice. A javascript bookmarklet to add a feed to Snackr with a click, when I discover it around the web, would be great too.

All in all though, I am very excited to discover the app. It was the first app I happened to look at on FreshAIR Apps today, an AIR site we reviewed earlier this week. I plan to spend a lot more time on that site, as AIR is a very exciting platform.

Six weeks ago, ReadWriteWeb published their definitive list of the top Twitter clients. The methodology for that list was watching the Twitter public feed and logging tweet sources. However, how does the list of clients people are using match up the list of the ones people are talking about? Using data from blog search engine Twingly, we decided to see which Twitter clients are getting the most buzz on blogs. The result is a list of the most popular 3rd-party Twitter-apps according to the blogosphere.

This is a guest post from Anton Johansson, a business developer at the Swedish startup Twingly.com, which developing a spam-free blog search engine focused on Europe.

Top 5 Overall

• Twhirl
• Mobypicture
• Twitterfeed
• Twitteriffic
• Terraminds micro search

ReadWriteWeb's public feed study in April also found Twhirl to be the most popular Twitter client. It was helped in the blogosphere by all the buzz created by its acqusition by Seesmic last month. [Incidentally, that also drove a lot of traffic to our Twitter clients list post as well. -- Ed.]

Top 5 Desktop Apps

• Twhirl
• Twitteriffic
• Snitter
• Tweetr
• Twitteroo

The top two desktop apps -- Twhirl and Twitterific -- are again the same ones ReadWriteWeb saw last month in their study. But after that, things deviate a bit. Snitter, Tweetr, and Twitteroo were all farther down the list in terms of usage, but are getting a disproportionate amount of coverage in the blogosphere.

Top 5 Web Apps

• Mobypicture
• Twitterfeed
• Terraminds
• Twistori
• Summize

Launched just a few weeks ago, Twistori (RWW coverage) has already garnered a lot of attention. Interestingly, Twistori actually uses data from Summize, one of the more popular Twitter search engines -- and clearly one of the most talked about, as well.

Top 5 Mobile Apps

• Hahlo
• Cetwit
• Twitter Answers
• Twapper
• Twittai

There have been far fewer blog posts written about mobile Twitter applications in relation to other categories. Hahlo, the first iPhone and iPod Touch client for Twitter takes first place in terms of buzz, followed by Cetwit, a popular app for Windows Mobile. Twittai is a Java-based Twitter cell phone application.

Notes and Methodology:

We used the the list of Twitter apps on the Twitter Fan Wiki as our source of applications to watch for. The list contains 209 Twitter apps, most of which have not been linked to from the blogosphere at all.

LoudTwitter, an app that publishes tweets to blogs, was excluded because most of its links came from link backs included when the service pushes tweets to blog posts. They didn't get many mentions in posts specifically about them, but their autolinks generated a ton of links within the blogosphere.

Allen Stern points out that RSS filtering service AideRSS has added Twitter to its PostRank algorithm. AideRSS works by measuring social media interaction with blog posts, and then comparing them to what's normal for that blog. The service then algorithmically applies a ranking to each post allowing users to filter out only the best posts based on the theory that people will only bother interacting with the most interesting or worthwhile content.

We're huge fans of AideRSS at ReadWriteWeb. Not only have we written about them a lot, we've also used AideRSS to filter aggregate feeds for the top content for a number of our toolkit posts. Adding Twitter support is an interesting move because it confirms Twitter's growing influence in the social media space, and lets blog owners see how their content is being spread across the microblog service.

Since we published our first look at AideRSS last July, their PostRank algorithm has changed a lot. At launch, PostRank included information from comments, Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket, and Bloglines -- now the latter three have been replaced with Twitter links and Google blog search conversations. Some of those changes likely had to do with API restrictions, some likely with just general tweaking to make the algorithm perform better.

Because AideRSS calculates PostRank against only that blog's past performance, the ranking is a fair representation of that blog's best work. For example, a PR 10 post on ReadWriteWeb would require different interaction metrics than a post on a small personal blog. PostRank would be easy to cheat -- you could comment a million times on your post, get your friends to Digg it, tweet it, add it it del.icio.us -- but since the service isn't measuring you against other blogs, there's really no incentive to cheat it.

AideRSS also announced support for OpenID.

The music search engine and Internet jukebox, Songza, lets you seek out any song on the web and stream it immediately. In January of this year, we announced the site's partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr, which allowed them to grown their online library to 28 million songs. Now, Songza grows again with a launch of a new Facebook app and the arrival of a Songza API.

The Songza Facebook app lets friends see what each other are listening to on the Songza web site. Whenever a song is added to your playlist, that information is posted to your mini-feed and your profile page. Your friends can then click the link to the song to be taken to the Songza site to listen to it for themselves. In order to use the Facebook app, you have to first sign up for an account at Songza.com

Along with the Facebook app, Songza is now also offering RSS feeds for the site's top-played songs, the featured songs list, and each user's playlist of newly added tunes, which is found on the user profile page. With that last one, the user playlist feed, you now have the ability to add Songza to a lifestreaming service such as FriendFeed, for example.

The last part of the Songza announcement involves the launch of their API. By using the API, developers can build custom widgets and applications based on Songza data. The API can be used to access the featured songs list, a user's playlist, and the last ten songs a user has added to their playlist. At the moment, Songza isn't imposing any limitations on the number of times requests can be made to the API, but they do remind developers that their feeds only update every 15 minutes, so there isn't much point to polling more often than that. 

Because Songza finds its music on the internet, it can be useful for locating more obscure artists or live performances. And since the service doesn't allow for downloads, only streaming, it's legit. They even pay artists based on how many times a song was streamed via licenses with the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC). However, the best thing about Songza is that you can listen to a song as many times as you want in its entirety, unlike Last.fm, whose on-demand service lets you play any particular song, too, but only in full three times before receiving a prompt to purchase it.

