Weekly Wrapup, 23-27 June 2008
Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reported on Nokia's buyout of the open source mobile OS Symbian, reviewed a "memory augmentation" service and a semantic search engine, and looked at what LinkedIn's strategy tells us about the IPO market. On the trends side, we contributed our 2 cents to Yahoo's board, investigated another Wikipedia controversy, analyzed the capacity of web 2.0 to bring about "change", and explored the online video market.
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Web Products
Nokia Acquires Symbian; Takes on Google's Android
Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. This week the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source. Nokia clearly aims to challenge Android, the open source mobile operating system of Google. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says that it wants to create "the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications".
See also: last100's analysis and Setbacks for Google's Android
Evernote Opens to All: Fantastic Promise, Disappointing Execution
The highly anticipated "memory augmentation" service Evernote opened to the public this week and you'll probably want to check this service out just to see what it tries to do. We may change our minds after more lengthy testing, but so far this combination of a bookmarking, note taking and photo cataloging service with apps for the desktop, web and mobile - not to mention the Optical Character Recognition powered search - adds up to a whole lot of potential ... and frustration.
Evri Beta Launches: Search Less - Understand More
Evri, a Paul Allen backed semantic search engine, launched into a limited beta this week. Evri was first shown publicly at the D6 conference. Evri's CEO Neil Roseman likes to talk about Evri in terms of organizing content instead of calling it a search engine. At its core, however, Evri definitely is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.
Facebook Targets Chinese Market
Social networking site Facebook has launched a Chinese-language version of its web site. Users logging into the site from the Chinese mainland are now being redirected to zh-cn.facebook.com, where users can choose between a version in simplified or traditional Chinese.
See also: China's Facebook Clones
LinkedIn and The Strange Case of The Disappearing (IPO) Market
Is LinkedIn worth $1bn? Yes. Why? Because Bain Capital says it is. The stock is not public, so you and I cannot trade it. The whole notion of the average punter trading tech stocks (or the average punter's pension fund trading it on your behalf) seems rather quaint, from some bygone era. But why has the public market for tech stocks disappeared? Where has it disappeared to? Will it ever return? The LinkedIn financing offers some clues to these questions.
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Web Trends
Yet Another Unsolicited Yahoo Turnaround Strategy - YAUYTS
Watching Yahoo's decline is rather sad. It is the result of nothing more or less than creative destruction. Meeting that challenge head-on is incredibly tough. Very, very few companies make the transition. IBM, led by Lou Gerstner, met the challenge of the PC era in his epic turnaround (described in the book Who Says Elephants Can't Dance). Microsoft has struggled mightily to remain relevant in the Web era and they are as smart and driven as it gets. What's so incredible is seeing the speed of these transitions - to see a big successful Web start-up like Yahoo marginalized by technology shifts.
Our Kids Are Failing - And It's All Wikipedia's Fault!
Talk about a knee-jerk reaction. This week news broke out in Scotland about how the internet was to blame for Scotland's failing exam pass rates. According to the Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC), Wikipedia, among other sources, was cited as the reason as to why the students were failing. Is this a case of the internet making us stupid? Or do students just need to learn how to use the new research tools of the web a little more appropriately?
Bored With Web 2.0? Demand Change
In April, Umair Haque posted a manifesto on his blog on the Harvard Business Publishing web site where he called for today's investors and start-ups to start building applications to "change the world" instead of just making apps that make money. He challenged Silicon Valley to find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and then pledged that he would help by providing free consulting. Recently, he revisited this topic...
YouTube Continues to Destroy All Competitors in Declining Video Market
YouTube's huge lead in market share over other online video sites continues to get bigger, even as the over all video viewing market continues a decline. According to traffic analysts Hitwise, YouTube now sees 75.43% of traffic to the online video category; that's up 26% from it's May 2007 marketshare of 59.95%. The nearest competitor is still MySpaceTV, which was down a whopping 44% to 9% marketshare. (Full chart of top 5 sites below.) In April we reported that YouTube's dominance in online video was bigger than Google's dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.
See also: The Top 40 Online Video Producers in May - This List Might Surprise You
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
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Weekly Wrapup, 16-20 June 2008
Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we explored Yahoo's ongoing troubles, reported on Firefox 3's record-setting week, covered a new "universal edit" wiki offering, and checked out some Mobile Web apps. On the trends side, we looked at what could disrupt Google search, explored the issue of 'info overload', analyzed lessons from Flickr, polled you about IM clients, and interviewed VC Brad Feld.
