ReadWriteWeb

Mobile Movie Search Gets the Google Treatment

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:22:23 -0800

Smartphone users just got an early holiday treat from Google.

Now, when searching for movies on their iPhones or Palm WebOS- or Android-powered devices, users can get not only theatres, showtimes, and films; they can also get trailers, ratings, and proximity-based information. This way, you can get in the car and peal out of the driveway before conducting a desktop search for movies, thus saving yourself another excruciating 5 minutes of "holiday cheer" with the family.

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In a quotation-laced post on the Google Mobile blog, Google mobile UX designer Nick Fey revealed that information will be available in English only for now in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Users of the abovementioned devices can now go to google.com in their web browsers. After searching for the term "movies," users can then tap on the "More movies" link for a panoply of new features and aggregated data. Users can then browse through film titles or nearby theatres.

One of the most welcome features is the ability to play movie trailers in the mobile browser without having to navigate elsewhere. This eliminates the usual need for multiple browser tabs or frustrating cross-app navigation.

Here's a spiffy demo video from our friends at Google:

The new features also include ratings and categories, movie posters, and every other imaginable detail about the films listed. The information will also include upcoming showtimes for the nearest theaters, which are conveniently presented in a Google Maps interface.

"We keep information on this page succinct," said Fey, "so you can quickly browse through shows and showtimes to help you decide which movie to see. If you want more details about a specific movie, just touch the poster or movie title and you'll see our new movie details page that has a synopsis of the movie, a more detailed list of showtimes, the cast and crew, and pictures."

In a way, the features remind us a bit of SkinniPopcorn, a web and mobile app that integrates movie-related Twitter data, movie trailers, film reviews from the New York Times, and synopses. And that site is available on any mobile device with a web browser.

Still, for the map and showtime information, Google wins this round.

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Ommwriter: Be Alone with Your Thoughts

Dana Oshiro — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:10:31 -0800

Between Skype, chat, texts, push news notifications and three screens of scrolling feeds, it's easy to get distracted while writing an email or post. If you've misspelled names, forgotten words or hit send prematurely on numerous occasions, then you probably just need to slow down. Rather than resorting to a life in the woods of hermit-like solitude, you could just take a few moments to think with Ommwriter.

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Built by Barcelona-based design agency Herraiz Soto & Co., Ommwriter is a gorgeous Mac download that allows users to block out other applications and focus on their writing. The company originally created Ommwriter for their own internal use but quickly realized the service's consumer appeal.

Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.

Similar to WriteRoom, users download the writing tool and install it on their desktop. Upon opening it, you receive a distraction-free environment with just a few spartan font choices and an export feature. While WriteRoom offers a CRT monitor-style interface, Ommwriter offers a white Zen-like experience. Keystroke sounds can be replaced by plinking water or what sound like soft footsteps in snow and users can choose to play ambient music or keep their writing space dead silent. If you're the type of person who is married to iPhone editing and a large feature set for word processors, then this is not your tool. But if you just want a few moments to collect your thoughts, then this is a great way to do it. To register for this free service visit ommwriter.com.

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Enterprise 2.0: Study Shows Adoption is Real

Alex Williams — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:36:07 -0800

When you look at Enterprise 2.0, you can see the hype pretty clearly but what is not so evident is how social computing efforts are faring within corporations and large organizations.

That's what's striking about the report from the 2.0 Adoption Council. The group did a web survey of its 100 members with 77 responding. That may seem like a small number to use for any quantifiable conclusion about the state of Enterprise 2.0. But the people who responded lead or help lead Enterprise 2.0 efforts at some of the largest organizations in the world. Thirty-four percent of the respondents work for companies with more than 10,000 employees. Twenty-five percent work for organizations that have more than 100,000 employees.

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These people have solid footing into how social enterprise technologies are being adopted.

Let's get to to the results:

Manufacturing Has Surprising High Adoption

It's not surprising to see high tech companies as leading the way in uses of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. But it's interesting that manufacturing businesses are proving to be adopters. These are companies with roots deep in the industrial age that are showing that they see it as important to bring social computing into the work of its employees.

