The state of Washington has declared today and tomorrow RSS days throughout the state. The declaration is in recognition of big companies, startups, and governments within Washington taking advantage of new technologies such as RSS to change the technology sector.
Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 is now available and includes some new feed reading features for users who like to browse their feed items in the browser. The new beta includes a refresh all option, mark all feed items read, and a few other final tweaks on the path to ship.
Sometimes it's not fun to obey the machine and its update schedule. Advanced information hungry readers can now update all feeds at once, grabbing the latest content before disconnecting from the Internet or to be absolutely sure you're caught up on all your feeds.
You can now mark a feed as read or unread as you navigate, and set the preference so it persists through all of your feed reading in IE7. All in the quest to help people unbold more content and get that unread count down to zero.
Both features might be considered advanced, designed for people who like to take control of the wheel and steer their reading experience. IE7 is now feature-complete for the feed reading experience but parsing and other issues will continue to be tweaked before final launch. The Internet Explorer team is collecting feedback here.
Vic Gundotra, Scoble's (former) boss' boss, is leaving Microsoft to join Google. Vic is taking a year off to allow his non-compete to elapse without legal issue.
Vic is a general manager for platform evangelism and helped build Channel 9, 10, and other general developer evangelism efforts within Microsoft.
Germany plays Argentina this Friday, June 30, at 8 a.m. Pacific time. If you're at Gnomedex I'll have a viewing party in my room at the Edgewater. I'm rooting for Argentina.
I'll be missing Chris Pirillo's opening statements and Mike Arrington's discussion, but no way they can't compete with Germany playing Argentina in Berlin. Sorry Om, I might miss the beginning of your session too.
Given the possible matchups on Saturday such as England vs. Portugal or Brazil vs. Spain/France these will be tough choices for morning sessions.
The next version of Microsoft's Spaces hosted blogging product will include more social networking, gadget integration, and premium options such as no advertising on your blog. The features were announced tonight in a post on the Spaces team blog.
Spaces has a whole new look (pictured above) with cleaner lines and additional featured content than current spaces blogs. Your IM friends list can be exposed as a blog module showing off all their latest content and online activity. You can add the same gadgets to your blog sidebar that run on the Live.com personal homepage. The new site also makes it easier to navigate your categories and entries, exposing more content to your site visitors to encourage them to stay a while and get to know more about your digital content.
The biggest surprise is the addition of a Windows Live premium account with special features for Mail and Spaces users. Twenty bucks a year gives you more storage space in your online mail and removes advertisements from your blog as well as from Windows Live Mail. Yahoo! offers a premium mail service for $20 that is limited to just the mail property.
I am attending Bloggercon for the next two days, listening, participating and leading conversations on the world of blogging. Some quick observations from the last three hours of the conference:
The live conversation surrounding me is competing with the conversations happening in the blogosphere. If the conversation becomes uninteresting I open my feed aggregator and see what's new among another few hundred sources of information. (pictured above: Marc Canter sleeping).
Bloggercon is a non-commercial conference focused on users, with no commercial messages or pitches allowed to leave your mouth. A few attendees wore t-shirts with messaging instead, letting the room know about their latest product without even opening their mouth.
Despite the 220+ signups on the Bloggercon wiki the room is about half-full.
Seth Sternberg of Meebo joined me and Om on this week's edition of Om and Niall PodSessions covering the latest trends and developments in instant messaging. Microsoft and Yahoo! launched new versions of their messaging software this week, including many features I will never use. What do end users want from their instant messaging software?
Seth doesn't think the big portals have added a new feature that users have been clammoring for in years. Chinese company Tencent has captured about two-thirds of the Chinese market with its QQ client. Estonian company Skype has enjoyed tremendous success with its P2P and encrypted conversation technologies. Meanwhile large companies have relied on acquisitions to stay fresh, such as Yahoo! integrating Dialpad and Microsoft adding FolderShare to their latest releases.
Meebo has noticed a sharp decline in instant message traffic during World Cup games involving England or Brazil. The world pauses to watch the game before returning to their computers for instant analysis.
This week's PodSession, Instant Messaging. The podcast is 24 minutes in length, a 11 MB download.