Web Products
There's been a lot of hand wringing in the media lately about Yahoo's rejection of Microsoft's takeover bid. Most of the coverage has focused on the (very serious) financial and people issues that Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang is now facing. But this week RWW focused on the impact on Yahoo's product line. Yahoo's key properties remain yahoo.com, email, myyahoo, and even Answers can be considered special. In short, content is what continues to drive Yahoo and those core properties are still enormously popular. It's just a shame Yahoo got bumped out of the way in social networking and online video -- two high growth content segments in recent times. Click through to read our recommendations for Yahoo.
See also: Yahoo Clings to Its Leading Web "Starting Points"
Firefox 3 Sets Download 'Record'
This week Firefox set out to break a record for most downloads in a 24-hour period. It surpassed the 5 million download mark it set out to meet well within the time limit - and ended up with 10.1 million downloads! We polled our readers: are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade? Here are the results:
See also: Get Firefox and Vuze is Another Good Download
Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button
Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface. It's a great little idea that could help breath new life into the wiki community. We would love to see the extension become a standard part of Firefox.
Loopt: Another Mobile Contender
Loopt is the third location aware mobile social network to become available for the majority of U.S. smartphones . It joins fellow competitors Whrrl and Brightkite, both of which have already started to gain traction (see our coverage of Brightkite here). However, this is not a market where the first one to debut on the smartphone will be the ultimate winner. Instead, in the wild west of the mobile social networks, the key will be adoption. This is an area where Loopt is making headway, having recently announced deals with all the major U.S. carriers and support for Blackberry smartphones.
See also: Fring API Could Shake Up the Mobile Web and Mobile Banking on the Rise
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Web Trends
11 Search Trends That May Disrupt Google
Bernard Lunn's first post for ReadWriteWeb (nearly a year ago) started with the premise that search was "game over", that Google had won and the only opportunity left was (re)search - i.e. what one does after the basic search. Unfortunately, none of the search start-ups since then has made a dent in Google's relentless march towards search market dominance. In this article, we outline 11 search trends that may change that.
Info Overload: The Problem & Solution
This was a 2-part series on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Part 2 is here.
Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.
Learning from Flickr's Co-founders on Their Way Out of Yahoo
In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired upstart Canadian photosharing web site Flickr and the web hasn't been the same since. Yahoo, on the other hand, didn't change nearly as much as everyone expected it to. Pre-CEO Jerry Yang told then-Business 2.0 writer Erick Schonfeld six months after the deal "I look at Flickr with envy, it feels like where the Web is going." Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have now cashed out and officially left the company. Though Yahoo! doesn't appear to have internalized many of the lessons of Flickr, it's not too late for the rest of us to look at those same key lessons for inspiration in our work on the web.
See also: 72Photos Offers a New, Sleek Alternative to Flickr
Why IM Interoperability May Just be a Dream
Interoperability between instant messaging (IM) clients is something a lot of users have wished for. More specifically, we wish it was standard and provided right out of the box instead of having to turn to third parties such as Adium, Digsby, Trillian, or Pidgin. Yet there seems to be a problem with the concept of interoperability for the companies of the more popular IM clients.
Also see the results of our poll on IM clients:
Note: 3 IM clients were added belatedly to the poll, due to demand in the comments of our post. Therefore the numbers for Pidgin, Miranda, and Apple's iChat are under-represented.
People in Tech: Brad Feld, Foundry Group
MIT Alumni, technologist, venture capitalist, marathon runner, Colorado dweller,
thinker, blogger, and all around super human, Brad Feld (LinkedIn, Twitter) has made a huge impact on startups. With posts on his personal blog, Feld Thoughts,
and on Ask The VC (a must read for anyone interested in venture funding) Feld has played a major roll in lifting the curtain on the traditionally mysterious venture process. We recently caught up with him for a quick interview.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
Finally, check out the latest episode of RWW Live, in which Sean Ammirati from ReadWriteTalk, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb, Steve O’Hear from Last100 and Charles Knight from AltSearchEngines discuss a number of big events over the last week.
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
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Weekly Wrapup, 9-13 June 2008
Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we covered the iPhone 2.0 announcement, reviewed 6 Adobe AIR apps for work, checked out the new MySpace and Last.fm re-designs, looked at Coke's social media play, and interviewed the co-founder of Mobile Web startup Skydeck. On the trends side, we provided real-time notes on the Future of the Web debate (featuring Tim Berners-Lee), looked into Google's data mining, analyzed the latest social networking stats, checked out the NYC tech scene, and explored the future of novels.