No Surprise About Early Adoption

It should be no surprise that Enterprise 2.0 is still in the early adopter phase.

Budgets Are Healthy

Budgets are less than $500,000 in most organizations but 52 percent of the respondents have budgets between $500,000 and $5 milliion.

Projects Are Well Under Way

Enterprise 2.0 is not just a concept any more but a reality in the enterprise with 34 percent saying they have multiple projects underway. We are curious about five percent having Enterprise 2.0 technologies fully ingrained into their work places. These must be more service oriented companies that do not rely on deeply entrenched technologies like ERP software.

Who's Driving The Efforts

We often use terms like "groundswell," to describe the phenomena around social applications in the consumer world. In the enterprise, it's a different story. Adoption is often user driven but management is dictating a lot of the efforts.

ROI is Hard To Define

The one weakness that Enterprise 2.0 faces is the abstractness of its return on investment. It's important to note, though, that 55 percent of the respondents are very satisfied with their Enterprise 2.0 efforts. Another 26 percent of respondents are somewhat satisfied.

Conclusion

The 2.0 Adoption Council survey results unquestionably show that Enterprise 2.0 is well becoming a core part of organizations. The challenges will come as more scrutiny is placed on how the organization benefits from Enterprise 2.0. What really is the ROI? We expect this question will answer itself as more advanced analytics provide more detailed views about how the efforts are faring.

A Final Note

In addition to its survey research, The Council has also released its first "how-to" report, "A Framework for 2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise," which gives additional insight into how to successfully implement Enterprise 2.0 technologies within organizations.

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Nincha Lets You Share What Others Won't

Dana Oshiro — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:12:16 -0800

Get your mind out of the gutter. This isn't about distributing your crude weekend photography, it's about being able to upload content outside the parameters of basic community categories. While we all know that YouTube is for video, Flickr is for photography and LinkedIn is for career-related content, it's hard to tell where we should be sharing our important but uncategorizable content. Nincha is a stealthy little community that just may infiltrate the community sharing space.

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Like many other social sites, Nincha lets you upload photos, create polls, share bookmarks and review products. However, some additional types of content include job and classified listings, code snippets, recipes, events and business cards. Rather than offering a basic light blogging tool, users are encouraged to comment on each others' submissions and favorite the community's best content. From here you can follow others and share your uploads via email, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg and text message. While it's too early to say which types of content will dictate the tone of this community, its obvious there are advantages to this type of social sharing.

Rather then just adding your code to GitHub or your own website, you can share snippets of code to your favorite social profiles with a better chance of recruiting new programmers and contributors. Additionally, the text message feature means that you can avoid sometimes finicky services like the Bump iPhone app and send your business card directly to an iPhone users' contact book. And finally, if you know your pecan pie recipe is going to be a Thanksgiving hit, you might as well tweet it out now and save yourself the trouble of forwarding it to others. Nincha is offering us the chance to share the content and links we need without confining us to specific file formats. The first 1000 lucky ReadWriteWeb readers can try the service at http://nincha.com/signup/readwriteweb_8xqg1b.

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Google Plans to Digitize Artifacts at Iraq's National Museum

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:40:23 -0800

During a ceremony in Iraq's National Museum in Bagdad today, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt announced that the company will digitize the museum's collections. By early next year, all of these images will be available online for free. The museum lost a large part of its collection to looting in 2003. Except for a number of photo ops and press conferences, the museum has remained closed to the public since the beginning of the war in 2003. Most of the museum's collection remains in storage.

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According to Reuters, the company has already taken 14,000 photographs in the museum. It's not clear how Google plans to present these images, though it seems as if Google plans a bit more than just a simple gallery of the photos it took. Eric Schmidt promises "a few surprises" for when the site launches early next year. Google and the U.S. State Department will share the cost of this project.

A Government-Sponsored Infomercial for Google?

While this sounds like a great idea, the New York Times also reports that there are also some interesting politics at play here. Parts of the museum's collections, for example, have already been digitized by Italy's National Research Center. This collection is already available online.