Apple is looking for ways to cut down on wait times at its stores' checkout lines and roaming WiFi-enabled processing stations in the hands of each employee may be the answer. The same employee helping you pick out the right set of headphones for your iPod can scan product barcodes and take payments via credit card right on the spot. Your receipt will sent to you via e-mail just in case you need to make a return or file an expense report.
The handheld devices Apple uses in its store are powered by Windows. More information is available in a NPR Day to Day report on "maverick retailing" filed earlier this week.
Access to Mountain View's upcoming Google-powered WiFi network will require a Google account when it launches later this year. Users of the public WiFi network will land on a specially configured Google homepage for the city of Mountain View upon successful login with local modules such as weather, news, Chamber of Commerce, and school information.
Requiring an account for every user means almost every person in Mountain View will have a GTalk account. Not only will you be able to likely connect instantly to people you know, but it will also be possible to browse users on nearby nodes if Google opens up the capability.
The new WiFi network was introduced to Mountain View residents last Thursday and includes 350 radios on lamp posts and three aggregation points at Google, Red Hat, and St. Francis High, a local private high school. The three aggregation points are plotted on the map below.
Residents are encouraged to purchase a PePLink Surf CPE device for their homes to boost the outside signal. The municipal network provides up to 1 Mbps connection to its users depending on variables such as distance from the nearest radio and current network usage. AT&T offers residential DSL starting at $13 a month for up to 1.5 Mbps. Local cable company Comcast charges $58 a month for up to 6 Mbps.
French personal homepage company Netvibes has amassed over 4 million users in its first 9 months of operation according to founder and CEO Tariq Krim. Tariq mentions the user numbers about two minutes into a video interview with CNET News.com. The site picked up over 15,000 visitors in its first week of operation. Close to half of Netvibes' users are in the United States.
Netvibes users can configure their homepage without logging in so it's unclear if the 4 million users are non-expired cookied users or actual user accounts.
Either way, keep the user numbers in mind when looking at feed subscriber counts of default homepage modules Boing Boing, TechCrunch, and NowPublic.
Yahoo! Local has added microformats support -- including hCard, hReview, and hCal markup -- to almost all of its business listings, search results, events, and reviews. The new markup allows parsers of Yahoo! Local pages such as web browsers and search engine to automatically recognize the structured contact, review, and calendar data present on Yahoo! Local pages.
Yahoo! Local is an entry point for small businesses on the web. The new markup should help Yahoo! market its listing services as optimized for machines and humans, giving businesses optimal exposure for their extended listings.
The new microformats markup on Yahoo! Local can also serve as a lightweight API allowing developers to easily pull out content from web pages.
A poster child of the dot-com boom, LinuxCare has rebranded itself "Levanta," raised another round of capital. BusinessWeek profiles the company though it's rise and fall and attempt to rise again and I found the details rather amusing.
Levanta sounds a lot like erectile disfunction drug Levitra but it's possible the company may be able to get their finances up again. Renaming the company seems like an attempt to hide from its past, which BusinessWeek covers in detail. Some highlights from the company's history.
Founder and former CEO Arthur Tyde is back, helping the company develop new business in Southeast Asia. The former private investigator took the job under encouragement from his therapist to help him "deal with his demons."
LinuxCare contributed some good cash and code to open source projects over its years, but still remains a poster child of the buzzword exuberance of the late 1990s. The BusinessWeek article made me laugh repeatedly and hopefully some lessons can be learned from the past.
Lately when talking about the Atom Publishing Protocol I can't help but think of O.P.P. from Naughty By Nature. I don't remember how it first got in my head, but now that it's there I feel the need to share this brain worm.
You down with A.P.P.? Yeah, you know me.
A.P.P. how can I explain it
I'll take you frame by frame it
To have y'all jumpin' shall we singin' it
A is for Atom
P is for Publishing scratchin' letters
The last P...well...that's not that simple
Geeky protocols meet early 90s rap music. Army with harmony.
Yahoo! Messenger now supports plugins, allowing developers to reach a potential audience of 60 million users inside their IM client with HTML and JavaScript. The new plugins can be integrated directly into a chat window or inside a user's contact list view.