Last August we called Spongecell 'the most intuitive of the online calendar apps,' and picked it as one of our 10 Must Have Online Office Apps. Since then, though, a lot has changed. Spongecell is no longer just a personal calendar, but rather a full-scale event management platform aimed at businesses with complicated event calendars. Last week I caught up with Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman and Chief Strategy Office Marc Guldimann to learn a little bit more about what the company is up to.

With Google Calendar now dominating the online personal calendar space, Spongecell decided to take a different approach to the market. Spongecell reworked their product and launched 'Spongecell Promote' in March 2007, a full event-marketing platform provides publishing, messaging, and reporting tools to event organizers. After seeing that they were getting more traffic via embedded calendars than via the personal calendar service that had been their main product, Spongecell decide to shift gears completely and make Promote their core offering.

Above is a sample Spongecell calendar widget.

The service compares somewhat to Evite, but Kartzman stressed that Spongecell isn't focused on one-off events like birthday parties -- though the product could be used that way -- but rather hopes to help organizations or event managers who run a large number of gatherings to manage their entire calendar.

Spongecell's service has three main components:

• Publishing: Each event gets a web page that allows people to RSVP, comment, get directions, etc. Event pages can be syndicated to MySpace, Facebook, Eventful, Upcoming and elsewhere via widgets.
• Messaging: Spongecell lets users spread the word about their event via SMS and email. About 2 million emails are sent out each month via the service.
• Reporting: Event managers can use Spongecell's reporting features to track their email and SMS blasts and guest lists.

Spongecell's calendar widget has about 12,000 installs and serves 2 million pageviews each month, Kartzman told me. About 25% of those come through the app's RESTful API, which allows developers to create custom calendar applications. Parenting site lilaguide.com, for example, uses the API to power its event section and has customized it so that parents can add events to the site's calendar.

Conclusion

Spongecell has already landed some pretty big clients for their platform, including CNN, but plans to expand into new markets over the coming year as part of an ambitious plan to become the event marketing management platform for any industry.

Spongecell may no longer be a must have office application -- if you're looking for a simple calendar, try Google -- but it is now a very well made and versatile platform for running an online event calendar on any web site. Deciding not to compete with Google was probably a smart move for the company, which now has a much better chance of cornering their intended market.

The way we create, interact with, and share information on the web is continuously changing, and at a very rapid pace. The end goal, most would argue, is the create a medium that completely democratizes the entire process. This evolution has taken us through editorially driven community sites (Slashdot), socially driven bookmarking sites (del.icio.us), and socially driven news sites (Digg), but none of them have really managed to figure out how to make the newspaper of the future. Just launched Knewsroom, one of the first apps from Kluster (ReadWriteWeb's coverage), believes that it has gotten it right, but has it really?

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

'The Knews' gets published every morning, featuring the previous day's top stories in Politics, Business, Technology, Design, Sports, and Entertainment. -- Knewsroom description

You can participate in the Knewsroom in several ways.

1. Propose a topic: Any user can speak up and propose a topic for coverage. The propositions are based on future occurrences that you think will take place, stories that might break, or events you would like to see covered. Once a topic has been proposed, any user from the community can create content based the proposition and you have a chance at getting published and getting paid. This feature works a lot like Newsvine - where you can create a column on your subdomain and get a shot at being featured as a columnist on the front page - but the problem is Knewsroom only shares 20% of its revenue with the community, and that 20% is divided between writers, readers, and evangelists. Newsvine on the other hand, gives columnists 90% of all revenue generated from their columns.

2. Submit or create relevant content: Story submission has two sides to it. First, as mentioned above, you can write original content based on a story someone from the community has proposed, and second, you can submit a link to an external source to be syndicated as a response to the story proposal. If the community deems your content 'Knewsworthy,' you will get published on the site's front page, and if the content is your original work you have the chance to earn an additional $150 on top of your cut from the 20% shared with the community. What you have to do to earn this additional money is not clear (but I imagine it is based on the popularity of the content).

3. Decide what content is deserving: Once a story idea has been proposed and someone else has either created content in response to it or submitted an external link related to it, the Knewsroom community gets to decide whether the story is worth publishing or not. If enough people agree that it is worth covering, it will be published as a column in the next day's Knewspaper.

What I find really interesting about Knewsroom is that the more you participate and the more the community appreciates and respects your participation, the more power you have to shape the Knews. This is a good way to incentivize regular participation and is the exact opposite of the way Digg treats its most passionate users. As you get more involved, you accumulate watts, a form of currency on Knewsroom, that you can 'invest' in proposed topics or created stories to show how much importance you attribute to them and how important you think it is to cover them in the next day's paper. You accumulate these watts - in the same way you accumulate actual cash on the site - by suggesting topics, writing stories, voting, and referring other members to join the site.

Just like on Wall Street, your return on investment is determined by the risk you take. You can invest in Topics -- which are kind of like mutual funds (lower risk/lower return), or you can bet on Stories -- which you can think of as individual stocks (higher risk/higher return). Of course, you can diversify and do both. Like everything else at Knewsroom,^TM it's entirely up to you.

At the end of each day (at deadline time), Knewsroom uses its 'sophisticated matrix algorithm' to determine what the most important topics are in each category and what the most important stories are within each topic. If your topics or stories are picked, you get a return on the watts you invest as well as real cash credited to your Knewsroom MasterCard.