Today's event was sponsored by the US Embassy in Iraq, where, according to the New York Times, US Ambassador Christopher R. Hill described the digitization project as "part of an effort spearheaded by the State Department to bring technology to Iraq." Some of the invited journalists, however, argued that the event was nothing else but a "government-sponsored infomercial" for Google.

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Regator Brings the Best Niche Blogs to Your iPhone

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:36:20 -0800

Scott Lockhart used to tell his co-workers in the real estate industry that there was a lot of valuable information to be found by reading blogs. They, like all of us, would try blog search engines and end up frustrated with spam, abandoned blogs and low-quality content. So Lockhart quit his job and built an application he thought could solve that problem by unearthing just the most high-quality blog content concerning a wide variety of niche topics. In doing so, he stumbled onto one of the most important issues in the future of the web - the tension between controlled user experience and chaotic freedom.

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That sounds crazy, but Lockhart's now three-person Atlanta company has actually done a remarkably good job of unearthing good content in a compelling user experience. Regator offers users a curated collection of high-quality sources on more than 500 topics, everything from martial arts to ceramics, aviation, cheerleading, law and Antarctica. Of course there are tech and business channels, too. Regator just got its $2 premium iPhone app into the iTunes store and it's the best "channel clicker" for niche content we've seen yet.

There's something a little bit odd about having the borders of your internet limited by someone else, but the Regator user experience is excellent otherwise. It's well designed and fun to use. User experience is key to making the web...usable. I've wished for years that more people got excited about sharing OPML files, bundled collections of dynamic RSS feeds, but that just hasn't happened.

Curation, bundles of content, discovery - these are functions of a prolific web that a new crop of services is trying to tackle with good design and tough decisions about openness versus...something else. Regator is an interesting entry into this place of tension and possibility.

The new premium iPhone app offers subscription to the selected blogs you like, video viewing, recommendations of related posts and issue tracking by keyword search. You can view the most recent posts from sources, or the most popular posts with other Regator users.

But is this just a pretty looking walled-garden? Regator brings to mind an admittedly paranoid but important blog post that consultant Chris Messina wrote this week called The Death of The URL.

"I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL...As a user experience designer, [the responsibility lies with] my discipline and peers to provide the right kind of ideas and leadership. If we get the design right, we can empower while clarifying; we can reduce complexity while enhancing functionality; we can expand freedom while not overwhelming with choice. Surely these are the things that good, thoughtful user experience design can achieve!

"If I were forced to choose between all the messiness of free will over the 'comfortability' of a contrived existence, I'd choose the red pill, time and time again. And I hope you would too.

From WebTV to the tightly controlled iPhone app platform, though - these interfaces can be very compelling to use. One of the risks of a controlled platform, perhaps secondary to the inherent loss of freedom, is that whoever is in control might not do a good job of picking out what shows up. Editorial control risks conflicts of interest and a lack of broad editorial knowledge compared to what topic experts know. It's not an easy role to play.

Kimberly Turner is the editor of Regator's selection of blogs. She's a former magazine writer and she works with volunteer reporters and editors who suggest top blogs in niches when they have free time. Turner doesn't believe that Regator is guilty of the sins that Messina calls other companies out for.

Whether you're finding sites through Google's algorithm, the community votes at Digg or your friends on Twitter "we all use some service or site to help us find what we're looking for," Turner says "and those are all 'curated' in some way."

"Regator's human-powered curation is simply less likely to yield poor quality content than some others'," Turner contends.

Thousands of blogs are included on Regator already and Turner says new features like related posts and searches help users "explore and wander into fresh territory rather than getting stuck in a rut and going to the same small subset of blogs repeatedly."

So far there are 20 blogs in the wine category for example, just 1 in the beauty/nails subcategory, 4 hockey blogs, 22 law blogs, 3 blogs about cheerleading and 7 about Emergency Medical Services.

The service adds new sources based on user suggestions and other discovery methods. Turner says, "once a blog has established itself as a well-written and trustworthy source, we want to make sure it is included." The fact is, though, that if a blog Regator turns you on to then links to another related blog that's not included in the Regator index - you as a user cannot subscribe to it. If the company offered a "suggest" button next to its "share" button in the Regator browser, that could be helpful.

