Read/WriteWeb

Distributed social networking - where users can connect their profile, friends and other data across multiple sites - is still a relatively new concept and not fully developed. There are plenty of companies and projects vying to be a major piece of the distributed social networking puzzle. The big Internet companies have initiatives such as OpenSocial (Google), Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, Yahoo! Open Strategy. There are also smaller company and open source projects such as DiSo and Noserub (we explain these below).

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For users the following scenario explains the end goal, albeit too simplistically: in a distributed social networking world you would be able to access your Facebook friends in MySpace, and vice versa. Of course, it's far from a perfect world and the Facebook-MySpace sharing scenario in particular is unlikely to happen any time soon. But slowly social networking is beginning to open up - and not just in the major social networks either.

We spotted an interesting screencast in the ReadWriteWeb Friendfeed room, The Future of Tech, that explains distributed social networking more.

Distributed Social Networking - An Introduction from pixelsebi on Vimeo.

The screencast was created by Sebastian Küpers, an Open Web and Virtual Worlds Evangelist from Germany. He starts by explaining that profiles are a building block of social networks - for example there's a lot of useful profile data in his Facebook account that he'd like to use elsewhere. Friends/contacts, messaging, groups, and activity streams are other building blocks of social networks, explained Sebastian.

He mentioned two projects that are aiming to create distributed social networks by using open standards - DiSo Project (our coverage here and here) and Noserub (a German app). DiSo is basically an umbrella project for many of the leading open standards in the social Web currently - microformats, OpenID, OAuth and more. Noserub describes itself as a "protocol" and uses standards like OpenID, RSS and FOAF.

Sebastian outlined the following use case: if you are a MySpace user and want to add someone who isn't a MySpace user to your friends list, right now you can't. But if MySpace supported the open standards that Noserub, DiSo and others are advocating (microformats, OpenID, etc), then it would be possible for MySpace to support that scenario.

Key Differences Between DiSo/Noserub and OpenSocial/fbConnect

One question that people have about distributed social networks, which Sebastian might like to address in a future screencast, is what is the relation between open source projects like DiSo and Noserub, and 'open data' projects of the bigcos such as Google's OpenSocial and Facebook Connect? Chris Messina, one of the founders of DiSo, pointed out one key difference in DiSo's Google Group in June:

"Our model is rather different than OpenSocial as I understand it, as we're trying to architect this in such a way that anyone can host their own friends list (for example) and not necessarily defer to Google, MySpace, etc... for starters."

So for DiSo, they are using the Wordpress blogging platform as their main vehicle for now. However in the same message, Chris mentioned that he's "personally very interested in the overlap between DiSo and fbConnect and OpenSocial." See also Marc Canter's comments on DiSo, because Marc's "open mesh" theories are very relevant here.

If Everything is So Open, Why Can't We Connect Yet?

There is confusion right now because all the commercial vendors are positioning themselves as open - yet they don't necessarily connect to each other! For example Google has been using the term "Open Stack" to explain what OpenSocial is doing. OpenSocial is still in development and it's important to point out that Google doesn't 'own' it, although it is obviously driving it. But OpenSocial isn't being used by key players like Facebook and Microsoft; and when it is being used by bigcos it can be buggy - a RWW commenter recently remarked that MySpace's OpenSocial implementation is "incredibly buggy". So the fact that all of the main pieces of the distributed social networking puzzle are still in beta, goes some way to explaining why ordinary people can't connect many of their profiles just yet.

We'd like to get some more feedback on distributed social networks in the comments - how would you explain the key differences between DiSo/Noserub and OpenSocial/fbConnect to people? How do you see all the different projects connecting together eventually?

Note: the idea for this post came from the ReadWriteWeb Friendfeed room, The Future of Tech. Thanks to Sebastian Küpers for posting it. If you're want to inspire the RWW crew to write posts on certain topics, our Friendfeed room is a great place to let us know! Thanks also Zee for managing that room for us.

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Freelance tech writer Megan McCarthy just landed one of the coolest jobs on the new web, editing semi-automated news aggregator Techmeme. The hire was made last month but just announced today in a blog post by site founder Gabe Rivera.

McCarthy's new job is really interesting in a number of ways. Rivera says with her addition "it really feels like the age of the news cyborg has arrived." It's also very interesting because of who McCarthy is. Most of all it's interesting because it's an absolute dream job for any tech news junky. We discuss the hire in depth over on Jobwire, our site dedicated to covering new hires in tech and new media.

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Today we came across Visual Explorer, a new browser that wants to provide users with a better, more tightly integrated browsing experience. Similar to what Flock does with Firefox, Visual Explorer is built on top of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and provides users with a new user interface, as well as a number of new features. While Flock focuses on integrating lots of social media services, Visual Explorer tries to provide its users with a more extensive set of general browsing features such as live previews for tabs or an enhanced download manager.

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Because of its dependence on Internet Explorer, Visual Explorer is only available for Windows. There, however, it will run on any version of Windows, including Windows 98, ME, NT, and 2000.

Features

Among Visual Explorer's more interesting features are its built-in themes, content filters, and its ability to use IE add-ons. Unlike the latest versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome, Visual Explorer does not feature any private browsing modes, but it does feature an interesting 'cloaking mode' which hides the browser after it has been inactive for a set amount of time.

Some of Visual Explorer's other interesting features that are not available in IE7 or the latest public beta of IE8 are its ability to save web pages as images, an enhanced download manager, and easy access to RSS subscriptions (though no integration with third-party RSS readers).

Oddly missing, however, is a bookmark bar where you can drag-and-drop your most often used bookmarks for quick and easy access. Visual Explorer also doesn't support IE8's Accelerators.

Just as Slow as IE8

Just as expected, when we ran Visual Explorer through the SunSpider benchmark, the results were identical to those for Microsoft's IE8 - and just as unimpressive, especially when compared to Google's Chrome or the latest nightly releases of Firefox 3.1. It is worth pointing out, however, that the Visual Explorer, just like IE8, feels just as fast as Google's Chrome when browsing regular web sites.