Problems with Knewsroom

As I was signing up for the service, I immediately saw several issues with it. For example, unlike traditional social news sites Knewsroom's Knewspaper doesn't update as people participate on the site and invest watts into stories, rather there is one Knewspaper per day and once it's published there is no changing it. This feels like a step backwards, toward daily print news cycles where if a news story breaks in the evening you don't know about it until the next day. It's as if they've taken something static (a print paper) and put it on a dynamic platform (web publishing) but refused to take advantage of the dynamicness.

For example Knewsroom's coverage in the technology section yesterday had no mention of Yahoo!, Facebook versus Google, CBS's acquisition of CNET, or any other stories that broke later in the day and were all over Techmeme and Digg almost immediately. In fact, I saw some of these stories in the queue for tomorrow's paper, by which time they will already be old news.

Furthermore, the revenue sharing, while a good idea, is not enticing enough to attract people already contributing to Newsvine's social news and content publishing hybrid that pays out a much larger percentage for your efforts. And while I like the idea of 'investing' in stories rather than a simple positive or negative vote (because it allows for degrees of approval and also limits how you distribute your watts among stories), the implementation of the feature on the site feels a little contrived. For example, rather than simply submitting a story, you have to first select a category, then pick a topic (or create a topic), then invest in it and hope enough other people do too (not to mention waiting for someone else to find a link to write original commentary on a topic you proposed), before it gets published. And you have until 5:00 AM CST for the entire process to complete, meaning a story that breaks an hour later would have to go through a 23-hour gestation period before it gets published (if at all).

If at first glance you find yourself simply comparing the service to a combination of the existing social news services with a newspaper-style presentation of the content, you're not far from reality. Knewsroom uses the existing services as models to build on and even though they are moving in the right direction, they have made some grave missteps that keep them from the prize. In the end, it's the site's slogan that sets it up for failure...

The best news isn't up to the minute -- it's up to you.

The problem is, a lot of incredibly important news is up to the minute and if I can't get it on Knewsroom, I will go somewhere else where I can.

Since we reported yesterday that cable and Internet provider Comcast had acquired social address book Plaxo for an estimated $150 million, we've been fielding a lot of comments and emails -- most of them not very supportive of the acquisition. Most people seem wary of Comcast -- which has a poor reputation on the web due to 'bandwidth throttling' practices -- and some have told us that they'll be deleting their Plaxo accounts. How about you?

We noted yesterday that Plaxo's early reputation was that of 'one of the biggest scum-bags of the mainstream social web,' and Comcast has an even more tarnished reputation. Recently, Plaxo had started to soften that poor reputation in some circles, but selling to Comcast may have set them back to square one. 'Given the histories of both companies, something devious is liable to happen,' we predicted, and many of our readers agreed. But we're curious, with Comcast at the helm, will you stop using Plaxo? Let us know in the poll below and add your opinions in the comments.

Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that's compromised of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X'ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we're going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole.

There's some contention over where exactly Gen Y starts and stops - some say those born 1983-1997, others think 1982-1997. In this week's Entertainment Weekly, Gen Y is defined as 'current 13 to 31 year-olds' and BusinessWeek says they can be as young as five. Regardless, we know who they are - they're the young kids of today, the most digitally active generation yet, having been born plugged in.

How They're Different

They're Plugged In: The term 'digital native' applies to most Gen Y'ers. Those in Gen Y grew up around computers, the Internet, mobile phones, video games, and mp3 players. They are web savvy multitaskers, able watch TV, surf the web, listen to music, and talk or text on their phones, often performing several of these things at the same time.

TV Isn't King: Although you'll find Gen Y'ers obsessing over the latest episode of 'The Hills,' and other shows, they aren't watching TV as much as other generations do. Instead, Gen Y'ers spend more time surfing the net and using other devices, like iPods and Xboxes, even when it cuts into TV viewing. For them, TV is often just 'background noise.'

They Don't Care About Your Ad, They Care What Their Friends Think: Because they are immersed in media, both online and off, Gen Y'ers are marketed to left and right. But when it comes to making decisions, Gen Y tends to rely on their network of friends and their recommendations, not traditional ads. 'Ads that push a slogan, an image, and a feeling, the younger consumer is not going to go for,'' says James R. Palczynski, retail analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Instead, they respond to 'humor, irony, and the unvarnished truth.' They're also somewhat distrusting of ads, which is why grassroots efforts can also work. However, don't get to comfortable, Gen Y doesn't have brand loyalty - they're quick to move the next big thing.

Work Isn't Their Whole World: Sure, they're going to go to work, but it had better be fun. For Gen Y, work isn't their identity. It's just a place. Gen Y sees no reason why a company can't be more accommodating, offering benefits like the ability to work from anywhere, flex-time, a culture that supports team communication, and a 'fun' work environment. They're also not going to blindly follow orders just because you're the boss. Sometimes dubbed 'Generation Why?' they need to 'buy in' as to why something is being done. Old school bosses may find their questioning insubordinate behavior, but they would be best to just change their management techniques and adapt. Gen Y hasn't known much unemployment and they're not going to put up with being treated poorly just for sake of a paycheck. (Bosses, your survival guide is here).

They're Socially Conscious: Gen Y cares about the world. They pay attention to politics, the economy, social causes, and environmental issues. They think they're a force to be reckoned with in elections and follow the candidates online on social networks. They read the news, but not in newspaper format, which is is going to hurt that industry even more as time goes by.

Gen Y & Technology

Since Gen Y grew up on the web, they're going to be the driving force behind the way the web of the future is shaped. What Gen Y wants from the web will be the web.