Does that sound reasonable? It's not as free-form and dynamic as other services. Collected.info, a new service for sharing and subscribing to other peoples' collections of feeds, is a particularly interesting recent entrant into this market from perhaps the other end of the spectrum. Both services take a little time to get your reading list set up well, but Regator delivers high-quality content from the start.

I like Regator and am already using the new iPhone app to discover interesting new content while on the go. A service that gives me access to fresh, high-quality content about ceramics, anthropology and museums with just a few clicks? Sign me up!

Still, there's something about the sources available being limited by someone else's choice. It's an interesting tension that may never be resolved - but is the basis for some very interesting software in the meantime. The Regator crew is right to identify as a problem the way people new to this social web struggle to find the best content. They offer a compelling solution to the problem. Time will tell which solutions catch on and what the consequences will be.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank one of the companies that makes it possible for us to bring ReadWriteWeb to you.

Groupsite is a long-developed, feature-rich, self-serve, professional grade social networking and collaboration service. If you've got a group of people you want to facilitate online conversation between - you should check out Groupsite. We really appreciate Groupsite's support here at ReadWriteWeb.

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Google Apps for Blackberry: Now for Businesses of all Sizes

Alex Williams — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:55:35 -0800

Google Apps is making it a bit more enticing for companies of all sizes to adopt its service for the Blackberry smart phone.

In a post this morning on the Google Enterprise blog, the group announced Google Apps Connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server has doubled the number of Blackberry phones it can support. This effectively allows larger enterprises to place more users on fewer servers.

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Google is also offering the capability to host multiple Google App accounts, broadening the number of users that can be supported.

In August, Google Apps launched its integration with Blackberry. The most significant aspect of the integration is the syncing capabilities. Google Apps Connector provides access to Google Apps email, calendar, and contacts from the built-in BlackBerry applications.

Email, folders and contacts are all synchronized between Google Apps and the Blackberry application.

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Mint Data Shows Online Retail Rebounding

Richard MacManus — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:52:27 -0800

Last night we wrote about Forrester's prediction that online holiday retail sales will grow 8% this year to $44.7 billion. comScore had similar numbers about the growth of online retail - toy web sites grew 9% in October, as did the retail apparel segment. Online personal finance service Mint.com has joined the festive statistics parade, with data analyzing some of the U.S.'s leading retailers.

Mint analyzed spending data and compared it to one year ago. The data is for top performers in the third quarter this year, based on "average monthly spend per user versus recession lows."

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Interestingly, Mint's data says that Q4 sales will not be as good as last year - which is the opposite of what Forrester predicts. However Mint does say that consumer electronics and clothing are set to rise in Q4.

Check out the charts below and compare them to Forrester and comScore's data.

The highlights, via Mint.com:

Aeropostale - the clothing retailer is up 10% year-over-year, having grown consistently quarter over quarter.
Best Buy - the electronics retailer is up 1% Q3 year-over-year, hit a recession low of -7%.
Fry's - while competitor Best Buy's sales exceed where they were at this point last year, Fry's remains down -7% year-over-year (though it's up from a -16% recession low).
J.Crew - the clothing retailer's lowest point was -3%, but it has since entirely corrected and even improved sales 4% year-over-year.
Sears - the department store's sales are up 8% over this time last year, having dipped to -10%.
Target - after an initial drop to -8% in Q109, Target has halved that loss and is currently down only -4% year-over-year.

See also:

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Rival Magazine Publishers Plan to Launch iTunes for Magazines

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:13:22 -0800

It's no secret that most magazines are struggling to hold on to their subscribers. Just like the newspaper industry is under a lot of pressure from the Internet, magazines are also having a hard time adjusting to the reality of the Internet. Now, Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst are planning to form an alliance that would bring more than 50 magazines to an iTunes-like online store that would sell digital version of these publications. The magazines that could be included in this program include Time, People, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker and Esquire.

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According to The New York Observer's John Koblin, a deal between these rival publishers is imminent. According to Koblin's anonymous sources, Time, Condé Nast and Hearst aren't planning to release their own e-reader for these magazines, but want to build a store and apps that would allow users to download and consume content on a large variety of devices. By grouping together, these publishing houses hope to save money. Koblin's sources also point out that this would be a risky venture for one publisher, but the three companies together could give users a single store to find all of the magazine content they want.