Can it Find its Niche?

The browser market is obviously huge, so even getting a small piece of this pie would be a huge success for Visual Explorer. Other companies like Maxthon and Flock have been able to carve out a niche for themselves, and Visual Explorer might be able to do the same by giving users who need to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer more flexibility and useful features than the original product.

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The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the immensely popular Wikipedia, just announced a new project that is meant to make it a lot easier for inexperienced authors to contribute articles and edits to the project. To do this, the Wikimedia Foundation just received a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation. The project will focus on making the user interface for editing and writing Wikipedia articles easier to use for less tech-savvy contributors.

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While there are already numerous browser extensions that try make editing Wikipedia articles easier, the default interface and markup language of the Wikipedia can be quite intimidating for first time users.

Helping First-Time Authors

As Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, points out in the announcement, most of the current Wikipedia authors have a "moderate-to-high level of technical understanding." This, however, excludes a large number of potential contributors who aren't very tech savvy, but would like to participate in the project.

The Wikimedia Foundation will use this grant to create a team of developers and user interface designers that will work on reducing barriers of entry for first-time authors. Specifically, the team will look at hiding the more complex elements of the user interface from users who don't need to deal with them.

To us, this seems like a worthwhile project. Anybody who has looked at the markup language for the Wikipedia knows that is anything but intuitive and that there is quite a learning curve involved before one can start to contribute anything more than simple edits. Reducing these barriers of entry will allow a whole new group of users to contribute their knowledge to the project.

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YouTube is announcing today that video publishers will now have more than 25,000 new songs to choose between for their video soundtracks. The songs are provided by independent music licensing firm Rumblefish and are available using YouTube's AudioSwap feature.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/YouTube_Adds_25k_New_Songs_to_Publishing_Tool';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Rumblefish is a Portland, Oregon based company that provides music for film makers, marketing firms and others. Is it just a lot of elevator music? Searching through the company's own online catalog, MusicLicensingStore.com, our first impression was relatively positive. You can even search for well-known band names and get suggestions for similar sounding unknown groups.

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How It Works

AudioSwap was launched as an experimental feature in February of 2007, with a fairly limited selection of songs separated by genre. If YouTube gives AudioSwap more prominent placement on the site, we suspect this could be a very big hit. The feature replaces the entire audio track of a video with the selected tune, an approach that will admittedly suit some people better than others.

We hope that YouTube will add a search function similar to the one on the Rumblefish site; the project would get a lot more traction if users could search for big names in music and get recommendations of similar bands they haven't heard of before.

Music licensing is an active if complicated market online, with major labels doing deals over the past year with both YouTube and MySpace. Video publishers interested in getting off the beaten path of mainstream music and doing so legally at no cost to themselves could find the newly expanded AudioSwap of great interest.

Following on the heals of YouTube's Global Symphony project, the Rumblefish announcement is another example of how much room for innovation still exists in online video.

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Starting today, companies and trademark holders can start registering their own .tel domains. However, unlike most domain names, .tel domains are severely restricted by Telnic, the main registrar for these domains. Users and companies can only put up their contact information on these sites and they can only do so through Telnic's own forms.

In some respects, these domains are similar to GoDaddy's SmartSpace or Chi.mp, only that these two products are far more flexible.

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During the current 'Sunrise' phase, only trademark holders can register .tel domains. The general public will have to wait until the 'Landrush' phase, which starts on February 3, 2009.

Online Phonebook

At its best, .tel domains could become something like an online phonebook, though the minimal amount of flexibility will surely disappoint many potential users. In its current state, .tel users can't even add their own logos to these domains.

GoDaddy and Chi.mp

GoDaddy and Chi.mp might be targeting a slightly different audience, but users get far more flexibility with these products, including the ability to aggregate their activity on social networks and to apply different themes and logos to their profiles.

In the end, the success of the .tel domains will depend on third-party developers. If other websites, social networks, or mobile phone address books start supporting these domains (and those of Telnic's competitors), then this might become an easy way to keep address books up to date. But then, you could also do this with any service that provides you with a vCard.

Can it Work?

In an age where the Internet is still synonymous with .com addresses (or their local equivalent) for the vast majority of users, it remains to be seen if these .tel domains will find a lot of takers. Also, the average price for .tel domains for individuals we found from US registrars was around $20, which is a lot more than most people pay for their .com domains - and those give their owners a lot more flexibility.

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With the rise of app-laden smartphones like the iPhone and Google's Android OS, now on T-Mobile's G1, many penny-pinching shoppers have downloaded barcode scanning applications onto their mobile devices. These apps allow consumers to compare the prices of merchandise on a store's shelf to competing stores in the area just by taking pictures with their smartphone's camera. The prices are instantly retrieved and displayed on the mobile phone so consumers can know before they buy if they're getting a good deal.

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Although consumers may be catching on to this barcode-scanning trend, some stores are still in the dark. For example, a Target store in Michigan recently requested a shopper to stop scanning merchandise, saying it went against store policy. The customer reported the event to the application's makers, Big in Japan, whose app Shop Savvy is a popular download for Android handsets.

Big in Japan called the Target store in question and spoke to the manager, who indicated that she was not aware of the policy. We also contacted Target's corporate headquarters to confirm Target's policy, or lack thereof, but we first had to explain the application to the company representative. They had never heard of such a thing before! (As it turns out, Target has no policy whatsoever on barcode scanning their merchandise.)

The same customer also noted they had visited Sam's Club, where they demonstrated the application to a store employee who seemed "confounded that such technology even existed," wrote the user.

Instant Price Match Is Retail's Future

Although this is just anecdotal evidence from one customer, it's entirely believable that without concrete store policies in place, you're going to encounter rogue employees here and there who have no idea what you're doing and will ask you to stop.