Internet TV: Although watching TV online is something that few Boomers do, Gen Y is perfectly comfortable with this. They time-shift content all the time, not only on the web but via portable devices and mp3 players, too. When it comes to TV on the web, a recent study showed Gen Y leading the way when it comes to internet TV viewing:

• Generation Y (33%) and Generation X (27%) led early Baby Boomers (19%) in use of official TV program web sites.
• Gen Y (62%) users are much more likely to have watched a full episode on the program site than Gen X (41%) or younger Boomers (32%).

Socializing Rules...But They Want to Control It: Gen Y thinks a truly 'private' life is a crock. 54% have used MySpace, Facebook, or some other social network. Most of Gen Y had to learn the hard way about the perils of posting everything online. As they've aged, they realized blogging their every thought and posting those embarrassing pictures might have hurt their jobs prospects at times, so now some of them are interested in more privacy on their social networks. They're happy to continue over-sharing with friends, but also learning how to protect their updates and set their profiles to private. They're also wary of old folks, like their boss, trying to 'friend' them in their social space, especially if they're tragically un-hip wannabes.

But that's not to say their over-sharing is going to stop - Gen Y is getting into lifestreaming too, streaming live video via services like Yahoo! Live. In their own world, they're celebrities. Says Jason Barg, a 2004 graduate of Penn State University and founder of an online real estate company, notoriety is more about standing out from the crowd. 'A primary goal of people my age is not necessarily to become famous but to become distinctive,' he says.

Marketing Has To Change: Because Gen Y is media savvy and conscious of being marketed to, brands that succeed in the future will be those that open a dialog with their customers, admit their mistakes, and essentially become more transparent (save one notable exception, apparently). Companies' web sites that want to attract GenY'ers will become more like today's Web 2.0 sites. Social networking will be just a feature. Blogs will be standard ways for companies to reach their customers. Customer service won't just be a phone call away, it will be available via non-traditional means, too. Today, savvy companies might be using Twitter, but that could change at any time if Gen Y moves on. Companies will have to keep up with Gen Y and not get too comfortable using any one format. (Oh, and you can stop calling everything 'viral' - that's lame.)

Work Tools Need to Mirror Web Tools: Gen Y will drive adoption of 'Enterprise 2.0' products and services. Gen Y in the workplace will not just want, but expect their company to provide them with tools that mirror those they use in their personal lives. If socializing on Facebook helps them get a sale, then they're not going to understand why they can't use it at work. For more buckled down companies, if workers aren't provided with the tools they want, they're going to be savvy enough to go around I.T.'s back and get their own.

Companies wondering how Gen Y wants to use these tools at work should take a look at this - Sacha Chua's Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work (made for IBM):

| View | Upload your own

Web Sites Will Need to Cater to Shorter Attention Spans: No more long boring text! Thanks to constant media input, Gen Y has shorter attention spans and their 'grasshopper minds' leap quickly from topic to topic. (They also didn't read this whole article...too long!)

Mobile Web? Yes Please!: Gen Y will be happy to adopt the mobile web - they are practically glued to their phones. Currently, Gen Y is using the mobile web to socialize, not search. Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, in a company whitepaper, Making search social: Unleashing search for the mobile generation, concludes that '...Generation Y, who sees the mobile as a social device first and an information device second, is not using today's mobile search as much as expected. But Generation Y is using mobile phones to access social networks.'

Conclusion

Ignoring the voices of Gen Y is something you should do at your own peril, especially if you're a business looking to hire, a company selling a product, or an advertising firm trying to reach them.

Some good resources I've found recently for following Gen Y trends comes in the form of blogs (you know we love RSS here at RWW!). If you're interested in this topic, you might want to subscribe, too:

• Ypulse (RSS)
• My Gen Y Life (RSS)
• Twenty Set (RSS)
• Our American Shelf Life (RSS)
• Millennial Leaders (RSS)
• Lisa's Generation Relations Blog (RSS)
• Modite (RSS)
• Life Before Noon (RSS)
• Generation Y Voodoo (RSS)
• Personal Branding Blog (RSS)
• Newly Corporate (RSS)
• The Marketing Student (RSS)
• Young and Frugal (RSS)
• Employee Evolution (RSS)
• PR Interactive (RSS)

This article is just meant to highlight some of the ways Gen Y will impact the future of the web. What other ways can you think of?

Paul Miller reports that Yahoo! is today opening up its open developer platform for search SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey, which we reported on at the Web 2.0 Expo, is a component of a major overhaul at Yahoo! across all of its properties to 'rewire' for the social graph and data portability. SearchMonkey allows developers to build applications for Yahoo! search 'that enhance the usefulness and relevance of search results,' according to Amit Kumar, Product Manager for Yahoo! Search.

'With SearchMonkey, developers have a hand in shaping the next generation of search by building customized search results and mash-ups that users can add to their Yahoo! Search experience,' said Kumar.

The SearchMonkey platform has three main components, according to Yahoo!:

• 'Site owners share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup (microformats, RDF), standardized XML feeds, APIs (OpenSearch or other web services), and page extraction.
• Third party developers build SearchMonkey applications.
• Consumers customize their search experience.'

SearchMonkey applications come in two flavors: Enhanced Results and Infobars -- though both theoretically enhance search results. Apps are triggered when organic search results include a specific URL. Enhanced results replace a normal search result and must include information only from the site referred to in the actual result. Infobars, which appear directly below results, can include links to other resources or calls for user action.

For example, if you owned a Lebron James fan site, you could create an Enhanced Result that replaced instances of results from your site with a box showing James' latest stats and news articles pulled from structured data on your site.

Yahoo! Developer Network today released a quick guide to adding Microformats to your site. Indexing Microformats, and then further sweetening the pot by allowing developers to create applications that use that structured data and enhance the actual search results, should help push the use of semantic markup across the web. Besides potentially creating a better user experience via search results widgets, by incentivizing the use of semantic markup Yahoo!'s new open developer platform will help get us to a world where the bottom-up approach to the Semantic Web is feasible.