Reinventing Magazines for Digital Distribution

As the Atlantic's Derek Thompson rightly notes, however, these companies will have a hard time charging for content that they are already giving away for free online. To make this venture work, these publishers would either have to offer unique content in their digital magazines or they would have to erect a paywall around all of their sites.

Most importantly, these companies will also have to reinvent their magazines for the digital age along the lines of Wired's app for the rumored Apple Tablet or Condé Nast's iPhone version of GQ (iTunes link). One of the reasons these publications are suffering is the long lead time that makes most of the content outdated by the time it arrives at the printer. While this still works for magazines like the Atlantic, which mostly publishes in-depth long form articles that aren't time-sensitive, gossip magazines can't really compete with TMZ or Perez Hilton. Just putting a digital copy of their magazines online simply won't cut it.

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Hardware Acceleration: The Next Frontier in the Browser Wars

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:04:58 -0800

Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 9 at its Professional Developers Conference earlier this month. One of the unique features of IE9 that Microsoft announced at that time was hardware acceleration for its browser. Thanks to technologies like Direct2D and Direct Write that are available for Windows7, Windows developers can use a computer's graphics card to render websites faster. While Microsoft is still working on this project behind closed doors, however, you can already download a Direct2D-enabled pre-release version of Firefox 3.7 today.

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Beyond JavaScript: Fast Browsers Thanks to Direct2D

Ever since the release of Google's Chrome, browser developers have emphasized JavaScript performance. There is still a lot of work left to be done in this area, but developers have also started to investigate other parts of the browser that could benefit from new technologies.

According to Firefox developer Bas Schouten, the current implementation of Direct2D in this pre-release version will work best with graphics cards that support DirectX10 and WDDM1.0 drivers. On systems that fulfill these specs, though, users are likely to see significantly better performance on graphics-heavy sites. Sites that mostly render static text or depend on Adobe Flash to display their graphics won't benefit greatly from Direct2D. One benefit of Direct2D that users will notice on most sites, however, is improved font rendering.

For the time being, this is just an experiment and it isn't clear if Mozilla will integrate this technology into Firefox 3.7. What is clear, is that Mozilla seems to be ahead of Microsoft and by doing its development out in the open and through open source, Mozilla will be able to rely on its vast developer community to test and enhance these features.

What About Google and Apple?

Some would argue that the release of Google Chrome started this new race towards faster browsers, and as CNet's Stephen Shankland pointed out earlier today, the Chrome development team is quite aware of Mozilla's efforts and investigating the use of hardware acceleration in Chrome as well. As Shankland also notes, these Direct2D efforts shouldn't be confused with other projects like WebGL or Google's Native Client. Direct2D-enabled browsers will be able to render current pages faster, while these other technologies will require developers to redesign their sites.

Currently, a lot of these experiments are mostly focused on Windows. With OpenCL in Snow Leopard, Apple already offers a programming interface for using graphics cards for general-purpose computing. Apple is probably also looking at OpenCL to speed up Safari, though we aren't aware of any projects from Mozilla or Google that are making use of OpenCL at this point.

Get it Now

If you feel like experimenting with a new browser, you can download an early pre-release of an alpha version of Firefox 3.7 here. While we have tested this browser for a while and didn't see any crashes, it is worth remembering that this version isn't meant to be run in a production environment and that most of your extensions will likely not work.

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What Apps Should Twitter Acquire?

Sarah Perez — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:47:40 -0800

According to a statement made today by Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone, the company is interested in acquiring more companies to expand upon their current core set of features. At a news conference held in Tel Aviv, Stone was quoted as saying that acquisitions are "something we are definitely interested in. We made an acquisition last year that turned out to be an outstandingly good decision."

The acquisition he's referring to is Twitter's purchase of Summize, a real-time search engine that has now become search.twitter.com. Since that original purchase in summer of 2008, Twitter has made no other moves or indications that they were interested in buying other companies, seemingly more focused on quashing bugs, acquiring funding and partnering with major search engines like Bing and Google. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of Twitter applications exploded, and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter's service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering?

