ReadWriteWeb

Boxcar: Twitter Push Notifications Done Right

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:27:36 -0800

A few days ago, we reviewed iTwitter, one of the earliest iPhone 3.0 Twitter apps to supported push notifications, but one major letdown of iTwitter is that push notifications only work when both parties use the iTwitter client. Today, however, Boxcar arrived in a the App Store (iTunes link), and this client actually polls your Twitter feed every 5 minutes and sends out push notifications whenever a new direct message or @reply arrives. Messages send between Boxcar users will be pushed out immediately.

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Not a Fully-Featured Client

It's important to note that Boxcar is not a fully-featured Twitter client. While you can reply to direct messages right from the app, it will actually open up your favorite Twitter client (you can currently choose between Tweetie and Twitterific) in order to open up replies. In the next version, which has already been submitted to Apple, Boxcar will also give you a choice to handle your direct messages in another Twitter client as well. This new version will also support multiple Twitter accounts.

OAuth Support

One nice aspect of Boxcar is that it allows you to sign in to your Twitter account using Twitter's OAuth implementation, which means that you won't have to give your Twitter name and password to yet another company.

Of course, Boxcar's 5 minute delay is still not quite the instant push that some users would like to see, but chances are that we will see this in the near future. At that point, Twitter can become a real alternative to sending text messages to your friends (assuming your friends are on Twitter and have a phone that supports push messages, of course).

We should also note that IM+ (iTunes link), which is mostly an IM app, but also supports Twitter, can also send push notifications when you receive direct messages and @replies. If the IM functionality isn't of interest to you, however, or if you don't want to switch away from Tweetie or Twitterific, Boxcar is probably a better solution at this time.

Boxcar as an Infrastructure Service

Overall, we think Boxcar is a very interesting solution, and at $2.99, it is also a dollar cheaper than iTwitter. We especially like the fact that, at least at this point, Boxcar is basically providing an infrastructure service and allows you to continue to use your favorite Twitter apps just like you used to.

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Blame it on MySpace: Ad Spending on Social Networks Expected to Drop 3% This Year

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:36:48 -0800

According to a new report from eMarketer, paid advertising on social networks in the US will drop 3% in 2009. In 2008, advertisers spent $1.175 billion on ads on social networks, but eMarketer predicts that this number will fall to $1.14 billion this year. The main culprit here is MySpace. EMarketer expects that ad spending on the social network will fall 15% in 2009. At the same time, it expects to see a 9% growth in ad spending on Facebook, and most other social networks are also doing just fine. EMarketer expects that this drop will be short-lived, however, and predicts a 13.2% increase in ad spending in 2010.

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It's important to stress that except for MySpace, most other social networks are still doing just fine, and advertisers have actually increased their ad spending on Facebook and other social networks. Also, while most advertisers only spend a relatively small amount of money on ads on widgets and applications, the amount of money companies spend on advertising on these platforms will actually increase from $40 million to $70 million.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, though, it is also important to note that eMarketer predicted a 10.2% growth in ad spending for 2009 in December 2008. For the upcoming years, eMarketer predicts that the market will rebound and it predicts a 13.2% increase in ad spending in 2010. However, given how far off eMarketer's prediction for 2009 was, we will just take this projection with a grain of salt.

More Bad News for MySpace

Overall, this is obviously even more bad news for MySpace, which is already struggling to just keep its current user base from moving to other services. Even as the MySpace team tries to improve the service and streamline its business, it faces an extremely tough challenger in Facebook, which also has a lot of momentum behind it right now.

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CoTweet Opens Public Beta: Now You Can Tweet Like Starbucks

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:17:49 -0800

The majority of companies on Twitter rely on a variety of tools to allow multiple employees to post to one unified Twitter account. CoTweet is one of the most popular of these tools and it is currently being used by major brands like Starbucks, CocaCola, and Whole Foods, as well as by celebrities like Britney Spears. Starting today, anybody can tap into the power of CoTweet, as the company just announced a free public beta program. In addition, CoTweet also announced that it has raised $1.1 million in VC funding.

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Features

CoTweet has a number of nice features that make it a great choice for any business that wants to get serious about using Twitter, and the fact that it is now available for free also gives small businesses and cash-strapped startups a chance to play the game at the same level as the big brands.

As you would expect from a tool like this, you can easily invite multiple users (up to 6 in the free version), hand out assignments to members of your team (which can be accompanied by notes), and create persistent searches (for your brand name, for example). Other interesting features in CoTweet include the ability to schedule tweets, see statistics from bit.ly in a sidebar right on the site, and set up email alerts for replies and direct messages.

Thanks to keyboard shortcuts and a no-nonsense design, using CoTweet is extremely easy, and even though it is meant to be used by multiple users, it's actually also a great Web-based Twitter client in its own right.

Free For Now

For the time being, CoTweet will remain a free product, though it is not clear how long this public beta will last and what CoTweet will charge afterwards.

If you are looking for a tool that will allow your team to easily post messages to one Twitter account, then CoTweet is definitely worth a closer look.

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Security Guru Calls Chrome OS's Security Claims "Idiotic"

Sarah Perez — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:33:00 -0800

Noted security guru Bruce Schneier, chief technologist at BT, has scoffed at Google's claims about its new OS, just announced yesterday. According to the Google blog post, Chrome OS represents a complete redesign of the underlying security architecture of the OS "so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware, and security updates." A bold statement to say the least...and apparently one Schneier doesn't think too much of. "It's an idiotic claim," he says.

