While SMS has already become one of the most important forms of communication in many parts of the world, the U.S. is only catching up to this trend slowly. Part of the reason for this is the high cost of using SMS, not just for users, but also for developers who want to use SMS for their applications. In contrast to other SMS service providers, Zeep Mobile offers developers a free SMS API without volume restrictions, though in order to monetize the service, it will insert ads into the SMS messages.
Advertising
While having random ads inserted into their messages might not work for some developers, having access to a free SMS gateway is a very seductive proposition, especially for small developers who don't have the resources to either establish relationships with the big mobile carriers, or who simply don't have the money to pay a commercial provider for access to their SMS gateway.
We asked Zeep Mobile if it had any plans to share revenue from these SMS ads with developers or if it was going to give developers any influence over which ads it would display. However, as of now, Zeep Mobile is not planning anything in this direction, though it would seem reasonable to assume that they might start sharing revenue with developers at some point in the future.
API
Besides the standard web API, Zeep Mobile has also developed Python and Ruby libraries, which developers can use free of charge. As far as we can see, this API is pretty straightforward and well documented.
Still in Beta
It is important to note, though, that the service is still in beta right now and that developers are limited to sending out messages to no more than 10 recipients at a time. Also, while Zeep Mobile has plans to expand beyond the U.S. in the future, the service can only send messages within the U.S. for now and is also limited to a select number of carriers.
Overall, though, this seems like a service worth looking into for developers who wants to start adding some SMS functionality to their applications without having to pay some of Zeep Mobile's competitors like SMS Everywhere, Clickatell, or Celltrust.
There has been a lot of speculation recently about an impending update to iTunes. Version 8.0, among other things, is supposed to finally bring a recommendation engine to the digital media player application. While that's interesting from a music discovery perspective, it is even more interesting to consider what this could mean in terms of an iTunes+iPhone based social networking experience.
iTunes (launched 2001) and the iTunes music store (launched 2003) have come a long way since they were first launched. The application has gone through various iterations, gaining significant features such as podcasts (2005), videos (2007), games, and applications (2008) along the way. In the process, selling billions of songs, millions of movies, and over 10 million applications in the first week of the app store's launch. Needless to say Apple has built an experience that with all it's parts combined is unparalleled in both its features and the breadth of its catalog of content.
The Software Side
While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other... because they can't. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0.
He says, '... the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it's gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.' In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven't bought/listened to. If you're a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you're probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn't come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn't introduced 2-3 years ago).
While this feature itself isn't social and can be implemented entirely on the back end, the implementation required for that functionality is so close to a networked experience (monitoring of habits and correlation across users) that they might as well take a small next step and add a visible social layer with which those users can interact. In fact, if you look at the results from a 2006 iTunes survey, you will see the people want to be able to see what people with similar interests and tastes (i.e. friends) are purchasing and consuming, so they can experiment with and pick from the same selection. More specifically, consumers want:
- The ability to view a friend's wish list, with permission.
- The ability to view what a friend is currently listening to, with permission.
- The ability to view a friend's playlist, with permission.
- The ability to view a friend's recent purchases, with permission.
- The ability to view a friend's favorite artists, with permission
What's also interesting about this approach is that it reaches the exact opposite conclusions of EMR's UK social networking study [PDF]. The study implies that social networks will be the content distribution channels of tomorrow, but the relationship may actually work better in the other direction. With the addition of networking and recommendation features to iTunes, the application could become the most efficient, most engaging, stickiest (always-on), and most profitable social network almost overnight.
But Apple's social networking potential doesn't end there. Remember Microsoft's 'welcome to the social' campaign that centered around the launch of its Zune digital media player? If you don't, you're not alone. The goal behind the campaign, 'to create a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers and will inspire discovery of new music and artists,' was actually a formidable one. Unfortunately an inferior device, coupled with disasterous software integration made the campaign a $100 million failure.
Enter Apple.
The Hardware Side
With a formidable install base, great hardware and one of the most versatile mobile operating systems around, the iPhone is ready to herald in the future of mobile social networking. Furthermore, with 3G/EDGE/WiFi/GPS capabilities, the iPhone is a great tool for both networking as well as wirelessly sharing digital media like the Zune promised (but failed miserably at). Not only does the device work seamlessly with the iTunes software, but Apple's DRM is more consistent and perhaps more forgiving that Microsoft's (which was partly responsible for crippling the Zune's ambitions).
The Cloud
With a firm grasp on the software side with iTunes and on the hardware side with the iPhone, Apple is in good shape. Their killer app, however, could end up being the cloud. Apple already operates MobileMe (previously .Mac) which faciliates the management of contacts, calendars (events), email, photos, and any other files or digital media. Admittedly the service has been an utter failure since launch, but Apple has acknowledge the failure and is on the path to fix its shortcomings.
The previously discussed iTunes social networking and collaborative filtering (recommendations) system, coupled with the iPhone's versatile wireless communication and media sharing capabilities, topped off with media and information management (and sharing) in the cloud, the combo is no doubt ready to be our digital life (and relationship) manager. The only limitation of the network, however, (and it will be a deal breaker for many) is that unlike every other social network today, the experience will come at a steep cost. Knowing Apple though, I have no doubt it will be an experience worth the cost (especially considering what they had to deal with at the MobileMe launch).
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.
RSS is the backbone for most things Web 2.0 but these days, it's not always fast enough. Politeness limits ping times to every 15 minutes at best in most cases, string a couple of applications together and information will sometimes not arrive where you're waiting for it for up to an hour.
A number of people are trying to speed up the feeds but today sees the first public mention of a new effort lead by the guys at popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed. FriendFeed is working on an open source add-on to RSS and Atom that will make it easier to discover when a feed has been updated. This could be a big deal.
What it Is
The FriendFeed crew is working on something called a Simple Update Protocol. It was first reported on by venture publication The Deal and subsequently by Venture Beat, leading us to believe the PR push is an effort to for the company to raise some more money.
In response to our questions, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit told us the following:
- RWW: How will it work?
Buchheit: SUP is just a very simple extension to RSS and Atom that makes it easier to discover when a feed has been updated.
- RWW: Where is this relative to XMPP?
Buchheit: It's unrelated to XMPP.
- RWW: Gnip? (See our coverage of Gnip, a startup that appears to be aiming to do what SUP will do and more.)