Web Products
iPhone 2.0 Announced - Revolutionary or Behind the Times?
This week the latest version of the iPhone was announced at Apple's WWDC event in San Francisco. Our network blog last100 posted an excellent overview of the news. The new version iPhone supports 3G and faster data networks, has GPS, has a few cosmetic changes and is thinner, carries a (dramatically) lower price ($199 for the 8 GB iPhone, $299 for the 16 GB model) and will be available in 22 countries starting July 11. It also features Microsoft Exchange and full enterprise support out of the box. These are all great features, but some people question: is the iPhone really that revolutionary compared to products available internationally? For example 3G has been available in many mobile devices for 2-3 years now in places like Japan. Check out the robust discussion in the comments to our post, as well as the results of the poll we ran:
See also: iPhone 2.0, Video Highlights and iPhone-less? Try Tiled Browsing Instead
Adobe AIR Goes to Work: 6 Apps for the Corporate Desktop
By now, you've heard of Adobe AIR - the cross-OS runtime that lets you run rich internet applications on your desktop. We've covered several of our favorite apps in the past, as well as places to find new ones, but so far all we've seen are consumer applications. What about the business world? Will companies ever be using AIR apps on their desktops? As it turns out, many already do and they're as easy to deploy as Adobe Reader.
See also: Where Are We in The Enterprise 2.0 Wave? and SharePoint To Run Enterprise 2.0?
MySpace is a Good Website and You Should Stop Complaining About It
MySpace announced this week that a new design will be launched next Wednesday. The army of MySpace haters is sure to kick into high gear, with exclamations that it's about time - even though they're unlikely to be satisfied with the changes. When Newscorp bought MySpace nearly three years ago for $580 million, people laughed at the acquisition. It's now recognized as a steal and yet people still complain. It's for user-experience reasons, though, that they should stop complaining.
See also: First Google Friend Connect Spotted in the Wild
Last.fm Re-design: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
One of our favorite online music services Last.fm is currently ungoing a semi-public re-design, available to Last.fm subscribers ($3 per month) at beta.last.fm. Bearing in mind that last.fm is now owned by mega media company CBS, it is great to see last.fm continuing to evolve fast. In this post we review the new design and see if it's ready for primetime. The short answer is no. The beta feedback so far has been mixed and comparisons to Facebook have been common.
A Smart Social Media Play From... Coca-Cola?
Coca-Cola quietly launched one of their first social media applications last weekend, a bookmarking widget for Facebook called CokeTag. (Coke Singapore also has a Facebook application out, promoting a tie-in with UEFA EURO 2008.) CokeTag is not only a smart play from the company, but also a fairly useful app as far as profile widgets go. The app allows users to create customizable Flash bookmark widgets linking to link collections on any topic they're passionate about.
People in Tech: Jason Devitt, CEO/Co-Founder of Skydeck
"...someone is going to build a billion-dollar company around the implicit social graph. And I'm betting on Skydeck." Jason Devitt
In this second installment of our new People in Tech series, we interview Jason Devitt, CEO/Co-Founder of Skydeck. It's a mobile web startup built on the premise that "you ought to be able to manage your cell phone records the same way that you manage your email." The second big idea of Skydeck is that your true social network is hidden in your communication records. Read on for more insights...
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Web Trends
The Rensselaer interactive debate on the future of the Web happened this week and it was webcast live. ReadWriteWeb was a media partner for the event and we also live blogged it. Topics included:
- Is the Semantic Web a Dream?
- AI's Role in the Web's Future
- Multi-lingual Web
- Democracy and the Web
- what's the difference between Web Science and Computer Science?
- Multi-modal Data; Can Semantic Web Capture Nuances?
Check out our post for full notes from the webcast.
Deborah McGuinness from Rensselaer introduces the debate, including a mention of ReadWriteWeb as part of the debate's "social media twist".
Do You Trust Google to Resist Data Mining Across Services?
Google's breadth of services is truly awesome and the amount of information the company touches concerning our lives and world can sometimes feel downright frightening. While almost no one takes the old phrase "Don't Be Evil" seriously anymore now that there are billions of dollars on the table and Chinese autocrats to satisfy - regular evaluations of Google's ethical positions still seem advisable. One of the big questions being asked with increasing frequency is this: Is Google using data it collects through particular services and using it for its benefit in other services? We know the company scans our GMail and uses the text there to sell ads, but is this a tactic being employed across services? Some people appear to believe it is.
Social Networking: Taking Off or Taking a Dive?