On the flip side, stores that do get hip to this trend may decide to implement store policies that ban scanning, once they realize that customers could discover their high prices. A post on AdLab for example, a blog about advertising and marketing, suggests retailers do just that. They also recommend retailers should consider investing in a a cell phone jammer. They even provide a "No iPhones on Premises" sign for printout.

That doesn't seem to be a very proactive way of dealing with the technology. In fact, it reminds us of how both the music and movie industry attempted to quash the pirating of songs and films: they just tried to make it stop. Instead of going a route destined for failure and trying to shut down barcode scanning altogether, retailers could choose to embrace the trend. They could offer easy-to-find barcodes on their promotional items with signage encouraging customers to compare the price instantly with other stores in the area. They could make barcode scanning the new advertising circular.

Hopefully, stories like those of the Shop Savvy customer will remain isolated incidents and no other store employees will bother customers looking to save money. If you've used barcode scanning applications and have experiences to share, please let us know in the comments.

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Dimdim, the easy-to-use web conferencing tool that delivers live presentations, whiteboards, voice and video, has just exited their beta period today. With the exit, the service has also added features like co-browsing and their new SynchroLive Communication Platform which automatically scales performance. The feature which you might be the most excited about, though, is Dimdim's decision to release their source code.

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The New Platform

With the new SynchroLive Communication platform, the service is now more scalable while keeping all live communications synchronized, no matter whether you're sharing audio, video, files, or web pages. This was one of the areas where Dimdim stumbled in the past. When we used it here at RWW for sharing our desktop with our readers during our testing of Chrome, the audio and video weren't matching up. That problem is, supposedly, no more. (We'll have to do another live demo and find out!) Says the company, the platform now makes it possible for five audio streams to be recorded, where before Dimdim only supported recording one.

The platform also allows for the new co-browsing feature to work. With this, a presenter can share their web browser with viewers who can then also be made presenters in order to browse along with the original presenter. The co-browsing allows for scrolling up and down, but does not track mouse movements, so it is not as good for using your mouse to point to an element of a web page. However, when you just want to share material on the web with a group - say, for example, a professor teaching remote students, it would be a good solution.

Open Source Dimdim, "Liberty"

Also launched today with the release of Dimdim 4.5 is the launch of "Liberty," the Open Source Community Edition of the new commercial hosted version. Liberty's complete source code will be made available under a GPL3 license with no limit to the number of attendees, meetings, or mashups that can be created. Liberty is also available as a downloadable VMWare Virtual Appliance.

The Open Source version also integrates with other web applications, including:

• Zimbra: Dimdim now offers a free zimlet for Zimbra's open source email system;
• Moodle: Dimdim is integrated with version 1.9 of Moodle's Course Management System;
• SugarCRM: Dimdim is integrated with the leading open source customer relationship management system,
• Claroline: Dimdim is embedded within with the collaborative learning environment.

More Enhancements

Those who have used Dimdim in the past will notice some subtle UI changes in the newest version including a smaller top frame and revamped menus on the left. Drop-down arrows have been added to those menus for easy access to files and shared web pages, too.

In the future, Dimdim will also allow for skinning changes and templates. Because Dimdim's service-oriented architecture is composed of a handful of different services (screen sharing, audio streaming, video, etc.), the platform makes it possible to use customize the look and feel of the Dimdim interface and create a template just for your needs. If you're only sharing web browsers, for example, you could turn all the other features off. The templates created by Dimdim users could then be shared with each other. Dimdim says these new features will be available sometime early next year.

In addition to the no-cost Open Source version, Dimdim will continue to offer a free version for meetings with 20 or fewer people. Dimdim Pro 4.5 starts at $99 per year for unlimited meetings plus video chat.

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With the relative freedom provided by laptops, mobile devices, and more affordable transportation, people have become more migratory and, yet, better at remaining connected - or at the very least, accessible. Nowhere is this more evident than in the tech sector, where individuals are jetting back and forth to attend events or meet up with coworkers halfway across the world.

And when it comes to keeping track of the techie crowd and their travels, Dopplr is one of the best resources around. Now, they're giving users a view into some of those travel patterns with Dopplr city pages.

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Dopplr has been testing the pages internally for some time. Now, they're exposing them to the Dopplr users. As the name implies, these new pages provide a visualization of annual visitor activity for practically any city on Dopplr. There are metrics, as well, including information on fellow travelers in town, the number of trips to the city overall, the number of trips for the given day, local time, and interesting facts - like from which cities people are generally visiting.

Looking at even a few pages reveals some interesting trends. Austin, Texas, USA, for example, gets a heavy influx of Dopplr users in March. Why? The annual pilgrimage to the SXSW interactive festival. Portland, OR, USA, by contrast, shows a definite uptick during the summer months. London, Paris, and Tokyo have steady traffic throughout the year. (Obviously, I could spend hours just thumbing through these cities.)

But there's something else interesting happening here - which Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned recently. To make the reports a little more aesthetically appealing, the city pages pull in images of the respective cities from Creative Commons licensed content held on Flickr. Not only does it provide more context for the city, it offers yet another venue for Flickr users to showcase their work. All thanks to Creative Commons.

Unfortunately, while the image concept is laudable - and often beautiful - many of the randomly selected photos tend to obscure the graphs of the travel data. So, if you're looking for beautiful images, you're in luck. But if you want to read the data, sometimes you're going to have to strain to see it.

Nonetheless, Dopplr city pages are well worth a visit. It's great to see Dopplr exposing some of the interesting data points that the company has been accumulating about its user base. And I'm a firm believer that any time this sort of data is made accessible, it's always wise to take a cursory look, for my own edification.

To see city pages in action, register or log in to Dopplr and search for the cities that interest you - or try clicking through some of the cities from your trips.

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You've got enough to do. And learning a new task management system - as helpful as that might be - is rarely on your list of tasks to complete. But what if there were a task management system that was simple and intuitive, enabling you to scratch that "get organized" New Year's resolution off the list a little early? Deadline may be that app.