Messenger plugins provide easy access to a user's favorite content but they can also interact with a contact and his or her actions. If your baseball-loving friend logs in the scoreboard plugin could be activated so you have something current to talk about. You can even pre-format a message with the latest statistic from the game. The in-conversation plugins are similar to a shared browsing experience but also useful for bots. Imagine querying IMDB or Wikipedia directly from your IM window to settle arguments quickly.
Yahoo! released a new beta version of Yahoo! Messenger with a few plugins and new features bundled in. If you use Yahoo! 360 you can now receive alerts from any of your contacts' aggregated content such as Yahoo! Local reviews, Flickr photos, or even alerts on any new blog posting. I believe Yahoo! is the first major IM client to include update alerts on any RSS feed configured by your friends on their profile.
Windows Live just released its first official product, taking the beta tag off Messenger and opening it up to the other 90% of its users.
Windows Live Messenger adds a new UI for 240 million users of the application formerly known as MSN Messenger. The new IM client allows you to place a call from your PC to any phone, connecting PSTN networks to the soft client through a relationship with Verizon. All Messenger contacts are synchronized using the Windows Live Contacts across Mail, Spaces, and soon other services such as Mobile. Offline messaging is in there too.
My favorite new feature is the FolderShare integration. Users can share a folder on their computer with anyone on their contact list. Your coworkers can access the latest files for a project or your mom can view your latest photos at any time, just as if they were a folder on her own computer.
The next big feature release should include interoperability with Yahoo! Messenger. The feature is currently being tested internally by both Yahoo! and Microsoft.
When I think of standards I think of the Stephenson gauge. Two pieces of steel laid at 4' 8.5" apart carries rail traffic for 60% of the world's railroads. The standard has been around for centuries, allowing easy interoperability between rail lines from different companies and countries, creating new and cheaper opportunities for commerce around the world. Railroad companies did not always believe in the power of standards but eventually came together for big contracts and their rewards.
Next Friday I will lead a discussion at Bloggercon IV about the affects of standards on the lives of users. How can cooperation and interoperability lead to happy users, increased profits, and more participation online?
In the world of railroads companies varied the width of their rails to force a transfer of goods from Company A using the trains and workers of Company B. These increased costs meant more direct control over commerce by the companies laying the lines, but ultimately made travel by rail unreliable and costly, forcing customers to utilize other methods of transport such as a river barge. The arrival of cross-country travel and military contracts in the United States eventually forced standardization and better options for users.
In the online world we rely on a few standards to make life easy for users. The W3C activity around HTML provides a common base for implementors and authors. We still have to tweak our pages for optimal use in each browser, but a common baseline reduces some of the work involved in deploying all over the world.
The world of feed aggregators interoperates using the OPML file format for subscription portability. Users can post to their blog and backup their entries using the application of their choice thanks to standards such as the MetaWeblog API and the Atom Publishing Protocol.
Open standards create open competition, eliminating lock-in and allowing users to pick the best services for their wants and needs. The door remains open, but companies focused on their users believe you are happy enough within their walls you'll never want to head for the doors.
What are your experiences with standards or the lack thereof? What new standards and interoperability would you like to see companies develop to thrill their users? Bloggercon is part of the user-centered summer of love. Let's chat about the things you love and hate about your experiences online and how collaboration and standards can help.
Box.net had humble beginnings as a Berkeley class project to revamp an industry in need of change. Aaron Levie (pictured above) and his cofounders thought online storage, backup, and sharing could use a makeover and they built a prototype and business reasoning for the class. Fellow students bought-in and encouraged the team to further develop the service in exchange for a few dollars a month.
Box.net currently offers 1 gigabyte of free storage, with upgrades available starting at $5 for 5 GB. They don't offer the most free space or the cheapest but see their strength as integration with other services and easy sharing. Using the Box.net API developers can add access to Box.net storage from within their own web applications. Customizable homepages such as Netvibes and Pageflakes already offer Box.net integration, allowing anyone with a Box.net account easy access to their most recently used files within their browser start page.
The three employees of Box.net will be working hard this summer on a new site release with lots of new features. According to a recent blog post by Aaron the team is "planning to change the face of storage and sharing" over the next two months. Stay tuned for more from this small team.
