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Weekly Wrap-up: Deleting FB Apps, Open Web vs. FB Connect, Adobe Gives up on Apple, And More…

cgseo — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 13:00:00 +0000

It took Sarah Perez's post How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should) a little more than 24 hours to become to the top-viewed post of this week. In a week filled with Facebook news, it certainly hit a nerve. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about how the Internet of Things can be an Internet of Cows, new tools to visualize the real-time Web, and how augmented reality developers can win $5,000. Read on for more. Sponsor Story of the Week: Delete Those Facebook Apps How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should) This is What a Tweet Looks Like XAuth: The Open Web Fires a Shot Against Facebook Connect Adobe Gives up on Apple, Welcomes Android Is the New Facebook a Deal With the Devil? Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 1: Design & Development More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com . Mobile Web Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 3: Emerging Markets Two-Thirds of iPhone Users Now Use Location-Based Services at Least Once a Week Top 10 YouTube Videos About Flash Mobs More Mobile Web coverage Augmented Reality Budding AR Developer? Put Your Creativity to Use and Win $5,000 Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Internet of Things Internet of Things Can Make Us Human Again As Cattle Rustling Increases, So Does the Need for RFID More Internet of Things coverage Real-Time Web PostRank Launches New Tools to Visualize the Real-Time Web YouTube Streams IPL Cricket Live In U.S. More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. The Art of the Email Pitch Tips for Networking (Beyond Just "Social Networking") Got an Exit Strategy? Lessons From Foursquare and Yahoo ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. The Largest Cloud in the World is Owned By A Criminal Network Google's Eric Schmidt Gushes About HTML 5 Google's Vint Cerf on Private Clouds v. Public Clouds Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrap-up: Deleting FB Apps, Open Web vs. FB Connect, Adobe Gives up on Apple, And More...

Yahoo!’s Smart Investment: The Hadoop Community

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:15:43 +0000

More than 250 people attended a Hadoop developer event at Yahoo! this week, demonstrating again the level of interest the company has in open-source big data initiatives. Yahoo! says it is the world's biggest Hadoop supporter. We say that's undoubtedly correct. Yahoo! supports community developer events throughout the world. In February it supported the first Hadoop! event in India. In June, it will host the Hadoop Summit. Sponsor Yahoo! is not always recognized for its cloud computing efforts but its deep commitment to Hadoop shows how the company views the ways that big data can be used to solve major technology issues such as spam. Hadoop, according to Wikipedia , "is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data." The developer conference featured discussions from the Hadoop community, including a presentation about using it to fight spam lead and a discussion led by a lead engineer from Facebook. Vishwanath Ramarao is director of anti-spam engineering for Yahoo! Mail. According to the Yahoo! developer blog, Vish described the intricate cat-and-mouse games played with spammers, and how Yahoo! uses Hadoop to abstract away the complexity of large scale data analysis and provide deep insight into spammer campaigns. Yahoo! Mail antispam - Bay area Hadoop user group Johhn Sichi, lead engineer for Facebook's data infrastructure team provided an overview of Facebook's work using Hadoop to manage data that is growing 8x annually, In March, 2008 traffic volume hit 200 GB per day. By the end of last year, traffic bumped to 12 terabytes per day. Hadoop, Hbase and Hive- Bay area Hadoop User Group Companies like Yahoo! and Facebook use Hadoop to organize data and process it from multiple sources. For instance, Facebook might use it to organize how it deploys its ad network. Yahoo! may be on to the most powerful use for cloud computing or at least the most interesting. And it shows how the company is thinking about cloud computing and the ways it applies to its overall strategy. Discuss

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Yahoo!'s Smart Investment: The Hadoop Community

Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

cgseo — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:29:37 +0000

Email may be old fashioned, but it's still where we spend a lot of our time online. Today Google announced that it's webmail service Gmail is becoming all the richer with the inclusion of support for sending Google Calendar invitations inside the email composition window. In addition to being able to insert invitations, you can also cross reference your calendar availability with the availability of anyone included in your email thread that you have permission to see the Google Calendar for. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty neat and it demonstrates the potential for building cool new features on top of our email inboxes. Sponsor Mashups and platforms are all about cross referencing multiple sources of data or functionality, as in this case: email plus calendar. We wrote earlier this Spring about a startup called Rapportive that cross references email and social media data about an email's sender (see also competitor Etacts ) and earlier this month we discussed the incredible potential in Google's announcement of a way to give developers secure access to the contents of your emails for analysis and the creation of innovative services. Yahoo has been calling this kind of approach Inbox 2.0 and has been working on it for more than two years. Here's what we wrote in November, 2007 coverage of Yahoo's vision - how do you think it's worked out? ( Yahoo Says the Future Will Be Modeled on Facebook ) The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by email. The big players won't put a major push into building a new social network. "It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand," are the words Google's Joe Krause. Your email account isn't valuable because it's got the email adresses of other people who could be solicited commercially - it's valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you. [Yahoo's] Garlinghouse says that in the future email and IM will be prioritized depending on the importance to you of the people who send it to you. We're not talking about the number of times people email you - we're talking about the percentage of times you open those emails, the keywords used in them relative to your personal/work profile, there are metrics so crazy we can hardly imagine that are available for determining the importance of people in your life. In your email. Facebook's people-search uses some similar math already. Various Ways Email Gets Innovated On Clearly there are all kinds of different levels of sophistication that can come with these sorts of developments. In fact, two plus years after Yahoo's call to action, things still seem relatively elementary. Rapportive displays data uniquely well but Etacts displays more data. This new Google Calendar integration with Gmail offers some visibility into your and your contacts' availability, but it doesn't tell you what you've got scheduled at a given time. Etacts offers inferior invitation sending but has a whole set of reminder and follow up features that Gmail doesn't offer natively. And Yahoo Mail more closely ties in Facebook than any other email, something millions of people are sure to enjoy. So while all the kids rant and rave about Twitter, Facebook, Augmented Reality, iPads and location based social networking, don't let them deny: email can still be very exciting. Discuss

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Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

Twitter’s Advertising Scheme is Delightfully Boring – Just As It Should Be

cgseo — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:58:59 +0000

Why do people care how Twitter will make money? "We won't know where we, the users, fit in -- until they tell us how they're going to make money," Dave Winer wrote a year ago this week , "And when they tell us, we may not like it." That's one reason why people care how Twitter makes money. Whether you're a person concerned that the popular social network you're investing your time and energy in might monetize in an anti-social way, or you're a skeptic who refuses to believe that the world-changing potential of Twitter is real until it proves itself economically viable - you probably heard that Twitter announced tonight it's got a plan for advertisements . You can breathe a sigh of relief; the plan is downright boring, just as it should be. Sponsor Advertisements will begin in search, with keywords being bid on and a single advertisement appearing with frequency dependent on its performance. Then the ads will be extended to 3rd party applications like TweetDeck and others. It's unclear who will use it, Tweetie got bought by Twitter last week and Twitterific has its own ads, but other apps will come and go, hopefully given the option (not the requirement) to show Twitter ads to their users. Finally, ads will begin to appear on Twitter.com, tailored to the interests of users, as easily observed by their messages published and received. This is great: it's relatively non-invasive, nothing too crazy, nothing terribly exploitive. Some people who insist on reading every Tweet in their stream will probably be annoyed once they find ads in it, but there are already lots of unofficial ads being published on Twitter and maybe this will break those people of the habit of obsessing over every little message. This is surely not the intention behind the plan, Twitter HQ itself is full of people who spend time carefully pruning their streams. Twitter's new head of PR Sean Garrett , for example, quit following NBC's @newmediajim and media analyst Shelly Palmer last week, something it's hard to imagine him doing for any reason other than concern about signal-to-noise ratio and an unhealthy concern with reading every one of the Tweets in his stream. But the point is this: it appears that no baby animals will be hurt in the making of the Twitter. Along with the big search deals with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and the forthcoming availability of power Commercial Accounts, Twitter seems to have found relatively non-violent ways to monetize. As long as the firehose of user activity data is in fact made more widely available and not kept from small innovators, and as long as regular accounts aren't handicapped in order to make commercial accounts more appealing - then these three plans together look pretty good. It's not banner ads, it's not sales of data to direct marketers, it's not licensing access to Direct Messages to the CIA. Twitter is at its best when it keeps things simple, when it stays out of the way and acts like a dumb, if textured, pipe. Put a contextual ad up to keep the lights on, what do I care? It's entirely predictable, shouldn't hurt too much and might even work. As Liz Gannes said so well in her headline at Gigaom tonight: "The Twitter Ad Model Revealed (What Were You Expecting, a Pony?)" Update: Twitter's Biz Stone posted to the company's blog about this at one minute after midnight. He didn't say much that was new but he did title the post "Hello World," implying that this is in some ways the real beginning for Twitter. Discuss

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Twitter's Advertising Scheme is Delightfully Boring - Just As It Should Be