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In a Yahoo News story, it's reported that Schneier isn't completely buying Google's promises. "It was mathematically proved decades ago that it is impossible -- not an engineering impossibility, not technologically impossible, but the 2+2=3 kind of impossible -- to create an operating system that is immune to viruses."

That seems to us like he's picking on the semantics of Google's statement just a bit. Google says that users "won't have to deal with viruses," and Schneier is noting that it's simply not possible to create an OS that can't be taken down by malware. While that may be the case, it's likely that Chrome OS is going to be arguably more secure than the other consumer operating systems currently in use today. In fact, we didn't take Google's statement to mean that Chrome OS couldn't get a virus EVER; we just figured they meant it was a lot harder to get one on their new OS - didn't you?

Even Schneier himself admits that an OS redesign which takes security into account "all the way up and down" could make for a more secure OS than the ones available today. However, that's different than saying that users won't have to deal with malware, he added.

Carl Leonard, security research manager of Websense EMEA, also shares Schneier's beliefs. "All software is susceptible to issues - it just depends on how much effort the malware author wants to go to and how much profit can be made," he said. "Already we have seen vulnerabilities and issues with the Chrome browser, and Google even ran a contest in which two well-known security researchers found 12 exploitable security flaws in the company's Native Client system."

OK, we get it: Chrome OS can get malware...technically speaking. But won't it get less of it?

Forrester Research analyst Andrew Jaquith, on the other hand, has more positive things to say about Google's new OS. He notes that the company has made strong security strides through its Native Client code technology and Chrome web browser, which includes features such as "sandboxing" which could help contain malware. "If [Google] brings that kind of thinking to the operating system and looks at it from a clean sheet of paper, they should be able to introduce some significant improvements," he said.

Do you think the security community is making a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to Google's security claims? Or do you think they were right to point out that no OS is invulnerable to attack?

Discuss

Who Uses Social Networks and What Are They Like? (Part 2)

Sarah Perez — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:31:00 -0800

Read Part 1 of this post here.

In a recent study by Anderson Analytics, the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn were revealed. The ultimate goal was to provide marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today. Here we'll delve into the details about the specific networks studied.

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Facebook

As we've heard before, Facebookers are older and better off. They are more likely to be married (40%), white (80%) and retired (6%) than users of the other social networks. They have the second-highest average income ($61,000) and an average of 121 connections.

In general, there is no one area of interest for this group of social networkers. Out of 45 categories, national news, sports, exercise, travel, and home and garden skewed only slightly higher than the rest. This is likely because this network has the most users and contains a high number of users within each demographic.

Facebookers are also extremely loyal: 75% say Facebook is their favorite site and 59% say they've increased their use in the past 6 months.

MySpace

MySpace users are young and there are less of them on the site than there were in the past. Even those participants who reported using MySpace said they had used the site less in the past six months.

The users of this network are more interested in having fun, specifically in the areas of entertaining friends, humor and comedy, and video games. They're less into exercise than any other network. Oddly enough, despite the youth-skewed demographics, they seek out parenting info more than users of any other network.

The average income of the MySpace user is the lowest ($44,000). They're more likely to be black (9%) or Hispanic (7%) and single (60%) and students (23%).

Twitter

Twitter users are more likely to be employed part-time (16% vs. 11% average) and have an average income of $58,000. The average Twitter user has 28 followers and follows 32 others.

The Twitter group is especially interested in news, restaurants, sports, politics, personal finance, and religion. They're also really into pop culture with music, movies, TV and reading, ranking higher than average. Their buying habits reflect those interests with this group being more likely to buy books, movies, shoes, and cosmetics.

However, this group is not that loyal to the network: 43% said they could live without Twitter.

It should come as no surprise that a network of business users is the one that has the highest average income ($89,000). Also not surprising is that LinkedIn users joined the network for business or work purposes, specifically for keeping in touch with business networks, job searching, business development, and recruiting.

They tend to like news, employment information, sports, and politics. They're also more likely to be into the gym, spas, yoga, golf and tennis. Interestingly enough - and perhaps because they can afford to do so - LinkedIn users own more electronic gadgets than users of any of the other social networkers. In particular, they enjoy digital cameras, high-definition TVs, DVRs and Blu-ray players.

However, when these guys unwind, they have some interesting interests: gambling and soap operas. 12% seek gambling information online (vs. an average of 7%), while 10% go online for soap-opera content (vs. an average of 5%).

This group is more likely to be male - it's ratio of male to female users is 57% to 43%.

Conclusion

The findings of this study have confirmed in some cases what we already knew about the different demographics of these networks. However, that's still helpful since the more sources that confirm the same demographics, the more likely they are to be accurate. In addition, by surveying the social networkers interests, the study reveals some interesting insights into the various groups, like how one group is more pop-culture focused and other spends more time at the gym. That info is invaluable to marketers looking to best capitalize on their social network ad spending.

Anderson Analytics will be releasing the full report next week. If you're interested, you can check their site for more details.

Discuss

Who Uses Social Networks and What Are They Like? (Part 1)

Sarah Perez — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:30:00 -0800

A new study by Anderson Analytics looks into the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn with a goal of providing marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today.

Some of the study's findings echo things we've already heard. For example, Facebook users tend to be old, white, and rich. MySpace users are young...and fleeing. Other info is new: Twitterers are more likely to have a part-time job, LinkedIn users like to exercise and own more gadgets.