Fabrik creates smart networked attached storage software and online storage to help home users backup and share their digital media assets such as music, photos, and videos. Fabrik's founders were previously executives on Maxtor's OneTouch line of storage products, a product line with hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue, and have spent many years thinking about the networked and online storage space. Fabrik's software is included in Maxtor's new Fusion line of networked storage. The first product launched on Thursday, and Dave Tang of Fabrik came by SF Tech Sessions on Thursday evening to show us the new hardware and management services.
The Maxtor Fusion networked hard drive includes half a terabyte of storage, Linux and Apache onboard, and automatic online backups. You may choose to use the hard drive as a web server, sharing your photos, videos, and music with the world. The device works with Mac and Windows out of the box and supports up to 12 user accounts to keep files private or under a set storage allocation. The networked drive launched on Thursday and is currently available at J&R Computer World for $800. An older Maxtor 500 GB networked drive from J&R costs $450, a 40% difference.
Fabrik has a slick browser-based interface to help people interact with their files on the local network or online. They call the technology a weblication, and it's a slick use of JavaScript and browser plugins to create an integrated media experience within a web browser. The software automatically retrieves ID3 tags and album art for music placed on the device. If you can listen to a music file instantly within the browser, or watch videos in a JavaScript overlay.
Built-in to the Fabrik file browser is a sharing function allowing anyone to place a media file in their blog or on their MySpace account. There are even specially configured options to add a photo album or slideshow to your MySpace page. This feature is slick, and allows home users to share large files using their home broadband bandwidth.
Fabrik will open up its online storage service to beta users in the next few months. Usage plans are expected to cost $2-$3 as a base plan and $5-$10 for larger amounts storage. General availability is expected by the end of the year.
Amazon shook up the world of onlien storage with the introduction of Simple Storage Service (S3) in mid-March. The web service is aimed at developers, providing REST and SOAP access to file storage and retrieval for 15 cents a month for a gigabyte of storage and 20 cents for each gigabyte transferred. The service has BitTorrent support built-in, and developers have extended developed many libraries and services in the three months since its launch. I was lucky enough to have Jeff Barr of Amazon present on S3 at this month's SF Tech Sessions.
Amazon needs to store its own data reliably and cheaply all over the world. S3 opens up the same platform with, 99.9% reliability, to developers around the world. Applications such Jungle Disk, Backup Manager, and S3 Ajax wiki use S3 as their backend.
Jeff Barr mentioned Amazon was able to push the storage prices low due to their existing operating efficiencies. Prices should be adjusted over time as Amazon grows and hardware becomes even cheaper.
I like the S3 system due to its cheap, reliable storage and broad access options. Small developers can use S3 as their backend with one less thing to worry about as they build a business. If you are serving up web pages from your home broadband connection, S3 can handle big files to help you stay small longer.
Live.com is sporting a new look tonight and I like it. The new header graphic draws attention to the search box and login, two services that help drive revenue. The Live.com homepage now has five different groups of preselected gadgets for users to fill up their homepage quickly. You can choose a basic set (news, weather, stocks), a news set, sports set, entertainment set, or all of the above.
There is even a set of World Cup gadgets to help you track the latest soccer information on every visit. The soccer page includes videos tagged "worldcup" on YouTube, image search results for "world cup," and world cup news stories from FoxSports, BBC, and ESPN. To answer Danny Sullivan, yes my Windows Live colleagues are doing something.
I like the new easy gadget selection to help users get over the paralysis of a blank page they need to fill with more content. Five choices keeps things simple and makes setup a lot easier.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates is stepping down from his full-time role at Microsoft to spend more time on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Microsoft announced the two year transition plan for Gates shortly after the close of U.S. financial markets. Ray Ozzie will assume Bill Gates' job title of Chief Software Architect after recently completing his team's integration of Groove Networks into Office 2007.
Bill Gates will be 52 years-old when he steps down from Microsoft and he is currently worth about $50 billion according to Forbes. The current life expectancy for a male in the United States is 75 years, but healthy billionaires with good medical care are living longer lives in good condition. If you were 52 years-old and worth $50 billion would you go to work every day when you've been all over the earth and seen the difference you could make?