Designed to take natural language commands via Web, email, and IM/Jabber, Deadline exudes task management simplicity.

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To use Deadline, simply establish an account and start populating it with your tasks and - of course - the deadlines for those task. But don't worry about some arcane nomenclature. Deadline has enough intelligence to understand common date formats as well as simple, natural language commands like "tomorrow," "next week," and "next Tuesday." And if the command is too cryptic, the app will ask you to clarify.

Not into the Web interface? No problem. You can also send tasks to Deadline via a unique email address. Simply address the email to Deadline and fill out the subject with the task and date. Or add Deadline to your GTalk/Jabber friends and start loading up your tasks via IM.

Getting reminders is just as easy. They arrive via IM and email, alerting you that you have tasks due. And if you're into a little more warning, you can track your tasks via an authenticated RSS feed or add your task list to an iCal compatible calendar. There are even top secret feed URLs for adding open RSS feeds to systems - like Google Calendar - that don't support authentication.

Admittedly, the simplicity may be far too simple for some. But for those who are looking for a straightforward task management system, Deadline seems to satisfy a number of common requirements. What's more, if you're a former Sandy user, I think you'll find Deadline picks up right where Sandy left off.

To try the application for yourself, register for Deadline.

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Whether it's with your family, your co-workers or your clients - many of us like to share the excitement we have about the new, social web with others. What do you show other people to demonstrate how powerful, and yet easy to use, this new world of technology really is?

We asked our staff and a number of other advanced social web users what the one thing is that they like most to show people who are less experienced with the web than they are. Some of our favorite responses are below, maybe they'll give you some fresh ideas about how to have that big conversation with the people in your life - maybe some of them will even be new for you.

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We think this is more than just fun to talk about. We think those moments of sharing and discovery of the best basic new apps offer lessons to learn about contemporary human psychology.

The Big Picture

Most of the people we talked to said they showed their friends and family something that falls into one of three categories: syndication, visualization or music. We agree that these are great approaches for turning people on to the new web.

There were a number of people who said that showing people how to use browser tabs made a big difference. (This author has a hard time comprehending that, to be honest.) Communications consultant Jordan Guthman says he likes to show people Google's "advanced search" and in particular the option to limit searches to content posted within the last 24 hours. (I must admit that's a new one to me!) That probably helps illustrate that the new web is always fresh and changing.

Betsy Weber works at TechSmith, makers of screen casting programs Camtasia and Jing, tools people use to share new things about the web with each other every day. Betsy says she likes to show people Firefox Mouse Gestures. Macbook Pro owners should check out the similar multi-touch command app MultiClutch. Both of these are big time savers, helping users navigate quickly through the expansive web.

Useful: Syndication

Syndication and RSS are life changing stuff, so we weren't surprised to that many people we talked to said that some variation of RSS is the first thing they show people.

Google Alerts are very popular but they aren't the only way to introduce people to the subscribable web. (This season's newest addition to the service - RSS feeds for Google Alerts, is pretty cool though.)

Using RSS feeds helps users move beyond stumbling through a handful of websites, caught unaware of emerging information unless by chance visits to sites. It puts us in command of a personalized information flow, increased in timeliness and breadth by orders of magnitude over our old browsing habits.

PR pro Mike Maney says he starts with an RSS reader (specifically, NetNewsWire from Newsgator) because it's "amazing watching people immediately grok the power of the web coming to them." We've found too that simply showing people a filled-up RSS reader turns on light bulbs immediately. Talking about the idea, not so much.

Josh Bancroft checks out cool new things and then shows them to other people for a living, at Intel. He likes to start people out with the Common Craft video RSS in Plain English. We like that video a lot, too.










iGoogle is another popular way to show off syndication technology and it comes with the convenience and brand familiarity of Google. Netvibes, possibly the easiest "start page" to customize, is also a favorite to show new users.

SocialText's Schott Schnaars says he pointed his family to FriendFeed, where they can find all of his activity syndicated in one place. That makes a lot of sense to us, though we suspect that a separate lifestreaming account might best keep family from being overwhelmed by too much work-related information they aren't interested in.

Marshall's Pick

What do I like to show people to turn them on to syndication? I generally show them Netvibes or iGoogle but after that, I like to show them how to find feeds to fill those pages up with. There's no better way to do that than with Yahoo's social bookmarking service Delicious. Specifically, I like to show them links like http://delicious.com/tag/TopicOfInterest+blog. Check out the most popular links there and you'll find some of the best blogs on whatever your topic of interest is. We discussed this and similar strategies in a post here titled Comparing Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche.

Show people how to find and subscribe to the top blogs on topics they are interested in and most people will be quickly engaged. It's really useful - far more useful than platitudes about "joining the conversation." Most people don't know where to look to find the conversation. Show them and they get really excited.

Next Page: Fun! Visualization and Music

Fun: Visualization and Music

Reading blogs and feeds may be good for work but work alone can sustain no one. Nor can it sustain most peoples' interest in all the new things going on online.

A number of people that we asked said that Google Maps, Earth and Streetview were their favorite things to show new users. Those certainly make a big impression. That's especially true with the new redesign of Google Maps and Streetview. For the sheer power of Google's view of the globe to be compacted down into my little browser is truly awe inspiring.

Looking at images of our world and the streets we live on isn't the only visualization that's easy to get excited about, though. Hardware blogger Mari Silbey says she shows people image browser CoolIris. That's fast becoming a very popular browser extension.

None of those visualization tools offer quite the feeling of teeming humanity that journalist Craig McGinty's favorite, TwitterVision, does. This world map of real time Twitter messages immediately communicates that there are everyday people all around the world communicating with new online tools, all day long. It's quite compelling.

While you're perusing all this imagery, why not listen to some music in the background? A number of people we asked said that they liked to show people music recommendation sites Pandora and Last.fm or MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine.

