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MySpace Joins DataPortability Project

Written By Drupad Sil | May 9, 2008 | Share This |

MySpace

Some news that broke late yesterday. MySpace announced that it had officially joined the DataPortability Project, an initiative that pushes for user control over personal data access and use by other applications, open source solutions, and bottom-up distribution solutions for said data. From the official DataPortability blog:

“MySpace joins other existing corporate members such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, SixApart, and Digg. We are excited that MySpace will join the rest of the community to continue the design, documentation, and implementation of a set of best practices for inter-operable Data Portability between trusted applications and vendors.”

MySpace’s announcement basically stated that they are embracing the DataPortability best practices and had already started data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter, and Photobucket. Eric Eldon at Venturebeat explains what the data sharing entails for users:

“Users will be able to do things like update their own photos on their MySpace profiles, then have those photos automatically update on other sites that use MySpace photos. Besides photos, information that will be shared will include publicly available basic profile information, MySpace TV videos, and friend networks…

If you want to be able to control what information goes from MySpace to Twitter, you will be able to access a central control panel that will be provided on the MySpace site, that will let you stop information from going from MySpace to Twitter.”

This seemingly small change has major implications for online social networking. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch explains:

“Historically MySpace has lagged Facebook in terms of innovation. But they definitely “get it” this time. Sharing user data so openly (with user permission) is a terrific way to incentivize users to store all their core data at MySpace to begin with. Users eventually need one place on the Internet to store their data, or lots of places to store different types of data. But what they don’t want is today’s world where they are recreating and storing the same data over a plethora of social networks just because all those sites refuse to share. We’re starting to see the floodgates open and the idea of data sharing become a reality…

By acting first, MySpace takes the lead and has a shot at being the long term winner – meanings lots of people use MySpace as their place to store data, and share it out to other applications from there. Look for Google to make their move next.”

It’s definitely an overdue concept, and timely for MySpace as NewsCorp owner Rupert Murdoch went on record as stating the social networking site had missed his financial targets. We’ll have to see if the world’s biggest social network can get any bigger.

MySpace Apps Go Live

Written By Drupad Sil | April 24, 2008 | Share This |

MySpace Apps

Big news for about 120 million people today as MySpace has moved its Application Gallery out of beta. The gallery had been in beta since last March, with over 1,000 applications approved and added to the gallery and more than 2.1 million application installs across the site since then. More from Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb:

“Every application on the MySpace platform will receive its own profile, similar to musical artists, which will allow developers to communicate directly with their core audience – those who have ‘friended’ the app. Facebook has started down this road by encouraging app reviews and more recently letting users become ‘fans’ of apps, but applications really need to set up separate ‘Pages’ to get the same functionality that MySpace will bake in.”

So, is this a big deal? Facebook Apps have been a staple of that network’s environment for a while now. Well, one major point is that MySpace can show that it has learned how to better engage its user base from Facebook’s mistakes. From Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb:

“…after a few months the Facebook platform has been a let down for many people who were besides themselves with enthusiasm over it at launch. Will app spam become an issue at MySpace the way it has at Facebook? Facebook has lost a lot of user good-will over app spam, something they are focused heavily on changing. My Space has largle killed the messaging spam that plagued its user experience for so long, I don’t imagine users will be happy to see something like it back again.”

The interface is simple and browsing for appropriate applications is a snap, so no doubt we’ll see MySpace users pick these widgets up quickly. Hopefully they’ll stay spam free.

FireBall: Twitter Your Location, Mobile

Written By Drupad Sil | April 22, 2008 | Share This |

FireBall

Some news on a cool app that isn’t getting much coverage yet. FireBall is a mobile geo-location service that integrates Twitter and Upcoming with Fire Eagle, a Yahoo!-run platform for controlling people’s location information. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld with a quick bit on how it works:

“When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed up for FireBall, you send a message to a FireBall account on Twitter. You get back a text message with a tiny URL link. When you click on the link, it opens up a KML file that launches Google Maps on your cell phone and shows you all your Twitter friends as pinpoints on the map. So your Twitter contacts serve as your mobile social network. You can also Twitter in your location. Simply mention a room at a conference, for instance, and it can pinpoint exactly where you are through integration with Upcoming.org.”