Bill Gates is stepping down from Microsoft and will no longer play a day-to-day role in creating the latest smart watches or new digitized handwriting techniques. Instead Gates will be working on fighting worldwide issues such as malaria, currently responsible for about 11% of child deaths in developing nations.
I think Bill Gates' transition away from Microsoft is a really good thing for him as well as the world. Microsoft will lose some celebrity power both inside and outside the company, and will need to revamp marketing campaigns around the new executives. Microsoft employees can currently author ThinkWeek papers to propose new products and initiatives for consideration by executives. Historically Bill Gates has read these papers during a week-long retreat once a quarter to plan new business strategy. I expect Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie may share this internal thought leadership duty in the future. Bill Gates is a recognized name and face throughout the world and now those recognitions may be more evenly distributed.
I just received a press release for a new startup launching today. The announcement is heavy with buzzwords, but doesn't actually tell me what the site is all about. Here's the actual first paragraph, with the name and industry removed.
Web 2.0 changes the way we perceive information. [Company name] uses Web 2.0 in the [vertical name] (i.e. blogs, podcasts, ajax, tags, etc.) and is particularly attentive to RSS, which presents a formidable opportunity for this sector.
The press release on the launch of this new company next explains what a typical RSS button on a website looks like, and how their button is similar to what people are used to seeing across the web.
Another case of buzzwords replacing features and function.
Amazon S3, Box.net, and Fabrik will present at tonight's online storage TechSession in San Francisco. If you're interested in cheap, reliable online storage for your digital media at home or your startup's backend you should come learn how each product is taking a new approach to online storage and user interaction.
7-9 p.m. tonight at 1 Market Street in San Francisco. Please RSVP on the blog or on Upcoming to help plan food, drinks, and building access.
The Japanese government is subsidizing a new search engine effort by 30 Japanese companies including Hitachi, Fujitsu, and NTT. Yahoo! currently dominates the Japanese market through its partnership with Softbank. Yahoo's search engine was powered by NTT's goo from 1998 until 2001 but Yahoo has been using its own search technology in Japan since October of last year.
The new Japanese search engine will feature better interactions on TV screens and through multimodal inputs such as voice. The domestic research institute for new search technologies opens this Friday. (via Search Engine Watch)
Some infighting at PubSub is driving the company into the ground. PubSub founder and CTO Bob Wyman has posted a note on his blog letting us know the company will be in bankruptcy within days. The company is struggling to keep its head above the water and has recently seen a merger and a financing round fall through.
Bob's blog is a bit too accusatory for a man looking to make sure his 39% stake of PubSub is worth something in a week. It's possible employee shareholder agreements are tying up new funding or acquisitions, but now is the time to herald the technology and accomplishments of your company and not throw a few rocks at colleagues on your way down.
Microsoft introduced new cameras yesterday allowing users to post the camera's 5 megapixel images to their Spaces account with one button click. Easy video posting shouldn't be far behind. This new hardware might be the first mass-market webcam with push-to-blog built-in.
I've been eyeing the Creative Live! Cam Voice and its adaptive array microphones with better specs for the same retail price. It looks like good hardware for podcasts and video chat.
An article by John Markoff and Saul Hansell in today's New York Times estimates Google has over 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. One of the latest large data centers is located next to a hydroelectric dam in Oregon and is the size of two football fields with a new permit to grow yet again.
The best quote of the article came from Milo Medin, who called Google "the Borg."
Business in the age of the Internet is a lot like traditional business: it's all about location, location, location. In today's interconnected business world, a good location provides cheap rent and electricity, is not too hot, close to good transportation (fat fiber pipes), and geographically close to users. New data centers need to come online to service the new masses of users and data storage, causing teams to scramble for more and more space to remain competitive.
According to the New York Times, web companies are still tapping into the excess capacity created during the last telecom boom and lighting up fiber that has been dark for years. When will the first towns appear and be entirely supported by a dammed river and a large data center on a now dry river bed? Perhaps buying a city and changing its name is not just a clever marketing stunt anymore, but a reality of a new era in online business.
Six Apart opened up Subversion access for its Movable Type blogging tool. The new code repository provides a real-time mirror of the team's internal code base.