Showing people not just free and legal music online, but free and legal music where the discovery is powered by algorithms, network effects and economies of scale - that's an exciting experience for almost anyone. It still excites me every time I visit these sites and think about what's going on.

Perspective: History

All of these tools and toys that we show people to share our excitement about the new web deserve some amount of criticism, as well, for a balanced perspective. The wisdom of the crowd may not be the best way to have your editorial decisions made in music, news or other content. Google's omniscience warrants some serious skepticism. RSS increases information consumption but may very well cost us contemplation.

We believe that these tools are still worth using, though. When used well, they give us super-powers as information workers. Those powers can be used for good.

There was a time in history when access to knowledge came in the form of monthly rides on a horse into the local town where the library was located. Those times had their up-sides, but our relationship to this kind of knowledge about the world was not one of them.

None the less, life before Web 2.0, life before the internet, certainly had a lot to offer. The Digital Divide not withstanding, we who live in many parts of the world will find ourselves, relatively soon, with no one in our lives who remembers what the world was like before the internet. That will be a significant loss for our collective knowledge.

Perhaps talking to people who do not live in the web, showing them what we're excited about, can be a learning experience for us as well as for them.

What about you? What do you like to show people first who are unfamiliar with all of this? Let us know in comments; those wonder-filled moments of discovery are fun to think about. Perhaps it's the memory of that high that keeps so many of us tuned in to all the new applications that launch every day - the hope that we will find "another RSS," another Pandora/Last.fm, another game changer that we couldn't even imagine before it came into our lives.

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In 2008 we saw the Semantic Web gain traction, giving us plenty of choice when selecting the 10 best Semantic Web products of 2008.

This is the first in a series of posts we'll publish over December, listing our choices for the top web products of the year. Then at the end of December, we'll post a Top 100 list - which we'll be promoting over 2009 and opening up at some point for public voting. Without further ado, let's jump into the top 10 Semantic Web products of 2008.

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Earlier this month we posted an update to 10 Semantic Web applications that we have been tracking for a year now. Some of those make this list, as well as some from our follow-up post 10 More Semantic Apps to Watch. We also have a couple of other products in this list, which for one reason or another didn't get mentioned in our watch-lists.

You may disagree with our selections, so do tell us in the comments what you think.

Note: the products listed below are in no particular order

1. Yahoo! SearchMonkey

In May this year Yahoo! launched an open developer platform for search called SearchMonkey. Yahoo hasn't had the happiest of years, but its willingness to innovate in search is to be commended. As we reported at the Web 2.0 Expo in April, SearchMonkey is a component of a major overhaul at Yahoo! across all of its properties to "rewire" for the social graph and data portability. SearchMonkey allows developers to build applications on top of Yahoo! search, including allowing site owners to share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup (microformats, RDF), standardized XML feeds, APIs (OpenSearch or other web services), and page extraction.

We think this is the best use of Semantic Web by an Internet bigco this year. So for that reason SearchMonkey makes our top 10 list. Related: The Story of SearchMonkey.

2. Powerset (acquired by Microsoft in '08)

Powerset (see our initial coverage here and here) is a natural language search engine. It's fair to say that Powerset has had a great 2008, having been acquired by Microsoft in July this year.

At the time of the acquisition, Powerset said that it needed a bigger partner to expand its product beyond its current state of only searching Wikipedia - something we had speculated about when the rumors of the acquisition first appeared. In its own statement, Microsoft stressed how useful Powerset's technology will be for improving Microsoft's own search products and to "take Search to the next level." In our analysis of the deal, we noted that it was a "bold play requiring exact execution" by Microsoft.

3. Open Calais (Thomson Reuters)

At the end of 2007, ClearForest had been recently acquired by Reuters and at that point it had a Web Service and a Firefox extension. What a change a year brings! ClearForest went on to release Calais, a toolkit of products that enable users to incorporate semantic functionality within their blog, content management system, website or application.

Since launching the Open Calais API early this year, over 6,000 developers have registered with it and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. Version 3.0 was released earlier this month and version 4 is expected by January 09.

4. Dapper MashupAds

In November we wrote about the recent improvement in Dapper MashupAds, a product we first spotted over a year ago. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that's related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. That could be movies, books, travel destinations - anything. We remarked that the UI for this has grown much more sophisticated in the past year.

The company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically. We think this has plenty of promise, so it makes our year-end list.

5. Hakia

Hakia is a search engine focusing on natural language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Over the past year Hakia has been busy extending its reach - licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology to other companies in March and announcing a Semantic API in June. It was also one of the first companies to utilize Yahoo! BOSS, by integrating their semantic parsing with the Yahoo! search index.

We think Hakia has made good progress getting its technology into the hands of third parties and making use of Yahoo's broader index, so for that reason it's among our top 10 for the year.

6. TripIt

Tripit is an app that manages your travel planning. With TripIt, you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest.

Over the past year TripIt has continued to iterate on its feature set - introducing LinkedIn integration, better mobile functionality, more social networking features, and other goodies. In short, it's user experience continues to rock!

7. BooRah

BooRah is a restaurant review site that we first reviewed earlier this year and has come on in leaps and bounds over 2008. BooRah uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs. Because of this, BooRah can recognize praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly. BooRah also gathers reviews from Citysearch, Tripadvisor and other large review sites.

BooRah also announced last month the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah's data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons.

8. AdaptiveBlue

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's founder Alex Iskold is a feature writer at RWW.

AdaptiveBlue are makers of the Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer. As we wrote in January this year, the basic idea behind BlueOrganizer is that it gives you added information about webpages you visit and offers useful links based on the subject matter.

Over the past year the company has been working on a new product, called Glue. Launched last month, Glue is a more social networking oriented version of BlueOrganizer - it connects you to your friends based around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. We think the company has diversified smartly in 2008, by integrating social networking and mobile functionality into its products.