FireBall is definitely looking like a smart and hip mashup of popular and useful services. For now, it’s in private testing and only works in San Francisco, but we’ll definitely be monitoring user feedback and looking out for its public launch.

Also, while Twitter and Upcoming need no introduction, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle platform merits a paragraph as a standalone service. Originally described as “twitter for location”, Fire Eagle had its private beta launch earlier this month, allowing a select group of users to stream their location information to each other. But, as Michael Arrington at TechCrunch explains, it’s much more than that:

“FireEagle has (well, will have) open APIs to send data and get data out. That will make a variety of other web services much more useful, since they’ll be able to figure out where you are without asking. Flickr images, for example, can be auto-tagged with location by comparing the time the photo was taken to your location at that time in FireEagle.”

Other sample features include a MySpace “I was pinpointed” badge that shows off your location, a Facebook app that displays a map with your friends pinpointed, and SMS update functionality on-the-go. The Fire Eagle team has announced that there are at least 50 third-party sites that have developed apps with the locator’s API, letting us imagine a social media suite that instantly updates based on location, adding tailored local search and news results. We can’t wait.

Enterprise Web 2.0 Worth $4.6 Billion in 2013

Written By Drupad Sil | April 21, 2008 | Share This |

Forrester Research

Forrester Research today released a six-year Web 2.0 Market Forecast. From the report itself:

“Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commodization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite the major impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces.”

A definition before we jump into the discussion. Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t include pure ad spending dollars spent on services like Facebook, Blogger, or Twitter, instead counting productivity tools based on Web 2.0 concepts. So, Facebook as a whole wouldn’t count, but money spent on the creation and syndication of a Facebook app or social network widget would.

According to the report, social networking spending will take up almost half of the total, coming in at about $2 billion, followed by mashups, RSS, and wikis, all three of which total approximately $1.6 billion. From Larry Dignan at Between the Lines:

“The top spending categories aren’t all that surprising. For instance, social networking is a decent substitute for knowledge management applications, a category that companies haven’t yet cracked. In other words, social networking could yield ROI. Mashups could also deliver faster time to market and it doesn’t hurt that giants like IBM are pushing them.”

So, what are some of the issues this developing market will face? Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb explains:

“For vendors specifically, there are 3 main challenges to becoming successful in this new industry, including:

1) I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as ‘consumer-grade’ technology

2) Ad-supported web tools generally have ‘free’ as the starting point

3) Web 2.0 tools will have to now compete in a space currently dominated by legacy enterprise software investments”

There are even problems with the definition of Enterprise 2.0 itself. From Dennis Howlett at Irregular Enterprise:

“[Forrester’s definition is] an incredibly loose definition and one that could be applied to any number of technology components from CRM through to supply chain management and pretty much anything in between. The fact is that with so many definitions floating around, I’m of the view that Enterprise 2.0 does not exist except in the minds of those who are selling technology components. That’s not a recipe for success.”

What’s the bottom line? The big picture seems pretty clear: the flexible communication and networking tools created in the past few years will probably find paying customers in the form of big corporations looking to become more lightweight. The interesting questions are how quickly it’ll happen, how much internal resistance there will be, and how they’ll be integrated into existing internal applications.

Flickr Adds Video

Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 10, 2008 | Share This |

flickr video

Photo sharing site Flickr this week added the ability for its paid users to upload short videos, or what it’s calling “long photos.” Like video site Vimeo, Flickr wants users to upload original content. But video length is capped at 90 seconds, which will help it distinguish itself from YouTube, et al. Flickr’s Heather Champ explains:

While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.

Gizmodo’s given it thumbs-up:

A quick test finds that the service is no more difficult than uploading photos, and it’s pretty quick to boot. Also, advanced embedding functions allow for users to choose their preferred width or height for the video and the service will calculate the dimensions and update the code accordingly. That sounds like a small touch. It is, but it’s also a pretty good one lacking in just about all video on the web.

Flickr’s strategy of keeping videos short is good, though users are up in arms over the addition of video.

Google Launches App Engine

Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 8, 2008 | Share This |

google app enginef

Google yesterday announced the launch of Google App Engine, a hosting platform for web application developers. From the brand-new Google App Engine blog:

The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it’s receiving significant traffic and has millions of users… Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data… We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.