Movable Type is an enterprise product with enterprise release schedules of about one update per year. The new code repository allows Six Apart to more actively engage its bleeding edge users while still maintaining a QA process, internationalization, and the same license/business model.
Open source competitors such as WordPress have of course had open code repositories for years and Movable Type might now be more attractive to developers it is losing to WordPress and other blogging tools.
Om Malik announced he is leaving Business 2.0 to found a new micropublishing company combining blogs and content-focused web services, among a few other things. Om's new company is the first investment of True Ventures. Both Om and True recognize the new era of lean, agile startups, and planned the early stages of the startup accordingly.
I wish my friend Om the best of luck in his new life as an entrepreneur.
This month's SF Tech Sessions event is all about online storage and the new services changing the way we think about our data. Jeff Barr of Amazon will introduce us to S3, a relatively cheap storage backend for developers and their applications. Aaron Levie from Box.net will demonstrate popular consumer applications for online storage including a free gigabyte easily managed on Box. Fabrik will talk about online backup built-in to hard drives in our machines and connecting to the Internet to share files and insure none of your precious data will be lost.
Tech Sessions is this Thursday, June 15, at Microsoft's San Francisco office at 1 Market Street from 7-9 p.m. Please RSVP in the comments of the event announcement or on Upcoming if you plan to attend.
The event is free as always but if you like pizza and drinks please donate.
Many people like to keep up with new product announcements and launches across Microsoft but wish they had an aggregated way to keep track of it all. Meet MSReadr!
MSReadr is an information aggregator for all of the product team blogs across Microsoft's Windows Live division. Search, Messenger, Mail, they're all in there. You can view the latest news right in your browser, subscribe to one feed for updates from all of the blogs, or add the site's OPML file as a reading list.
The site is powered by Python and Sam Ruby's branch of Planet Planet. The domain name is missing an "e" because that's the Web 2.0 thing to do.
Also available at RoboScoble.com.
This project was created on a Sunday evening without the approval or blessing of Microsoft. It's a work in progress.
Reports are coming in from the Vloggercon conference about Robert Scoble's latest career move. According to Beet.TV and a few other verbal sources who were at the conference Scoble will publicly announce he is leaving Microsoft within the next few days and joining Silicon Valley startup PodTech.net as a videoblogger. Scoble has been at Microsoft for about three years and plans to move back to the Bay Area.
Robert Scoble was employed as a videoblogger at Microsoft's Channel 9 developer center, interviewing teams across Microsoft on their latest releases and features. Later in his Microsoft career Scoble's popular blog became a part of his job as well, connecting his readers to Microsoft teams, announcements, and people and company using Microsoft products. He was originally hired as a developer evangelist for what was then Longhorn, now known as Windows Vista.
The news does not surprise me, as Scoble's tour of corporate campuses and PR firms over the past year undoubtedly yielded some lucrative job offers. Working at PodTech allows Scoble to continue chatting about technology every day with executive clients of the corporate communication network. Scoble's readership in the blogosphere will be a selling point for new clients, allowing them to have an amplified message in this new communication medium. PodTech is early stage and I'm sure Scoble has a good sized equity participation.
What does the news mean for Microsoft? More people in large companies now realize the value of an information aggregator for internal and external communication. In a 60,000 person company you need some internal connectors to help keep teams and projects working together and benefitting from the work and knowledge of others. If Microsoft does not already have a team or teams dedicated to internal corporate development, hopefully they'll realize the value and create such a team.
Microsoft's TechEd conference kicks off this week, and executives will talk about new developer programs and outreach efforts. Windows Live Messenger is rumored as the first Windows Live product to leave beta, and it's also the first big application I know of to have a link to the team blog as a menu item. Expect more applications to connect directly with their user active base through the application. The Windows Live Dev also just launched to help connect more people with information about products and to collect feedback.
Many companies have bloggers among their ranks who want to be the next Scoble. I'm sure a few people within Microsoft envision themselves in the position of a PR blogger. The world of corporate communications is changing, and the good news is that you are now able to get closer to the teams developing the products and features you use every day. Yesterday Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon was able to get an annoying bug fixed within the Windows networking stack just by blogging about it. A few people responsible for the file causing him some grief were able to jump into the comments, get the information they needed, and hopefully patch the issue before the next release.