Buchheit: We're talking with several companies about supporting SUP, but aren't ready to announce anything.
- RWW: Open source?
Buchheit: Yes, absolutely Open Source.
Not a whole lot of information is available about SUP, but we hope the above helps. We're real excited to see what FriendFeed has under its hat. The company has done more interesting things with popular use of RSS than anyone else has in awhile.
The Simple Update Protocol is due to be released next month. We look forward to checking it out. Soggy feeds put a damper on our day far too often. Update: FriendFeed has posted details about this on their blog.
Interested in FriendFeed? Take a tour of the RWW writers' activities on the site here. See also our months-old podcast interview with the founders of FriendFeed, still one of the best sources of in depth information available about this important service.
For most companies, having to deal with one piece of bad publicity in a day is already bad enough. Apple, however, has to deal with three pieces of bad publicity today. In England, the Advertising Standards Authority, moved to ban one of Apple's ads for the iPhone because of misleading statements in it. Also, an embarrassing security hole in the iPhone firmware lets anybody bypass your security code, and Apple's move to ban a violent comic book from the App Store has also set off a minor firestorm of protests.
iPhone Ad Banned
Apparently, two British TV viewers were unhappy about the fact that one Apple TV ad for the iPhone stated that the phone would give you access to the whole Internet. However, because the phone does not support Flash or Java, these folks argued that this is a misleading statement and the Advertising Standards Authority agreed.
Security Hole
The gaping security hole in Apple's firmware for both the iPhone and iPod touch is maybe the most embarrassing of these three stories for Apple, especially because the problem was already known and fixed back in the days of the first iPhone.
If you lock your phone with a security code, anybody can bypass that code by hitting the 'Emergency Call' button and then double tapping your home button (if it is still set to display your favorites, which is the default behavior). After that, you have full access to the contact list, email, web etc.
If you want to protect your self from this, just set the home button to do anything but display your favorites (Settings -> General -> Home Button.)
Comic Book Controversy
As if all of this weren't enough, Apple itself created some more controversy after it moved to ban the violent comic book Murderdrome (which is based on the ComicReader app) from its App Store. As Apple's SDK states, the apps are not to offend anybody and Apple itself is the sole arbiter of offensiveness, so the company was in its right to ban this book, which, after all, features a good number of beheadings and ripped out limbs, which might make some users feel a bit queasy about the comic.
Apple's SDK states:
"Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users."
On the other hand, this is a comic book and, while a bit over the top, it doesn't feature anything that other comic books haven't shown before.
For developers, this once again shows the dangers of working within Apple's closed off iPhone ecology, where Apple has the final say over what gets included and what doesn't, with no place but the Internet to complain about it.
So What Does Apple Do?
In typical Apple fashion, the company has not made any statement about any of these issues yet - and is likely not to do so anytime soon. That, for better or worse, is the way Apple operates. At the same time, though, the disastrous launch of MobileMe forced Apple to issue repeated notices about the status of the service. Maybe (and just maybe) this current firestorm of problems might just force the company to open up a bit more, though we don't expect Steve Jobs to start blogging about iPhone apps anytime soon.
For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.
But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.
Taking Notes
1) Evernote
Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. If you are in a lecture, for example, you can also take a picture of the blackboard with your phone, upload it to the Evernote server, and thanks to Evernote's clever OCR algorithms, even pictures of handwritten notes become instantly searchable.
You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. Best of all, you can use a web app, a Windows or Mac desktop app, or a Windows Mobile and iPhone app, all of which seamlessly synch with each other, so that your notes are always up to date.
2) Google Notebook
The Google Notebook is one of Google's lesser know products, but, thanks to a very well designed Firefox extension, it's a great tool for when you do most of your work in a browser already. If you do some of your research in Google Books and Google Scholar, you can also easily clip excerpts from books and articles into your Google Notebook.
One additional nice feature is that you can invite collaborators to work on a notebook with you. If you are doing a research project in a group, for example, you can easily share your research with your whole group.
Online Office Suites
3) Google and 4) Zoho
Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are probably the single most often used tool among college students, and while none of the online offerings can yet beat Microsoft Office (which, for students, now only costs around $60 for the Ultimate Edition), the online office suites from Google and Zoho do have some distinct advantages. Office obviously has a lot more features, but not only are both Google Apps and Zoho free, they also allow easier sharing of documents and working on projects collaboratively.
And while the online tools to create presentations are still a bit crude compared to Powerpoint or Keynote, they are both worthy contenders, especially if you don't feel the need to add lots of fancy transitions to your presentations.
If we had to choose between Google's and Zoho's offering, our vote would probably go to Google, as the Google apps have a slightly more organized and professional feel to them, which, in the end, is going to make it easier to focus on the content of your documents.
Bibliography
5) Zotero
The standard tool for doing extensive bibliographies in academia is Endnote. While that is a great tool if you are writing a dissertation, Zotero is a great choice for less extensive research projects - and it's free. Zotero is a Firefox extension, so it is not technically a web app, but in its next version, the developers are promising the ability to synch your bibliographies to a web version of the tool, so that your books and notes will become available everywhere.
For now, Zotero lives in the status bar of Firefox, and it pops up a little icon in your URL bar every time it recognizes a compatible website. Zotero already supports the databases of a huge amount of libraries worldwide, as well as a lot of standard academic databases such as JSTOR, LexisNexis, InfoTrac, PubMed, or ScienceDirect. Besides curating your citations, you can also add notes, tag items, or add attachments (like pdf files of articles). Once you are done, Zotero will create a bibliography for you in most standard formats, including APA, MLA, or Chicago style.
6) EasyBib
If you just need to create a short bibliography, Zotero might be more than you need. EasyBib will just help you to quickly create a bibliography entry in MLA format - a favorite among literature teachers. It can also handle the APA format, but you will have to subscribe to the pro version of EasyBib.
If you really hate figuring out where to put a comma and where to put a semicolon in your APA style bibliography entries, those $7.99 a year for the pro version might just turn out to be a bargain.
Also, if you only need a quick bibliography entry for a book, check out OttoBib, where you just have to enter the ISBN number and it will give you a fully formatted citation.