The service is similar to and will compete with Amazon’s S3 platform. But because Google has such extensive services that many startups take advantage of (email, docs, etc.), Read/Write Web wonders what additional reliance on Google means for startups that will use the App Engine, too:

But looking at the bigger picture, startups which use Google App Engine are essentially tying themselves into Google’s technology. They’ll need to host with Google, do their processing with Google, store their data with Google, etc. And as some people have already speculated, having a web app built and deployed with Google App Engine makes it much easier for Google to eventually acquire that web app. It does make you wonder: would you want Google to control your entire end-to-end development environment?

These are certainly important implications for startups to think about, but ultimately the promise of a free sandbox to develop and storage to do it with will likely outweigh any reservations developers might have.

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MySpace Music Teams Up With Big Labels

Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 3, 2008 | Share This |

myspace music

MySpace will turn MySpace Music into a joint venture with three of the four major record labels (EMI is sitting things out, at least for now). The new service will provide free, ad-supported streams; shareable, customized playlists; and DRM-free ad-supported or paid downloads. From the New York Times:

Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends. They will also be able to download tracks to play on their mobile devices, putting the new site in competition with similar services like Apple, Amazon and eMusic.

A subscription-based music component, where users pay a monthly amount for unlimited access to downloadable tracks, is also being considered, [MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe] said.

“This is really a mega-music experience that is transformative in a lot of ways,” he said. “It’s the first service that offers a full catalog of music to be streamed for free, with full community features, to be shared with all of your friends.”

MySpace has long been a great site for music discovery but has had trouble monetizing that. The social network was sued by Universal in 2006 (presumably that lawsuit’s being dropped since Universal will now be part of MySpace Music) and has a host of competitors in the music discovery space, among them sites like RCRDLBL and Muxtape. And undoubtedly, MySpace wants to capture some of the ever-growing online music sales business; Apple has just superpassed Wal-Mart as the top music retailer in the United States.

5 Questions with Tony Pierce, LA Times Blog Editor

Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 25, 2008 | Share This |

los angeles times blogs tony pierce

Tony Pierce oversees the nearly three dozen blogs at the Los Angeles Times. Before working at the LAT, Pierce edited LAist, a blog that covers local L.A. culture and events. He has also worked at Buzznet and the E! channel, and he runs a popular personal blog from which he’s created two books, aka blooks.

Searchviews asked Pierce to share his insights on blogging and media convergence: what it takes to successfully integrate blogs in a news organization, how best to leverage social media sites to meet page view goals, and where video and mobile fit at the LA Times. Here’s what he had to say.

Searchviews: The traditional journalism world has misunderstood or been suspicious of blogs in the past. While many journalists have come around to blogging and other forms of social media (like Twitter and Facebook) in the last couple of years, relatively few newspapers have demonstrated that they really understand where these media fit in their business or how best to utilize them. What role do blogs play at the LA Times, both when it comes to using them as a tool and platform for journalism, and also when it comes to bringing more readers (and ad revenue) to the LA Times site? How do you hope to evolve blogging at the LAT? And what role do you play in teaching old-school journalists about new-school tools, like blogs?

Tony Pierce: Blogs play an extremely important role at the LA Times. Part of the responsibilities and goals of a news organization is to inform, enlighten, and enrich its readers in a timely manner. Not only can blogs do that, but at the Times we accomplish that daily. Be it liveblogging the NCAA tournament, hosting live video chats after Presidential debates, or getting deeper into stories than the actual newspaper has the physical room to do - blogging is the perfect complement to what most people have come to expect from traditional newspapers. For example, one of our newest blogs, L.A. Now, posts about a dozen or so blog entries a day. Only online could you have a post at 9 am talking about a local story in print, a comment or ten from the readers in that post, a rebuttal from a columnist in that same blog by noon, and a column in the paper the following day because of that exchange. Journalism, the market as a conversation, and the dialogue between writers and readers is changing very quickly, and the Times has woken up and is taking a leadership role in that change.

Will taking that leadership role attract more readers and revenue? Probably. Who knows. The more important thing is that as long as the Times continues to adjust for the inevitable, it will remain one of the centerpoints of conversations about current events related to LA and the rest of the world.

