Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 11 of 72.

Four million Netvibes users

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…

Yahoo! Local adds microformats

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!…

LinuxCare rises again

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. Raised over $70 million in venture capital, including big names such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield &…

You down with A.P.P.?

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 adds plugins, Y!360 alerts

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…

Windows Live Messenger adds new ways to share

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…

Standards for Users

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…

Box.net graduates from college

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…

Fabrik storage at home and in the clouds

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…

Amazon Simple Storage Service

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…

Live.com has a new look, new config options

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…

Bill Gates leaving Microsoft in 2008

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…

Buzzword laden startup launches

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…

Online storage Tech Session tonight in San Francisco

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….

Japanese government funding home-grown search product

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)…

PubSub has about three days to live

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…

Webcams built for blogging

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….

Measuring the Google Grid

The New York Times estimates Google currently has over 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world.

Movable Type code repository

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…

Om Malik as an entrepreneur

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….

Tech Session: Online Storage

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,…

Windows Live Product Reader

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…

Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup

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…

Google GBuy payments system on June 28?

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…

Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard

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…