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The Anderson study sampled over 11,000 GreenfieldOnline panelists (an online survey community) over an 11 month period to understand social networking services' (SNS) reach and overlap among the U.S. Online Population. In May, the company surveyed an additional 5,000 panelists of which over 1,250 participated in an in-depth attitude and usage survey. They then grouped the participants into two categories: those who use social networks and those who don't. To be considered a social network user, the participant had to use one of the sites in question in the past 30 days.

Of course, not everyone is devoted to one social network alone. The study found that there is some overlap between sites, as shown in the chart below.

Social Networkers, in General

Out of the 110 million Americans (or 60% of the online population) who use social networks, the average social networking user logs on to these sites quite a bit. They go to social networking sites 5 days per week and check in 4 times a day for a total of an hour per day. Nine percent of that group stay logged in all day long and are "constantly checking what's new."

Interacting with Brands

When it comes to brands online, the study found that:

52% of social networkers had friended or become a fan of at least one brand,
17% felt positive when seeing a brand on a social network,
19% felt negative when seeing a brand on a social network,
64% were neutral or didn't care about brands on social networks,
20% would like to see more communication from brands online,
35% would not like to see more communication,
45% were neutral or didn't care.

Social Networking Myths Shot Down

A couple of interesting things that came out of the study included the debunking of some social networking myths. Social networkers are not as interested in friending strangers or creating "fake" friends to boost their ego. Out of the group, 45% connect only to family and friends and another 18% will connect only to people they've met in person. In other words, two-thirds are connecting to people they actually know. Only 10% of those surveyed said they will friend anyone.

Also interesting is that only 15% of social networkers say they log on at work, thus debunking another myth about how prevalent social network use is at the workplace.

Non-Social Networkers

The study revealed the reasons why some online users aren't into social networks. Surprisingly, it's not because they hate technology - they spent just as much time on the web as the networkers do. Instead, they don't use social media because either they don't have the time, they don't think it's secure, or they think it's stupid. Yet even out of the time-starved group, 22% report they'll start using social media in 3 months and 27% said they'll start using it in a year.

Continue to Part 2 for details on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 2: Search Engines, User Interfaces for Data, Wolfram Alpha, And More...

Richard MacManus — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:00:00 -0800

In part 2 of my one-on-one interview with Tim Berners-Lee, we explore a variety of topics relating to Linked Data and the Semantic Web. If you missed it, in Part 1 of the interview we covered the emergence of Linked Data and how it is being used now even by governments.

In Part 2 we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.

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Semantic Web and Search Engines Like Google, Yahoo

RWW: You've been talking about the Semantic Web for many years now. Generally the view is that Semantic Web is great in theory, but we're still not seeing a large number of commercial web apps that use RDF (we've seen a number of scientific or academic ones). However we have begun to see some traction with RDFa (embedding RDF metadata into XHTML Web content), for example Google's Rich Snippets and Yahoo's SearchMonkey. Has the takeup of RDFa taken you by surprise?

TBL: Not really, but the takeup by the search engines is interesting. In a way I was happy to see that, it was a milestone for those things to come out of the search engines. The search engines had typically not been keen on the Semantic Web - maybe you could argue that their business is making order out of chaos, and they're actually happy with the chaos. And if you provide them with the order, they don't immediately see the use of it.

"The search engines have not been keen on the Semantic Web [...] their business is making order out of chaos, and they're actually happy with the chaos."

Also I think there was misunderstanding in the search engine industry that the Semantic Web meant metadata, and metadata meant keywords, and keywords don't work because people lie. Because traditionally in information retrieval systems, keywords haven't proven up to the task of finding stuff on the Web. One of the reasons is that people lie, the other is that they can't be bothered to enter keywords. So keywords have gotten a bad reputation, then metadata in general was tarred with this 'keywords don't work' brush. Because a lot of Semantic Web data included metadata, then people thought that with Semantic Web data -- again, that people will lie and won't have the time to produce it.

Google rich snippets example; image credit: Matt Cutts

Now I think there's a realization that when you're putting data online, that people are motivated NOT to lie. For example when your band is going to produce its next album, or when your band is going to play next downtown, you're motivated to put that information up there on the Semantic Web. There's an awful lot of cases when actually data is really important to people; and it's on the web anyway. So I think it's great that some of the search engine companies are starting to read RDFa.

Does this mean that they [search engines] will start to absorb the whole RDF data model? If they do, then they will be able to start pulling all of the linked data cloud in.

"The web of linked data and the web of documents actually connect in both directions, with links."

Will they know what to do with it? Because when it's data in a very organized form, I think some people have been misunderstanding the Semantic Web as being something that tries to make a better search engine - i.e. when you type something into a little box. But of course the great thing about the Semantic Web is that you can query it, you can ask a complicated query of the Semantic Web, like a SQL query (we call it a SPARQL query), and that's such a different thing to be able to do. It really doesn't compare to a search engine.

You've got search for text phrases on one side (which is a useful tool) and querying of the data on the other. I think that those things will connect together a lot.

So I think people will search using a search text engine, and find a webpage. On the front of the webpage they'll find a link to some data, then they'll browse with a data browser, then they'll find a pattern which is really interesting, then they'll make their data system go and find all the things which are like that pattern (which is actually doing a query, but they'll not realize it), then they'll be in data mode with tables and doing statistical analysis, and in that statistical analysis they'll find an interesting object which has a home page, and they'll click on that, and go to a homepage and be back on the Web again.

So the web of linked data and the web of documents actually connect in both directions, with links.