I hope to continue to be a part of blogging at the LAT as it evolves with journalism, and as journalism evolves with blogging. This evolution isn’t always an easy task. However, blogging has survived the original demonization of its critics, while at the same time the mainstream media has found ways to incorporate digital journalism into its offerings. Likewise, I have found myself being asked by a variety of veteran journalists at the Times for more and more help in regard to learning about the intricacies of blogging, its subtleties, and how it can be used best at the Times. So this belief of “traditional journalism” being suspicious of blogging is about to die off, along with the Mark Cubans and those who believe that the Earth is flat.

In many ways, blogging is simply a means with which to convey ideas, a delivery method, and a new tool for writers to express themselves. Nothing at all to fear, unless for some reason you have something you are afraid might get exposed.

SV: Tony, part of your job at the LA Times is launching new blogs; for example, you recently brought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on board and he’s done some interesting stuff with video and written about everything from jazz to politics. What new blogs are you planning now, and what ideas make for viable blogs? In other words, what should newspapers or other media companies consider when they’re planning new blogs and hiring bloggers?

TP: We are planning a wide spectrum of new blogs that I am not at liberty to reveal at this time, but they will leap from and be based within every section of the paper that you could imagine - from the front page to the back page.

Kareem has been quite a blessing. I don’t think anyone anywhere has a Hall of Famer writing for them, from their heart, every day, about sensitive and interesting topics. And as you said, he does it with video, audio, and the written word. His Rolodex is endless, so one day you might see him doing an interview with will.i.am and the next day he’s exchanging emails with Senator Barack Obama. The day after the Super Bowl, Kareem reminisced about hanging with the Manning brothers, and the day after the Grammys, there was a picture of him with Herbie Hancock. Last week he was on the Colbert Report, and when the Lakers return you will see him inches away from the court with the Lake Show. And he writes about all of it. He is a totally fascinating man with an amazing and unreal life, and we are so lucky to have him writing about it daily.

When newspapers are planning new blogs they should consider what jewels they have in their backyards. It might not be ESPN’s Collegiate Athlete of the Century, like Kareem, but odds are they have more than a few precious gems on their radar. My advice is to reach out to those people and let them do what we’re doing with #33: let them write about whatever they want, using whatever format they feel most comfortable with. Not everyone wants to write about what made them famous, not everyone wants to type away at a keyboard. Most people are complicated. So let them tell you a wide-ranging assortment of things in a variety of ways. The blogging medium is dynamic and limitless, so don’t let your own boundaries limit your bloggers. Let them go, let them experiment, encourage them, and be there when they need you.

SV: Your past projects have included a really popular personal blog, a stint at buzznet.com, and a position as editor-in-chief at LAist, which is part of the Gothamist network of city blogs. At LAist, you were particularly savvy at and strategic about using Digg to break page view records each month. How are you using social media tools like Digg at the LAT now? How do you approach building an audience and traffic differently at the LAT as opposed to at your previous gigs?

TP: I’m not saying that Digg wasn’t part of our later success at LAist, but we doubled and tripled our readership before we ever got a following on Digg. In fact, at Buzznet I helped attract over 13 million pageviews in 8 months without even one click from Digg. There are 120 million blogs out there, countless websites, and more than a few newspapers, search engines, and email addresses. Simultaneously, there are people out there who want to see what you’ve got.

Social media tools like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, MySpace, and del.icio.us are all fine for certain stories - very few of which we write about at the Times. I love Digg, I am on it several times a day, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully in the slightest, but in many ways it’s lowest common denominator, college freshman lulz. I love Digg because in my heart, that’s who I am. But that’s not what the LA Times is, and that’s not even what the majority of what LAist is or was.

In order to get people to link to you, you simply have to find out what blogs, web pages, or media outlets are interested in your story and you have to tell them that your story exists. That might mean sending an email to an editor, or linking to a blog in one of your stories, or calling someone, or building a relationship with a so-called competitor. Eventually, when you see something being written, you will know exactly who you are going to tell. Likewise when people link you, you should write down who they were and what they linked you for. That way, when something else comes down the line, you can let them know that you have something new for them.

In November of last year, Andy Malcolm and Don Frederick were getting about a quarter million hits on their political blog Top of the Ticket. Last month, they got something like 1.6 million because they got in the practice of emailing the right political blogs about their posts. Yes, sometimes they’d get snotty emails back saying the blogs weren’t interested in such and such, but for the most part, bloggers are grateful when you make their jobs easier for them - especially if you have done your homework and have fed them a story that fits in with what they blog about. By the way, Top of the Ticket has been on Digg a few times, but I don’t think they were on it at all last month.