Staying Organized
7) Google Calendar
There are lots of great online calendars out there, including 30 Boxes and Yahoo's calendar app, but our favorite is the Google Calendar, simply because it is dead easy to use, integrates nicely with GMail, allows for importing and exporting your calendar, and lets you publish a site with your free/busy information with the click of a button, so that your friends know not to bother you while you are cramming for that test.
8) Remember the Milk
Remember the Milk might just be the tool that will keep you on track. And to make things even easier, Remember the Milk also integrates nicely with Google Calendar, so you can manage everything in one place.
Picking the Right Class
9) Rate My Professors
As much as teachers don't like sites like these, Professor Performance and Rate my Professors can be useful tools when you decide which class you want to take. While almost every university makes you rate your professor at the end of the semester, schools never make this data public, so whenever you get a choice between professors, you really have no idea who the better teacher is. We like Rate My Professors a bit more than Professor Performance, simply because its search is a lot easier and the site is a bit more up-to-date. The site now also features a Facebook application.
Keeping in Touch
10) Meebo
As much as your teachers would like to think so, college isn't just about classes, papers, and long ours in the library. If you want to stay in touch with your friends no matter what computer you are on, Meebo is a great universal IM client that lives on the web. It supports, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk, as well as Meebo's own IM architecture.
What are we missing?
Are there other tools you use in school that we missed here? Let us know in the comments.
Flickr image by laffz4k.
Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you've made that argument in conversation before (and we now many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you'd be wrong.
The official Google Blog made a post this morning following up on a New York Times story last week where the company claimed that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own when they find it using YouTube's new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.
Argument: Content ID is Next to Impossible
Many have argued that YouTube wasn't capable of finding all the pirated content uploaded to its site - that it's been an arms race pitting human monitors and shoddy ID technology against a sea of users uploading content. Video maverick Mark Cuban has argued that YouTube's claim it can't identify content was refuted by the fact that it manages to keep porn off the site and thus that the company couldn't plead ignorance about copyright either.
Right: We don't know if there's some direct financial overlap between Katy Perry's publishers and the ringtone site advertising on this video of hers, but at 600K views we're pretty sure the video's rights holders have seen it and chosen to let it remain on the site. Is that "what good girls do?"
Now it appears that YouTube's newest content ID technology is doing quite a good job of finding copyrighted content. That alone is a game changer.
Argument: Media Companies Don't Want Low Quality Versions of Their Content on 3rd Party Sites
It's also been argued that many media companies are unwilling to have their content appear online in any form other than high quality files on their own webistes. That way they can maximize ad revenue and protect their brands. YouTube's claim that 90% of content owners who find their work on YouTube are running ads on the site instead of demanding it be removed indicates a sea change in big copyright holder attitudes.
Scarcity is no longer a tenable strategy in a world of digital content and file quality is clearly not as important to consumers as many content producers believed it would be. Imagine what the web would be like if music producers took a similar strategy with mp3 files on other sites. Those same parties are undoubtedly among the participants in YouTube's new program, using the ID technology to find songs being used along with user created video. Unfortunately, the music industry may be too greedy to support this same kind of model throughout a whole ecosystem of websites. Witness the plight of Pandora, a wildly popular service that's trying to play by the rules.
Argument: YouTube Wouldn't Be What it Is Without Pirated Content
One of the most commonly made critiques of YouTube is that it was only able to ramp up fast because it caught copyright holders by surprise; that it was born of illigitimate uploads of pirated TV shows and movie clips.
The latest turn of events leads us to wonder whether this question was turned around the wrong way. Couldn't we just as well assert that YouTube was lucky to survive before a time when copyright holders understood that they had options with content that they owned rights to on the site? Had copyright holders come down hard and fast in the earliest days, as they did in later months surrounding the Google acquisition, then YouTube wouldn't still be pushing the envelope and opening new doors for distribution and monetization today.
There's a world of possibilities beyond even what's being done today by the most open minded copyright owners. The Times article mentions Electronic Arts, for example, who encourages users to upload Spore related content and then uses YouTube's ID technology to find it and highlight the best stuff. Any number of other campaigns have tried to get people to use a common tag in their metadata or upload through a dedicated portal powered by the YouTube API. YouTube is a chaotic place, though - companies may get the greatest connection with their fans by letting those fans upload how they like and using YouTube's ID tech to find them afterword.
This is Big
This isn't just about copyright and advertising, this is about a new paradigm that big copyright holders may be catching up with. From video to user data, it's not about scarcity and silos anymore. It's about keeping your users and fans through better service and compelling value-ads. Let's hope this YouTube experience is more than just a flash in the pan and that the industry is genuinely moving in this direction.
Since our initial review of Yahoo! Buzz earlier this year, not much has changed about the service. At the same time, however, the perception, acceptance, and impact of the service has changed drastically. The service has shown that it can send enormous amounts of traffic (very talkative traffic), and has displaced Digg as the most active 'social news' community. In the process, they added widgets and rss, and most recently (and most importantly) have opened up participation to everyone.
Since they opened the submission process to everyone, the buzz surrounding the site has really been at a high. Desperate publishers and marketers who were previously locked out of the supposed 'traffic mecca' have joined the service in droves and have already started the practice of vote-begging in the hopes that enough votes will get them promoted to Yahoo's main page. Here's what you need to know about the current state of Buzz.
Note the important distinction between the Yahoo! main page and the Yahoo! Buzz main page, and the distinction between content made popular (i.e. promoted to the Yahoo Buzz main page) and Y! featured content (which is content cherry picked from Buzz to be featured on the Yahoo! main page).
ReadWriteWeb's one (and so far only) appearance on the yahoo.com frontpage - Wikipedia story bottom right
- Yahoo! Buzz is not a social experience. The process of being featured on Yahoo! Buzz is socially driven (based on votes, shares, and search patterns), but if you consider the site's place in the overall structure of Yahoo's strategy, the experience isn't social. Yahoo! Buzz is the picking ground for the content that ultimately gets featured on the Yahoo! main page, which means it is social in the exact same way Slashdot Firehose is social. Your votes may get a story to the main page of Yahoo! Buzz but after that it's up to an editor's judgment whether a story gets featured on the Yahoo! main page or not. So the final result, or the process of getting featured on Yahoo's main page is not entirely social. Furthermore, there Yahoo! has turned off the comments so there are no conversations, and because there is no networking aspect to the site, there are also no relationships.
