Josh Norem, a former editor with Maximum PC magazine, offers his take on the relative strengths of magazines and the web – and, he say, the web wins hands-down. Nothing particularly new in the arguments, but they obvious have some resonance as it was on the front page of Digg.
Even though I wasn’t able to be at the second day of Future of Web Apps (see previous posts for an account of day one), through the magic of blogs, I am able to provide an account of what went on.
Tags: fowalondon07
David Neeleman ceo of US budget airline JetBlue has recorded an apology for poor customer service directly onto YouTube. It comes across as unpolished and sincere. Is this the way company ceos will now talk to their customers in the bad times?
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Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher has just created a blog for startups, which is more than blog. Intended as a resource centre for those wanting to start up their own business it has an attached wiki and forums. It starts with a string of posts from successful entrepreneurs including John Battelle, Dick Costolo of Feedburner and Ross Mayfield of wiki company Socialtext.
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Day one is over and I won’t be back tomorrow, so that’s it….
Technorati Tags: FOWAlondon07
Kevin Rose, founder of Digg is on stage and is apparently going to make an announcement. First he talks about the Digg ecosystem. The first thing is to create incentives at every level. Why should people submit content? People want to share stories they think are important and they want recognition for doing it (like Slashdot). People want to store things that are important (del.icio.us). His aim was to solve both motivations. Empowering the user and giving them a vote is fundamental – when people Digg something they are increasing its value throughout the site. There was a virtuous circle – content which gets Diggs drives traffic which encourages site owners to add buttons to get Diggs.
There are some issues we have been having. We have 900,000 users and they don’t always get along. How can you create tools to allow the community to moderate itself? We need tools which reward good behaviour at the topic level. We need a system to dispute and review inaccurate information. We want to allow the community to attach other things to a story, links, pictures, videos and so on. We want to add location-based services to add a geographic dimension.
We have spent a lot of time looking at what people are Digging? You don’t realise how many people you are agreeing with on a regular basis. There is a difference between true friends and people who you tailgate – people whose opinions you value. There can also be value in what people bury and other people bury. We want to show people upcoming stories which aren’t yet popular but which you might be interested in based on what you have done in the past.
We have dedicated resources to working on spotting spammer and gamers and we constantly work to detect and eliminate them.
We will be launching a Flash toolkit which plugs into our API which will allow visualisations of user behaviour – where are people changing their interests.
We will provide a tool which allows you to export your attention data, to export friends data. We will be supporting OpenID in the next few weeks (there we are – the announcement. This was very well received by the audience)
Technorati Tags: FOWAlondon07, social media
Stefan Fountain was so inspired at last year’s event that he went off and created a web app called Soocial.com. This is an attempt to solve the “contact problem”. “We had to find a name with two o’s in it as every successful web company has two o’s in it.” You can sign up for the public alpha now – invitation only.
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Amit Kothari and Chris Garrett from Quotationsbook.com is a start up which is aiming to create a Web 2.0 infrastructure for quotes – a “quotes cosmos” allowing people to explore the time, date, author linked quotes and so on. The aim is to become a search engine which can find anything notable that anyone has said. An API is coming out in the next few weeks.
Technorati Tags: FOWAlondon07, tools
Somewhat ironically, given the painfully slow BT OpenZone speeds, there’s a presentation from Stephen Stokols on BT Contact, a new service from BT which creates a platform which links all communications platforms together. It was to have been a live demo, but….
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After the coffee break and Bradley Horowitz is on the stage talking about social interaction. He says we have to move beyond the term “user” and turn them into “people”. He has a model for interaction where there are three types: creators, synthesisers and consumers and the ratio is 1:10:100 He sees his role as trying to make the ratio 1:1:1. The internet is democatising production.
He gave some examples of where Yahoo! was adding features which encourage people to interact with content:
“Interestingness” is a feature which has been added to Flickr since Yahoo! acquired it. Up to then the pictures were ordered by date. What makes a photo interesting? “We could have used voting, but we chose to look at things like how much it has been looked at, saved as a favourite, blogged about – implicit behaviour. This means it’s less susceptible to gaming, it was able to be used retrospectively on everything in the library “
Turning users into taggers. “Tagging is magic” – it’s not a new concept but what’s cool is that it is so easy. I can invent words. ZoneTag is a project where information from camera phones (location, time, identity) is used to auto tag. TagMaps is a research project which crosses a tag cloud with a map. This has been further filtered by time to show night views, for example.
Clustering using co-existence of tags in the system.
Pipes: He gave an example of wanting to find an apartment near to a day care centre. Currently this is difficult but with Pipes you can extract data from Craig’s List and Yahoo! Local and create a service to answer the question. “Pipes is moving you from a world where people sample to one where they synthesise”.
Q&A: he’s asked if there will be an API for Groups. Eventually, he says, but he says another big Yahoo! service will have an API released very soon. He wouldn’t say which …. even when pressed….
Technorati Tags: FOWAlondon07, GYM, social media