I’ve been very much preoccupied with my web conference, Appfrica, so I haven’t blogged much lately but there’s been some really big shakeups this week in the Web sector.
The biggest is the announcement that Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have decided to leave the company they sold to Yahoo! in 2005! This is big, not only because they’ve been pretty adamant about staying involved with their pet project but because Yahoo! is in the middle of formulating new strategies to appease angry shareholers after that much publicized Microsoft acquisition failed. They’re also under increased pressure to breathe life back into their stock which has also suffered in the wake of that same deal.
Technorati announced some new funding, no doubt related to the longtail business model they just unveiled. Technorati essentially plans to allow bloggers and publishers of all levels of popularity to sell ads.
The Huffington Post is also making a major step towards becoming an even bigger news media outlet. They intend to compete in localized news markets initially offering a Chicago, Illinois portal and eventually expanding to include other regions of the country. This is apparently part of a larger strategy to move beyond solely political blogging, which has obviously been critical in this election year.
“We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news [sic], not just the political blogging the way we began,” Huffington said.
I’m almost certain this will either lead to acquisition offers by the major media news outlets who are (or should be) afraid of Huffington’s growing dominance on the web.
Lastly, Facebook surpassed Myspace to become the most popular social network worldwide. Considering it was valued by analysts at over a billion dollars only a few months ago, this adds more validity to speculation that Facebook will file for an IPO and go public soon.
The waters ahead just got a little more Turbulent for Twitter, Google may be prepping the retun of Jaiku…
Jaiku is joining Google. While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.
But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.
Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders
In the past few weeks Twitter has faced confusion and what some might call a mass exodus of users because of the fact that it was unprepared for such heavy traffic from users. The combination of high traffic, too many calls to the API and the strain of Instant mesaging has brought the Twitter servers to their knees more than once. Now it appears Google is kicking the service while it’s down by purchasing Jaiku, Twitter’s nearest competitor. Now it appears Google may be prepping a big relaunch of the service it purchased last year, Jaiku. Meanwhile new competitor Plurk and FreindFeed continue to experience rapid booms in growth from former Twitter users who seem to be debating on weather or not they want to stick with the ailing service.
Note: This post has been corrected due to an error on my part. I left the original erroneous text but struck it out to avoid confusion.
From what I’ve heard, working at Google as a programmer is all about exploring exploring your unrequited love for web applications and new ideas. It’s no surprise, then, that the Gmail team is rolling out a javascript applet that allows customers to try out these new features.
It’s the new beta test model, where the actual testing and bug reporting is essential crowd sourced, allowing those diehard, bleeding edge, early-adopter users to feel more nerdy while helping Google work out the kinks. They’ve also opened up channels for sending feed back directly to engineers. Here’s somewhat of a GLabs manifesto from Product Manager Kieth Coleman.
People often ask how we decide what to build next. It’s usually a mix of factors, like how many users are asking for it (think delete button, vacation responder, and IMAP, among others), how useful we think it will be (think chat, conversation view, etc.) or how much fun it will be to work on (this is actually really important). We have all sorts of debates about each option, we weigh the pros and cons, and then some of the time we probably make the wrong decision.
Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn’t normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they’re good or not. When you sign in, you’ll see a new page in Settings called Labs. It has a list of experimental new features, and you can enable or disable each one. Some of the popular ones will become core parts of the product, and we’ll eventually retire the ones that don’t get much use. We’ve put feedback links in there, too, so you can discuss a feature with other users and the engineer(s) who wrote it.
In my post “Adobe Realizes it Gaffed”, I talked about some of the ways in which Adobe missed opportunities to capitalize with web based ventures. Well it looks like that argument was correct and the Adobe team is actively trying to catch up. On the heels of the announcement of Photoshop Express, Adobe just launched a web-based office suite of collaborative software at Acrobat.com.
If you think this is just direct competition for Google Docs and 37Signals you’re wrong. Acrobat trumps them both in spades!
The Highlights at a Glance:
Flash-based
Uses Adobe ConnectNow
Uses your pre-existing Adobe ID to log-in
Allows for online storage
Sharing of Files
Works with the downloadable version of Acrobat 9
Edit and Creates PDFs online
Each user is given a space called a Meeting Room
Allows for Screen Sharing via Web
Can access your web cam from the browser!
Can share your microphone from browser
Appears to allow VOIP conference calls
Advanced Bandwidth Allocation Preferences
Shows all connected users
Shared Whiteboard for taking notes and quick sketches
Native chatting
PICS
Click pics to see more.
I tested it briefly for this article and a few things I can tell you is that it’s fast and dead simple to use. While the fact that it’s Flash-based worries me, it makes perfect sense. They invented Flash and I’m sure are dedicated to proving it’s scalability and usefulness for building web applications. It would be admitting a weakness if they used Ruby for something like this, not to mention with the recent problems Twitter’s been having that doesn’t sound like the best idea these days anyways.
The verdict? Acrobat.com aims to be the new place people do business online. It’s Skype, 37Singals’ Campfire and Google Docs all rolled into one! After Beta testing this once, I’ll never use at least two of those applications ever again! ReadWriteWeb has an even more in-depth review.
WeWorkForFree is a design community that allows it’s members to upload and share their portfolios in order to raise money for international programs that benefit developing nations.
They do this by hosting contests sponsored by donors that need a job completed, but who are also willing to donate money to a good cause. The programs are target small communities in places like Kenya, Uganda and India. Examples of some of these programs include goals like raising money to donate OLPC laptops to classrooms, raising money to send food to Tsunami victims or donating funds to a clinic that shelters refugees from Kenya.
One of the most interesting elements is that artist can apply for scholarships to actually go volunteer for a few weeks in some of the countries where WW4F are established! The idea is to help designers, photographers, illustrators, and other artists get involved in using their talents to benefit the world at large.
The UI of the site will be quite familiar to those of you using services like DeviantArt, CarbonMade and ConceptArt.org with the added benefit of raising money for the people in areas of the world that desperately need it.
We Work For Free is currently in private beta. Click the image below to visit.