- Your votes don't mean much. Number of votes is one of the metrics used to determine content popularity. Even then, I've learned that the impact of votes is arbitrary. I know people whose content was featured on the Yahoo! main page with 0 votes, and people whose content didn't even get to the Yahoo! Buzz main page after 75 votes. The other metrics are the number of times content is shared via email and on other social sites, as well as search volume.
- Exposure is very limited, inequitably distributed. The Yahoo! Buzz main page presently is less significant than even the upcoming/most page on Digg. Although being on the page may increase your odds of catching an editor's eye, you don't get any exposure unless you are featured on the Yahoo! main page. Furthermore, such an insignificant number of stories cross from Yahoo! Buzz to the Yahoo! main page that for the average person, participation in the quest for exposure is an act in futility.
To summarize, Yahoo! Buzz is social insofar as a community of users gets to submit content, and vote/share it. Anything more than that, Yahoo! Buzz doesn't do.
That said, the site also doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is. It doesn't consider itself to be a competitor to other social news and networking sites, in fact it allows you to and even recommends you to share Buzzed stories on other social sites and then counts 'shares' as another metric to measure content popularity. As the popularity of Yahoo! Buzz grows and more people start frequenting the Yahoo! Buzz main page to read and at some future point discuss stories, that will all change. Until then, that page is just a stepping stone to the Yahoo! main page, which is the end goal.
Who should participate on Yahoo! Buzz?
From a content producer's/publisher's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz should without question be used by anyone publishing multiple posts a day on a site, or anyone that owns a network of blogs publishing content for different niches (heck you can automate the submission process). Networks like Hearst Digital Media and Conde Nast Publishing come to mind, but the strategy should also work for networks like Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media. From a community member's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz's features are so limited that they would probably appeal to someone with a passive interest in social news, or someone just entering the space and wanting to get his or her feet wet. If you are interested in making friends, participating in heated discussions, etc., look elsewhere.
What kind of content works on Yahoo! Buzz?
It's a wry twist in the story. The people most interested in exploring Yahoo! Buzz and participating on the site are the digerati. But the kind of audience Yahoo! Buzz is designed to cultivate is quite the opposite. Before you give up in frustration, understand that the audience the site is supposed to appeal to is the same audience for the Yahoo! portal for news and entertainment. That's why you won't see a lot of insider Silicon Valley news featured and instead you'll see content from mainstream news outlets (a lot of syndicated content from Yahoo! News) about mainstream news events or entertainment.
What's the future of Yahoo! Buzz
Yahoo! Buzz is an interesting service because it has become an awkward balance between social news and mainstream news, where some of the basic social news and networking elements are intentionally missing. At the same time, it is also interesting because although the site made some buzz for supposedly dethroning Digg, the prevailing social news champion, the site doesn't compete with it and is not cannibalizing the social news audience. If anything, people who use Yahoo! Buzz may very well over time switch to sites with more robust social news and networking capabilities.
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.
In yesterday's episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, our topic was online music and we had 3 very special guests on the show: Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of Imeem; Lucas Gonze, founder of Webjay and until recently a senior member of the Yahoo Music team; and Rob Williams, Senior VP of Music Software at RealNetworks. Also on the show were Sean Ammirati (host), Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick. The audio is archived below for your listening pleasure.
In this post we feature some of the highlights from the show, which included many interesting factoids about Imeem, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody. But more importantly there was a lot of fascinating discussion of online music trends and where the music industry is headed.
What Are The Killer Features for Online Music?
The show started with a discussion about the killer feature set for online music, based on a post Marshall wrote recently. Marshall noted that the user experience in online music is not as good as it should be in streaming music websites.
In reply Lucas said that the listening experience has changed since around 2000 - e.g. people who follow mp3 blogs enjoy the personalities and the "constant sense of flow" of new music. In terms of streaming music, he said that there is a close connection between the songs and the community - it isn't intended to be decoupled. He said an ideal listening experience now is one that mixes music with fun, the social aspects.
Dalton said that Imeem started out as a social network, then the music came later - not the other way round. They slowly added music features, as people asked for them; and that has steered the product. He said that online music shouldn't be about consumption, but online community and self-expression. He thinks sites that are primarily community focused, rather than just listening to lots of music, are the ones that have succeeded most in online music. He also said technical advantages are key - he pointed to Imeem's acquisition of Snocap and its upload technology.
Sean asked Dalton a bit more about how Imeem got into music. Dalton replied that originally Imeem was meant to be a social network where people could express their tastes in media, whether that be video, music, etc. But they have turned into a music specific site, due to how their market evolved.
Rob from RealNetworks talked about how Rhapsody has had success in web services. He said they're continuing to build out their APIs across a range of devices. He spoke about their partnership with iLike. He says music discovery, social networking and music creativity are important features these days. The way they do things is work on the backend and partner with lots of companies. One point that resonated with us was that online music services should work more together, in a federated way. e.g. you can move personalization data around and get recommendations across the likes of last.fm, Imeem, Rhapsody etc. He mentioned OAuth and OpenID as some of the standards being used to do this.
Developer Platforms
Lucas segued off Rob's point about standards, using that to point out a key difference between Imeem and Rhapsody. He said that Rhapsody is a 'pure play', it's for obtaining music. Whereas Imeem is a social network that uses provisioning to complement its strategy. So which of these two things will be better business models?
Rob's response was that Rhapsody has a developer program which it is using to expand its reach. He said that Imeem focuses on developers too, but they focus more on web developers whereas Rhapsody targets hardware developers too. Dalton agreed that they focus on web developers.
Marshall asked Dalton for an update about the Imeem developer platform and specifically how it compares to the "wide open" Seeqpod API, which has been leveraged a lot. Dalton replied that there are 2 ways the Imeem platform is encompassed - the 'off website' version and the 'on Imeem' one. The widget and embeds is being integrated into eg Slide's Top Friends, and Apture (a blog plug-in that features an Imeem player). In terms of the 'on Imeem' API, that hasn't been shipped yet. That will be similar to Facebook's platform, so that developers can build new media experiences inside Imeem.
Business Models for Platforms
Sean asked a question from the podcast audience, about what Imeem's business model is for their platform. Dalton replied that the vision is to make it mostly ad-supported. They also want to do rev share. They still have to complete building out the technology for ad serving for online music. He doesn't think the subscription model would work for their audience.
Lucas said there is a lot of skepticism in the music industry (labels, artists etc) about ad-supported revenue.
