O’Reilly Research reports that:
87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. This is a long tail marketplace with a vengeance — but unfortunately, the economic models (for developers at least, though not for Facebook itself) all rely on getting into the very short head.
Because we don’t do cool stuff like this.
Great primer on the structured web from Read/WriteWeb.
Paul Graham on the future of web startups.
Twilight of the CIO.
The Social Graph in Plain Language.
Open Authentication.
Blogging 2.0
Mozilla Labs Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.
Facebook is displaying ads for products that appear to be endorsed by actual users. When I clicked on the person’s name, I was directed to the ad, not the person’s profile. I don’t like being tricked like this, not one bit. But I did click.
I have a love-hate relationship with Boston Streetsweeper, the service at Boston.com where you enter in the street your car is parked on and receive emails the day before the street is scheduled to be swept.
Why isn’t this a Google Map that lets me drag my car from street to street? Why isn’t it a mobile application? I sent a long and detailed message when the folks behind Streetsweeper asked for ways to improve the service, and got nothing back. Is Boston.com in cahoots with the Boston Office of the Parking Clerk?
Someone needs to create the ultimate parking ticket fighting application and let it loose in Boston and other cities. Tying it into your GPS or OnStar would be the holy grail, unless they figure out how to make your Lexis find a new spot, after all, it can park itself already.
This is such a cool idea. Why not sell software in iTunes?
But if software authors were to offer their programs through an application like iTunes, the benefits would be immediate. Instead of customers blindly downloading, you could show 30-second demos, just like Apple does with music videos, TV shows and films today. Instead of one-line descriptions, the developer could describe their offering with full paragraphs, explaining the benefits, and happy users could add reviews. And leveraging the iTunes infrastructure, one-click payments and rapid downloads would be a piece of cake.
Talk about a great extension to an already fantastic service.
Read/WriteWeb covers the impending launch of Twine.
(Founder) Nova Spivack has an illustrious history in the Semantic Web and AI business, having worked for both AI legend Ray Kurzweil and tech guru Danny Hillis (Thinking Machines). The genesis for Twine, said Spivack, came from an R&D project about 5 years ago, which turned into a research project, then a Series A round with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2006. As of now the Twine team is 30 people working from San Francisco — and they’re finally ready to unveil their new mainstream Semantic Web product.
The aim of Twine is to enable people to share knowledge and information. At first glance it is very much like Wikipedia, but there is a whole lot more smarts to the system. Spivack described it to me as “knowledge networking”- i.e. it aims to connect people with each other “for a purpose”. It’s not based around socializing, but to share and organize information you’re interested in. Using Twine, you can add content via wiki functionality (there are many post types), you can email content into the system, and “collect” something (as an object, e.g. a book object).
I’m signed up, will check it out and see if it’s all its cracked up to be.
I like that an export option is built in from the get-go.
EarlyStageVC has more.
I’m amazed at how little attention is being paid to Freebase. Freebase is going to take off once it gets more traction. It needs several more large data inputs from sources like Wikipedia before it will start to take off. Now we have widgets for exposing Freebase data.
Mjt is an open source templating engine for pulling Freebase data onto your website or into an app. You add a few lines of javascript (the script lives at their site) and can pull in live information about people, places, movies, albums or anything listed. It’s still early, between version 0.4 and 0.5, but you can start using the service if concurrently logged in to Freebase.
Go upload some data and take the rest of the day off.
I think Cardspace addresses the multiple-personality issue quite well, from the user-experience perspective. I’ve been playing around with the identity selector in Firefox on my Mac, which actually works some of the time. Easily selecting a persona based on the context of a given situation (game, blog post, adult content access, etc) is as easy as clicking on an icon.
Interesting to see the verification companies starting to get involved. You need access to a lot of datasources to get out of pocket verification working.
I keep thinking of OpenID like my TypeKey ID. Nothing more, nothing less than single sign-on. OpenID now has something like over 100M potential users. Problem is, there are only a handful of sites that accept OpenID. The lag is killing the potential.
How can we avoid the flamewar that is going to erupt over who owns distributed transparent databases that store our identities?
From the Rapleaf team:
We wanted to let you know that the Rapleaf API v2 is now available to all Rapleaf partners.
The Rapleaf API v2 allows you to go beyond reputation information and query for social network profiles, name, age, gender, location, and more.
This is all made available via the person resource, which you can learn more about at:
http://www.rapleaf.com/apidoc/v2
All partners can query up to 4000 lookups per day on the Rapleaf API v2.
If you currently have the Rapleaf API v1 running, you will not be affected by this release, but we encourage you to upgrade to v2.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, and we look forward to seeing Rapleaf partners build great web tools on top of our v2 API.