SV: The LAT very recently introduced video to the site. How long before we see a video-only blog from the paper? How about seeing more video on the other blogs?

TP: The Times is very dedicated to all sorts of multimedia in our blogs, and video is one of the most spectacular aspects of that. [LAT Multimedia Director] Barbara Morrow and her team have remodeled a portion of the 2nd floor that now looks like a TV station with online video editing bays, camera packages, and stuff I hadn’t seen since my days at the E! channel.

People will be pleasantly surprised when some of these video packages start finding their way onto the website, because the production values are so good that they will say, “Wait, this is the LA Times?” The concepts of what we are going to cover with video are things that you wouldn’t even be able to predict, but I have seen the future and you will love it and you will say, “Why didn’t someone do this earlier!”

That said, I doubt you will see video-only blogging for several reasons. First, Google is your friend and Google has a very hard time knowing what’s in your video unless you have some text around it. And second, we have a staff of some of the best writers in town - the writing complements the video, and the video complements the writing.

Meanwhile, we have had lots of video in our blogs that many have enjoyed: video of some pilgrims from Costa Mesa on the Hajj; when Dan Neil covered the Detroit Auto Show he took lots and lots of video, and when yours truly went to South by Southwest, we were one of the first outlets that had video evidence of Lou Reed singing with Moby.

You will definitely see more video in lots of other LA Times blogs; stay tuned.

SV: The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently reported that the cell phone is the one tool most Americans would have the hardest time giving up. How should newspapers respond to this increased dependence on mobile technology? What is the LAT doing about it?

TP: The LA Times is currently in the process of upgrading its mobile site in a way that anyone with a Blackberry, iPhone, or mobile device will appreciate. I can’t imagine having to go without my iPhone, and I scorn PEW for even floating that possibility out there. How dare they!

AOL Buys Social Network Bebo for $850 Million

Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 13, 2008 | Share This |

aol bebo

AOL today announced it is acquiring UK-based Bebo for $850 million. The social network is expected to complement one of AOL’s most popular services, the instant messaging system AIM. From the Bits blog:

As AOL has search for a growth strategy over the last decade, one of the biggest puzzles has been what to do about the AIM system, which allows anyone on any computer to send instant messages, whether they were paying AOL customers or not. Even as AOL’s access service declined, AIM remained the preeminent IM system in the United States, fending off competition from Microsoft, Yahoo, and later Google.

AOL has tried to out social network from AIM, but it was never successful. And Google now integrates AIM in its own chat system, taking advantage of AOL’s network of users. By buying Bebo, AOL now has its own social network which, when married with its robust advertising network (a result of a relatively recent buying spree over the past several months), solidly puts the company in the running with social network behemoths MySpace and Facebook, who are also still figuring out how best to monetize their vast user bases. Bebo has 40 million users worldwide and AOL says it is the third most popular social network in the U.S.

Search Engine Land notes that Yahoo had previously wanted to buy the social network. The company is a search and advertising partner to Bebo and has also been in talks with AOL about the possibility of merger, to avoid an acquisition by Microsoft.

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Wal-Mart Finally Gets Blogs

Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 4, 2008 | Share This |

wal mart corporate blog

Wal-Mart’s latest blogging effort may be titled “Check Out” but it looks like the company’s finally getting it when it comes to blogs. From the New York Times:

Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing. The result is an intensely personal window into the lives, preferences and quirks of the powerful tastemakers at Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, who have spent years shielded from public view.

Compared to many past corporate blogging efforts, which are either super-stiff or super-fake, Wal-Mart’s Check Out blog does well by its writers and readers because it relies the personalities of real people, even if they sometimes say things that are a little questionable:

But all that uncensored rambling has its potential drawbacks, like irritating suppliers or consumers. Mr. Muha, the video game buyer, may have ventured into dangerous territory, for example, when describing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

“The bad guys are the usual Middle Eastern extremists. I guess they are the new Nazis for the modern era,” he wrote.

One consideration Wal-Mart is missing with this blog is SEO. The site lacks good title tags and meta descriptions. A Google search for “walmart blog” puts Check Out in fifth position; above it are links to Wal-Mart watch-group blogs, Wake Up Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Watch.

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