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GetGlue Adds New Releases to Recommendations Made by Human & Machine

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:15:28 +0000

It's hard to keep up with all the newly released movies and music these days, but a lightweight social network with a whole lot of smarts under the hood says it can now offer you personalized recommendations of new releases that suit your very particular interests. GetGlue is a semantic web browser plug-in that has, for years, been smart enough to recognize when you're looking at the same musical group across different websites, be that on Last.fm, MySpace or elsewhere. The service recently added a stream of recommendations of music, movies, books, magazines, wikipedia articles and other things you might like. How can it tell what you'll like when something is brand new, though? Today the service has launched a "new releases" section, where human editors rush to classify brand-new media. Then the semantic robots can serve it up to the right users, still hot out of the oven. It's pretty cool. Sponsor GetGlue founder Alex Iskold says he's learned a lesson similar to what formerly automated tech news aggregator Techmeme has learned: algorithms and user generated content can take you a long way, but there comes a point when it's good to hire some dedicated editors. The service asks you to like or unlike a wide variety of things. It then uses that feedback to build a taste profile to compare against things it finds put into its database and find the stuff it thinks you'll like. That's harder with new releases, though. "When something new is coming out, we don't know what it's like, so you need to have proffessionals tag it," Iskold told us. "We have two editors on staff who look across the spectrum of new releases each week. They draw the similarities between things in a deep way - the tagging system we use will be unvieled later. We use really eclectic tags to characterize what kind of zombie or vampire movie something is. We also use tags brought in from other systems and our users find cool new things really fast." The end result is a nicely displayed stream of big icons for personally recommended newly released movies, music and books. You think you're hip to your scene now? Wait until you've got a network of contacts, a semantic robot and real human editors all working together to bring you the freshest content in your weird little niche. To be honest, I've been testing it out today by switching from new album recommendations on Glue over to Apple's Lala.com , where it's easy to listen to full albums once for free. That's not the way Glue wants you to use it, but that's the way I like to use it so far. The Down Side It's an incredible system, when it works. GetGlue knows though that there are some challenges in this kind of game though. First, it's not easy to present this kind of flow of data to users without either overwhelming them or boring them. Many of GetGlue's latest changes are focused on making the user experience more pleasant: bigger images, collapsed bundles of shared items, etc. Can the service find a balance between giving you strong-enough recommendations on one hand and regularly offering up new recommendations on the other? In past versions of the product, I've received too few recommendations to keep me coming back. Hopefully new releases will scratch that itch. Iskold also says that after "liking" only 15 musical artists, I'm actually much less active than most of the 400,000 registered users of the service. Personally, I'm more drawn to the Wikipedia recommendations on GetGlue than anything else. The new releases in music might be roughly in the same sub-genres I usually listen to, but that doesn't mean they are any good. Finally, all this "liking" obviously begs the Facebook question. Writing as an ostensible Facebook competitor about that giant network's radical innovations unveiled last week, Iskold wrote the following in a widely-read article here at ReadWriteWeb about Facebook's Open Graph: "Time will tell where we land, but my gut is that positive things will come out of this. If nothing else, let's give Facebook credit for innovation and re-imagination the Web." Today he emphasized in speaking with me that Facebook is new to what it's just begun to do, but his company has been doing it for years. There's no guarantee that Facebook will get it right, he said. It's hard to say for sure that GetGlue has got it right, either. But as a work in progress, it's pretty darned good and today's new additions are very interesting. Discuss

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GetGlue Adds New Releases to Recommendations Made by Human & Machine