Nokia Expands its Geolocation Plans with Location Services Buy

cgseo — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:23:19 +0000

Nokia acquired location-based services company MetaCarta on Friday, a service with two distinct focuses: geosearch and geotagging . With MetaCarta's geosearch technology, the service finds content, data and information about a place and then presents it in a single mapped-based view using any map server, whether one from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ESRI or another company. The geotagging technology, on the other hand, lets MetaCarta pull geographic references from online content and then allow that information to be used in other applications. Sponsor One of the more notable examples of MetaCarta technology is the NewsMap application, a hosted mashup that extracts the geographic information found in news articles and displays those locations as icons on a digital map. Users can then zoom in and out on the map to see where the news is happening and what stories correspond to the map icons. For a real-world example of how Newsmap works, you can visit DailyRecord , a news site which features an embedded "news map" at the bottom of their homepage. For another example of a similar technology, see Bing Maps's Local Lens application , a map layer that identifies news stories by city and neighborhood and maps them out using the Bing Maps service. (Bing Maps does not use MetaCarta's technology, it's just similar.) Although news maps like those above are somewhat interesting, the most intriguing thing about this new acquisition is not the map app, but the technology behind it. Basically, the geotagging aspect to the MetaCarta service can add location data to existing information that previously had none. In doing so, a company could build up a geo-database that could function as the backend for all sorts of location-based services from social apps to local search tools and more. And the need to have an accurate, rich and complete geo-database is going to be a key component to winning a top position in the emerging location-based services market. Nokia hasn't specified exactly how it plans to use the newly acquired company's technology, only saying that "MetaCarta's technology will be used in the area of local search in location and other services." It's not a leap, though, to assume that MetaCarta's technology could be integrated into Nokia's free Ovi Maps mobile application. Nokia has had a clear focus on location-based services as of late. The company acquired the social travel service Dopplr in September of last year and later launched turn-by-turn navigation for Ovi Maps in January. However, the company's largest mapping-related acquisition to date is still the $8.1 billion purchase of digital map provider Navteq in 2007. Discuss

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Nokia Expands its Geolocation Plans with Location Services Buy

New Legal Decisions Will Impact Net Neutrality and Startups

cgseo — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:00:54 +0000

Two important legal decisions were made this week that could have significant impact on technology startups. On Tuesday, Fred Wilson argues in a post on his blog today that perhaps it is time to reframe the terms of the debate, moving away from the phrase "net neutrality" and instead to argue on behalf of "internet freedom." He writes "Internet Freedom is about sustaining the era of permissionless innovation that has characterized the first fifteen years of the commercial Internet in this country and brought us thousands of new big profitable companies, millions of jobs, and a vast array of new services and devices that have changed our lives and made them better." As courts, legislatures, and agencies try to create policies around digital technologies, how will new startups be effected? Discuss

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New Legal Decisions Will Impact Net Neutrality and Startups

Search Engines in March: Ask Continues to Grow – Bing and Google Lose 1%

cgseo — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:41:27 +0000

According to the latest data from analytics firm Hitwise, Ask managed to grow an astonishing 21% last month (from 2.84% to 3.44%), while Microsoft's Bing actually lost 1%. After a long period of slow but steady decline, the total number of U.S. searches on Yahoo grew about 3% last month, while Google lost about 1% and fell under 70%. Alternative search engines only accounted for 1.93% of all U.S. searches. Sponsor Verticals Even though Bing lost some ground in the overall search market, it did quite well in the verticals it already specializes in. Year-over-Year, the percentage of upstream traffic from Bing to automotive, health, shopping and travel sites grew more than 100%. Month-to-month, Bing also saw double-digit growth according to Hitwise. Google, of course, remains the most important source of traffic for these verticals and it's worth noting that even though Bing's important is growing, it only delivers between 2 and 4% of the upstream traffic for these key industries. To some degree, though, Bing isn't really interested in delivering this traffic to outside sources and would rather serve its customers by giving them answers right on its own site. Discuss

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Search Engines in March: Ask Continues to Grow - Bing and Google Lose 1%