User Interfaces for Semantic Content

RWW: At the recent SemTech conference, Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters' Calais project suggested that user interfaces for semantic content are key in getting more take-up. With that in mind, I wonder if you've seen some great interfaces or designs for semantic applications in recent months - if so which ones and why did they impress you?

TBL: I think that whole area is very exciting at the moment. The only piece of hacking I've done over the past few years has been on a thing called the Tabulator [a data browser and editor], which is addressing exactly that. Partly because I wanted to be able to look at this data. And now there are lots of different ways that people need to be able to look at data. You need to be able to browse through it piece by piece, exploring the world of data. You need to be able to look for patterns of particular things that have happened. Because this is data, we need to be able to use all of the power that traditionally we've used for data. When I've pulled in my chosen data set, using a query, I want to be able to do [things like] maps, graphs, analysis, and statistical stuff.

W3C Tabulator, a data browser/editor; Image credit: wiwiss.fu-berlin.de

So when you talk about user interfaces for this, it's really very very broad. Yes I think it's important. There's also the distinction we can make between the generic interfaces and the specific interfaces.

There will always be specific interfaces; for example if you're looking at calendar data, there's nothing else like a calendar that understands weeks, months and years. If you're looking at a genome, it's good to have a genetics-specific user interface.

"I want to be able to do maps, graphs, analysis, and statistical stuff."

However you also need to be able to connect that data, through generic interfaces. So if my genome data was taken during an experiment which happened over a particular period, I need to be able to look at that in the calendar - so I can connect the genetics to the calendar.

So one of the things I hope to see is domain-specific things for various different domains, and the generic user interfaces. And hopefully the generic interfaces will be able to tie together all of the domains.

Next Page: Wolfram Alpha; e-Commerce and Linked Data

Wolfram Alpha and Natural Language Interfaces

RWW: An interesting new product that was launched this year was Wolfram|Alpha, a 'computational knowledge engine.' It's kind of a mix between Google (search) and Wikipedia (knowledge), and it's key attribute is that enables you to compute something. The founders think that 'computing' things on the fly is something we're going to see a lot of in future. What's your take on Wolfram|Alpha?

TBL: There are two parts to that sort of technology. One of them is a sort of stilted natural language interface. We've seen those sort of natural language queries for years. Boris Katz [from W3C] created a system called START [a software system designed to answer questions that are posed to it in natural language]. I think with the Semantic Web out there, those sorts of interfaces are going to become important, very valuable, because people will be able to ask more complicated things. The search engine has traditionally been limited to just a phrase, but some of the search engines are now starting to realize that if they put data behind them and have computation engines, then you can ask for things like 'what's this many pounds in dollars' and so on. So yes, those interfaces will become important.

"Those sorts of interfaces will become important [...] people will be able to ask more complicated things."

Conversational interfaces have always been a really interesting avenue. We've had voice browser work in W3C, that has been an interesting alternative avenue. It's possible that as compute power goes up, we'll see a prolifieration of machines capable of doing voice. It'll move from the mainframe to being able to run on a laptop or your phone. As that happens, we'll get actual voice recognition and pattern natural language at the front end. That will perhaps be an important part of the Semantic Web.

We talked before about what a great challenge the Semantic Web is going to be from a user interface point of view. Conversational interfaces are going to be part of [solving] that. Of course it's also going to be really valuable to have compositional interfaces - for the visually impaired and so on.

Wolfram|Alpha is also a large curated database of data sets. Obviously I'm interested in the big data set which is out there, which is Linked Data. This everybody can connect to. I don't really know a lot about the internals of Wolfram|Alpha's data set. I don't know whether they're likely to put any of it out on the web as Linked Data - that might be an interesting addition. I imagine that quite a lot of it may have come from the web of Linked Data.

e-Commerce and Linked Data

RWW: There have been reports recently that both Google and Yahoo will be supporting the Good Relations ontology and linked data for e-commerce. Companies such as Best Buy are already putting out product information in RDFa. What would be your advice to e-commerce vendors right now, to help them transition to this world of structured data on the Web. The same question could be asked across many verticals, but e-commerce seems like one area which has some momentum right now. Would you advise them just to put out their data as Linked Data?

TBL: Yup! Certainly this year is the year to do it. I've been advising governments to do it and when you look at an enterprise, you find that a lot of the issues are the same. But when you put your data from government or enterprise out there, make sure you don't disturb existing ecosystems. Don't threaten those systems, because you've spent years building them up.

Maybe there's an analogy with when the Web first started and the first bookshops went online. They were more or less a flyer, saying 'hey we have a great bookshop at 23 Main St, come on down!'. Let's say that a person named Joe owned one of these early online bookshops. If somebody had suggested to Joe that he should put his catalog online, Joe would've felt that that was very proprietary data. And he'd be worried that other bookshops would see where he was weak, so they'd be able to advertise themselves as filling that niche he's weak in.

"When you put your data out there, make sure you don't disturb existing ecosystems."

But when his competitors Fred and Albert put their catalogs online, then Joe can check which books people are browsing at Fred and Albert's websites. So Joe would [finally] be pursuaded to put his book catalog up online. But he doesn't put the prices... until Albert and/or Fred does. And even if catalog and pricing is up there, nobody puts their stock levels online. And there was a period of time when nobody [i.e. online booksellers] had their stock levels up. But people got fed up with ordering stuff that wasn't in stock. So the first book shop to actually tell you about stock levels suddenly was then unbelievably attractive to its customers.

So there's this syndrome of progressive competitive disclosure. This happens when people realize that if you're going to do business with somebody, if you're going to have your partners up and down the supply chain, really it's useful to check the data web - and life goes much more quickly and open.