Twitter, DMCA Take-downs & the Prior Restraint of First Amendment Speech

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:58:00 +0000

Last week, the big news in DMCA takedowns was the sweeping removal of Hitler parody videos . Earlier this year, it was Google suddenly wiping out six separate music blogs . Today, it's the removal of a tweet . While this might not seem like a big deal on the surface, it leads to some much bigger questions about free speech, what content should fall under a proper DMCA take-down and whether or not the DMCA is a legal method of applying censorship by any content owner. Sponsor Here's the story as told by TechDirt: The story involves a music blogger named JP, who runs the appropriately named JP's blog . Not surprisingly, JP also has a Twitter account , where he mostly seems to post links to his blog posts. One such post was about the leak of the new album by The National. That post includes a link to Amazon where people can purchase the new album... and also a link to a download of one song (in MP3 format) from the album. According to JP's blog post on the subject, Twitter sent him a message last Thursday "in response to a DMCA take-down notice". The email, he writes, read as follows: jp917, Apr 22 03:10 pm (PDT): Hello, The following material has been removed from your account in response to a DMCA take-down notice: Tweet: http://twitter.com/jp917/statuses/12499491144 - New Post: Leaked: The National - High Violet http://jpsblog.net/2010/04/20/leaked-the-national-high-violet/ JP denies posting any link to the leaked album in his tweeted blog post, saying that he will not bother filing a counterclaim to the take-down. He also links to an article in Plagiarism Today from a year ago that alleges that Twitter's handling of DMCA take-downs and counterclaims is problematic and that "there is clearly an organization issue here and that's leading to confusion." While last weeks' take-downs of parody videos may have been "overbroad take-downs of legal content" , as the Electronic Frontier Foundation asserted, this sort take-down may go an extra step, beyond constitutionally protected First Amendment speech. With the YouTube take-downs, at least there was copyrighted content present, although it may have been used according to the law in the end. In this case, according to JP, there was neither pirated content nor a link to any DMCA-violating content. While TechDirt argues that "specifically, nothing in the tweet itself is infringing -- which means that the DMCA take-down for the tweet is bogus, and a violation of the DMCA itself", we spoke with David Sohn, senior policy council with the Center for Democracy & Technology , who said that the question might not be so cut and dry. Section 5.12D of the DMCA relates to cases involving "information location tools" and "links". "One possibility here is that Twitter has gotten a take-down notice that might not stand up as a totally valid take-down notice," said Sohn. On Sohn's advice, we asked Wendy Seltzer, founder of ChillingEffects.org , what this all meant and she explained that the burden of proof lies with the person creating the content and not the platform. All the platform, in this case Twitter, needs to know is that the complaint me be valid and that, by removing the offending content, they cover themselves legally in the eyes of the DMCA. Whether or not section 5.12 D of the DMCA actually applies doesn't really matter. The introduction to her recent paper, "Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright's Safe Harbor: Chilling Effects of the DMCA on the First Amendment" (.pdf), speaks clearly to the problem we saw when first reading this story: Each week, more blog posts are redacted, more videos deleted, and more web pages removed from Internet search results based on private claims of copyright infringement. Under the "safe harbors" of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet service providers are encouraged to respond to copyright complaints with content takedowns, assuring their immunity from liability while diminishing the rights of their subscribers and users. Paradoxically, the law's shield for service providers becomes a sword against the public who depend upon these providers as platforms for speech. The problem with the current format of the DMCA, especially in the case of something like a communication platform such as Twitter, is that a DMCA take-down notice becomes an extremely effective means of silencing information for a legally mandated period of 10 days. In essence, it provides those who wish to silence a voice a quick and legal means of enacting what is called a " prior restraint ", something clearly prohibited in First Amendment law. "When non-infringing speech is taken down, not only does its poster lose an opportunity to reach an audience, the public loses the benefit of hearing that lawful speech in the marketplace of ideas," writes Seltzer in the paper. Twitter offered this response: "Twitter regularly receives DMCA takedown notices. We strive to balance the interests of our users and copyright holders by reviewing each notice. After determining whether the notice is compliant with the law, we also consider other factors such as whether the notice is abusive to our users, or fails to take fair use into consideration. You can read more about our DMCA process here: http://help.twitter.com/entries/15795-copyright-and-dmca-policy "We are always working to improve our transparency. Users are notified immediately when content has been removed from their account. In this situation, we responded to a request to remove a Tweet containing a link to download content from an unreleased album. After reexamining our decision, we believe this was the correct first step. If the affected user believes we have made a mistake or that the notice is in error, the appropriate thing for the user to do is file a counter-claim. "We believe that the reasoning of the DMCA claim and its origin should be transparent to both the affected user and other interested parties. We are working on further steps to improve access to this information." So, our next logical question here is: Since this post includes the email from Twitter, which includes that original link to a blog post that supposedly linked to infringing content, can it too be removed according to the guidelines of the DMCA? Discuss