Best of luck to Robert Scoble on his new venture.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but the words and thoughts above are my own.
Google is releasing a payments and certification service named GBuy on June 28 according to a report on Forbes.com. Merchants enrolled in the program would receive free payment processing during the beta period and, according to RBC analyst Jordan Rohan, 1.5% to 2% after the beta period expires.
GBuy will reportedly process orders on Google's domain, similar to PayPal processing, and hand the user back over to the requesting site once the transaction has completed. The new service would give Google a more complete view of commerce search conversions, ultimately allowing the company to charge higher or lower rates to advertisers based on observed purchase conversions.
The new service is also reported to have a merchant certification program, allowing select merchants using the GBuy service designation as a "trusted GBuy merchant." The special seal of approval would be displayed in Google's search results and could possibly be used as a new ranking variable for advertising placement.
I'll be looking at World Cup schedules every day for the next month, but a few people at Microsoft put together a small application named Soccer Scoreboard to track your favorite team, group, and results from your Windows desktop. It even has a RSS aggregator built-in so you can follow along with the latest news about Rooney's foot or whatever you're into. Game times are displayed in your local time and the application is localized to close to 20 languages.
Here's a short list of soccer feeds from around the world if you'd like to add them to Soccer Scoreboard or a more general-purpose aggregator.
Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. home team Germany will take the field against Costa Rica to kick off The World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world. I am a total soccer nut and I'll be distracted for the next month as I watch from afar as the U.S. lives up to its #5 ranking and Ronaldinho weaves through the defense with his golden boot and a smile. The world's attention will be on Germany for the next month watching blades of grass fly and a thermal-bonded ball hit the back of a specially woven net.
This is my first World Cup watching from the technology industry instead of from the world of soccer. In 1994 I was at Santa Clara University watching Brazil train. In 1998 I was working for the San Jose Clash and the coaching staff got together to watch the big games on satellite TV. In 2002 I ran an online sporting goods business scrambling to get high end Adidas soccer balls out of Pakistan while the country tested its latest missiles and the longshoreman's union was on strike here in the U.S.
I've added the major games to my work calendar with various levels of importance. Netherlands versus Argentina? Definitely watching that one live. United States vs. Czech Republic? I'll be on the edge of my seat. I've warned my coworkers to not be alarmed by the screams of joy and agony coming from my office over the next month.
Let the games begin! Ole!
Think Partnership's planned acquisition of IceRocket has fallen through at the due diligence stage. Andy Beal reports the letter of intent has expired and interim CEO Scott Mitchell announced he will not move forward with the deal according to reporting by Andy Beal. (via Search Engine Watch)
Want an easy way to jump to the specifications of your favorite web feed technologies? Me too! I created a few URL shortcuts to eliminate the need for bookmarks and provide a new and memorable way to introduce people to specs and standards. Add a subdomain before FeedSpecs.com and you just might find what you're looking for.
A simple setup that makes it easier to share feed information.
I'd ideally like to create a centralized learning site supported and in partnership with other companies in the space to help introduce more people people to feed syndication technologies. If I had more time I'd make each spec better styled, create a feed generator in JavaScript, and provide a full database of aggregators and their parsing behavior.
I'll stick to the simple stuff for now and keep adding domain shortcodes as new namespaces gain popularity.
comScore Media Metrix has published a breakdown of Technorati's visitors as well as inbound and outbound link traffic. comScore now tracks over 4.5 million monthly unique visitors to Technorati as of April 2006.
Of those people visiting Technorati.com in April, 29.6 percent arrived at the site via MySpace.com. Similarly, 26.6 percent of those leaving the site immediately went to MySpace.com. The high level of cross-visitation suggests a symbiotic relationship between the two sites.
Yahoo!, Wikipedia, eBay, and MSN are also high sources of traffic according to comScore. No mention of Google, or Technorati's media partners in the comScore analysis. Technorati's largest age demographic is 35-54 year olds (36%).
I've seen many instances of the "MySpace effect" on the growth of online startups. YouTube, Userplane, and Slide are just a few companies benefiting from easy integration with MySpace and its millions of users.