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Apparently, there may be a few apps that have already caught Twitter's interest. Stone told the crowd in Tel Aviv that "our attention is grabbed by some of these developers," and the company plans to "take a hard look at them."

What Companies are on Twitter's Radar?

Which applications do you suppose have crossed Twitter's radar? Some insight may be found on Twitter's "goodies" page where the company lists a handful of apps, widgets, and website buttons which Twitter users can browse through and download. Here, desktop Twitter clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck are promoted alongside mobile applications like Twitterific and PocketTweets.

However, the complete app list seems a little out-of-date when compared with what today's Twitterers are actually using, especially on the mobile front. According to a study from August of this year, iPhone apps like Tweetie and TwitterFon are just as popular as Twitterific - if not more so - as is the Blackberry app TwitterBerry. And the one-time popular Twitter app Twhirl, an Adobe AIR desktop client, has long since been overshadowed by the more robust TweetDeck and similar web counterparts.

Among those web counterparts are the new tools from Seesmic and Brizzly, both of which have been garnering attention as of late, especially when they each introduced support for Twitter's new "lists" feature earlier this month.

But client applications are only a small slice of the entire Twitter app universe. There are also games, blog and email plugins, utilities, analytics and search tools, shopping services, URL shortners and so much more. Plus, there are sites that attempt to aggregate the chaos into some sort of meaningful structure, like the oneforty.com website, for example, often called Twitter's unofficial "app store" by its fans.

While we could only guess at which applications Twitter would want to adopt as their "official" clients or services, a good guess may involve some of the media sharing tools that have been popularized by a number of Twitter users wanting to share photos and videos in addition to plain text. TwitPic comes to mind as one of the top photo-sharing clients and TwitVid or Tweetube may be considered for video shares. These sorts of acquisitions seem to fit better with Twitter's goal of expanding upon the core functionality of Twitter. Where before, the company was content with its simple 140-character updates, recent changes, including the integration of the URL-shortening service bit.ly, Twitter lists, geolocation features and a new implementation of the "re-tweet" structure seem to hint at Twitter's desire to add more layers of complexity to the once-basic service.

More Acquisitions Could be Too Much of a Good Thing

However, Twitter needs to be careful not to add too much. Up until now, the service has grown organically, with a lot of its features and conventions implemented by its own user and developer community outside of the official channels. Bog it down too much with extra add-ons and new behaviors, and Twitter may scare off potential new users who already often struggle with figuring out what to do with the service in its simple form. Plus, longtime Twitterers may also be put-off to see their favorite clients or services ignored in favor of whatever companies Twitter chooses to bless through an acquisition deal. And once acquired, competing companies could wither and fade away, unable to compete, eventually leading their developers to cut their losses and move on.

What Should Twitter Acquire?

Earlier this year, we listed ten companies that Twitter should acquire next. Not surprisingly, some of the companies or their features have already been implemented, including bit.ly's URL shortening service and the geo-location feature we mentioned. Meanwhile, another app on the list, FriendFeed, has already been acquired by Facebook, leaving our original list much shorter and now in need of an update.

Given Twitter's intentions to start a shopping spree sometime in the near future, we wonder what apps will make their list. We also wonder if more Twitter acquisitions will end up being a good thing for the company and the community as a whole, or if it will end up stifling competition in what is now a thriving ecosystem of innovation and development. We hope Twitter proceeds cautiously and wisely in this area - any major unwelcome changes have the ability to alienate the very community that made Twitter what it is today.

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Feedly Comes to Google Chrome

Sarah Perez — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:24:50 -0800

Feedly, the magazine style feed reader we first covered back in August of last year, is now available for the Google Chrome web browser. As with the Firefox implementation of the service, the Chrome version also uses a browser plugin to offer an alternative user interface to Google Reader. This early version of the Feedly for Chrome release offers most of the features found in the original Firefox version of the service, but requires the installation of a dev build of Chrome in order to work.