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Twitter, DMCA Take-downs & the Prior Restraint of First Amendment Speech

Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:01:18 +0000

Facebook today announced that application developers will be allowed to store user data for more than 24 hours, removing a major restriction that the company had imposed on its ecosystem for years. Competitors like Twitter and MySpace had no such restrictions and now Facebook is in the same boat. Founder Mark Zukerberg used to say that the rule against storing data was essential to protect users and their privacy. Where are those now? Privacy, Zuckerberg told me in a March 2008 interview, "is the vector around which Facebook operates." Two years later, not so much. In a December 2009 interview , Zuckerberg said that Facebook's new public-by-default privacy settings reflected how he would build the site if he were to do it again from scratch today. Compare below what Zuckerberg said in 2008 and what today's new Developer Terms of Service say about holding on to user data now. Sponsor I believe that the Facebook policy change on storing user data is a net win for the web: it will enable all kinds of new innovation. It was that kind of innovation that I was asking about two years ago when I got the following answer about privacy that just doesn't sound right anymore today. Zuckerberg on Data Portability, March 10th 2008 interview with ReadWriteWeb : "If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends' news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive - then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there's no longer any control over the data for users. " (emphasis added) And today, on the new Developers' Terms of Service : You must give users control over their data by posting a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, and how you will use, store, and/or transfer their data....You may cache data you receive from the Facebook API in order to improve your application's user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date ...You will delete all data you receive from us concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide a mechanism for users to make such a request. (emphasis added) One thing that remains the same? "You cannot use a user's friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use." Facebook doesn't want you taking your data out of the Facebook ecosystem, to other competing services, but it doesn't insist that 3rd parties under its shadow check in with you daily anymore, either. It's hard not to feel a little cynical about that. Discuss

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Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years