9. Zemanta

Zemanta is a blogging tool which harnesses semantic technology to add relevant content to your posts. While it didn't make either of our 'Semantic Apps to Watch' lists in November, a number of commenters pointed it out as something they use. In September we covered a major upgrade to Zemanta's service, allowing users to specify the sources they want to see in the suggestions list that Zemanta provides. Users can now incorporate their own social networks, RSS feeds, and photos into their blog posts. As we noted, this makes Zemanta a lot more appealing to established bloggers who are in less need of suggestions and more in need of automation.

Zemanta's API is also being used by startups, including semantic bookmarking service Faviki - which we mentioned in our second Watch-list. So all up, we think Zemanta has done enough this year to be included in our top 10 list.

10. UpTake

Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make the process of booking travel online easier. In our review in May, we explained that UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities - over 400,000 of them - from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations.

And now please let us know in the comments what you think of our selections. Do you think we've picked the best 10 Semantic Web products of the year?

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Nokia today unveiled its new flagship phone, the N97, which is clearly meant to compete with the iPhone and Google's Android platform. Unlike the iPhone, however, the N97 has a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard. In terms of its other hardware features, the N97 also clearly outperforms the iPhone. The N97 supports up to 48 GB of storage, including the 32 GB that are already built-in. The phone has a 5 megapixel camera and its GPS is capable of giving turn-by-turn directions. The resolution of the phone's 16:9 touchscreen is 640x360.

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Location

The phone will also be able to make use of Nokia's updated mapping product, which will feature 3D landmarks and, according to Nokia, is more versatile than Google Maps. These new maps themselves pose a major challenge to Google, as Nokia will, at some point in the near future, allow users to point their phones at a building and get relevant information (and presumably advertising) about that building on their phone.

Interface

Of course, the iPhone's real advantage (as well as that of any Android phone) was never its hardware, but its operating system and the overall elegance of its user interface. It is hard to say where the N97 falls here based on the videos we have seen so far. Earlier Nokia N-series phones also featured extremely capable hardware, but the operating system made it extremely hard to make good use of these features. In terms of software, Nokia does have one ace up its sleeve, and that is the N97's ability to play Flash videos and games. The OS also supports copy and paste, which is still sorely missing on the iPhone.

Widgets

The main feature of the phone's touch-enhanced Symbian OS is its support for widgets, which will be open for third-party developers and are available for download through an application on the phone itself. Nokia calls the N97 a 'mobile computer,' and a lot of its success will surely depend on the applications that third-party developers will develop for the phone. Apple's App store already features over 10,000 native applications, so Nokia definitely has to play catch-up here.

We have to say that the phone's hardware and user interface look extremely slick. Of course, we haven't been able to get our hands on one yet, and the demo video is nice, but as we know from Apple's ads, these videos can be quite deceptive as well.

Overall, the N97 looks like a formidable challenger (especially with regards to its hardware specs), but much of its success will depend on the quality and ease of use of its user interface.

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While OpenID is one of the more interesting online identity concepts, usability issues have clearly hampered its mainstream adoption. Flock, MySpace, and OpenID provider Vidoop have now come together to develop a browser extension for Flock that makes using OpenID a lot easier for Flock users. Besides managing your OpenID credentials, the extension also detects when a site supports OpenID and lets you sign in with the click of a button.

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While the extension is still in alpha, it worked perfectly fine in our tests.

Usability

One of the main problems with OpenID, a technology that allows you to use the same set of credentials to sign into any service that supports this standard, is that it is often confusing to mainstream users. A number of large vendors that support OpenID, including Yahoo, MySpace, and Microsoft, have started to develop best practices for using OpenID, but to us, this extension for Flock might just represent one of the best solutions we have seen so far.

The extension is based on Vidoop's work on 'Identity in the Browser,' which has also resulted in an interesting OpenID solution for Firefox.

Flock, of course, does not have a very large user base, but other extension and browser developers will hopefully use this as an inspiration to create similar features for other browsers in the near future.

IDIB OpenID for Flock from phatbuddhaz on Vimeo.

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We recently had the opportunity to meet with two senior executives at Google. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus and I met with Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. Then a few weeks later, I met with Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, via video conference. Both meetings provided some interesting background - but the one question that keeps returning and that was not so well answered is: why is Google not deploying Gears aggressively?

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What Is Gears?

As explained on Google's FAQ:

"Gears is an open-source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server;
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser;
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background."

That is important. The biggest single hurdle to mass adoption of web-based office software is the inability to use it when online access is not possible (in airplanes and other fun places off the grid). Offline access is also reassuring for those times when the cloud platform is having trouble: at least you can work offline for a while. This is not a small feature. It is the big one.

We get the usual beta warnings from Google:

"Gears is currently a beta product; moreover, it is currently considered to be a developer-only release. When the developer community has had a chance to examine, critique, and improve Gears, a final version suitable for use with production applications will be made available."

But we learn to ignore these beta designations from Google. Gmail still says beta.

But in this case, Google really is being shy about fully bringing Gears to its own product line-up.

Zoho Is Using Gears. Why Not Google Apps?

Zoho started using Gears in Writer as early as August 2007, nearly 18 months ago. In October 2008, Zoho Mail went offline with Gears.

On March 31st, 2008, Google announced Gears for Docs. This was a step forward, albeit 8 months after its competition (Zoho) did it.

So, the big question is, "When will Gmail enable offline use via Gears?" I posed this question to Dave Grirouard, President of Google Enterprise. The response was along the lines of, making it work on the scale of Gmail is not a trivial engineering challenge. That sort of made sense. But Gears has been out for a long time; it is a critical feature, and Google has the best software engineering talent on the planet.

Ahem, What About Chrome?