Marshall mentioned that recorded music is just a loss leader, and monetization can be made with tours, merchandise etc. Rob replied that for artists there is a lot of money in that. So he said there are really good businesses being built off the online music platforms - eg recommednation engines like last.fm, connecting artists to their fan base (e.g. iLike), Ian Rogers' new company topspinmedia.
Dalton said that at Imeem they're trying to change the relationship people have with music, focusing not on monetizing consumption, but monetising self-expression and attention in music.
Imeem screenshot
Lucas said that the value in online music isn't in the download, but in all the things around it - socialising, shows, etc. So the business is in supporting the user to do all those things.
DRM & Interoperability
Marshall brought up the topic of DRM. He said that there seemed to be 3 different points in the spectrum of DRM in online music:
a) Rhapsody embraces DRM the most and the requirement that subscription be ongoing;
b) Imeem playing in the middle with Google Open Social integration;
c) Yahoo focuses on open standards
So Marshall asked how long will big players be able to use their large audience to compete with small more open players?
Lucas said that he no longer speaks for Yahoo, but they've changed over the last six months to "embrace openness and become a connector". Yahoo Music eschewed its own subscription product and made a deal with Rhapsody. He said that interoperability with Imeem would probably also be a popular move within Yahoo. He said though that there is immaturity of current open products, specifically mentioning OpenSocial. Secondly, companies like Yahoo need to figure out how to make money from the open strategy. He said that Rhapsody's strategy is very open, but the big question is can that be extended to record labels and artists as well as users.
Rob didn't agree with the characterisation that Rhapsody was pro-DRM. He noted that at the end of June they launched a DRM-free music store (ReadWriteWeb coverage here). He also said that they're big supporters of the ad model. He also said that partnerships are an important part of their strategy, e.g. powering Yahoo Music and iLike (which gets them into Facebook). He told us that some demographics accept ads, but they've had issues eg with the Facebook crowd. So he said a blended approach is what they're pursuing - part ads, part track sales, part subscriptions, part discovery/buying track for your phone, etc. He said that music is a $10b market in the US, but so far only $1b of that is online.
Rhapsody DRM-free store
Legal Battles With Record Labels
At this point I asked a question about the legal issues with online music, specifically pointing out that there is a 'have' and 'have not' situation in online music currently - with larger sites like Imeem, Yahoo, Rhapsody being able to make partnerships with record labels and avoid the legal issues plaguing the likes of Pandora, Muxtape and other small startups.
Lucas said there are two markets emerging: large scale, partnerships with labels, big traffic but low profit margins (Yahoo, Imeem, et al); the second market is small scale, uses media like artist sites, works in the "grey area" in terms of legal issues, has smaller traffic but higher margins. He points to Hype Machine as an example of the latter, which isn't paying anything [to record labels]. He said these two margins are emerging in parallel. He said that Muxtape was a red herring, as it was trying to become a big service, i.e. get too big to fail and so cut a deal [with labels].
Muxtape woes with the RIAA
Lucas said in a couple of years the wall between the large providers and small ones will start to go away, as music becomes more "webby" and interoperable.
Dalton said that small companies need to steer clear of the major record labels in order to survive.
Rob said that the backend, platform approach will make this easier, as small companies can use the big platforms provided by Rhapsody and others. So that is one way to avoid the legal hassles of music acquisition from music labels. Dalton said that he agrees, noting that at Imeem they try to "abstract away all the complexity" around licensing and streaming and hosting. He also said they acquired Snocap partly to get access to their registry of music from the major record labels as well UGC (user generated content) music. This enables them to build a platform that scales from UGC music to major record label music. So he says there should be no reason for startups not to use a platform in a couple of years.
Marshall brought up the issue of international. Rob said it's very tough, they have enough problems dealing with US laws around rights to use music. He said Pandora has had lots of issues with international laws. He said it probably will be never fully global, so it will stay in "the grey area" for many countries.
Who Will be the Leading Online Music Services 1 Year From Now?
To wrap up the podcast, Sean asked everyone about the current poll we're running on RWW (see below). last.fm and Pandora are still the most popular apps with our readers, so Sean asked which apps will be the leaders a year from now?
Rob said that he hopes Pandora is still around and the statutory radio issues get worked out across the industry. He said there will probably be a number of new contenders, and he hopes there will be much more cross-service users (i.e. the ability to use more than one service).
Lucas said that Hype Machine has the opportunity to get pretty big.
Dalton said that the line between social networking services and music services is blurring, so he thinks apps that aren't just about music may become most influential - e.g. iPhone apps.
Marshall said he has high hopes for Hype Machine (our initial review and update) and also thinks Songbird (our review) has potential, with so many developers and an open framework.
I said that music discovery is key for me, finding new music. The likes of last.fm, Pandora, Imeem, Hype Machine are doing this for me now, but given Imeem's rapid growth recently there will probably be another 1-2 services that emerge over the next year that take discovery to the next level.
Hype Machine, beloved by a few in the panel
Listen
You can listen to the entire show here (select Episode 6):
Note about the podcast: We experienced technical issues with our podcast hosts Talkshoe during the recording, which affected our live listeners. Many people either couldn't login to the call or were thrown off midway through (including the host Sean!). We sincerely apologize for this, and we are looking into an alternative solution for upcoming shows. We're pleased to say though that the archived recording is 100% intact!
Vote
Don't forget also to vote in our current poll: What are your favorite online music streaming services?
Image: She sings, she sings by gwen
OAuth, the open authorization protocol standard that will let users give limited access to their data to third party websites without giving away their passwords, crossed an important threshold tonight.
All parties involved in building the spec have signed a covenant of non-assertion, meaning that OAuth can now be safely implemented anywhere without concern about Intellectual Property lawsuits. If you think this is too geeky for you - try out the live demo embedded below.
We celebrated Google's addition of OAuth to all the Google Data APIs in July, but for all you cautious types out there - there's not much excuse anymore. No more passwords are required and a greenfield for mashups is now wide open.
The parties that contributed to building OAuth and have singed the promise not to sue are: Yahoo, Google, AOL, Twitter, Ma.gnolia, Citizen Agency, Wesabe, Pownce and Six Apart. Also signing as individuals were Eran Hammer-Lahav, Mark Atwood and Blaine Cook.
