The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘across-the-web’

Xbox LIVE was previously known to censor or even ban gamers who indicate or even hint they were of an untraditional sexually orientation. This could either be from listing it in user profile or using a slang term in a tag

Read more: 
Xbox LIVE Terms of Use reverses policy on sexual orientation/identification

Document-sharing site Scribd launched three years ago with the idea of making PDFs and other text-documents more Web-friendly. Now three years later, the site stores more than 10 million documents, which in turn have been embedded more than 10 million times across the Web. Scribd says it reaches more than 50 million people a month worldwide (Quantcast).

To celebrate its birthday, Scribd just rolled out a redesign with a new Zune-brown logo, much faster document search (to support 1.4 million searches a day), and other small new features such as the addition of collections. It lets you explore by category or trending documents.

Scribd took a big hit to its traffic in the middle of last year when it started getting serious about cracking down on pirated documents, from which it still hasn’t completely recovered. But its stronger copyright filtering makes partners like major publishing houses more comfortable using Scribd as a way to promote and distribute its books. Scribd’s biggest competitor DocStoc is also growing at a nice clip and adding new features at a steady clip.

Scribd is also making a big push into mobile reading by making it easy to send documents to avariety of mobile devices, including iPhones, Android phones, Blackberries, Kindles, and Nooks. The company has raised $13 million total from Charles River Ventures, Redpoint, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan, and David Sacks (who recently joined its board).

Personalized search is something that we all know Google feels strongly about. Today, the search giant is adding a new feature to help users mark searches: Stars. So when you see search results, you can click to mark a star next to a result that you feel is relevant. The next time you perform a search relevant to a starred item, the result will appear in a special list right at the top of your results.

The feature will be rolled out to users over the next few days and will be available to users who are signed into their Google accounts. Google says that stars will make it it easier for users to remember their favorite results because they don’t have to keep track of them after they star them. Google will essentially do all the heavy lifting by remembering starred items and presenting those results when appropriate. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can access your list of starred items in one place if you’d like to see them. Stars can also be used to mark pages when browsing the web; you can click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, which will show up in your starred items.

Google says that stars in search will replace SearchWiki, a tool which we weren’t very fond of. Searchwiki allowed users to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. Apparently others felt the same way, because Google said that users disliked changing the order of Google’s “organic search results.” Stars appears to be an effort to personalize search results in a simpler way. Google notes that if you have been using SearchWiki, your edits will be preserved with your Google Account.

Apple and Google are engaged in a fascinating battle of mobile OS’s. Among other things, they’re duking it out on patent infringement, developer relations and carrier support. Lines are being drawn, and everyone’s taking sides.

That begs the question: what’s the difference between the App Store and Android Market for developers? And how does this affect their bottom line? Mobclix, a TC50 Company, just released a report comparing the Android Market to Apple App Store. They are a mobile analytics and advertising platform whose footprint includes over 6,500 publishers including ngmoco, SGN, and NewToy (creators of Words with Friends).

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

When Hulu first launched, it was supposed to be the media industry’s answer to YouTube: a place where shows and movies from TV would find an audience online and make advertising money directly for the media companies backing it instead of sharing any of that video ad money with YouTube. All that professional quality video from NBC, Fox, and Comedy Central brought in a huge audience, helping Hulu grow into the second largest video site online with more than 1 billion video views a month.

Well, that formula is great for Hulu, but it isn’t working for one of its biggest media partners. Yesterday, Viacom decided to pull two of the top shows from Hulu: Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Both were regularly among the most popular shows on Hulu, which is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. When Hulu first convinced Viacom to allow it to distribute Colbert and The Daily Show back in June, 2008, it was seen as a major milestone for the young video service.

Just like on TV, the majority of video viewership on the Web is driven by hits. The Comedy Central shows were big hits for Hulu, as evidenced by Hulu’s blog post practically begging Viacom not to leave. But Viacom decided that Hulu needed Colbert and Jon Stewart more than they needed Hulu. Clips from the shows will still be availble for free online on TheDailyShow.com and ColbertNation, where Viacom controls and sells all the video ad inventory through its own sales force.