Yahoo! is also hosting a SearchMonkey Developer Challenge with $10,000 in prizes going to winners in 4 categories: Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories).

Google announced this morning that YouTube's new Insight video viewer analytics now includes free demographic stats on any video's viewers. YouTube users who have included gender in their user profiles can be anonymously reported and providing your age is a requirement to open an account with YouTube.

It's interesting to know that my latest video about late night escapades was viewed primarily by men ages 30 to 50. In a few minutes I will embed in this post a video of myself eating a live baby chicken and will report back on viewer demographics when they become available. You can view the demographics on your videos by clicking the 'insight' button next to each video on your account view.

Geographic location is also reported as part of the Insight package. Statistics can be limited to any time frame and are viewable side by side with metrics on a video's relative popularity and leading sources of off-site inbound traffic. It's a great little metrics package.

Presumably YouTube isn't getting all Facebook Beacon on us and tracking the demographics of users logged into YouTube but viewing videos embedded around the web. That would be a positive thing to see in anonymous aggregate. Since such views are unlikely to be counted, perhaps I should spare the fluffy little baby chick. Oh what the heck, let's give it a try.

These kinds of statistics were presumably available for advertisers, in large quantities, since the dawn of YouTube. Breaking them out on a video by video basis and offering a nice interface is a very logical next step but one that too few services online would take the time to provide - much less for free.

It would be nice if users were given the option to publicly expose their video Insight statistics and could view them on a chanel-wide basis instead of just for a single video. Update! I was wrong, several readers pointed out that YouTube does offer aggregate demographics of all your videos! Thanks, friends!

In a deal that was surprising only in its price, CBS has announced that it will buy CNet, owners of everything from News.com to Download.com to our competitors Webware, for $1.8 billion.

That's 10% more than Google paid for YouTube, and that deal was all for stocks. CBS paid a 45% premium over CNet's closing stock price and it paid it mostly in cash. CBS buying CNet is a big, complicated deal with a lot of possible take aways, but below are ours.

CNet is Well Baked

Founded in 1993, CNet is the granddaddy of all the blog networks on the web. It's had a good long time to marinate, has major internal problems like suit-happy shareholders and arguably fluctuating traffic, but CNet is as stable an online collection of brands as anyone out there.

What gets validated here is this: great online ad sales, high production value, serious talent, company maturity and breadth in both content and distribution. While all of those have always been important business traits, upstart content networks on the web have tended to focus far more on marquee personalities. Perhaps that's only a short term strategy until some of us can hope to build out networks with more fundamental business strengths.

CNet's content producers may not be flashy web 2.0 names but they've got rock stars of their own over there. Larry Dignan is an enterprise dark horse that our readers may or may not know about but who regularly rocks Techmeme more than anyone but TechCrunch. Declan McCullagh may be the best political tech blogger there is. Caroline McCarthy combines scoops, research and professionalism in a way that anyone would do well to learn from. WebWare may not get talked about in some Web 2.0 circles, but it's one of the very biggest blogs in that market and is written by people like Rafe Needleman and Josh Lowensohn - both of whom would be great on TV. I'd embed a CNet video here to demonstrate its production value, but few of the company's video properties allow embedding. So much for web 2.0, eh?

The above are just the Web 2.0 type names at CNet, we're less familiar with the company's powerhouse properties in gaming, consumer electronics and autos.

The importance of a strong ad sales team can't be understated. While most blog networks in this nascent medium end up selling ads with one side of the brain and writing content with the other, maybe teaming up with an ad network that pays the bills but doesn't power growth, CNet is lauded for their in-house ad sales team. If hiring top talent, doing in-depth research and offering high production value are important, then there are few aspects of content online more key than strong ad sales. Strong ad salespeople are hard to come by.

Finally, CNet's distribution of content (including some RWW articles) in China and Japan is more serious than any upstart blog network has been able to accomplish. What markets could be more important, other than India?

CNet is a mature, accomplished and broad network. While it may be more fun for some of us to read other, smaller, edgier blogs (RWW included, we hope), CNet properties are far closer to being household names than any one else in our market. Now they're part of CBS.

What Will CNet Look Like at CBS?

It appears that CNet will maintain a high degree of independence at CBS, but we can assume that some of its energy and brains will focus on bringing CBS into the next era online. Along with recent, much smaller, purchases of the recommendation technology behind Last.fm and the brains of Wall Strip, CNet should help CBS put more than just its toe into the waters of the web.

Will CBS TV content become available online more quickly? Will CBS TV content get better with an infusion of creative talent from the web? Will CBS create a show called 'Everybody Loves Redmond,' as one joker in our community of readers offered? Will all talent get diffused and leave innovation lovers wondering what happened to CNet in just a few short years?

It's hard to say for sure, but if nothing else - CNet offers one vision of what it takes for an online content network to cash out big time.

Soulseek, which was creted by former Napster programmer Nir Arbel and visibly resembles early versions of Napster, is not one of the most popular filesharing apps. It doesn't have the mainstream appeal of Kazaa or Limewire, nor does it garner the press attention of BitTorrent. And that's all probably fine with its users, who tend to gravitate toward more independent musical fare. But Soulseek has done something the others haven't -- made the jump to the iPhone.

Developer Errrick created iSlsk, a new filesharing client for jailbroken iPhones that works with the Soulseek network, by basing it on open source versions of the client for the Mac. 'I saw all the capabilities this little gadget had and then thought 'why didn't someone already do something like this?'' he told TorrentFreak.

iSlsk lets iPhone users search for and download files directly on their phone. The software also imports downloaded files to the iPod music database so that they can be played with native iPhone controls.