Best Buy may be what starts the ball rolling [among e-commerce vendors]. Now if I want to look out for what [products are] available, I can write a program to see what there is. If somebody wants to compete with Best Buy, to my program they'll be invisible unless they can get their data up in RDF. Doesn't matter whether they use RDFa or RDF XML, as long as it maps in a standard fashion to the RDF model, then they will be visible.

Next Page: Internet of Things; Conclusion

The Internet of Things

RWW: I'm fascinated by how the Internet is becoming more and more integrated into the real world. For example the Internet of Things, where everyday objects become Internet connected via sensors. Have you been following this trend closely too, and if so what impact do you think this will have on the Web in say 5 years time?

TBL: It connects very much with Semantic Web [and] with linked data. With Linked Data you've got the ability to give a thing a URI. So I can give a URI to my phone, and I can say that's my phone in Linked Data. And also the company that made it can give a URI to the model of the phone. They can also put online all the specs of the phone, and then I can make a link to say my phone is an example of that product. So now any system which is dealing with me and has access to that data will be able to figure out the sorts of things I can do with my phone, which actually is really valuable. Especially if the phone breaks.

"The Semantic Web is a web of things, conceptually. Tying an actual thing down to a part of the web is the last mile."

The Semantic Web has already given URIs to things, and to types of things. When the things themselves have an RFID chip in them, then I think it's a very exciting world. One can take that RFID chip, go to the Internet and find out the data about the thing. Whether we'll be able to do that, whether the manufacturers will be open enough to allow me to turn data about the identifier of the thing into data about the thing, is yet to be seen. But it's a very exciting idea.

Similarly, I'd like to be able to scan a barcode and get back nutritional information about what's in - for example - a can of food. But we don't have that yet. To get that sort of thing, which is very powerful, we need to build look-up systems, which allows you to translate an RFID code or a barcode into an HTTP address.

The Semantic Web is a web of things, conceptually. Tying an actual thing down to a part of the web is the last link - the last mile. Give the thing a notion of its own identity in the web.

Conclusion

The over-riding message in both Part 1 and 2 of our interview with Tim Berners-Lee, is for companies and organizations to make your data available online. Preferably as Linked Data, which uses a subset of Semantic Web technologies. But Berners-Lee noted in Part 1 of our interview that he'd even be happy with the data in CSV (comma separated values) format.

It's clear that we've seen a lot of progress in linked data already in 2009. In upcoming posts on ReadWriteWeb, we'll continue to track this trend and explain how you can contribute your organization's data.

Discuss

Zoho's New Plugin Turns Microsoft Access Databases into Web Apps

Steven Walling — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:40:00 -0800

To everyone wishing they could use their Microsoft Office Access database to build a Web app, your savior has arrived. Zoho has introduced a plugin to migrate Access databases on to their platform. Once migrated, they can be used to build database applications through the Zoho Creator interface.

The new plugin is just one part of a larger strategy by Zoho to integrate with Microsoft, in the hopes that they can encourage converts to their SaaS products. The boon for those who use Access databases is that they can now easily translate their data tables in to applications, which can be served through Zoho at little or no cost.

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Zoho is one of the leading providers of SaaS collaborative tools for the enterprise and consumers alike. Since their advent in 2005, they've created some of the most useful productivity apps available online, and their platform as a whole shows promise.

But to compete further with Microsoft, they've recently taken to integrating with their competitor. Late last month, they even added support for SharePoint, despite a staunch belief in the superiority of SaaS.

From Desktop Database to Web App

Microsoft Access is a simple, WYSIWYG interface for creating a database. While technically you can make Access data public through SharePoint Services, actually building a working application on the Web is basically impossible out of the box.

The best options for moving your Access database on to the Web have long been either MySQL or PostgreSQL, which are frankly beyond the capabilities of many people who find Microsoft Access an attractive tool.

Enter Zoho's migration plugin.

In a process that takes relatively little time, Zoho will take your database and place it within the grasp of your Zoho Creator account. Once it's been migrated to their servers, you can collaborate on the data tables with your colleagues and easily build applications for your business. Controls on how much of the database you share are reasonably fine grained, with three levels of access.

If you're not developing an app solely for within a company, you can additionally publish your work through the Zoho Marketplace or run it on the Google App Engine.

Microsoft Access is a fairly painless way for enterprise users, many of whom are still tied to Microsoft by IT and management, to build simple databases. But there's never been a particularly easy method for sharing those databases and doing something really useful with them. While it might also be attractive to developers aiming at the consumer Web, Zoho's plugin will best aid businesses with databases that have had no where to move forward.

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Social Media in Germany: 5 Years Behind - Still Lots to Learn

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:45:02 -0800

A few days ago, we got a chance to talk about the state of blogging and social media in Germany with Marcel Weiß, the editor of Netzwertig.com - one of Germany's most popular blogs. In the interview, Weiß told us that Germany is at least five years behind the U.S. when it comes to social media and its adoption by a larger part of society. Blogs are still considered to be suspect by a large part of the German public and have very little influence, and social news sites and aggregators attract very little attention. With regards to Germany's Internet startup scene, Weiß argues that, with very few exceptions, most companies are also years behind the U.S. and just aren't innovative enough to compete.