First Public Draft: Taking the Wraps off of OAuth 2.0

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:15:00 +0000

The OAuth 2.0 draft specification is out there. The efforts the group working on the specification are paying off in the form of an IETF working group submission. One thing that is clear is that there is a natural tension in following the processes of IETF and the hyper-innovation cycle of web standards that are now powered by the growth of social media. In this world, keeping up with all the work in the community itself is feat by itself. As proven recently, even aligning the naming of standards in our small community (xAuth, XAuth) proves challenging enough. With that said, we'll share we what we've learned about this version and what work has been incorporated in it. Sponsor For those coming up to speed on the issues surrounding OAuth 2.0, here is a brief summary of the state of the union: The OAuth Working Group in IETF generated a first draft of OAuth 2.0 . This group that is credited with this document consists of active leaders of both the Twitter API team as well as Facebook community standards team. A robust number of daily discussions are happening in the working group hosted at IETF include topics such as the default use of JSON that show the opportunity and challenge of growing the standard from a web-based to a broader set of devices and scenarios. One of the stated goals of the IETF OAuth working group is to maintain backwards compatibility with OAuth 1.0. From our sampling of the depth of change in scope and conceptualization of the standard, this may be a big deal for the group, especially if key members decide to legacy their support for the first versions. As part of the evolution of OAuth, there is the case of the OAuth WRAP Google Group . This group has forged ahead to develop profiles for scenarios seen as extensions to the profile OAuth 1.0A. This includes new ways to gain tokens bringing the use cases of Javascript or RIA applications. WRAP also redefines the dependency on SSL and provides a simpler way to get started using tools easily accessible to the web resource. With some changes noted, this work has been brought forward in the OAuth 2.0 public draft. David Recordon, a chief thought leader in the open web (also employee at Facebook) recently offered this summary " What's going on with OAuth ?" to help align the understanding of the evolution of the standard. Here we show one of the better known descriptions of the OAuth flow as provided by Yahoo. The annotations show a few of the areas that are under consideration for changes in OAuth 2.0 and/or in the work done in the OAuth WRAP group. Last week, at Twitter's Chirp '10 the Twitter API team gave this presentation, " Too many secrets, but never enough: OAuth at Twitter ". This document contains overview of the basic process of Twitter, commitment to the movement to OAuth 2.0, and discussion of Twitter's xAuth and OAuth Echos projects. Twitter Likes to Optimize Twitter is deeply intertwined with the inception and direction of OAuth. The company is both involved in the specifications but also is a lightening rod for discussion in the development community. In the Twitter blogs and developer groups, OAuth is being considered deeply in the trade-offs in implementation, design, and risk in the Twitter ecosystem. A few areas under discussion is how to remove the re-direction from the process, and also how to keep a running log of all account client accesses available to the user as a way to make sure users are aware and signaling proper account use. The Twitter API team has been willing to make change happen in the community by deprecating legacy processes, such as basic auth. With the changes coming in OAuth 2.0 the company may be in the best position to bootstrap developer adoption of the new standards. In this way, OAuth 2.0 need to adapt to the speed and need of the Twitter use cases, to avoid becoming like XML. XML is a good thing, of course, but when push comes to shove, JSON is lighter weight and more compact. This is helping it become the preference for data attribute exchange in APIs like Twitters that support OAuth. With the rise of the social ecosystem as the hub for authorization, it is becoming clear that the IETF efforts need Twitter as much as Twitter needs the IETF. This seems like a good balance that will guide use cases along the way to practical standards formalization. There are a lot of questions out there about OAuth 2.0. Top of mind is whether this technology release will see the effective join of Twitter, Facebook, and Google? Or, will the practical matters of business and strategy keep the standards intact, and the implementations as islands? What is your prediction for OAuth 2.0 and web resource authorization? Discuss

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First Public Draft: Taking the Wraps off of OAuth 2.0

Ford Sync Will Soon Let You Control Your Mobile Apps by Voice

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Thanks to voice-controlled systems like Ford's Sync , drivers don't have to take their eyes off the road if they want to place a call or switch to the next track on their playlists. Today, Ford announced the next step in the company's roadmap to connect mobile phones and cars. With Sync AppLink, Ford is introducing a new platform that allows developers to offer voice controls for their mobile apps on Sync-enabled cars. At first, AppLink will only work with Android and BlackBerry devices, but the company plans to offer support for Apple's iPhone OS and other smartphone platforms next year. Sponsor The first Sync-enabled applications, which will be available later this year, are Pandora , Stitcher , and Orangatame's OpenBreak Twitter app. Even though Sync is based on the Microsoft Auto platform, Ford did not announce that it plans to support the upcoming Windows Phone operating system. Drivers will be able to control AppLink-enabled mobile apps through voice commands that will be routed through the Sync system, as well as from buttons on the steering wheel. The first car to feature this new service will be the 2011 Ford Fiesta . Ford plans to offer AppLink on all Sync-equipped cars next year. Existing Sync users will be able to update their car's software at a later point as well. Same Apps - Just Controlled by SYNC From the user's perspective, installing a Sync-enabled app is no different from installing a regular app on their mobile phones. The only difference is that the car will notice when you start a Sync-enabled app and allow you to control the app's function with your voice. This allows Ford to plug right into the existing developer ecosystems and distribution channels for all of these platforms and developers only have to make relatively minor updates to make their apps compatible with Sync. It's important to stress that these applications are running on the user's phone and not on the car's built-in Sync hardware. Sync only passes the voice commands on to the application but doesn't interact with the app beyond this. In Ford's parlance, these are "brought-in" apps, as opposed to "built-in" apps (like Ford's Vehicle Health Report and 911 Assist) or "beamed-in" cloud-based apps that send traffic information and turn-by-turn directions to the car. Sync AppLink for Developers Ford is currently working with a small group of trusted partners and plans to open up the Sync API and software development kit to a broader selection of developers later this year. Ford also announced the launch of a Sync developer community that will give developers a pathway to partner with Ford on Sync-enabled applications. Image credit: Flickr user Jim Trottier Discuss