This is not an application you'll ever see in the upcoming official iPhone application database. Apple certainly won't let applications that a) potentially facilitate illegal file sharing and b) cut into their iTunes Store revenue into their official app distribution channels. If iSlsk and other music and video sharing applications catch on, will we continue to see jailbroken iPods even after the release of the official app store? Even if Apple starts selling phones that aren't tied to AT&T?

A video of the of the app in action is below:

While social media services such as Twitter and Friendfeed are great ways to start making connections, nothing compares to face-to-face interaction. Mobile social networks like Brightkite aim to bring users together by allowing users to connect with others that are in the same location and interact more honestly with one another beyond the virtual world.

However, the very reasons that such networks exist are also proving to be their weakest points. In this post we look at the current market for mobile social networks and try to understand some of the issues they face.

Location, Location, Location

While mobile social networks promote and encourage users to meet offline, this is also the biggest obstacle for networks to overcome. GPS may not be a requirement, but honestly, who's in your neighborhood and using these services?

The majority of the users of mobile social networks congregate in one specific city and rarely move outside of it. These areas are normally cities that the product premiered in, or a city in California (Silicon Valley anyone?). However, step outside such hot spots and users will hit a desert that stretches across many states.

Marketing To Mainstream

It's no secret that most mobile social networks are not catering to mainstream users. Take a look at the who's using Brightkite and we'll guarantee that the majority of users are part of the early adopter crowd. While this is fine, mobile social network developers need to realize that such products don't have to run into the same issues that hinder services like Twitter or Friendfeed from going mainstream. The mobile market is already mainstream, with over 1.8 billion cell phone users worldwide!

Compatibility issues

Anyone can sign up for mobile social networks such a Brightkite, Zyb, or Groovr, regardless of whether or not an invitation is needed. However, the majority of users are greatly disappointed afterwards because phone compatibility is another issue that plagues mobile social networks. They aren't the only ones with this problem either. Even services such as Qik have limited compatibility with mobile phones. It seems that if you aren't using the latest high-end phone made by Nokia, which runs well over $400, you're given the cold shoulder by these services.

Bleak or Bright Future?

Unfortunately, mobile social networks still have a long way to go. Other outside issues such as network compatibility can also affect the number of active users of mobile social networks. Despite these issues, we continue to look forward to the development of mobile social networks and services. However, developers need to take a moment and look closer at the problems that they may be creating just by developing networks that are as immobile as their users.

In the next post we'll review some of the aforementioned mobile social media contenders.

Blist, the cloud database application, which we covered back in March when they launched into their public beta, just received a big update yesterday. The update addresses, for the most part, stability and performance issues, but it also includes some new social features as well.

What's New

Responding to user feedback, the blist team focused on making their application more stabile and faster. Specifically, in two areas where it was too slow - horizontal scrolling and 'blist-in-a-blist' (table inside a cell). Prior to the update, those were two of the slowest areas, but now, each has received a noticeable performance boost.

Additionally, two of blist's social features were also updated - Discovery and the Dashboard. In the Discovery section, there is now a leaderboard showing the most social blist users - that is, who is doing the most sharing of their databases. The goal here seems to be to encourage people to publicly share their data with other blist users instead of making their databases private. On the blist Dashboard, there were some minor improvements - you'll now see more events and you can even scroll through the past 100. The dashboard's UI was also tweaked to enhance the flyouts which now give you a quick overview of the user.

blist flyout

However, one of the best improvements in terms of usability is native Excel import. Prior to the update, the only way to import Excel files was to first save them as a .CSV. Now Excel docs can be imported even if they are in .XLS format.

We love to see what's arguably one of the more useful web applications still doing well. As an alternative to complicated software like Access or Zoho's database, which requires some knowledge of SQL, blist makes database creation nearly as easy as making a spreadsheet. And anything that makes our lives easier is a good thing.

In a tragic and surprising turn of events, Brijit, one of the most interesting startups on the web, has announced that the company has run out of money and will cease operations until more funding is found. Brijit offered 100 word summaries of the best long-form content in print, on television and most recently on sites like Digg, Techmeme and YouTube. Review writers were paid $5 per approved review and the angel funded company planned to sell ads targeting high-end periodical readers.

I loved that site and am very sad to see it go. The service was a lot of fun to use. Given how recently the company has received substantial media attention and how loyal its small group of users was, this was a real surprise.

Visitors to the site tonight were greeted with the following message:

You've reached this page because, at the moment, Brijit is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words. We're working hard to find a way forward for our service and hope to relaunch in the not-too-distant future. Thanks to all our loyal readers and writers. And to our Brijit writers: payments in full for all abstracts published through May 15 will be made next week.

As you can see from the Compete graph below, traffic was trending up at Brijit after an initial media spike. The company has a really compelling system of 'assignments' for review writers and the end result is a great crib-sheet for anyone headed to the periodicals section of a local bookstore on the weekend.

Brijit content is still available on the website here. You can read our previous coverage here. A great article about Brijit in the Washington Post is here. The Post reported in October that the company had raised $1 million in funding. Did it already burn through that, $5 at a time, or has something else happened?

I really hope that this isn't another signal that only lowest-common denominator content is able to monetize and scale online these days. It's hard not to think that Brijit's management must have drastically miscalculated somewhere. A million dollars aint what it used to be, though. Either way, the web will be a less wonderful place if Brijit goes belly up for good.

Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet. We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content. But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We're speaking of the contextual user interface.

Even five years ago we lived in the boxed world of Windows-dominated UIs. There were standard UI elements - menus, tabs, combo boxes, tables - and every single desktop application was full of these elements and nothing else. User interface was not the place to be innovative. It was considered unorthodox and even dangerous to present the interface in non-standard ways because everyone believed that users were, to be frank, stupid, and wouldn't want to deal with anything other than what they were used to.