What is OAuth?
OAuth is a standard protocol for one web site to access user information on another website without asking the user for their password, but accepting confirmation from the 2nd site that the person is in fact who they claim to be. As Eran Hammer-Lahav, Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo! and OAuth point-man, told us tonight: "It is a way to build distributed services across multiple vendors while still keeping your data as private and safe as you would like it to be. You can limit it, for example - for time (like only one day), only read access, photos only and not videos, etc."
Why is this important? This is a key technical step towards making data portability real. It creates a path for users to move data they've created on one service into another service that can then offer new features or personalization based on what the users have exposed to them about themselves from elsewhere. It's a big ingredient in a recipe for innovation, in the form of mashups or otherwise.
How is it different than OpenID? It's a related, but different way to move data around. OpenID got a non-assertion covenant signed almost a year ago and provided, along with the Apache Foundation, the basis for the OAuth covenant. There's a whole lot that can be done with both of these protocols and we look forward to seeing them develop together.
What does OAuth look like in the wild? Below are two examples. The first is a screenshot of Yahoo's location based service Fire Eagle asking a user if they want to grant permission for another app to access their data on Fire Eagle.
Screenshot from Chris Messina.
The second example is a mock live demo of OAuth in an iframe, created by Eran Hammer-Lahav. A detailed explanation of this demo can found here.
Pretty awesome, no? So let's get the safe, granular data porting rolling! We eagerly anticipate a growing ecosystem of apps that do things with user data that were never possible before. As Eran Hammer-Lahav, who's been working on this full time at Yahoo! almost all year, says - the web owes him a beer.
The internet is a whole lot of nothing without a search engine or two. While the staying power of search engines has never been in question, it's been interesting to see how they've evolved to the point of replacing the address bar.
With more information being published on the internet and different filters for interpreting this information being created, here's a look at a our picks of unique search engines that are making headlines and changing the way we search.
Viewzi
There's no question that Viewzi is a search engine of the future with a host of visual features. Viewzi is a visual search engine that's only gotten better since its initial public launch. What makes Viewzi so unique is the various visual viewing options that are available for users to view their search results. From the album and mp3 search view for music, to the 3D Photo Cloud and Celebrity Photo views, there's something for everyone with Viewzi.
SearchMe
Listed as one of Time magazine's best websites of 2008, SearchMe is a slick search engine with an advanced and intuitive interface. Search results are displayed as a gallery of images that allows you to see the page without having to click-through. Do a search on "Obama" and SearchMe will note that you're probably referring to the future presidential candidate Barack Obama. In doing so, SearchMe will present you with several related categories to narrow your search such as Politicians, Democratic Party, US Government, and Political News. SearchMe also provides users with the option to create stacks, or bundles of web pages saved for later. This is a highly unique search engine of the future.
Custom Search Engines
Rollyo is a service that allows you to create your own custom search engine. While we also recommend Google's service that offers the same concept, Rollyo is a little more user friendly. Users can enter up to 25 individual sites to roll into a custom search engine. If you sign up for the service you can make your custom search engines either public or private and add it to your Firefox browser.
Custom search engines are unique and valuable search engines of the future because of what you can do with them. Sarah Perez noted how you can build your own custom search engine with your bookmarks. You can also build your own custom search engine to search through the archives of your competitors and see if they've written about anything you'd like to write about. In essence, you're providing the filters for your very own personalized search engine by only searching the sites you'd like to see results from.
What Did We Miss?
While there are tons of alternative search engines, we'd like to know what you think will be unique search engines of the future. Don't just give out names. Let us know what you're using now and which search engines you expect to see being used a lot more in the future. For more alternative search engine goodness, we recommend heading over and subscribing to AltSearchEngines.
Social networking overload - it's a common problem and one that it seems like it could be easy to solve. Thus there are countless attempts being made to build services that tie it all together. Some of those attempts are awful and one of those is a service we tested today called SocialU. RWW readers can try it out themselves via this link.
SocialU is a half-baked, condescending, poorly designed, ad-ridden lifestreaming app built in Adobe AIR. We'd refrain from writing about it, but the things we dislike about it seem worth mentioning and with all the frothy clone-like startups flying around on the web, who doesn't like seeing one that deserves it get a good blog-lashing sometimes?
What's Wrong With SocialU
SocialU is an AIR app, so it runs on your desktop, but it acts as a single-app browser. There's no way to return to your home page, your friends' activity streams or any other logical place without scrolling down to the bottom of the page main. That's frustrating.
Almost all the links on the site throw you out into another browser tab and onto the home page of the various services aggregated. You can see when friends comment or like an item in your activity stream - but you can't interact with that information.
We'd have thought the service was just very unfinished, but the company has retained a PR agent, seems to have a fair sized staff and may be hiring some other support services as well, judging from who's on the site.
It's Hard to Look At
SocialU already has a big ad in the sidebar, annoying the handful of early users who have little reason to stay as it is. In the primary window of the browser you'll find all kinds of insipid "gifts" (McDonalds fries, Starbucks coffee) and stock-photo illustrated "give aways." Gifts on Facebook are icons drawn by Susan Kare, the woman who drew the original Mac icons. That's a classy operation. SocialU is probably pitching itself to ad networks as a company with a plan to use product placement and rounded corners to shovel money into the back of a big truck. It's awful and as the service looks today - it's not going to work.
The SocialU founder's blog is a giant block of undifferentiated text. Update: We deleted an inappropriate line here, commenting on a profile pic is pretty uncalled for and we won't do it again.
We see a lot of apps we think will improve peoples' lives and/or create a ripple effect of innovation around them. This isn't one of them.
The social news and bookmarking site reddit today announced that it will allow its users to completely modify the CSS for their custom reddits, as well as pointing those sub-reddits to any domain they would like. You can now also choose your own header image and replace the reddit alien with your own creation. After opening up the sub-reddits and open-sourcing its code, this is yet another radical (but logical) step, and reddit's users are likely to greet it with joy.
Custom Everything
For those who already have established communities on reddit, being able to point your own domain to reddit without having to host the open source version of the service yourself is a great step forward. Also, being able to customize your CSS stylesheets gives you the opportunity to make reddit fit into the design of your own brand. This makes using reddit a lot more palatable for those with established names who would like to experiment with social news sites, but shied away from it so far.
Reddit definitely doesn't seem to be afraid of giving up control. In the end, though, this move is only going to help it grow its audience - and while the audience might sometimes not even be aware that they are looking at a custom reddit site, reddit itself will surely run advertising on those sites, so its bottom line is only going to benefit from this.
One thing reddit doesn't allow you to do, though, is to create your own voting algorithm - though judging from the direction the developers have been moving in lately, this is probably only a question of time.
Contest
Also, reddit has announced a contest for those who want to start their own community on reddit. Whoever manages to create the largest sub-reddit within the next month can take away a Macbook Air and a reddit bobblehead.
Reddit Keeps Growing
Reddit also announced that they have seen a 300% increase in subscribers and subscriptions since unveiling their latest redesign in May.
While reddit is still much smaller than Digg or Yahoo Buzz, it is definitely driving the development of its site forward a lot faster, and, at the same time, pushing its competitors to become more open and creative as well. While Digg is trying to keep very tight control over its service, reddit is moving in the opposite direction and judging from the numbers cited in this announcement, it is working out quite well for them.
Adobe Photoshop is a top of the line design software. We've written extensively in the past about the many ways Adobe is branching off of Photoshop to cater to a broader audience from the release of new features for Photoshop Express for lighter usage to the entire Adobe package. Adobe is sure enough building an online empire. The next addition is a mobile version of Photoshop!
Get Your Smartphones Ready
Unfortunately, the latest addition won't please everyone. However, smartphone users of the Motorola Q9m/h, Samsung Blackjack I/II, and Palm Treo 750w/700w/wx will be thrilled to here that Photoshop.com will be available from their phone's browser and Skyfire won't be necessary. The service will be available as a free download in September. To get started you'll need a Photoshop.com account ID and one of the aforementioned supported Windows Mobile phones.
What'll Be Available for Photoshop Mobile
We're not sure if this application should even be named Photoshop.com. There's hasn't been any hints, aside from the name, that users will be able to edit their photos from their mobile phone. Instead, this will serve more so as a storage center for your photos. Users can upload photos to their account with 5GB of storage. Photoshop Plus members will receive 20GB of storage space. You can share these photos will family and friends, though no word on how yet.
Users will be able to also use Shozu to upload photos to their Photoshop.com accounts and more phone support for other popular cellphones including the iPhone, BlackBerry Pearl, Motorola Razr, Nokia 5310, and Nokia 6301 will also come in September following the launch of Photoshop.com.
A Feeling of Emptiness
While the service may be a step in the right direction for Adobe, we couldn't help but feel a little disappointed and the meager offerings from Adobe. Personally, I feel that users would be better off sticking with Flickr on their mobile devices. The emphasis on the site's title made us think there would at least be an editing option or two. However, we're hoping to see such features in future updates of the application. Until then, stay tuned for more news on Photoshop.com's mobile launch.
We were big fans of Muxtape here at ReadWriteWeb, but when the the virtual mixtape service shut its doors last week because of legal issues with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), it definitely left us wanting for more. Last night, we heard about OpenTape, a self-hosted open source version of Muxtape. Being the Muxtape fans we are, we just had to install it for ourselves and came away quite impressed with how well it worked.
Easy Install
Because it's a self hosted program, the bar for entry is a lot higher than for Muxtape of course, though as far as installation goes, all you have to do is to copy the OpenTape code into a publicly accessible directory on your server and you should be good to go (as long as your server runs Apache, PHP5, and curl). After that, all you have to do is set a password, give your mixtape a name, and start uploading songs (or FTP them into your 'songs' folder).
Playing and Embedding
Playing songs works just like in Muxtape or any of its competitors like 8tracks. Just click on a song and it starts playing - click again and it stops.
One nice feature of OpenTape is that it provides you with an embedded player.
RIAA
As others have pointed out, part of the reason people would want to host their mixtapes on their own server is to make it harder for the RIAA to shut down a particular server, but hosting a virtual mixtape with copyrighted music could quickly become a major nightmare, as the RIAA and others would probably have no problem with serving takedown notices and asking for enormous fines.
Still, OpenTape also has other applications - bands, for example, can host their own music with it (though that is also the only service Muxtape still offers), you could use it as a podcast player, or you could just use it to promote some of your favorite Creative Commons licensed music.
Limitations
While hosting your own mixtape (just one for now, unless you install numerous copies of OpenTape) is fine, the beauty of Muxtape or 8tracks is that you can also search for other people's mixtapes, which is often a great way to discover new music.
Of course, somebody could host a central repository for OpenTape mixtapes, but then that would make it even easier for the RIAA to go after alleged copyright violations.
For some, OpenTape might fill the void left behind by Muxtape's demise, but for most, the limitations of OpenTape and the fact that you have to host it yourself will make other like 8tracks a far more attractive alternative.
Adium, the popular Mac IM client that lets users chat across multiple services at once, issued a major new release last night that is sure to please users old and new. Highlights include the addition of Facebook chat to the list of options and a new search bar that lets you quickly find anyone on a long list of contacts.
This incredibly customizable program lets you chat seamlessly across almost every IM network you can think of - the absence of interoperability becomes almost inconsequential after you sign up for an account on each service and tell Adium to log in to each. We are very excited about the upgrade.
Facebook Integration
We're not sure how likely to use Facebook chat we are, but we know that a lot of people do use it. We'll now be reachable that way too. By telling Adium to connect to social networking status messages, we're also now seeing peoples' Facebook status in Growl notification. That's pretty nice. Not something we'd want for Twitter, but for the less frequently updated Facebook messages that makes sense.
Effective interoperability with Facebook IM makes us think we should take our friend accepting a little more seriously there. Unfortunately, one known issue is that Facebook doesn't want to keep you logged in when you're also logged in via Adium. We hope that can be solved quickly.
Search
One of the most frustrating things about Adium has been that by tying together contacts lists across multiple services, it creates a very long aggregate list. It can be hard to find anyone in particular when you want to initiate a chat. No longer! The new version of Adium solves this UI scaling problem by bringing up a nice search bar when you hit the command-F keys.
There's So Much to Do With Adium!
Seven months in the making, this update to Adium is a big one. There's sure to be more on the way soon (many people are hoping that video and audio chat will be enabled someday) but in the meantime, check out AdiumXtras, the site where you can find all kinds of skins, plug-ins and other Adium fun.
Fast growing social network Facebook has hit the 100 million users mark, according to a statement today by Dave Morin, the company's Senior Platform Manager.
How does that compare to MySpace's ascent? A guy named Rick appears to have become MySpace's 100 millionth registered user in 2006. MySpace took 3 years after launch to hit that magic number; for Facebook it took 4 years and 6 months.
Drama
The first years of MySpace were characterized by music and spam, while Facebook's beginnings were in college parties and drama. That drama continues today. For example, the company reports that only 20% of its 100 million users have visited the dramatically redesigned version of the site by clicking on a button at the top of their screen in recent weeks. Facebook users don't like change.
The company wants to spin the 20% number as a positive embrace of the changes (and the ordinarily fabulous Eric Eldon at Venture Beat buys that spin for some reason) but in fact it fits in the history of conflict between Facebook and its users.
Innovation and Monetization
None the less, the site is growing by leaps and bounds. 100 million registered users probably includes a substantial number of regularly active users. Now if only the company could figure out how to monetize those numbers as well as they'd like.
We believe they will probably figure it out. More interesting to us is watching Facebook develop its feature set, leading then falling behind in innovation. 100 million registered users is a lot of people to innovate with.
Unfortunately for Facebook, sometimes it seems that those people are not interested in innovation or monetization - they just want to communicate with each other. I guess when you call yourself a "utility" some people expect you to remain unexciting.
A new school year is about to start very soon and students nation-wide will be clamoring for ways on how best to keep up with their school work. With many schools starting to offer free iPod Touches, iPhones, and laptops, the iTunes App Store will be one of the first places to go for back to school apps. The new school year also means that research via Wikipedia is going to be on the rise. Fortunately for those with iPhones and iPod Touches, they can now access Wikipedia anywhere while on the go with Wikipanion from the iTunes App Store.
Wikipanion Review
Wikipanion (iTunes link) is the best application out for Wikipedia on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This app is simply genius and gives you a simplified version of Wikipedia without leaving out any of the site's extra features. To simply the site to fit the screen size of the iPhone, the normal links that you'd see to each section of an article are foregone on the main screen. Instead, there's a small icon located at the bottom of the app that's similar to the bookmark button in Safari on the iPhone. Using this button, users can access all the sections of an article.
Looking for the list of sources, related topics, and external links for your article? There's a button to access these features also. You not only get to see the links, but you can open them in Safari. According to the developers site, loading Wikipedia pages with Wikipanion is a lot faster than accessing the Wikipedia site from the iPhone's browser. To be honest, we agree.
Wikipanion: The New College Student's Bible
With just about everything accessible from this app including pictures, links, and more, the only thing that's missing is an automatic bibliography creator. Students and Wikipedia fans alike will definitely find this app to be enjoyable. However, if you're into creating articles on Wikipedia, I'm afraid this isn't the app for you. There's no way to edit an article. However, all of Wikipedia's articles are now accessible with just one click with Wikipanion.
FriendFeed, one of our favorite lifestreaming applications, launched the beta version of its new user interface today. The new version adds features that allow for organizing friends into different groups, which makes FriendFeed a lot easier to manage, especially for those who follow a large number of people. Also, you can now easily share photos on FriendFeed directly and see the home feeds of other users, which makes finding new friends a lot easier as well.
Lists
The most important changes to the interface are connected with the new ability to group your friends into different lists. While most of the navigational elements of the regular version were on the top of the page, the new beta moves all of these elements to the right.
Adding friends to these lists is done through a nifty text interface that auto-completes names as you type them. Of course, if you can't remember the names, you can also add friends through the subscription sub-menu (see screenshot).
Overall, these lists are a very nice feature that will make using FriendFeed a lot easier in the future, as it will allow you to create specialized feeds with relatively little noise. This way, for example, you can group political bloggers into one list and tech bloggers into another, while updates from your close friends can go into yet another list.
Home Feeds and Comments With Date Stamp
One other nice new features is that you can now see the actual home feeds of other users. This is a great way of discovering new people to follow.
Another good addition to FriendFeed's feature set is that it now displays how long ago a comment was made when you hover your mouse over the little bubble next to every comment. Before, it was impossible to tell when a comment was made.
Posting
Posting directly to FriendFeed has now become a bit easier and the old "Share Something" button has been replaced with a text box at the top of the page (though interestingly, as you search, this box turns into a search box, which is a bit confusing). One nice new feature is that you can now directly upload pictures to FriendFeed. While we really like universal uploaders like Pixelpipe here, sometimes you might just want to send a picture to FriendFeed. This has been possible every since FriendFeed acquired mail2ff.com, but this new posting UI makes it quite a bit easier.
Still Some Unfinished Business
As much as we like the new interface for how it makes dealing with a lot of friends easier, there are still a few areas where FriendFeed could improve. In this new version, for example, the FriendFeed rooms you subscribe to are always visible, but searching for interesting rooms is still not possible.
FriendFeed also still has to figure out a way to deal with duplicate entries, as many users tend to share the same link over and over again, even though a discussion has already formed around the link somewhere else on the site.
Becoming the Default
As FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor told us, the plan is to make this beta interface the primary FriendFeed interface after gathering more feedback from users and tweaking it accordingly. We think that this new interface is a great step forward for FriendFeed and we would assume that most users will switch over to the new interface long before it becomes the default.
Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Most people don't know how to write Javascript, though, so we end up using the Greasemonkey scripts developed by other people who do. There are lots and lots of scripts that have been written and they are fun, useful and easy to run.
It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4 minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.
We hope readers will add comments with some of your favorite Greasemonkey scripts for people to check out as well.
What Is Greasemonkey?
Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to insert Javascript into the local display of web pages in your browser. Nothing changes for anyone else, but images, links or text can be added or hidden automatically when you visit a web page that a script has been written for. Developers have written these little scripts to customize or improve the way different web sites are experienced. It's a powerful, lightweight platform that we think you'll really enjoy using.
For nontechnical users, "script" may be an intimidating word, but we think of it as a plug-in for the plug-in. The user experience is that simple.
How do I Use It?
Below you'll find a four minute screencast walking you through the process of setting up Greasemonkey and running some of our favorite scripts. Links and text are below the video. RSS readers can click here to view the video.
Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Flash version)
Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in.
Find scripts to install. Most are at Userscripts.org but the ones we reference in the