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Feedly: A Better RSS Reader and More

Feedly is much more than just another way to read feeds. Although it originally got its start as an alternative UI to Google Reader, today the service is part RSS reader, part social network aggregator and part search utility. Since its launch in 2008, Feedly's developer Edwin Khodabakchian has constantly added new features including Twitter and FriendFeed integrations, a river of news view, search tools, Mozilla Ubiquity integration, a Feedly "mini" toolbar and so much more.

Once installed, a click of a browser button transports you to the Feedly start page where you can browse through the latest news, comment, star, share, discuss and search through the articles displayed. As you read through the items, your activity is seamlessly synced back to Google Reader.

Although voracious RSS readers who subscribe to thousands of feeds may find using Feedly a bit slower than using Google Reader itself, a good many of the more casual consumers of RSS prefer Feedly's clean, easy-to-scan interface to Google Reader's more utilitarian look and feel.

Feedly for Chrome

The new Chrome version of Feedly is virtually identical to the one available for Firefox with only two major exceptions: there is no Gmail integration or Feedly mini toolbar available in the Chrome version just yet. The toolbar is one of Feedly's many innovative features which provides a floating bar that hovers at the bottom of your screen as you surf through blogs on the web. Toolbar buttons show you various pieces of metadata about the blog post you're reading, including number of Diggs and number of Google Reader shares. You can also save or share the post yourself in Google Reader or tweet a link to the article, among other things.

However, according to Khodabakchian, Feedly mini's omission isn't due to any technical issues. Instead, he notes in the comments of a Feedly blog post that the mini toolbar is in the process of being redesigned and when the Firefox version is complete and stable, he will then look into building a toolbar for Chrome. The estimated timeframe for its inclusion into the Chrome beta is 6-8 weeks.

How to Install Feedly for Chrome

In order to run Feedly for Chrome, you'll need to first install a dev build of the Google Chrome browser. These dev ("developer") versions of Chrome aren't as stable as the public release but allow you to play with yet-to-launch features like Google Chrome extensions, for example. And for Mac and Linux users, the dev release is your only option because Google has yet to provide stable versions of Chrome for those two operating systems as of yet.

After installing the dev release, you'll need to add the new Feedly extension to the browser.

Here's how to get started:

Download and install the Chrome 4.0 Dev Channel: Windows | Mac | Linux 32-bit | Linux 64-bit
Restart Chrome to make sure that you are running the 4.0 version.
Load http://update.feedly.com/release/feedly.crx to install Feedly.
Click on the Feedly icon on the chrome toolbar to load your Feedly.

After you have Feedly up-and-running, you can receive support through the company's Get Satisfaction page or by emailing feedly-chrome AT devhd.com. You can also tweet @feedly_chrome with questions, comments, and other feedback.

We're beyond excited to see Feedly on Chrome - although it was relatively easy to give up most of our Firefox extensions when we made the move to the Chrome browser, Feedly was one of the few that was sorely missed. However, if you're a more cautious user hesitant to install test builds of your browser and experimental extensions, you may not have to wait much longer before you can play with fully functional and stable versions of both. Yesterday, Google put out the call for developers to begin submitting their extensions for inclusion in the upcoming Chrome extension gallery, a step that signifies that this feature is closer than ever to launching. When the time comes, we're sure that Feedly will be among the top-rated extensions found there.

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Sponsor Post: LeapFish Draws on Power of Social Media for Worthy Cause

RWW Sponsor — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:00:55 -0800

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Business and social uses of Twitter have gotten most of the attention since the social platform hit the mainstream. But Twitter's benefit to charities and worthwhile causes is just as obvious, and we're now starting to see more and more uses in this sphere.

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Witness the #beatcancer campaign, which made it into the Guinness World Records for tweeting its way to raise $70,000 in 24 hours for four cancer-fighting organizations.

Twitter is not alone. Facebook is proving to be a viable base of operations from which to draw attention to the world's most pressing problems. The Causes application alone has 17.5 million monthly active users and has helped raise $4.5 million for approximately 155,000 non-profits.

LeapFish, a newly launched real-time and social search engine, is joining the movement. It has teamed up with the Make-a-Wish Foundation to empower Twitter users with the ability to grant an ill child's dream to go to Disneyland. The Tweet-a-Cause, which hit the wires last week and runs until November 27th, is steadily climbing through the twittersphere.