The Comedy Central shows are not going behind some sort of Murdochian paywall. They are still embeddable and shareable across the Web, but with Comedy Central’s garish video player and its ads. When you have hit shows, people will find them even if they are not on Hulu or YouTube. Viacom made the calculation that it can make more money by recentralizing distribution of its hit shows on its own sites than allowing them to be streamed on Hulu. Why should they split video ad revenues with Hulu when they can have it all themselves. As Andrew Barron in an insightful post

In other words, whatever they get for ad sales over there at Hulu is going to be split up between Hulu and Comedy Central. Why should Comedy Central cut in Hulu on their ad money? They can sell their own ads for a premium and make 100% of the share if they do it themselves. Some shows may be glad to give Hulu 50% or even more of the rev share because Hulu brings an audience they dont already have. But eventually, for any top show, the leverage tide will turn and the middle person will be the first to go.

Hulu is good for shows that can’t attract a big enough audience to their own sites, but there is too much money left on the table by splitting ad revenues for the hits. If this trend continues, with media partners pulling their best content from Hulu once it becomes self-sustaining, that could turn into a long-term problem for Hulu. It’s also bad for consumers, who don’t want to have all of their videos in one or two places rather than have to jump from ColbertNation to TheDailyShow.com to HBO.com to CBS.com and so on.

The economic incentive is too great for media properties to centralize their videos on their own sites. But to consumers, this recentralization looks more like fragmentation and opens up the opportunity for someone else (Steve Jobs, Brian Roberts?) to once again bring it all together in one place. It is clear that consumers don’t want to hunt across the Web for all their shows, but the economics of video advertising are dictating otherwise.

You know all those share buttons across the Web? They are getting more and more social. What I mean by that is initially they were used to share stories or content mostly via email on a one-to-one basis, but over the past year or so services like Facebook and Twitter have been overtaking the way people use those buttons to share stories, videos, images, and links.

The way most people interact with these button is through widgets on publisher’s sites. But one of the largest sharing button networks, ShareThis, is about to turn that around and introduce a Share Stream which shows you what your Facebook friends are sharing across the Web. Soon your Twitter followers will be added as well (at launch you will only be able to see what everyone is sharing across Twitter). Of course, the Share Stream is also available as a customizable widget to show on any site.

A link at the bottom of each ShareThis widget will invite you to find out what your friends are sharing. When you click on it, you will be taken to a Share Stream where you can log in using your Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Yahoo IDs. There you will see what your else people are sharing from the site you just came from or about the same topic as the page you were on. The Share Stream can be filtered by trending or real-time topics, by source, by what everyone is sharing, or only by what your friends are sharing.

ShareThis gets its data from the 130,000 sites which use its sharing buttons and collectively reach 430 million unique visitors a month. Its No.1 competitor AddThis is somewhat bigger, but ShareThis recognizes the same users across sites and creates a semantic index of the every page where its buttons are placed. Using a taxonomy based on Wikipedia categories, ShareThis can figure out the topics associated with each page that is shared. Thanks to this topic knowledge, ShareThis can suggest other pages on related topics which are also being shared by your friends or more generally.

CEO Tim Schigel plans to create an ad network of sorts which will let publishers and advertisers target ads to people based on what they are sharing based on browser cookie data (yup, every time you share, you are being tracked, anonymously). He keeps data on engagement levels after people share content, and while the pageviews resulting from each click are still highest for email, Facebook is catching up. And Facebook has a bigger multiplier effect (on average three different people click on each shared link versus just one for email) which puts it over the top in terms of impact. Twitter’s multiplier effect is six times higher (18 clicks per link), but its engagement levels are much lower.

More importantly, people who follow a link from Facebook, says Schigel, “are 50 percent more engaged,” on average, than people who find the same page from search. Intuitively that makes sense because there is more hit or miss with search results compared to following a suggested link from someone you trust.

Like other sharing networks, ShareThis has seen Facebook soar to 42 percent of all sharing, beating out email (at 40.7 percent) for the first time in February. Twitter represents 8.7 percent of all sharing via the ShareThis button. So the Share Stream pretty much already exists on Facebook and Twitter alone.

Looking at blogs and news sites across the web, it’s clear that many have robust communities with eager, intelligent people looking to contribute. But up until recently, the only way most sites (particularly blogs) allow users to share their thoughts is through comments, which work well enough, but certainly aren’t always perfect. Grogger is a new service that looks to help sites tap into this community knowledge, allowing you to build a site that includes posts written by both you and your audience.