Strikingly, the recent wave of UI innovation is proving exactly the opposite. Users are not stupid, and in fact, they were overwhelmed with choices presented in traditional UIs. The new interfaces are winning people over because they are based on usage patterns instead of choices. The key thing about new UIs is that they are contextual - presenting the user with minimal components and then changing in reaction to user gestures. Thanks to Apple, we have seen a liberating movement towards simplistic, contextual interfaces. But can these UIs become the norm? In this post we take a look at the rise of the contextual UI and ponder if they will cross the chasm.

Windows UI - The World Of Never-Ending Choices

Looking back at the years when Windows dominated our lives one can hardly believe what we put up with. These interfaces were massive and overwhelming. Each application was full of screens with huge numbers of options and settings.

Every imaginable choice was thrown at users at once and it was up to the poor user to figure out what to do. To cram more information onto the screen, the interfaces of that era used tabs. At some point Microsoft invented the ultimate UI element - a tab with a scroll button in the end which allowed the user to page through hidden tabs.

Another philosophy of the old UI approach was that the user wants to see all information all the time. Instead of building UIs that responded to the way that people actually interacted with the tool, the user interface opened up all possible choices at all times. Naturally, this is completely overwhelming and confusing to people.

The only way to cope with complexity was to introduce a standard set of widgets, such as tables, combo boxes, check boxes, etc., so that users at least had some familiarity with UIs from program to program. But on top of that, there was a myth spread that users were stupid and would not be able to understand a non-standard UI.

The myth was supported by the fact that a lot of people do not respond well to sophisticated visualizations, like graphs, heat maps, or treemaps. While this is true, it doesn't mean that people can not figure out new user interfaces. The proof comes from Apple, which continuously innovates with new UIs for its software products. Also, recent social web applications have made a strong case for simpler, contextual user interfaces.

Apple's Revenge

Since Steve Jobs returned to Apple over 10 years ago, the company has been on a roll. The secret sauce behind Apple's success is a strong investment in software. In turn, this has meant a lot of innovation is user interfaces. Many years ago, when I myself was blinded by the standard Windows UI, my boss told me that user interfaces are cheap. He meant that building new UIs from scratch makes sense, because the UI is so essential and so important to get right that you shouldn't just reuse code and widgets.

Steve Jobs and his team know this all too well. Apple's UIs evolve constantly, taking on new forms and seeking simpler ways of delivering a superior user experience. What is remarkable is that you always know how to use Apple's products. I watched this over and over again. From my 4 year old daughter to my 83 year old grandfather, everyone I know could use an iPhone right away. iTunes has so few buttons that it is impossible not to know how to use it. And so does iPhoto and every other program developed by Apple.

In addition to simplicity, Apple has for years been using a contextual approach to user interfaces. Apple widgets react to user gestures by changing shapes and presenting more options only when it makes sense. And the latest web applications have got the contextual bug from Apple.

Contextual User Interfaces on the Web

It is ironic that it took web UIs so long to discover the elegance and simplicity of context. Since its dawn, HTML lacked the sophisticated widgets that are present on the desktop and web UIs were always considered more primitive and slow. Contextual, AJAX-based UIs actually seem faster because they do not reveal all possible choices to the user. Instead they focus on surfacing just the bits that are necessary and then surfacing more based on user gestures.

A good example of context-based UIs can be found in modern video players. The controls in these apps are hidden until the user moves the mouse over the player. Depicted below is the player from Vimeo.

Another typical element of contextual UI is modal DHTML dialogs. Regular modal dialogs are annoying to the user, but the modal DHTML ones work great because they bring the actions into the spotlight. For example, the dialog below comes up when the user clicks on Embed option in the screen above.

Note the contextual options in the screen above. The user can either preview the video or customize its look. Neither of these options are required so they appear as closed off toggles. If the user decides to explore the option, the toggle simply expands as shown below.

Another important breakthrough in the contextual UI approach is the realization that function is more important than design. The famous Apple mantra that design is the function is true, but not everyone can design like Apple. Lots of web sites in the nineties ended up with designs that were overwhelming and needlessly flashy. Those designs paid more attention to colors and forms than to the function. The new UIs are different, because a lot of them are purposely plain. They favor CSS over images, and focus on function and context instead of knock-out looks.

Lots of companies got the context bug. Flickr, Digg, and 37 Signals are just a few that use contextual interfaces. Our next example comes from the literary social network Shelfari, which developed a contextual UI for interacting with individual books. The remarkable thing about this UI is that it violates a lot of classic principles yet it succeeds in delivering the necessary functions in a contextual and compact way.

When the user mouses over a book, a contextual popup comes up containing information about the book and a set of associated actions. Part of the popup is a button/menu (sort of like a button and combo box) widget that allows the user to provide information about what he or she did with the book. The first thing to note is that combination of a button in a menu is not standard, yet it makes sense because it saves a click for the most important action. Secondly, the menu is effectively a popup within a popup, which is a big no-no in the classic world, but works well in this context. The elements of the menu are not buttons but check boxes, which allow multiple selection - another violation of classic user interface elements, but which works very well in this context. What is remarkable is how intuitive this gadget is - you are interacting with it in the context of a book and each choice is simple and clear.

Such clarity and simplicity was never present in the old interfaces. Clearly, this new approach to UIs is great, and early adopters are loving it. But will it cross over to the mainstream?

Can Contextual UIs Go Mainstream?