Again, from Google's FAQ:

"Gears works on the following browsers:

• Apple Mac OS X (10.4 or higher)
  • Firefox 1.5 or higher
  • Safari 3.1.1 or higher (requires OS X Tiger 10.4.11+ or Leopard 10.5.3+)
• Linux (Requirements)
  • Firefox 1.5 or higher
• Microsoft Windows (XP or higher)
  • Firefox 1.5 or higher
  • Internet Explorer 6 or higher
• Microsoft Windows Mobile (5 or higher)
  • Internet Explorer 4.01 or higher
  • The following devices are not supported
    • Samsung i320 and i320N
    • Orange SPV C600
    • Motorola Q

Additionally, the team is working on supporting Safari on Mac OS X in a future release."

Notice the elephant not in the room? Yes, Gears does not work on Chrome. Is that because Chrome does not support extensions?

Is Google holding up Gears until Chrome can support Gears? We hope not. That seems contrary to its philosophy to date, which has been to couple them very loosely. So that is probably just coincidence.

Editor's update: we obviously got the above section totally wrong, so it's been struck out. Apologies for that error, but thanks to our commenters for quickly pointing it out!

"Gears for Mobile Is the Holy Grail"

I had a fascinating talk with Vic Gundotra (VP of Engineering) and Sumit Agarwal (Mobile Product Management). They laid out a mobile strategy that clearly shows that Google is thinking bigger and deeper than anyone else about the future of this huge market. They were also frank about the scale of the engineering challenge. Looking globally, there is no dominant mobile device. In fact, it is an extremely fragmented market. That is a problem when each user expects a native interface.

Vic Gundotra described how about a year ago Google bet that the mobile browser would be the unifying force. Specifically, the strategy was to standardize on Webkit-based browsers. That makes sense but still leaves out the all-important offline access question. So, I posed the "What about Gears?" question. I was told that Gears in a mobile browser was, of course, the "holy grail."

The Answer Given Is Probably Correct

Google is confirming that Gears is critically important to both its web apps and its mobile strategy, and that the delay is simply because deploying Gears on the scale that Google operates is a tough engineering challenge. That seems like the best explanation. But we would love to hear from our readers. Have you used Zoho Mail with Gears, and did it work well? Is it simply a scale issue that is delaying Google's more aggressive deployment of Gears?

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Imagine TweetDeck as an online application. Now imagine that you could use its paneled dashboard interface to keep tabs on your other online identities, too. With PeopleBrowsr, you can. This new application, currently in alpha, lets you update your networks, follow your friends, organize your favorites, and search for content across networks that include Twitter, flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, Seesmic, identi.ca, Photobucket, upcoming, and FriendFeed.

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About PeopleBrowser

Keeping tabs on all the happenings across the social web can be a challenge. For some, FriendFeed is the destination of choice as it lets you see streams of information from all your friends as they share, comment, and participate in social media. Others find the application too noisy, as it requires a lot of manual tweaking and filtering to remove unwanted content.

A good alternative for those who want to keep up with the social web in a more organized fashion is PeopleBrowsr, a virtual dashboard for tracking your online identities. It's very much inspired by TweetDeck with panels that you scroll through horizontally. It also has a "Groups" feature, but its implementation was somewhat confusing. We'll give it a pass for now, though, as the application is still in alpha.

How To Use It

To get started with PeopleBrowsr, you simply add your online IDs and authorize the PeopleBrowsr service when necessary, as with flickr and YouTube. Once you're finished, you can then switch over to the PeopleBrowsr app itself.

There are actually two different views to choose from: the stream view (which resembles TweetDeck) and the Gallery view which lays out the avatars of your friends across the page. You must select your view of choice upon login. In the Gallery view, you can click on friends' avatars to see their latest updates and then interact with those updates accordingly, depending on what network you are browsing at the time.

To select the network you want to see, there's a navigation bar at the top left side of the page. You can scroll through the various online sites listed, selecting those you want displayed. In the Stream view, this is more practical as it loads up each new network in a separate panel, letting you then scroll horizontally from Twitter, to flickr, to YouTube, etc.

Your Streams

Each network provides different options for the types of views you can add to your paneled view. Clicking on the network from the navigation bar (see above) will add some default views to the window, but you can also choose to add other views from the navigation bar above the streams themselves. For Twitter, the views to choose from may include things like Replies and your Friends Timeline, for Flickr it includes options like Favorites and Friends' photos, and for YouTube, it includes your videos, your favorites, and so on.

PeopleBrowsr also has "PeopleTags" which let you tag friends in order to create cross-network groups. This feature wasn't entirely intuitive to use because the "My Groups" option appears at the top of the page even when no groups have been created. It seems to respond to a click but does nothing even though you're assuming that it will open up a pane for group creation as in TweetDeck. However, as you click on the individual posted items in your streams, you have the option of tagging them in order to create groups which then makes the "My Groups" link functional.

PeopleBrowsr Shows Promise

For an alpha app, this is a great first start. There are still some tweaks, like the Groups feature for example, that need to be made. Also, although it was possible to add a FriendFeed ID, FriendFeed did not appear in the top navigation for some reason. Without its inclusion, this would be an incomplete application. The app was also slow at times, once even crashing Firefox entirely. However, it's hard to tell for sure whether that's the app at fault or the pre-beta OS the testing was done on. That said, PeopleBrowsr definitely looks like a promising tool to organize your social streams in ways that make sense to you.

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Memorization is a waste of time when Google is only a a few clicks away. That's what Don Tapscott, author of the bestselling books Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital, believes. Tapscott, considered by many to be a leading commentator on our Internet age, believes the age of learning through the memorization of facts and figures is coming to an end. Instead, students should be taught to think creatively and better understand the knowledge that's available online.

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Rote Learning is a Waste of Time

According to Tapscott, the existence of Google, Wikipedia, and other online libraries means that rote memorization is no longer a necessary part of education. "Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is," Tapscott told the Times. "Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don't need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorize that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google," he said.

He doesn't feel that method of learning is anti-education since the information we must all digest is coming in at lightning speed. "Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times," he continues. "So for them memorizing facts and figures is a waste of time."