At its core, Grogger is an easy-to-use blogging platform, but rather than only exposing its editing tools to a handful of site administrators, they’re shown to everyone. When a user comes to your Grogger site and writes an entry (called a Grog), it’s then added to a moderation queue, where your site administrators can approve it. Once an entry has been approved, other users can vote it up using a ‘Like’ system, and administrators can ‘feature’ it to make it even more prominent. And while readers are free to contribute their own Grogs, they can also leave old-school comments under posts by other writers.

Grogger tracks each user’s profile over time, allowing you to quickly look up all of their previous posts. You can also elect to only follow certain writers if you want to tweak your reading experience (and Grogs can be broken up into categories). Frequent contributors are rewarded through a badge system. The site has only one theme available at this point, but more are coming in the near future, and you can manually edit the CSS if you want to get creative.

Grogger is still pretty early on (I ran into a few bugs, and some of the UI isn’t that intuitive), but it’s got potential. The site is now open to the public and is free, with plans to eventually roll out some premium options.

Now that Twitter did away with its monolithic Suggested User List, everyone can fight for followers on a more equal footing. Tweetmeme wants to help you gain followers with a new Follow Button you can place on your blog or Website. It looks very much like Tweetmeme’s ReTweet button, which is on 100,000 sites and registering 7 billion monthly impressions across the web, except it says “Follow” instead of “Retweet.” When you click on the Follow button, a window pops open that lets you sign into Twitter and follow the account tied to the button (usually the person or publication of the site the button is on).

The Follow button comes in different shapes and sizes, shows how many followers you have, and is tied into analytics services such as TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer, and TwitterGrader. The data from the Follow button should also appear in Tweetmeme’s own analytics. But it doesn’t yet. The Follow buttons are geared more towards advertisers, and indeed they can and will be placed in ads as well as on editorial content. Tweetmeme is also working on turning its ReTweet button into an advertising platform with AdTweets.

Follow buttons are nothing new, but Tweetmeme has a lot of distribution muscle with its Retweet buttons. The question is, how many buttons are you going to gunk up your site with? Should we add a follow button to every post?

This strange app is a touchscreen interface that connects people, places, and things using “clouds” of items and people. It basically makes Venn diagrams of your contacts and allows you to share and explore content and messages.

This looks way too weird for the average user but clearly someone out there may want to move Sven and Nikola to a timeline and figure out which emails came from each person and which emails overlap.

The text input system is actually quite cool, however, because it predicts the words you’re about to type. Pop over to 4 minutes in to see how that system works.

Video after the jump.

Last year, Apple’s iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone sales to 14.4 percent, up 6.2 points from the year before, according to the latest market share figures put out by Gartner.  The iPhone still trails behind Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones (No. 1), which saw their share decline 5.5 points to 46.9 percent, and RIM Blackberries (No. 2), which gained 3.3 points to end the year with a 19.9 percent share.

Remember, these are worldwide estimates.  In the U.S., both Blackberry and Apple are much larger than Symbian.  And when it comes to mobile Web traffic, Apple and Android dominate with 81 percent share.  According to Gartner, Android phone sales jumped 3.4 points (to 3.9 percent), but Android is still smaller than WIndows Mobile or Linux.  Those mobile OSes, however, saw their market share drop  3.1 and 2.9 percent, respectively.  Palm’s WebOS barely made a mark with 0.7 percent share.

So when you tally everything up, Symbian lost the most share (5.5 percent), followed by Windows Mobile and Linux.  The iPhone saw the biggest gain (6.2 percent), compared to smaller but roughly equal jumps by Blackberry and Android (up 3.3 and 3.4 percent, respectively).

All together, Gartner estimates 172 million smartphones were sold last year, up 24 percent.  In contrast, total mobile phone sales were flat at 1.2 billion.  Smartphones represented 14 percent of total mobile handset sales last year, up from 11 percent in 2008.  The iPhone, for all of its growth, made up only 2 percent of all mobile phone sales last year. Below are the market share tables from Gartner:

Table 2
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 2009 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (February 2010)

Table 1
Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 2009 (Thousands of Units)

Note* This table includes iDEN shipments, but excludes ODM to OEM shipments.
Source: Gartner (February 2010)