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Blogging in Germany: Five Years Behind

Weiß argues that blogging and social media adoption in Germany is far behind similar trends in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Blogs are still considered suspect and have almost no influence over local or national politics. The mainstream media still likes to describe the Internet as a dangerous place, full of malware, porn, and scammers. While regular newspapers in Germany have also started to feel the pressure from the Internet (and every major German paper has a web site), the absence of a successful Craigslist-type site in the country has given the newspapers a longer lease on life than in America.

Unlike the U.S., no political blog has the influence of American sites like DailyKos or Talking Points Memo, though a recent (and misguided) move by German politicians to censor the Internet in Germany in order to combat child pornography led over 130,000 German Internet users to sign a petition against this plan and galvanized the German Internet community in an unprecedented way. It remains to be seen, though, if this sudden rise in Internet activism in Germany will have legs, or if it will just fizzle out quickly.

While political blogs in the U.S. also got a push during the Bush years when mainstream media outlets were generally seen as too close to the administration, German news outlets did not suffer from a similar pushback and most Germans still generally trust the mainstream media's reporting and equate blogging with excessive over-sharers who write Internet diaries about their German Shepherds.

In a post that created quite a stir in the German blogosphere (with a focus on blogging about economics), Felix Salmon argued that Germany's culture was basically the antithesis of what blogging is all about. If this is true, then maybe there is really little hope for blogging in Germany in the near future, but at the same time, there are also a number of news blogs that are doing quite well (Netzwertig is one of them), and there are a lot of passionate German bloggers who are trying to change the current negative perception of blogs.

The Absence of Social News

Unlike in the U.S., the German blogosphere also doesn't have large social news sites like Digg or Reddit to bring readers to blogs. With Yigg.de Germany has its own Digg clone, but it's not only hampered by a rather unpleasant design, but even the top stories there hardly get more than 20 votes. In addition, a headline on Yigg or similar services like Webnews.de barely drives any traffic to a site.

With regards, to blog monetization, things obviously also look equally bleak. Weiß told us that most companies still don't quite get that they could find a very targeted audience on blogs - but of course, the fact that blogs are still struggling to find a large enough readership doesn't exactly help matters here.

Startups

To some degree, the same is also true for the German startup scene, where, as Weiß argued, too many companies simply try to copy popular concepts that were developed elsewhere. The prime example for this is obviously StudiVZ, a blatant Facebook clone. Yet, while StudiVZ was able to quickly grow in Germany while Facebook was still ignoring most of the market outside of America, development of the site has now mostly come to a standstill and while Facebook is turning itself into a platform, the team behind StudiVZ has no interest in making any platform play whatsoever. Indeed, as Weiß told us, very few German startups are actually interested in the platform business and providing APIs for developers is still seen as unnecessary.

That doesn't mean that there aren't some interesting and successful German startups, of course. Xing is a good example for a service that gets things right, and SoundCloud, a very cool music service based in Berlin is another one (though the founders are actually from Sweden). It's important to note, though, that Germany never really had much of a startup scene and that there are a lot of cultural and bureaucratic barriers that would hold even some of the most determined founders from starting their own businesses.

Outlook: Bleak - But With a Silver Lining

There are multiple reasons why blogging in Germany just isn't taking off, but there is a chance that things might turn around this year. The upcoming election in Germany, for example, will give political blogs a chance to shine, especially if they manage to capitalize on the current discussion around Internet censorship. And while Twitter isn't quite a mainstream phenomenon yet, the discussion around its use in Iran during the current controversy around the elections there, also brought Twitter into the spotlight in Germany.

A number of Germany newspapers have also started to run blogs on their own sites, and with Rivva.de, the German blogosphere also has a very interesting meme-tracker that looks and feels similar to Techmeme and Memeorandum, and which provides a central focal point for the German blogosphere.

Of course, in a piece like this, we can only touch upon a small number of examples and have to rely on some sweeping generalizations. Feel free to take issue with our (and Marcel's) assessment of the German Internet scene and leave a comment.

CC-Licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Will Palmer.

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Google To Announce Major Identity Initiative for 1 Million+ Companies and Schools

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:06:30 -0800

Google plans to announce in coming weeks that it is turning each of the one million plus Google Apps customer domains into an OpenID provider, enabling millions of people to log in to OpenID-supporting websites with their work, school or organization ID.

"For these organizations," Google Security Product Manager, Eric Sachs, wrote on the public OpenID Board mailing list this morning, "Google Apps can now become an identity and data hub for multiple SaaS providers." Sachs appeared to believe his email was not being posted to a public board; he asked that it not be circulated so that some unusual technical work could be completed and political support shored up in the face of likely community and press cynicism. There's good reason for that - it may not be the good news it seems to be.

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But First, A Word from OpenID's New Sponsor

OpenID is important not just because it makes logging in to sites around the web easy, with one username and a secure password, but because it's a way for people or organizations to maintain control over their own identities and data. There are no policy changes you don't approve of when you're in control.

Google's Sachs explained in his email that in order to pull this all off, OpenID relying parties will need to be redirected from the domain provided at user login over to Google's OpenID service. In order for this redirect to happen, all relying parties will need to start looking for a new OpenID extension that Google has developed and implemented in conjunction with one relying party technology, JanRain's RPX.

"There is the potential for some community members (or press) to assume (or at least imply in articles) some evil intent by Google to co-opt OpenID with these extensions," Sachs wrote today. "It would be nice to have a blog post on the formal OpenID blog that was supportive of our approach, so I wanted to see if the board members are comfortable with that."

Watching to see if the nonprofit OpenID Foundation will speak out in support of Google's forcing the rest of the industry's hand with new code extensions that are required to recognize the users of one million Google Apps customer accounts will now be a spectator sport.