This particular campaign is devoted to four-year-old Jacob, who has a rare and life-threatening disease that has affected him since birth. LeapFish is donating $0.10 per tweet to the Make-a-Wish Foundation until 100,000 tweets have been sent, raising $10,000 and granting Jacob's wish: to take his family to Disneyland for a week.

Social media is powerful, and hopefully causes such as these are only the beginning.

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SAP Joins PowerPoint and Twitter - Does This Work?

Alex Williams — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:17:48 -0800

As we approach 2010, a number of new efforts are underway to make documents more social. One consultant told us how recently a client tried to turn Sharepoint into a Twitter client. That's a monster!

But we have to give SAP credit for developing a more innovative way to add social elements to PowerPoint presentations.

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Last month, SAP launched a free PowerPoint Twitter tool. Yesterday they made a number of upgrades to the service, including:

Auto-tweeting
An additional feedback slide
An option for secure internal use
The ability to pre-format slide with Twitter values. For instance, create templates for conferences.

Aspects of the service may be a bit complex for many presenters. But if you keep to the basics, it can be a smart tool for engaging audiences. The download for the PowerPoint Twitter tool is free.

Auto-Tweet

Let's say you are presenting a PowerPoint deck and you want to tweet what you are saying about the slides. With auto-tweet, you can tweet your slide notes from the PowerPoint presentation.

Timo Elliott writes on the SAP Web 2.0 blog:

"You can use the twitter feed to reinforce the points you are making in your presentation, or ask the audience questions related to your content, and include a feedback slide later in the presentation to review the audience replies."

Feedback Slides

The new feedback slide shows twice as many tweets as the original version.

According to Elliott, the feature supports pagination and custom feeds. For example, it can use a service like http://TidyTweet.com for a moderated feed, or any other atom-based feed.

Features for the More Advanced User

The remaining new features are for more advanced users. For instance, to secure feeds internally, Elliott recommends adding a server and installing the open-source microblogging platform from Status.Net. That usually requires assistance from a company's IT department.

The Basic Stuff Is Pretty Cool

The more basic features make the SAP service worth checking out. For example, the service provides the ability for people to tweet their votes:

Overall, the SAP service does work. it adds an interactive element to presentations.

"Death by PowerPoint?" Maybe not so much with Twitter part of the equation.

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Is Bing Cashback Costing Users Money? Sometimes, Yes

Jolie O'Dell — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:12:49 -0800

When Bing debuted a feature called Cashback, the product was intended to save users money while they shopped from online retailers.

As we told you last month when discussing the program's early successes, Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item and then buy it from a participating store. But some users have found the opposite to be true: Retailer cookies trigger jacked-up prices for some items, causing a phenomenon one man calls "negative cashback." How much do Bing users stand to lose? Read on, and brace yourselves.

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The problem may lie with Bing's ability to accurately track website changes or with Bing's relationships with retailers or with the basic values of the retailers themselves, but one way or another, the system seems to be gamed.

Essentially, certain products from certain websites appear through a Cashback-enabled browser to be a certain price. Yet, if the same user visits the same site at the same time from a non-Cashback browser or machine (or if he deletes his cookies), the price is sometimes drastically different in a way that benefits the end user not a bit.

As one user very succinctly put it, "If I go directly to butterflyphoto.com, I pay $699 with 0% cashback. If I use Bing Cashback, I pay $758 with 2% cashback, or $742.84. Using Bing cashback has actually cost me $43.84, giving an effective cashback rate of -6.27%."

We did the same search, and we saw the same results. Here's our Bing Cashback screenshot from an Internet Explorer window:

And here's the same product on the same website in a Chrome tab:

As a side note, the blogger that alerted us to this issue had previously received a nastygram from Microsoft about his post on Bing Cashback technical issues.

So, what do we make of this issue? Is it a potentially scammy technical glitch? More importantly, how soon can it be fixed so innocent online shoppers aren't quietly swindled out of cash throughout the holiday season? Let us know what you think should be done in the comments - particularly if you've noticed this bug yourself.

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