Recently, there have been a few conflicting reports about the current popularity of social networks in the U.S. On one hand, you have reports that point toward the growth of social networks and their continuing crossover into mainstream use. On the other hand, recently released stats on visitor data show that these networks are maturing and plateauing. So, what's really going on here?
See also: 10 Mobile Social Networks to Check Out
What's Holding Up the New York Tech Scene?
Since moving to New York from London in 1990, Bernard Lunn has become a firm convert to the idea that New York is the center of the universe. London, Paris, Berlin, Mumbai are all pretty great, but if you like cities, New York is it. So it has always been a source of frustration for Bernard - and other New Yorkers - that their great city is such a slouch when it comes to high tech startups compared to boring suburbs like San Jose and Palo Alto, and even provincial towns such as Boston and Austin. Bernard thinks the problem is Wall Street.
Will the Future Novel be More than Text on a Page?
We all know what it looks like when a novel is adapted for film or television. But what would it look like when the novel format is adapted for the Internet? We reported in March that more and more reading is being done online, especially by the younger generation, but because of the distractions of the media rich world in which we live, most reading on the web is actually just skimming. So how do you create a compelling novel format for the online world? Canadian author Nicola Furlong thinks the answer is a new web publishing format she's calling a "Quillr."
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
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Weekly Wrapup, 2-6 June 2008
Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we analyzed Adobe's new Web Office suite, investigated a worrying exodus of sellers from eBay, looked some more at Yahoo's Search Monkey, and showed you 6 tools to save links with. On the trends side we explored the latest Web happenings in Asia, provided an overview of I.T. 2.0, analyzed the exploding popularity of online video, and checked out the readiness of banking customers to use Web gadgets.
Web Products
Adobe Launches Online Office Suite and New Flash-Enabled Acrobat 9
Back in March, we said that Adobe was slowly building an online empire. This week, that news turned out to be true. Adobe launched their version of an online office suite at Acrobat.com, complete with word processor (Buzzword), web conferencing/whiteboard app (ConnectNow), online file sharing (Share), file storage, (My Files), and PDF converter. To complement this launch, Adobe also announced a brand-new version of Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat 9, the biggest release since the initial one that introduced Acrobat to the world. The remarkable change in this new version is that Adobe is now incorporating Flash into the PDF experience.
"I think [fixed prices] will disappear online, simply because it is possible - cheap and easy - to vary prices online." That was MIT Media Lab's Patti Maes in 1999, at a time when eBay's business was booming and auctions were seen as the future of ecommerce. Flash forward 9 years, and BusinessWeek this week called online auctions a dying breed, Nick Carr is wondering if auctions were a fad. Indeed, the fixed price ("Buy it Now" only) format is beginning to dominate eBay, and the company has taken recent steps push fixed price even harder. But the death knell of the online auction format is not eBay's biggest problem -- no, that would be the small exodus of sellers from the site.
Yahoo! Pushes Search Results Customization to Users
Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey platform got a little more public this week with the unveiling of the Search Gallery -- the platform's official application repository. The gallery has already been open to developers and curious bloggers for a couple of weeks, but Yahoo! is now pushing it to the public at large via a "Customize" drop down menu on all search results. In addition, starting this week developers can share applications via external links even if they haven't yet been approved for inclusion in the official gallery.
6 Great Tools to Save Links for Later
Unfortunately, there just aren't enough hours in the day. This seems to be especially true when you take on a lot of projects. Between blogging, researching, emailing, and real life, reading all of your feeds isn't something we can do all the time. Sometimes, we see something that we'd love to save it for later without cluttering up our bookmarks. Here are 6 tools to get the job done.
See also: RSS Reset: Dump Your Feeds for a Month
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Web Trends
OpenWeb Asia: Opening the Asian Web to the World
Everyone working on the web around the world would like to connect with people in Asia, but it's not easy to do. That dynamic and populous region is often focused inward and it's made inaccessible to outsiders because there is so little information about what goes on there available in the web's dominant language, English. OpenWeb Asia is a new project that aims to change those trends.
See also: C-Shirt: Remixable T-shirts by Mobile Phone and Nico Nico Douga and the Simulation of Real Time (two Japanese web apps that Marshall checked out during his recent trip to Japan)
I.T. 2.0: How Changing Technology is Having Big Impacts on Business
In case you haven't heard yet - the I.T. world is changing. The rise of social computing technologies, generally branded as "Web 2.0" and including things like wikis, blogs, social networking, RSS, and more are slowly making their way into the business world. This new movement is called Enterprise 2.0, and it's no small shift. They're even having a conference about it next week. But the change encompasses more than just the introduction of new, social software into the formerly stodgy business world - it also includes the movement of server software from in-house data centers to the cloud, the rise of a mobile workforce, the rebirth of thin client computing, a self-provisioning user base, and more.