Getting the Job Done

On the other hand, if one were to put a group of well-intentioned people in a room and ask them to solve the sticky problem of asking millions of organizations to adopt OpenID provider infrastructure - that might not ever happen. Enter Google's largess and the "proposal" that federated identity for all these companies and schools can be outsourced to a centralized player, Google, and OpenID might get a big boost in adoption. Companies and schools using Google Apps will now only need to flip a switch in their Google Apps admin controls to turn on OpenID support, and Google will do all the heavy lifting.

Caveat Emptor

Presuming that all the sites that let you log in with OpenID decide to play nice and look for Google's redirect (to Google) then the idea of logging in to sites around the web with your favorite, secure account credentials (My Job, Powered By Google) could become far more common.

It might defeat the purpose of putting people in control over their own identities through distributed identity providers, because so many "OpenID" users would be coming back to Google, but the OpenID brand would no doubt benefit in the short term at least. And Google can do no evil, right?

In other words, this move by Google could kill the spirit of OpenID by drowning the letter of OpenID with support. We think we're logging in to websites with our work or school ID, and OpenID lovers think we're logging in with OpenID, but we're actually logging in with a Google-controlled ID. All the heavy lifting would be done, Google would take care of the data storage and probably offer some neat value-added features. All the companies involved would have to do is hand online identity provisioning over to the company that they have already purchased email, calendaring and document sharing from. ("They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety," Ben Franklin once wrote, "deserve neither liberty nor safety.")

At least it's not Facebook!

So goes the wrestling of titans, on the very playing field created by champions of the free and independent little guy.

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Talk to Me: 5 Great Translation Tools

Dana Oshiro — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:30:15 -0800

Tim Ferriss believes you can learn (but not master) a language in 2-12 months. But what if you don't have that much time? Whether you've managed to find a last minute travel deal or you just want to welcome your new neighbors down the hall, below are a few translation tools to aid you in your quest to communicate.

1. Forvo: Forvo is a fantastic crowdsourced language site where users submit, rate and share audio clips in order to practice proper language pronunciation. One great feature is that audio files are mapped according to the speaker's region. This means you won't make the mistake of speaking le français du Québec to Parisians.

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2. Babel Fish: Human translation will always triumph over online tools. Nevertheless, unless you're a diplomat, it's unlikely that you've got a polyglot at your disposal. One of the most established online translation tools, Babel Fish allows users to translate large blocks of text and URLs. This is particularly useful to understand hotel websites, online menus and directions. Microsoft's Bing Translator offers similar capabilities with the added ability to automatically detect the initial language.

3. Google Translate: Google Translate and Babel Fish are very similar services. However, Google recently added Google Translate functionality to Gmail. Now you can instantly translate your emails by choosing a language from the drop down menu.

4. TweetTranslate: TweetTranslate is a great service for those interested in restaurant and entertainment recommendations. The service integrates with your Twitter profile and allows you to translate your tweets into more than 40 languages.

5.BabelWith.Me: RWW first covered this cool chat translator a few weeks ago. BabelWith.Me allows users to chat in more than 45 different languages. This is a great tool for negotiating room and guide rates.

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Find & Grade Companies Based on Environmental, Social Responsibility with Scryve

Jolie O'Dell — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:30:00 -0800

If you're the kind of person who cares about the companies with whom you do business - who owns them and what impact they have on the world - Scryve is worth checking out.

This startup was created as a research and vetting tool for determining the environmental and social responsibility of a wide range of companies. Their data comes from consumers, researchers, and KLD, a corporate social responsibility firm, as well. Scryve allows users to contribute to ratings and suggests alternative companies with better scores.

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Powered by XWiki, a powerful platform for collaboration, the site allows users to engage in discussions about various companies and track changes made to a company's profile and compare different versions.

Scryve co-founder and CEO Alexander Gillett wrote to us in an email today, "With our tools, consumers can easily make decisions with their behavior (and specific rating) of a company. As their records become more public and more important, companies are changing the decision-making process to accommodate the expectations of a better-informed public."

Scryve has been bootstrapped by its founders through its initial research and development phases. "As we've moved from a beta service to a more public test of our services," wrote Gillett, "we've found success in two major aspects of our services.

Scryve's browser tool has been downloaded by more than 50,000 people to date. The browser tool, available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, allows a company's rating, when available, to be displayed discretely in the upper right corner of the browser. Ratings will also appear in a user's Google search results.

The icon is clickable and directs users to more details on the rating and alternative companies.

Scryve has also developed a service that makes their ratings available to any news content site and a comprehensive research guide for consumers seeking to learn more about the companies they buy from and review.

"The potential for change inherent in Scryve's success is massive," wrote Gillett. "With enough people using the information to make their decisions, companies pay more attention to the responsibility of their actions. Over time, it will be a given that the positive and negative actions associated with a company will impact its bottom line, and companies will have to plan accordingly."

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Atlassian's Crucible & Fisheye 2.0 Are Rough Around the Edges

Steven Walling — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:15:00 -0800

This month, Atlassian launched the 2.0 versions of Crucible and FishEye, their collaborative software for coders. For those who're unfamiliar, FishEye is a browser for source code repositories, and Crucible is a tool for peer code reviews.

Both have had a complete UI makeover that shines, but despite a strong track record from Atlassian, there are some critical flaws. FishEye's new activity streams and profiles are valuable, but they're overshadowed by how cluttered and counter-intuitive Crucible's iterative code review system is.