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Ford Sync Will Soon Let You Control Your Mobile Apps by Voice

Bit.ly Pro Takes the Mystery Out of Shortened URLs

cgseo — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:54:18 +0000

URL shortener bit.ly has announced some simple user interface changes for its standard users and a whole series of new features for paid users, including custom domain names and statistics. While the standard user interface changes are neat, it's the "end-to-end branding" that we're actually looking forward to, as it should take a bit of that mystery meat feel out of our day to day online lives. Sponsor The biggest changes standard bit.ly users will see is the searchable history, which allows users to search through URLS they have added. Bit.ly has also tried to make it easier to manage the links you've added by adding a specific "Manage" section, which will show all the links with basic statistics on each, such as Twitter conversations and clicks. And all of a user's shared links will be available in RSS format. As for the bit.ly's pro users, the service will begin offering a traffic dashboard, short domain redirection, unlimited API calls and, most importantly, a full "end-to-end branding". End-to-end branding means that if someone goes to shorten a New York Times URL, for example, they will end up with a link containing the nyti.ms short link instead of a standard bit.ly link. This will happen for all users, whether they shorten the link through the bit.ly website or through third-party Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Twitterfeed and ÜberTwitter. While this type of service is not only great for the website, its useful for the users too, because you don't have to blindly click on a shortened link. It keeps everything short and sweet for our Twitter character limit while giving us, the user, some clue of where we're going. Discuss