Crossing the chasm is a tricky thing and many cool technologies that are endorsed by early adopters fail to do it. Even though simple, contextual UIs make sense, the old UIs are still holding on strong. One of the early examples of a company that has adopted the new approach to user interfaces that we found is the Hertz car rental site. Hertz had one of the less user-friendly sites around, with a dull, 'click-to-load next page' sort of UI. Their new web site features an intelligent contextual UI, which enhances and simplifies the process of reserving a car.

For the transition to happen the new approach needs to be embraced by more mainstream web sites. Will they go for it? The answer depends on whether they will think that the new UI approach, with contextual choices, is more complicated. Certainly there will be people who will say that consumers are not smart enough to figure out where to click. The concerns might be amplified by the fact that each contextual UI is unique and so won't be familiar across the board for users the way the old UIs were. Still, it seems, based on our experiences over the past few years and on the impressive track record of Apple products, that simple, contextual UI have a chance to finally win out over their complicated Windows rivals.

What do you think - can contextual UIs become the new standard for creating user interfaces? What are your favorite contextual UI elements?

Adobe announced today the release of the Flash Player 10 beta, previously code named 'Astro,' on the Adobe Labs site. The beta is available for download immediately at the Astro web page and adds a number of compelling features to the Flash player. Adobe, which claims that the Flash player is on 98% of Internet connected PCs, says it has seen an acceleration in the penetration rate for new versions of the player which each new release. It took just 3 months to reach 62% of Flash users for the last version of the player (verion 9), according to the company.

Last October at the Adobe Max event in Chicago, Adobe showed off early demos of 'Hydra,' a new image processing programming language. At the time, Hydra was being used to power many of the special effects and filters in After Effects CS3 -- a market leading motion graphics software package for film and video -- but Adobe planned to integrate it into future products, including Astro.

Hydra is now known as Pixel Blender and it is indeed in Flash Player 10. Pixel Blender can be used by developers to create small functions that can be applied to vector images, video, and bitmaps in real time -- think things like morphing transformations or transitions. One thing that struck me about Hydra when I saw the demos at Max was its speed, and the same can be said of Pixel Blender, in part because Flash Player 10 is taking more advantage of the GPU.

Adobe has set up a Pixel Blender Exchange where developers can swap Pixel Blender effects the way Photoshop users swap plugins and filters.

Also new in Flash 10 is a new text rendering engine that will allow developers to create their own text controls. The new engine 'provides interactive designers and developers creative control over device font attributes, such as anti-alias, rotation, and style as well as support for ligatures,' according to an Adobe press release, as well as 'more text layout options, such as vertical, bi-directional and right-to-left.' The latter is important because it will make supporting non-Latin alphabets, such as Japanese, more easy.

One of the most immediately accessible and compelling new features in Flash Player 10 is the native support for 3D. Developers will now have the option of performing 3D effects on 2D objects with just a few lines of code. The screenshot below, for example, is made up of 2D images of cell phones that were laid out in a circle, then tilted up into 3D space and told to rotate.

Adobe expects to ship a final version of Flash Player 10 later this year, and also plans for the new features to find their way into AIR in a future release.

Communications giant Comcast has acquired social web application Plaxo for an estimated $150m or more. Techcrunch confirmed the deal first but offers an understated critique of the alliance. Many web users familiar with the operations of both companies are much more upset about the deal.

Plaxo has probably the most clouded reputation of any of the major participants in the current data portability discussion, except perhaps for Microsoft. Comcast is no angel either.Together the two companies will be ill prepared to serve end users well.

Users Want ISPs Out of the Way

The plan for Plaxo at Comcast appears to be for the acquired company to power media publishing, sharing, lifestream aggregation and presumably contact management. The problem is that there's a whole market of alternatives for those services and many users just want their ISPs to deliver the damn internet so they can use it however they see fit.

Comcast has done a poor job of this lately. By engaging in a practice called 'traffic shaping,' whereby the company throttles down the bandwidth available for activities like media downloading, Comcast has made itself the poster child proving that network neutrality is a valid concern. How much further would things need to go before Comcast slows the user experience to a crawl when users seek to visit sites that compete with Comcast properties? The kind of lifestream aggregation that Plaxo offers is an emerging bandwidth hog - perhaps Comcast customers ought not be allowed to use lifestreaming apps other than Plaxo.

Likewise, you'd expect your address book to mind its own business - but that's not what Plaxo has been about traditionally. Email inboxes around the world used to be filled up with spammy requests for contact info from Plaxo. ('hi, this is Joe, could you update the contact info I have for you in Plaxo?') While the company's earliest reputation as one of the biggest scum-bags of the mainstream social web has been greatly softened lately by a very charming (and now wealthy) young exec named Joseph Smarr, the old tarnish is hardly gone from many peoples' minds. Some users complain that Plaxo is still spammy and some people in data portability circles, where nouveau hip geeks like Plaxo (and yours truly) hang out, say that Plaxo is still clearly doing what's best for Plaxo above all else.

Maybe big money on the table means never having to do more than say you're sorry, but the Plaxo deal with Comcast is liable to hit more bumps in the road than just an unpopular history.

Mismatched Visions, If Everyone's Telling the Truth

One stop social web shopping at your ISP isn't an unusual vision at all. Plaxo's data portability talk seems at risk of going out the window for the relatively cheap price of $150m, though. Comcast is far more like to want Plaxo to power a new line of Comcast branded social web services than they are to want their customers running links off-site to Yahoo and Google properties through their Comcast experience.

Given the histories of both companies, something devious is liable to happen. Perhaps though Comcast just wanted to acquire some human resources, including people who figured out how to spam the whole web for contact information and just a few short years later end up hated less than a telco. That is impressive, even if not enough to warrant trust from users.

Last week, the fight to manage your social data kicked off in earnest as three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profi