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FishEye 2.0

FishEye 2.0 is a lot more than just a browser for source code repository. It's become a comprehensive dashboard for viewing and analyzing progress on a development project.

New activity streams show commits, JIRA issues, and Crucible reviews. There's also fresh focus on individuals and projects, with impressive statistical charts to track what's going on.

Still, tracking all the stats on commits and other activity is a value proposition that's going to appeal to those managing teams, not those actually doing the work. Instead of the slick new capabilities, the biggest boost to adoption of FishEye is likely to be the beta support for Git, the version control system.

Crucible 2.0

Some of the changes to Crucible will be welcome improvements. Small things like keyboard shortcuts, highlighting of unread comments, and better integration with JIRA are all sure to make the lives of developers easier.

But the core of the product, code reviewing, is problematic in the new "iterative review" user interface. In short, it's anything but intuitive to do diff by diff comparisons. At this point, free and open source alternatives like the Google-made Rietveld for Subversion, or Review Board present a simpler way to do side-by-side comparisons. That's regrettable, considering that how valuable Crucible is when used alongside FishEye and JIRA.

Code is Law

Talking with developers about their strategies for code review, we discovered that most aren't particularly hungry for complex platforms to do the job. If flashier aspects of a review tool hamper the ability to get quick feedback in any way, then you've got software that's not worth using.

There's no doubt Atlassian practices what it preaches when it comes to agile development. But the new features they've incorporated take the focus off code and put it on people and metrics. No matter how well-executed, that's a fundamental problem of strategy that tars the software.

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All the Designs You Love on the Web in One Place: DesignBuggy

Jolie O'Dell — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:40:52 -0800

Organizing and aggregating content from around the web using frames and bars is a trend we've seen from a lot of social sites in 2009. A similar curation resource now exists for designers, decorators, and architects: DesignBuggy.

Co-founder Ritesh Patel wrote in an email that his cohort and co-founder Chris Kincaid "was a print guy publishing a high end competitor to Architectural Digest. We hit upon the idea that perhaps curated search for one-of-a-kind materials from artisans in the design world would be a good idea." Hence, their site was born.

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The duo is also white-labeling the same concept under a different name: Sourcebox.

Why is the management of multi-source digital assets becoming such a hot topic in web trends?

"Curated search based on friends or people with like-minded views and thoughts will be big," wrote Patel today in an email to us.

"We as users are becoming more community driven in all things we do online. Zagat's had that original idea about how we trust restaurant recommendations from friends or people we know who are like-minded. The adage, 'Birds of a feather flock together,' applies universally. Add open technology, and now you have the capabilities of applying this to a whole set of categories and places."

DesignBuggy's experience begins when users install a simple bookmarking tool or a full toolbar in Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox. What follows can be as simple as occasional grabbing of ideas, sites, or items. It can also be as complex as a multi-user collaborative, long-term design project. The use cases are as deep and wide as the site's well-thought-out toolkit, which includes sorting curated items by site as well as any number of categories and sharing items with groups and individual users.

Although the site's database has yet to be built out by end users and there are more-than-occasional bugs, the organization and discovery possibilities are exciting and the interface is clean and functional.

DesignBuggy allows users to peruse the finds of "users who search most like you" in a section called "My Neighbors." The site also makes inviting collaborators and finding current friends simple; searching by name is now available, and searching through email contacts is coming soon. Users can also subscribe to feeds from other users, websites, and categories.

We like the idea, and we love the execution. Hopefully, the co-founders will be able to build the user base to make this a really great resource for designers to collect and share data from the hundreds (thousands?) of sites they use most.

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Facebook's New Events Publisher Demonstrates How Wrong the Site's New Privacy Strategy Is

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:34:46 -0800

"Dear Grandma, would you like to come out to the bar with my friends and I for a drink tonight?"

Your grandmother is on Facebook now and Facebook introduced today a new way to invite all your "friends" on the site to an event. The way the tool works is the best example yet of how Facebook is moving in exactly the wrong direction with its new privacy settings. Facebook continues to implement features in a way that presumes all our contacts are in one big bucket, instead of recognizing that we want to communicate different things to different groups of people.

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The company announced today that Events will now be publishable through the same Publisher tool that all your status messages are posted in. Unfortunately, that Publisher tool does not include the ability to limit access to event invitations (you have to go through the separate Events menu to do that) and the site's new emphasis on pushing all updates out to everyone never looked so shortsighted.

Last week Facebook acknowledged in a call with press that it really does want more people to be sharing more content outside their immediate friends and family with the whole of Facebook users. Prior to that acknowledgment we wrote about how a more accurate understanding of privacy on the web would respect peoples' desire to limit access to messages to the appropriate people in appropriate circumstances. In real life we talk about different things with different people, we don't default to a public broadcast of everything we have to say. That would be the best approach for a social network that says it prioritizes user control over privacy. Facebook is taking the opposite approach - making context-specific communication a "custom option" that few people are likely to take the time to find.

Default options in social software have consequences for human behavior and social interaction. Inch by inch a new texture of privacy is being created on Facebook; soon the path of least resistence will be for all of our content to flow out to everyone. Many users believe that's what Twitter is for - but Facebook is for communicating with known friends and family.

There's no better example of how inappropriate that can be than giving people an easy way to offer event invitations without making it easy to target those invitations only to the people you really want to invite. Today's announcement is just the latest indication that Facebook, big on talk about privacy, is actually moving in a direction that its privacy-minded users are unlikely to appreciate.

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