10 Smart Clothes You’ll Be Wearing Soon

cgseo — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:14:36 +0000

In the emerging Internet of Things , everyday objects are becoming networked. Clothing is no exception. It's still early days for Web-enabled clothes - the best example so far is the Nike+ running shoe, which contains sensors that connect to the user's iPod. But expect to see everything from your shirt to your underwear networked in the not too distant future. In the following list of ten 'smart clothing' items, we showcase Internet pants, a proximity sensing shirt, a heart sensing bra, biosensor underwear, a "thought helmet", and more! Sponsor Motion Detecting Pants Now, we're know what you're thinking - it's already pretty easy to detect 'motion' in pants isn't it? Nevertheless, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg has developed a pair of pants "that detect movement and let a computer know your every move." These smart pants work via a loom that helps sew the wires and fabric together. Sensors embedded in the fabric measure the speed, rotation and flexibility of the pants with every movement. Wireless signals are sent from the pants to a computer to display the activity. The scientists at Virginia Polytechnic don't yet know why this activity would be useful (to a computer), but we're sure that use cases will arise. Proximity Sensing Shirt The Locked ON Proximity Sensing T-Shirt is currently available at the ThinkGeek store . It features a "radar screen" on the shirt that scans for matching shirts. If you get within a few meters of your counterpart wearing the same shirt, the radar on your shirt "locks on" and detects the other. This could be useful for love or war - the video below shows the latter scenario. Heart Sensing Bra The Numetrex heart sensing bra uses electronic modules and silver coated electrodes to pick up a person's heart rate and transmit the data to a watch worn on the wrist. Says NuMetrex Marketing Director Meg Burich, "It's a comfortable way to wear a heart rate monitor, because we knit flexible heart sensing fibers directly into the fabric of the garment. There's no hard plastic belt to strap around your chest." Smart Running Shoes Nike+ running shoes come with a sensor that tracks your run, then sends the data to your iPod. It even has its own social network and can automatically tweet and post a status report on Facebook. See ReadWriteWeb's review of the Nike+ shoes . Networked Jacket According to a report from GizmoWatch a couple of years ago, Lunar design's BLU Jacket is a futuristic concept that could make walking billboards a reality. Lunar Design used organic fabrics containing semiconductors in the BLU Jacket, in order to display your moods through signs and colors. This BLU Jacket also has a GPS module built into it. So if someone asks you directions, you could theoretically project a map onto your jacket's sleeve through it's flexible display. Or, asks GizmoWatch, "how about getting paid for displaying advertisements on your jacket?" Next Page: Neuro Headset, Thought Helmet, Biosensor Underwear, iPod Watch, Nanofibers. Neuro Headset The Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset is for gamers and is available for $299. It's described as "a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset." The headset uses a set of sensors to "tune into electric signals produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expressions and connects wirelessly to most PCs." According to the company , the headset can detect emotions such as anger, excitement and tension, as well as facial expressions and cognitive actions like pushing and pulling objects. Thought Helmet Let's get very futuristic for a minute. Six Revisions references an article in Time from September 2008, which claims that the U.S. Army is actively pursuing "thought helmets" for secure mind-to-mind communication between soldiers. The goal "is a system where entire military systems could be controlled by thought alone. While this kind of technology is still far off, the fact that the military has awarded a $4 million contract to a team of scientists from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland means that we might be seeing prototypes of these systems within the next decade." Image: Wikimedia iPod Watch Back to the now, and there are already a range of iPod watches available from different manufacturers. These watches let you control your iPod using your wireless watch. Biosensor Underwear RSC Publishing reported recently that US scientists have developed durable biosensors that can be printed directly onto clothing, to allow continuous biomedical monitoring outside hospitals. The aim is to enable constant monitoring of blood pressure and heart rate: "Joseph Wang and colleagues at the University of California San Diego, La Jolla have developed a method for printing biosensors directly onto clothing. To form the sensors, Wang screen-printed carbon electrode arrays directly onto the elastic bands of mens' underwear. The tight contact and direct exposure to the skin allows hydrogen peroxide and the enzyme NADH, which are both associated with numerous biomedical processes, to be monitored using the sensor, explains Wang." Nanofibers To round out our list, we go a level down the clothing chain and look at next generation fabrics. Delta Farm Press reports that Cornell University's Department of Textiles and Apparel aims to develop fibers that have computing devices in them. An example use case is a shirt "made of cotton threads coated with a thin layer of semiconductor polymers and nanoparticles that conduct electric and can power your cell phone or iPod or monitor your heartbeat, brainwaves, and other functions." The University is also investigating "textiles that can act as sensors that could be used to detect the presence of hazardous bacteria, such as E. coli or anthrax." A further example is smart clothes made of fibers that can change colors - "one appropriate for daytime business environment, a different one for nighttime socializing." One thing is for sure with all ten of these examples of 'smart clothing' - at least some of the clothing that we wear in the future is likely to be networked, in one form or another! Thanks to Deane Rimerman, who provided research for this article. Discuss

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10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon

Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative

cgseo — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:35:00 +0000

Given the recent developments in the Twitter developer ecosystem, I think it's a good time to revisit the idea of an open Web alternative to Twitter. The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I'm going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge. Sponsor Guest author Chris Saad is VP of strategy at Echo , the world's leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. His role is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction. His background includes co-authoring of the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founding the DataPortability Project . Used by Digg, BBC, NewsGator, France Telecom and others, APML is industry standard for Attention Profiles. The DataPortability project's mission is to advocate interoperable data portability for users, developers and vendors. Length Microblogs are, well, micro. They are shorter. This is not some marvelous invention - it is a simple, imposed limitation on the input field. Any publishing software today, from WordPress to Drupal, can be modified to force users to stick to 140 characters - call it "microblogging mode". I don't think this particular difference (or how to bridge it) warrants much more explanation. Real Time While blogs used to update rather slowly in a publish and subscribe model, microblogging has had a reputation for being faster or real time. The old school refresh rate of 15 minutes or more (the time between RSS refreshes) seems like an eternity these days. Of course the reality is that the Twitter API is still incapable of sending updates to individual clients in real time, and the whole thing is far from real time. Updates in seconds, however, is a key trait of microbogging. The fact is, however, that blogs now have a method of pushing updates that's faster and more effective than even the Twitter API. It's an open standard called PubSubHub and it's supported by both Blogger, WordPress, Buzz and countless other smaller services. Blogs are already real time. Identified Subscriptions One of the nice things that Twitter does that traditional Blogging software does not do is called Identified Subscriptions. That is, when you subscribe to (a.k.a follow) a user, their name and face appear in your sidebar, and you get a nice little ego boost in the form of a notification email and increase in your follower count. Why couldn't we add a simple mechanism to PubSubHub so that when a client subscribes to push updates, it leaves behind some optional identifying information about the user like their name and avatar? Or maybe instead of leaving the actual username and avatar, it might provide a URL to the subscribing user's own microblogging site that has that metadata stored in the header. Addressability This is perhaps the most complicated difference and gap to close. With Twitter, you can easily say, "Hey @chrissaad you are are a crazy hippy" and I will get it in my message stream. Blogs can't do that right? Well, actually, blogs have been doing addressability since day zero. The same way the rest of the Web does addressability - using links. Bloggers frequently link to each other and then check their trackbacks and pingbacks for incoming references. The only problem with this model is that it's not user friendly enough. Mainstream users don't understand URLs and checking pingback and referrer logs is just plain silly. So rather than reinvent the wheel, why not just add rubber? To make it easier for users, imagine if blogging software kept track of the users you were following (see Identified Subscriptions above) and when you type the equivalent of "@", they provided a list of suggested aliases to choose from. When you select the person you are addressing, the software could insert the alias and hyperlink the name to the associated URL of that user's microblogging site. Clients, then, could subscribe to Google Blog Search (remember blog search is essentially the blogging world's open firehose) and search for any reference to your personal URL. The rest is just presentation tricks to show those replies mixed in with the rest of your microblogging items. Clients Why can't existing Twitter clients allow users to subscribe to PubSubHub enabled RSS and Atom feeds. They would also subscribe to the Google Blog Search for references to your own URL (for @ replies). No need to rip and replace Twitter, just offer an open alternative: subscribe to any site - anywhere. The Future As you can see here, microblogging is and could be fundamentally the same as blogging in terms of the mechanics and technologies involved. The techniques used to build and improve the open blogosphere could be used to bootstrap a microblogging sphere as well. There have been many big strides in this area, such as Status.net. The opportunity now is for the (ex?) Twitter clients and blog publishing platforms and the standards groups to make small tweaks to extend the technology in the right way. Discuss

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Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative

What’s Next For Mobile Apps?