Google officially launched its Spreadsheet product in its alpha labs, allowing a small user base to poke around and experience the new ideas and integration. I can see the immediate benefit from online spreadsheets integrated with a portal experience such as Google. I'll give you two concrete usage examples: my soccer team and my mom.
First, realize that although Microsoft's Office suite is probably the best selling piece of packaged software in the market, it's not a staple of every household. Microsoft created a special basic version of Office 2007 to increase sales from home users. My mom doesn't use Office and I don't have full adoption across a team of 20+ players.
The announcement from Google has been way too overhyped as the latest strike in the blow-by-blow epic battle between Google and Microsoft. Office Live will have online spreadsheets too, and you can signup for an account there today and play around a bit with that experience if you'd like. Neither product is an Excel-killer and that's not what these new announcements are about. Online mail applications and other portals into personal information exchanges need to increase the number of file attachments they can render and possibly produce if they want to provide a good user experience. Gmail users could now have a new option of rendering a spreadsheet from their mail message, make a quick edit, and on to the next task. Hopefully all big online mail services are looking at how they can better manage our daily personal information flow and help users view the most popular attachment types on each system.
I produce team schedules and contact lists to share among about 20 people. Things change frequently throughout the season. A game is rained out, a player moves or gets a new phone number, or the game location may change. I would create an HTML table, upload it to my private hosting account with a custom domain for our team, and anyone with a web browser can view our latest information. I am the only one who can edit and upload, and in the case of a team contact list, I'll put it behind a username and password prompt to keep things private.
Not exactly a good solution for the average user. With online spreadsheets and user-level rights management anyone can edit, auto save, and view the latest data in a variety of formats. Most people already have an account with a major portal, and if they do not it's not too much of a hassle for them to sign up and use the account for multiple services.
Getting my mom to download a free Excel viewer is tough enough. She interacts with most new files as they arrive inside her Yahoo! Mail account (fairly typical I believe). She can now take action directly within the mail message, make a few changes, and have the confidence she did everything right.
A major portal might also integrate new change alerts for spreadsheets and other collaborative data sources into a personalized home page so my mom can keep track of what's going on without needing an e-mail message regarding updates.
Another day, another startup opportunity. Mark Fletcher has left Ask and is undoubtedly working on his next startup. Mark's company, Bloglines, was acquired by Ask 16 months ago in February 2005.
Officially Mark is leaving to "spend time with family." In reality he is working on his next startup, assisting entrepreneurs in the valley, and perhaps investing some angel money as well.
The Wall Street Journal reports Google will release a web-based spreadsheet application tomorrow on a limited test basis. Combined with Writely and Google Base it gives Google a mini office suite in what might be compared to Microsoft's Word, Excel, and Access offerings.
Is there room for an online PowerPoint (Google Pages + S5 perhaps) to complete the suite?
A multi-billion dollar TV almost didn't happen. A television producer was eventually able to find one person who understood his vision to reinvent television and was persistent enough with his idea to help an old industry grasp a new concept.
British producer Mark Burnett had an idea for a new reality TV show but needed support from network gatekeepers to make his vision a reality. In the late 90s Burnett went all over Hollywood pitching the show to whoever would listen, including the cable networks. No one was interested and the idea of reality television had not taken off.
Mark Burnett's business manager doesn't give up and placed a call to the executive assistant of Ghen Maynard, a lower ranked executive at CBS who wants out of his cubicle. Ghen happened to major in social psychology at Harvard and understands the appeal of reality TV to the masses. He gets excited about Burnett's idea and pitches it to CEO Les Moonves. Moonves supposedly calls the "the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life."
After a little more persistence Les Moonves reconsiders. Survivor is born, and makes CBS millions of dollars and reinvents the reality TV industry.
Story based on Bill Carter's book, Desperate Networks.
Mugshot is an open-source social networking application and developer platform created by Red Hat. The project features desktop applications for Windows and Linux (OS X is partially supported) and server software if you would like to build your own system nodes.
Mugshot features link sharing and collaboration (a link swarm), and music and TV tracking, sharing, and recommendations among other things. My afternoon's a bit too busy to dig into the platform, but if you're interested in open social networking features built on top of XMPP, Firefox, and GNOME check out the Mugshot developer wiki for more information.
Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »