Craigslist addicts like myself will be interested in Craigsphone, the new iPhone app from Next Mobile Web. Craigsphone offers a clean UI; the ability to post, upload and share location while mobile; a saved viewing history, location-based suggestions, and instant-dial numbers. The Next Mobile Web crew is claiming that there is much more to come. "The internet is raw and beautiful because it is Us," they say, "and no site is more Us than craigslist." While the ability to "see stuff, fun and people nearby" is currently limited to San Francisco and Manhattan, Next Mobile Web says they will "take the best local site in the world and make it truly local." It will be interesting to see exactly where they go with that. This app might end up being the greatest thing since sliced bread for those people who constantly scan the Missed Connections hoping to find themselves described.
craigsphone from Next Mobile Web on Vimeo
We are mobile geeks working hard to improve the web. [more]
Portland bloggers have another valuable resource coming their way - the newly-formed Portland WordPress User Group is hosting their first meeting on Thursday, January 15 at CubeSpace. The meeting will go over future meeting times and dates; topics, ideas and speakers; ideas for regular help sessions; and an overview of cool new WordPress 2.7 features.
Portland is definitely a blogging town: on January 16, check out the one year anniversary party for Beer and Blog. Beer and Blog meets every Friday between 4:00pm and 6:00pm at Green Drago.
Portland has lots of opportunities to get involved with the blogging community, network, and learn some new tricks - all bloggers are encouraged to come out to these meetups!
Last week Jeremy Wright of b5media shed a little light on how his company has managed to monetize their network of 300+ blogs and bloggers should take note. In a glowing Toronto Star article three days before Christmas, Wright broke down his traffic and revenue numbers and bloggers worldwide grabbed pencil & paper to work out what their blog could/should/would be making based on b5's metrics.
Toronto-based blog network b5media boasts more than 300 blogs written by 200 professional writers. Each month it receives 30 million page views and 10 million unique visitors.
Those numbers mean revenue. Large numbers of visitors and page views mean b5media can charge more for advertising. And it's been working out fairly well. In 2005, for instance, b5media brought in revenue of $70,342 and in 2007 that number had grown 1,798 per cent to $1,328,885. And it continues to grow.
Based on 2007's revenue ($111K per month) and today's pageviews (30 Million per month), b5 is monetizing well but not as well as some people might think will a CPM of approximately $3.70.
Any bloggers out there? How does your site compare?
b5media is a global new media network featuring more than 255 blogs on a wide variety of subjects ranging from entertainment and news to technology... [more]
According to Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr, 2009 will be the Year of the Uber Blog.
Some may moan at the use of the word uber, so feel free to substitute it with big or large, because the meaning remains the same. An Uber Blog is a blog that combines different content streams into one large blog, with one primary top level url. The Huffington Post is an example I’ve used before. The blending of content can be in related fields, or non related fields; for example, you might blend specialties in tech into the one tech blog.
Riley may know what he's talking about. He has a solid blogging pedigree that includes co-founding the b5media blogging network and contributing to Techcrunch during its meteoric rise. Riley's reasoning is remarkably simple: it’s easy to sell ads on one blog vs many blogs. One 'big' blog means increased traffic to the core blog making the sales pitch more appealing.
Riley notes that ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Alley Insider, and Gawker have successfully gone from a traditional blog network to the uber blog model while Techcrunch and GigaOm have preferred to collect seperate online properties like they're going out of style.
In 2009 big will be better. Not big networks of many sites, but big blogs that break out of the narrow niche focus that has been typical of commercial blogging until now, and instead go wide in content but focused on one brand and one url.
The rise of the uber blog will also mark the beginning of the time new media starts to surpass old media. The thing holding back new media to date has been its obsession with niche plays that didn’t naturally lead to scale that sets them up well to compete with old media titans that went wide online as they did offline in print. The new media uber blogs of 2009 and beyond will offer real substitution of old media like we haven’t really seen before, and with lean structures that are best placed to last the recession, could ultimately emerge on top.
I like the way you think Duncan Riley. Techvibes is on its way to becoming a uber blog that gives its readers an easy way to slice & dice content hyperlocally all on the same trusty url. We're looking forward to the New Year.
Corvallis-based Strands just released the first version of their iPhone App. A social networking aggregator, Strands' app lets users share their online action with other friends using Strands. Users can also comment on and rate what's shared by friends, and share their own Twitter activities. Strands creates a "taste stream" of the websites that users frequent, and then posts it to friends' iPhones. The app then points out the things that they think each user will be interested in seeing.
A "lifestreaming" company in the vein of FriendFeed, Strands is gaining some notice as the first lifestreaming iPhone app despite its fairly small user base. There have already been quite a few positive reviews - if you've tried it out, let me know your thoughts on it.
The company has also shown a keen interest in developing their mobile pages, and the clean UI reflects that dedication. Strands also offers an online money-management tool, and a website recommender tool.
Strands develops technologies to better understand people's taste and help them discover things they like and didn't know about. Strands has... [more]
Via CNET Webware, today both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect launched. Both are services that let you sign on to third party sites using your credentials from the respective site. While this feels like a trip back to 1999 when Microsoft launched Passport as a single-sign-on service (what was Passport is today Windows Live ID, and it's not open to third parties anymore). Arguably Microsoft's biggest mistake back then was asking thousands of dollars in licensing fees for those wanting to implement it. In 2008, in Web 2.0, you can't charge for anything, so there's no cost associated with either.
Both Facebook and Google's Connect services go beyond what Microsoft was offering back then. Both allow the third party site to access the user's contacts, in the case of Facebook, a user's privacy settings as propagated as well. Facebook Connect lets those sites then publish items back to the user's news feed. Google Friend Connect ties into OpenSocial, allowing third party sites to make use of social widgets. The root functionality of these two services— single sign-on—is the same, but the implementation and other features offered differentiate them a fair bit.
These systems still run into the argument that many used against Microsoft Passport: a single point of failure, controlled by a corporation. OpenID, an open protocol, decentralized single sign-on system, has come to maturity lately, but uptake and use is slow. Many large services such as Google and Yahoo act as OpenID providers, but much fewer sites actually accept OpenID credentials. Google Friend Connect actually accepts OpenID among others, but to an average user who already has a Google and Facebook account, OpenID is just something they don't understand. For many developers, the closed system where most people already have an account is much more appealing.
Eight years after Microsoft tried to solve the single sign-on problem, it's intriguing that it's taken this long for others to try in their footsteps. That's eight years of making separate accounts for every site you use. We have the technology to solve this, but can we settle on agreement of how?
Portland-based Values of n announced on November 24 that they will be closing its doors on Monday, December 8. The good news? Their intellectual property has been bought by Twitter, so fans of Values of n's Stikkit and I Want Sandy will hopefully see some of their favourite features incorporated into Twitter in the future.
Rael Dornfest, CEO of Values of n, is moving into an engineering position on the User Experience group at Twitter; a consultant there for several months, he admits that he "fell in love with the team."
An RSS pioneer, the purchse looks to have been a strategic play for Dornfest himself. Dornfest seems to be genuinely looking forward to the move:
"I'm excited to continue building simple, engrossing products -- my favorite thing to do -- and to imbue my work with all I've learned over the last three years."
No numbers have come out yet regarding the deal, but one number we do have is $500 million, which is the offer Twitter recently turned down from Facebook.
Our mission is to help people collaborate and get organized. Simple enough. And yet, building software that quietly facilitates collaboration as... [more]
Twitter is a privately funded startup with offices in the SoMA neighborhood of San Francisco, CA. Started as a side project in March of 2006,... [more]
A pleasant surprise this weekend: Techvibes has been nominated for a Canadian Blog Award in the category of Best Sci/Tech blog. We share this category with some top notch blogs like Amber MacArthur's, Bad Astronomy, and DeSmogBlog. The many awards competitions that come out around this time of year can seem stale and meaningless, but the CBAs are a wholesome and non-profit affair, organized by a volunteer group of bloggers. With hundreds of nominees across 27 categories, they're also the most thorough poll of Canadian blogs. Browsing the categories is a great way to discover other fine blogs.
Round 1 voting goes until November 29, then the top five of each category move on to the final round. Please vote for us today!
How can some one be generous? Further, can a generous spirit be more effectively put into action in today’s Web 2.0 world?
Theodore Malloch thinks so. Malloch is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Roosevelt Group, a leading strategic advisory and thought leadership company. He has written a book called Being Generous, which is scheduled for release this coming year. After having read the preview text and spoken with Malloch, I believe this is a valuable book for socially responsible that will be of great benefit to business people. Even Oprah endorses it saying, “This book is a true gift. It can bring the whole world together in acts of generosity.”
Malloch has direct experience with Web 2.0 companies. He is on the board of Global Giving, a Washington, DC-based network for peer-to-peer philanthropy. He is also an advisor to MakeGood [NOTE: I am the founder of this company] which enables businesses to effectively communicate social responsibility.
Malloch chose the title for his book quite deliberately. In 1995 MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte wrote a best selling book with the title, Being Digital. It was a non-fiction science and technology forecast, describing a future world free of wires. It became an instant classic and in many ways came to define the Internet era. Malloch explains that Being Digital provided a general history of several digital media technologies; many that Negroponte himself was directly involved in developing in the labs.
Negroponte argued that humanity is inevitably headed towards a future where everything that can be digitalized, will be digitalized and he was very soon proved right. Negroponte's book was as much about change as it was about the future. We can no longer describe the future or the process of change without mentioning digital technology.
Malloch’s book is about being generous: but generosity exists only because of people and what they feel and do. It is a virtue, a habit that governs the way of life and the expectations of generous people and causes them to look on the world as though others, and not themselves, are the principal reason for the world’s existence.
Malloch cites Jeff Skoll as an example of generosity in today’s Web 2.0 world. As eBay’s first President, Skoll prospered early in life. He retired at age 34 and used $34 million from the proceeds of the company’s IPO to set up his own foundation. A $7.5 million gift to Oxford University to integrate social entrepreneurship into business skills is indicative of his visionary interests. He is now financing and producing films on social responsibility. His foundation, set-up in 1999, pursues his vision of a world: “where all people, regardless of geography, background, or economic status enjoy and employ the full range of their talents and abilities.”
Malloch describes how Skoll is looking to lead lasting social change. He invests in social entrepreneurship through his flagship Awards program. He connects people through the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School. He sponsors forums with thought leaders; and has built Social Edge, as an on-line community where like-minded people can network, learn and inspire one another.
Like Negroponte, Malloch’s sees the overthrow of the paradigms of the past and how this is creating new potential for being generous in a Web 2.0 world. Malloch explains that, “We are beginning to share our traditions, religions and moral philosophies. And we appear to be ready to forge something new—a global civilization. At the core of that new way of being is the virtue of generosity. It too can become ubiquitous.” Malloch’s book is a valuable attempt to see what being generous means and might entail for everyone in our interconnected, digital future. The Web 2.0 world will expedite the process of being generous.
When the recent Facebook redesign relegated applications to a tab instead of the front user profile, some declared that they were giving up on the Platform. This week Facebook launched it's Application Verification Program. Qualifying applications get a special badge indicating that it has been reviewed by Facebook, increased limits for requests and emails, and increased news feed visibility. For this, an app must pass their Guiding Priciples for Social Applications, and submit $375 for an approval good for one year. The principles are somewhat vague but basically common sense: be meaningful and/or interesting, don't be spammy, buggy, or ugly.
Is this an attempt at monetization beyond advertising? TechCrunch's Arrington calls it a "protection racket" and includes a picture from The Godfather in his post. In my opinion, this is a reasonable move to help solve the problem of distrust in Facebook applications. However, I believe that the distrust could have been largely prevented had Facebook been more conservative with the platform launch.
In Fall 2007, developer enthusiasm for the Facebook Platform was at a fever pitch. At the first Facebook Developer Garage in Vancouver, we had to turn people away after filling the theatre and then some. Enthusiastic developers shared their new creations, and we all revelled in the huge potential of the platform. But by Winter, Facebook app fatigue was setting in hard. Shady developers had exploited any weakness possible to gain users; some tricked users into sending invites out to their entire friends list. Users had become annoyed by spammy apps to the point that they didn't trust them. The reputation of the platform was tarnished hard.
Over this same time period, Apple and Google have launched platforms that have maintained and built good reputation. Third party iPhone apps must pass Apple's approval, and are limited in what aspects of the phone they can access. If they attempt to overstep their bounds, the phone will kill the process. While developers complain about the restrictions and the approval process, iPhone users can rest assured that no app will harm their phone or compromise their security. Google App Engine launched in beta with very tight restrictions on CPU usage, data storage, ability to send outbound email, and number of people accepted into the beta. They've increased the limits over time as the platform has proved stable and secure.
Looking back at the progression of the Facebook Platform, they took a big chance in opening major site functionality to third party developers. Unfortunately it backfired when they didn't act as a strong enough gatekeeper to their service. The platform isn't dead, but developers now need to try extra hard to win over users. The Verification Program is a good step, but if Facebook is serious about the platform, they'll have to prove it stronger.