For the older generations who grew up having to memorize historical dates and mathematical formulas, the idea that memorization shouldn't be a part of the educational experience is somewhat shocking. Of course you need to know the exact year something happened...don't you? Or is it better to just have a general idea so you can focus on better understanding the context and meaning?

Our Wired Brains

Today's students are growing up in a world where multi-tasking has them completely immersed in digital experiences. They text and surf the net while listening to music and updating their Facebook page. This "continuous partial attention" and its impacts on our brains is a much-discussed topic these days in educational circles. Are we driving distracted or have our brains adapted to the incoming stimuli?

A new book on the subject, "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," states that our exposure to the net is impacting the way our brains form neural pathways. Wiring up our brains like this makes us adept at filtering information, making snap decisions, and fielding the incoming digital debris, but sustained concentration, reading body language, and making offline friends are skills that are fading away.

If our brains are, in fact, becoming rewired, wouldn't it make sense that the way we teach students to learn should adapt, too? Actually, there aren't too many people who think so. Most educators, like Richard Cairns, Headmaster of Brighton College, one of the U.K's top-performing independent schools, believe that core level of knowledge was essential. "It's important that children learn facts. If you have no store of knowledge in your head to draw from, you cannot easily engage in discussions or make informed decisions," he says.

Do you agree?

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Last week, ReadWriteWeb and RWW Jobwire both reported on Twitter acquiring Rael Dornfest's company, Values of n. The acquisition brought Rael to Twitter, along with products Sandy and Stikkit. The unfortunate part of the news for Sandy users was that - like Six Apart's acquisition of Pownce - Twitter has decided to shutter the Values of n services, leaving a number of faithful users without a virtual digital assistance.

But all hope may not be lost. Lifehacker reports that a group of developers are scrambling to develop an open-source version of Sandy.

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For those who never got the chance to meet Sandy, she served as an anthropomorphic digital assistant who helped users remember to-dos and appointments. And she was intelligent enough to interact via email, IM, and Twitter. (Clearly, she took on so many human qualities that many of us continue to refer to her as "her" instead of "it.")

The open-source project proposes to recreate Sandy from the ground up, ensuring that users still have access to the functionality that the original Sandy possessed. They're beginning to consider plans for monetization, as well.

Like many open-source pursuits, this project stems from user frustration over the lack of control they have in the situation. It will be interesting to see where the community decides to take the project now that they have more control over Sandy's features.

For now, the developers are seeking guidance on initial features and functionality:

"If you are a fan of Sandy, let us know here or at mysandy on twitter what features are most important to you, highest priority for us to focus on implementing first. Note that we won't be able to recreate all of Sandy's full feature-set for a first release. So it's helpful to know from you what your priorities are. Please keep in mind we'll need to provide features based on what's available to us open source and free, for now, so that will be a constraint on what features are in the first release."

It's also interesting to note, that there are already mentions of working with identi.ca, the open-source microblogging tool that sprung onto the scene during a similarly difficult time with Twitter.

Whatever the case, they're off to a running start. The team says they currently have a proof of concept prototype up and running.

We'll continue to keep tabs on the open-source Sandy, even without the original Sandy around to remind us to do so.

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Always wanted to play in a symphony? Here's your chance - without even leaving your living room. YouTube has just announced the "world's first collaborative online orchestra" - the YouTube Symphony Orchestra - a one-of-a-kind experiment that provides individual musicians with an opportunity to collaborate with other musicians all over the world.

But that's not all. If you play well enough, show some creativity, and exude passion, you may find yourself seated in the famed Carnegie Hall, performing live with other YouTube musicians.

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The contest is open to all musicians over age 14, regardless of instrument or skill. But it's not going to be easy. It's going to take some practice.

To begin, download the sheet music and start learning your part. The music? You get to pick your favorite classical piece to showcase your talent. And you'll also have the opportunity to perform a new piece - "The Internet Symphony" - by Chinese composer Tan Dun, the Grammy and Oscar winning composer of the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

But you won't be practicing alone. YouTube will help you learn the music, rehearse, and upload your performance for the virtual symphony video. Along the way you'll gain insight from Tan Dun and the London Symphony Orchestra, and get tips from pianist Lang Lang. Rest assured, all of your hard work and practice will pay off, culminating in a unique YouTube concert composed of users from around the globe.

If you perform well enough, there may be more in store for you. Musicians who exhibit that certain je ne se quois will get the opportunity to perform at the renowned Carnegie Hall, under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

Submissions are open until January 28, 2009. The live performance in Carnegie Hall will be held in April 2009.

Now, would be a good time to start practicing.

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A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the first birthday of Google's OpenSocial project, an open API framework for social networks and websites. Google's OpenSocial Blog recently presented some statistics, including that OpenSocial now reaches nearly 675 M registered users and there are 7,500 applications.

What's interesting about these numbers is that the single largest number of registered users isn't coming from MySpace, hi5 or even Orkut. The largest user base appears to be from 51.com, which as we've reported before is one of China's largest social networks with 130M registered users.

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China is obviously a key market for OpenSocial, with another recent Chinese addition being the social network Xiaonei (30M registered people).

Here are the other stats that Google mentioned:

• 315M+ app installs
• 85M+ daily canvas page views
• 7,500+ applications
• 20+ live containers

2,100 of the 7,500 apps are attributed to hi5.

As we noted in our previous post, for the first year OpenSocial has seen tremendous uptake in the online community. The list of organizations developing apps includes AOL, Bebo, hi5, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Yahoo!. Of course still missing from OpenSocial are Facebook and Microsoft.

Perhaps with MySpace covering the key U.S. base and the Chinese social networks coming on board OpenSocial, Facebook will find itself on the outer. Google looks to be well on its way to defining the "new open stack" and populating it with large social networks - so we have to wonder how long Facebook can hold out, even despite its recent moves to expand Facebook Connect. Check out the full OpenSocial slides here.

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