Flickr’s Community Manager Says Goodbye

cgseo — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:10:47 +0000

When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr . Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium . Flickr went from a Canadian social gaming company in 2004 to a photo sharing service to a Yahoo! acquisition in 2005. 3 years ago next month, Yahoo! shut down its giant Yahoo! Photos service and moved everyone over to Flickr instead. Sponsor Champ put her work in perspective on a blog post that included the following: "How do you take a community the size of small town to the size of a nation? How do you grow a site that began in one region and make it truly global by adding languages and localizing in what's now 25 countries? How do you apply a content filtering system to a living site to ensure that members can be respectful of one another but still share the greatest variety of content? These are some of the big hairy challenges." Just as most of Yahoo! has, Flickr has seen budget challenges as well. A substantial number of the Flickr team members were laid off one year ago this month . Facebook has long been larger and now sees almost an entire Flickr's-worth of photos (3 billion) uploaded to that social network every month. As Facebook pushes its users more and more public with their content, it would be well served by paying attention to what Champ did at Flickr. The succinct and oft-learned from community guidelines at Flickr are among the work that Champ says she has been most proud of. Those challenges were experienced at Flickr in some of the earliest days of what's now called "social media" and Champ helped forge best practices that have served as a foundation for communities all over the web ever since. Photo by Beth Kanter. Discuss

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Flickr's Community Manager Says Goodbye

This Week in Online Tyranny

cgseo — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 03:00:00 +0000

Have you become the Mayor of Buttita Plaza Pawn on Foursquare? Or the Archbishop of Myung Dong Tofu Cabin, or the...Deputy Sheriff of the Twilight Bowl? Yay for you! Meanwhile, bloggers in Morocco and Vietnam have become the Governor of Prison and the Water Commissioner of the Interrogation Room. Feel bad? I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't. All this technology we use and write about and enthuse on has higher stakes than we think. Here are some of them. Sponsor Moroccan blogger Abdellatif Ouaiss arrested. Ouaiss was arrested Sunday for "an article published in his English-language blog in which he criticized the ten-year rule of King Mohammed VI" according to Rihab Alhoria . Vietnamese human rights lawyer and blogger Le Thi Cong Nhan rearrested. In the middle of March, only three days after Le Thi Cong Nhan was released from prison after a three year sentence, she was arrested again. "Police took her to a Hanoi police station for allegedly violating the terms of the supplementary sentence of three years of house arrest that she is now supposed to serve," according to From The Old , which has more information. Germany blocks content country-wide, imitates China and Iran. Germany, according to the OpenNetInitiative , has instituted "block lists." What starts with porn ends with you shutting the hell up. (What was that thing about the lessons of history? Ah, whatever. Let's dance! Ganz toll! ) Google gets hacked in China . Intermittent hacking and other mysterious interference slows, and in some places, blocks Google. Google stammered in response. More from ReadWriteWeb . Yahoo gets hacked. In China. Over a dozen Yahoo email accounts belonging to foreign journalists, activists and analysts in China were hacked. Effectively, the email accounts were shut down. More from ReadWriteWeb . Still. Iranian blogger Hessam Firouzi 's still in prison. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is still in prison. Omid Reza Mir Sayafi (murdered March 18, 2009) is still dead. Top photo by Adrian Van Leen End photo by FreeKareem.org The author was a co-founder of the March 18 Movement. Discuss

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This Week in Online Tyranny

Yahoo Hacked in China: Journalists, Others Affected

cgseo — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 03:27:06 +0000

Associated Press initially reported that three foreign journalists and one analyst have seen their email accounts hacked into today. The New York Times subsequently reported that there were "at least a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China," including the author Andrew Jacobs. AP: "They were greeted with messages saying, 'We've detected an issue with your account' and were told to contact Yahoo, they said Tuesday. Yahoo technicians told one of the four that his account had been hacked and restored his access, but it was not clear if the other instances were related." Sponsor Jacobs reported that "hackers altered (his) e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address." Among those affected were Clifford Coonan of Variety magazine and Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelancer. Agence France Presse reported that Yahoo! was avoiding directly addressing the hacks, saying only that it "condemns all cyberattacks regardless of origin or purpose." Yahoo! was roundly condemned for hurriedly turning over user information on reporter Shi Tao to the Chinese security forces in 2005. Their actions resulted in a long prison term for Shi for sharing Chinese media coverage policy with foreign sources. The late U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos called CEO Jerry Yang a "moral pygmy" for his collusion and subsequent slippery excuse-making. Earlier today, intermittent blocking of Google was reported in the country. China has the most sophisticated and widespread online censorship regime in the world, dovetailing social measures, criminal statutes and electronic measures. Additionally, some believe that government-sponsored, or at least encouraged, hackers have been behind multiple attacks on the properties of foreign companies, like the one that occasioned Google's surprising announcement of its intended withdrawal from China in January. Discuss

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Yahoo Hacked in China: Journalists, Others Affected