Aggregators Are Around Us, Will Proliferate
During the past six months I’ve become really interested in news aggregators. Techmeme is the first thing I check after email in the morning and it has helped me a lot in finding out what people are discussing about technology right now. It has saved me hours of time and I’ve come across stories I would have missed otherwise.
Of course Techmeme has its problems. Tristan Louis wrote about Techmeme myopia - Techmeme highlights stories that are being discussed right now, but it cannot distinguish between rumor and news or a personal clash between bloggers and really disruptive innovation. But I’m fine with that. It would be great is Gabe Rivera could develop Techmeme so that It could tell the difference. I hope he does, but it will not be easy.
What, on the other hand, is easy, is creating an aggregator around one topic and then cloning it to handle something completely different. That’s what Rivera has done with celebrity gossip, politics and baseball.
A new entrant (at least new to me) to the aggregation game is Loud3r. They have created aggregators to handle such diverse topics as sneakers, dogs and motorcycle roadracing. The most interesting to me are Found3r (about venture capital) and Buzz3r (about internet business & technology). These sites do not quite get to the same level as Techmeme, but they produce somewhat different results, which is always welcome. And I also like that they reveal the score they give to each story and how it is counted from three variables: quality, community and buzz.
In conclusion, aggregators are all the time easier to create, they are easier to copy and they will continue to become a very big part of peoples’ lives. Currently aggregators like Techmeme and Buzz3r are used by only a handful of people, but as aggregators develop to get better results they will eventually be used by the masses who have no time or will to go through the noise.
[Techmeme discussion: Techmeme Myopia]
[Loud3r via Friendfeed by Scoble]
Startups from Finland: VerticeTree Creates Business From of Social Networks
VerticeTree is a Finnish startup founded in October 2007 that offers “Research, technology and consulting for online and mobile social networks”.
Their offering is divided into three areas: Network analysis and visualization (Analyzing and visualizing your most valuable customers in social networks), Advertising experiments (pretesting of advertising -which is nothing new - and Facebook apps) and Social targeting of advertising which sounds somewhat similar what Facebook does with its Newsfeed and Beacon.
So far VerticeTree has created PlayFinland, which is a community (web site and a Facebook group) for the Finnish Game industry funded by Tekes and an interesting Facebook experiment on the network of one apps users. What VerticeTree is doing is very interesting and I’m really looking forward in hearing more from these guys in the future.
The Next Web – Day 1 Wrap-up
This seems to have been the overall opinion so far.
A very concise wrap-up of all the presentations.
Read more…
Death Of The Domain Names Is Near
Or more correctly: the slow decline of the importance of domain names has begun. Cabel Sasser wrote an inspiring article about how in Japan they do not use URL’s on billboard ads, but instead they have pictures of search boxes with keywords. This is done beacause all the good domain names are already gone, but more importantly, as Snipperoo pointed out, people do not remember domain-names, instead they input the brand or product name into search boxes i.e. use search for navigation.
How many domain names do you remember?
When thinking about this I realized that domain names are becoming more like phone numbers, you need them to get to the right place, but nobody really remembers them anymore. The most important ones you have written down (bookmarked) and for the others you use the white pages (Google).
[via Techmeme]
[Original image from Cabel.name]
Teen Age Girls Will Take Over The Internet
New York Times has an article on the differences of online behavior between teenage girls and boys. The article is based on an earlier PEW research report Teens and Social Media that found that girls are more creative than boys online. Girls blog more, are more active on social networking sites, post more photos and create more websites of their own. The only area where boys are more creative is shooting and posting videos.
Read more…
Twitter Ready for Main-Stream Competition?
Twitter is a great service. The microblogging platform is already the fastest media when it comes to technology and Silicon Valley related news. Twitter is proving to be more and more useful all the time.
It’s a shame Jaiku wasn’t able to keep its front runner position after being bought by Google. Jaiku is the very reason why Twitter hasn’t gotten picked up here in Finland at all, but Worldwide Twitter has close to 900k users (according to TwitDir) and has evolved to become the better service. Read more…
List of Google Killers: Search Engines of the Future
I’ve compiled a list of search engines that will change the way search engines work. I’ve only listed general-purpose sites, not niche or vertical search engines focusing in a specific type of information. I’m not really claiming these services will replace Google as the number one search engine any time soon, but they will at least have an effect on the way Google and the other large search engines will develop their core function.
List of the search engines of the future:
Read more…
Measuring Influence in Social Media and the Future of Marketing Communications
Jonny Bentwood has witten a white paper that outlines views from several prominent individuals on the topic of measuring online influence. It’s called “Distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media“.
Some interesting ideas presented in the paper:
Popularity is a meaningless measure when talking about influence in social media.
Today, it’s not the people with the money who are in control, it’s people with the content.
2008: Problems for Google, Facebook
Forecasting the future is never easy, but the writers of Read/WriteWeb have looked into their crystal balls. It seems that this year will be hard for Google and Facebook. But what will be the biggest thing on the web in 2008? It seems that even they don’t know about it yet.
My predictions are summarized in the following sentence: Asian Open Mobile Twitter Widgets go mainstream.
Some interesting predictions in the original post’s comments as well. Virtual Knitting will be huge!
The Future Of TV Is Personal On-Demand P2P and Community-Created, Mobile Live HD Widget Aggregations For Free
The end of TV as we know it is near. The future of TV is online and ready to hit the mainstream and it will be better than YouTube. It will be more than just good old tv channels streamed to your computer through P2P technology.
The TV of the future will be a form of personal expression on the numerous video blogging platforms.
TV will be on-demand. It will be streamed live from your mobile or webcam.
Read more…
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