See also: Introducing the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad Finalists
The Numbers Are In, Live Video Online Is Blowing Up
Live video broadcasting service Ustream.tv announced this week that live feeds on the company's website and distributed video players got a combined 10 million unique viewers last month. That's a major validation of live streaming video on the web. When YouTube Live launches later this year, this medium is only going to get bigger.
See also: Watch Out TV: YouTube is Taking Over
Survey: 48% of Bank Customers Want Web 2.0 Gadgets
WorkLight, a startup that offers enterprise 2.0 products, recently did a survey among Facebook users to find out their willingness to use Web 2.0 tools for secure banking. The survey was conducted among 1000 Facebook users between the ages of 18-34. The fact that the survey was conducted among Facebook users gives it a bias towards tech-savvy people. However there are some surprising findings.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
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Weekly Wrapup, 26-30 May 2008
Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we covered announcements by Google about Gears and App Engine, we looked at some compelling Yahoo! Pipes apps, we checked out Strands Lifestreaming, and we reviewed promising Semantic Apps Faviki and Freebase. On the trends side we analyzed the contentious Semantic Search market, we looked at Google's Android vs iPhone, we put the Social Networking battle between Google and Facebook in context, and we explored more social media trends.
Web Apps
Google Gears Turns One: Future is in Open Standards
Google Gears, the offline web application API it debuted last year at its developer conference, turned one this week. To celebrate, Google dropped the company name from Gears. The name change is a symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google's commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.
See also: Google App Engine Announces Pricing Plan, APIs, Open Access; Why Google is Wooing Web Developers
The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List
Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest ways to mashup the RSS feeds of various sites and sources to get the data you want. Since our initial coverage of Yahoo! Pipes, thousands of creations are now available. However, finding the best picks can be tough. ReadWriteWeb has done the hardest part and comprised a list of some of the best Yahoo Pipes created by users. We give you the ultimate Yahoo! Pipes list.
Strands Lifestreaming: What They're Doing and Invites for Readers
Recommendation service Strands.com launched a lifestreaming service this week that aims to pull together the company's wide range of services in particular media and online activity into one central place for users to share socially. The new Strands is a way to share your music, bookmarks, blog posts and other activity with friends, family and groups. It's a major entry into one of the most interesting sectors of the new web. We give it a mixed review...
See also: Recommendation and RSS: A Look at Two Readers Filtering the Noise
Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.
Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism
Freebase, the first product of semantic web company Metaweb, is an open, semantically marked up database of information that we called one of the "10 semantic apps to watch" last year. With $57.4 million in funding, a smart team, and a tech legend in Danny Hillis at the helm, Metaweb is considered to be one of the most serious players in the Semantic Web space. Yet the company's
efforts to date have been met with skepticism. Particularly, people have asked how is Freebase different to Wikipedia? Jamie Taylor, the Minister of Information at Metaweb, spoke at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose last week in an effort to dispel some of that skepticism.
SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY
Web Trends
Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality
For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search.
Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest
to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results.
In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?
See also: Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey
Android Is Out For iPhone Blood
Wednesday, at Google's I/O Event, the company demonstrated their Android prototype phone, a device which has been greatly improved since its last public outing at this year's CES and Mobile World conferences. Today, Android looks classy enough that you half-expected them to pull a Steve Jobs and announce that you could run out and buy it right now. During the demo, the company showed off some of the applications that will run on Android - like a Google Maps Street View app that drew cheers from the crowd. From the buzz surrounding the Google Phone at this event, it's clear that Android has a shot at knocking that other touchscreen phone off its pedestal.
See also: Google's Android: How Will it Compare to iPhone?
The Social Networking Arms Race
Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google's platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example -- the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war.
See also: How Many Friends is Too Many?
The Fork in the Road for Social Media
Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.
See also: Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise
Who Are The "Digitally Savvy?"
A new report put about by consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research has revealed some interesting information about the section of the U.S. population that's being called the "digitally savvy." These are the consumers who are more likely to own high-tech items like DVRs, satellite radios, and VoIP phones and are more likely to engage in Internet activities that include blogging, downloading music, and other web 2.0 activities. In other words - they're us.
See also: When User-Generated Content Goes Bad
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
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