cgseo — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:16:18 +0000

Yesterday we looked at DASH7 , a wireless sensor networking standard that may play an important part in next generation mobile services - including location-based services, Internet of Things and social networking. In this post we analyze some use cases for DASH7, which also point to where the Mobile Web is heading. We'll explore long distance mobile advertising and mobile coupons. We'll also look at how location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla could evolve. Sponsor Extending Location-Based App Functionality Given the growth of location-based apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla in 2010, it's intriguing to think about what's next for these services. According to the DASH7 report, enhanced loyalty programs could be the next big thing. With a DASH7-enabled phone, the white paper states, "a user could set his or her preferences in the Foursquare or Gowalla application that would allow the user to be automatically "discovered" or "checked in" at the coffee shop/restaurant/gun store/etc. and thereby accrue loyalty points passively, i.e. by just being "in" the establishment, rather than requiring active/conscious user behavior to participate in the program." Even more advanced services could offer customized promotions created "on the fly", targeting a certain user's preferences. Mobile Advertising From Long Distance and On-The-Go A long-held goal of the Mobile Web - at least for retailers - is using mobile phones for mobile advertising, loyalty programs, couponing, and other 'personalized shopping' experiences. Of course there are privacy issues with these things, but nevertheless these scenarios are (finally) coming soon. NFC-enabled phones have shown glimpses of this functionality, via smart posters, kiosks and billboards. As discussed in a previous post, NFC technology is limited to a 4 centimeter range - so the phone needs to be held close to the media asset in order to initiate the data transfer. Also it requires a tag reader application to be installed on your mobile phone. According to an as yet unreleased white paper that ReadWriteWeb was shown, the DASH7 Alliance thinks that "a far larger set of customers would be willing to execute the same applications provided that they were executable a) from a longer distance, b) while moving, and c) in some cases, passively/without any conscious initiation of their own." DASH7 has a range of hundreds of meters and can be used while on the move. While point 3 might scare some privacy advocates, it's very likely that customers would need to opt in before they "passively" received such advertising messages. If this is still to abstract for you, here's a potential scenario: I'm driving down a street and I pass a smart poster pasted onto a building wall. This elicits a beep from my phone, because my phone has 'passively' scanned the poster and discovered something that I want to be notified about (I've opted into receiving notifications only about certain things). Because it's against the law to check my mobile phone where I live, I wait till I'm parked and then I check what the beep was for. Turns out that one of my favorite bands is playing in the city tomorrow night! The smart poster I'd driven past was an advertisement for that band. So I then proceed to book a ticket, using my phone of course. Mobile Coupons Mobile coupons are a hot area of activity already, with Google and others offering them. However, currently mobile coupons are limited to short-range and active receiving. Soon we might have long-range couponing, real-time interaction and 'passively' receiving coupons. The DASH7 Alliance white paper offers a scenario of Paramount promoting its upcoming movie Iron Man 2, using a smart poster. In the NFC scenario, someone could walk past the Iron Man 2 poster and download a 2-for-1 coupon to see the movie. However, according to the DASH7 Alliance: "...a combination DASH7/NFC-enabled smartphone could still support the default NFC scenario, but could also provide for a) longer distance distribution of the coupon b) "passive" acquisition of coupons according to a user's pre-defined "coupon acquisition criteria" (e.g. "auto-accept coupons for any movies starring Al Pacino" , and c) real-time interaction with the media asset (e.g. "answer the following three questions correctly and win a 2-for-1 coupon to see "Iron Man 2".)" Those are just some of the next generation mobile services we can expect to see soon, thanks to wireless technologies like NFC and DASH7. Let us know in the comments if you have other potential use case ideas! Discuss

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What's Next For Mobile Apps?

Who Clicks on Mobile Ads? Symbian, Feature Phone and Windows Mobile Users

cgseo — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:30:00 +0000

According to Smaato , a mobile ad optimization and advertising company, Internet users on Symbian phones, feature phones and Windows Mobile phones are far more likely to click on mobile ads than users on iPhones, Android phones, Palm devices and Blackberries. To get this data, Smaato , analyzed over 4 billion ad requests on 36 mobile ad networks . Worldwide, the click-through rate (CTR) for Android users declined markedly over the last two month. While Android still had an above-average CTR in January (just behind Symbian), Android ranked at the bottom of Smaato's ranking for March. Sponsor Android in South East Asia While the worldwide CTR for Android is down, however, the CTR for Android phones in South East Asia is far higher than for any other platform. Sadly, Smaato only publishes a comparative index doesn't release the actual click-through rates for all the ad networks it supports. Because of this, it isn't clear if this just means that the CTR for all the other platforms in South East Asia simply dropped, or if the usage patterns for Android phones in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are very different from the worldwide average. Who Clicks on Mobile Ads? Symbian and Feature Phone Users Surprisingly, users with Web-enabled feature phones are far more likely to click on ads than those on most smartphone platforms, even though the user experience is likely to be far inferior to clicking on an ad on a smartphone. According to Smaato's analysis, Symbian users are more likely to click on ads while surfing the Web on their devices than users on any other platform. While we can only speculate as to why this is the case, chances are that this has more to do with the different user demographics than the actual user experience on these devices. For more details from Smaato's report, including fill rates for different ad networks and data from previous reports, head over the company's website . Discuss

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Who Clicks on Mobile Ads? Symbian, Feature Phone and Windows Mobile Users