Yes folks, it is the end of an era -- or at least, the end of this blog as we know it. Our Social Software coverage has been subsumed by a larger entity, although without the usual acquisition rumours, inebriated launch party (complete with Flickr RSS feed) or sudden influx of VC money. Our own Download Squad will be proudly taking over coverage of news in the social software space, so tune in over there for your daily fix; set your new bookmarks to the Social Software category or the main Download Squad site, and reorient your voracious newsreaders to the Social Software RSS feed and/or the Download Squad main RSS feed.

Thank you, and good night.

From the same nice people who brought us that dishwasher churning away in the next room comes an exiting new way to visually brainstorm and collaborate with your friends! Ok, so it might not be all that "new," and some of you might not find it particularly "exciting," but dammit, I thought it was cool. Developed by General Electric, Imagination Cubed (hence-force to be known as I^3, for the self-serving purpose of me not having to type it out each time) is another one of them multi-user online whiteboards. As I said, nothing particularly special about that. The cool thing about I^3 that sets it apart from other similar tools is the fact that there are no accounts, and therefore, you never have to go out of your way to make sure your friends and co-workers are registered. Simply visit the site and invite up to 2 other people to simultaneously use your white board. When you're done, you can print your final product, see a replay of what happened, or save the white board for later. I can see this being really useful for those times when you are trying to explain to their mother-in-law how to use tivo to record "Today in Cats," and that she needs to "push the green button, not that one, the other one, I mean the big green button shaped like a rhinoceros, here let me draw it for you!" You can also add text to your drawing, change the background color, and display a grid to help you draw more geometrically.

Wrap all this up in a delicious nougat AJAX interface and you've got yourself a winning web 2.0 application. Now, if only they could find a way to monetize it...

Via Lifehacker

"Friend-what?" you might be asking, but it's true: Red Herring is reporting that Friendster, the ill-fated social networking that (I think) started it all, has been granted a patent on social networks. Following a great tradition of painstakingly clear patent language, Friendster owns the patent for a "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks".

Whether Friendster will use the time-tested 'if you can't beat 'em, take em to court' strategy is yet to be seen, but to their credit: they apparently applied for the patent (issued June 27 of 2006) way back in the day, before they fell from their perch.

[via Slashdot]

Jookster mashes up web archiving, social networking, and ranked searching to provide a new service that I think has some interesting things going with it. After signing up for a Jookster profile and installing the Firefox tool-bar, users have access to personalized searches and instant web archiving. Clicking on the Jook This button in the tool-bar instantly archives a copy of the page you are visiting and indexes it for search. You can go back at your convenience and search through all the pages you have jooked. The cool thing about Jookster however is not the fact that it can archive and index content, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 has been doing this for ages. The cool aspect of Jookster is the social aspect. Adding buddies with similar interests expands your search results to include things jooked by them, and their buddies, and their buddies buddies, etc. You can specify how many degrees of separation you want to search. The search results are ranked by how many degrees the person who jooked a page is away from you. This feature brings in a concept that has been much talked about at the Supernova conference this week; the fact that outside of the web, we use trusted contacts so look for information, and judge the quality information based on the what you think of your friends. Jookster brings this idea to the web, and I think it could be the start of something big. Imaging searching for information on the ecosystem of the amazon rain forest and being able to see that a biologist you know had jooked a result; wouldn't that immediately reassure you that the information there would be good stuff?

I think Jookster is a great idea, and even if it turns out that it is one of the many startups that will go belly up in this boom, I'm confident that the underlying ideas it embraces will be something that we are using for years to come.

Rupert Murdoch and Billy Bragg: you have to wonder how these guys got in bed in the first place. It's a notion that'll induce Scanners-esque head explosions and I wouldn't spend much more time it, as the avowed socialist Bragg has taken his toothbrush and, we presume, did not let the door hit him on the way out of avowed capitalist Murdoch's crib.
Irked by terms of service that apparently gave MySpace "a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute" his music, British songwriter Billy Bragg pulled his music from the social networking site.
Bragg's MySpace.com page offers this explanation: "SORRY THERE'S NO MUSIC," because "once an artist posts up any content (including songs), it then belongs to My Space (AKA Rupert Murdoch) and they can do what they want with it, throughout the world without paying the artist."
As Publishing 2.0 notes, the falling out is a harsh reminder of the lengths MySpace will go to compensate for not owning any of the content (read: the underlying value upon which much of the enterprise depends) posted on its sites and of MySpace's still-showing Web 1.0 roots.
Naturally, MySpace chalks this all up to a bit of sloppy lawyering.
"Because the legalese has caused some confusion, we are at work revising it to make it very clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist's work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends," Berman says. "Obviously, we don't own their music or do anything with it that they don't want."
Whew. Well, I'm relieved; how about you? As we all know, when someone dismisses the tiny print in a contract as "legalese," that part is immediately invalidated, right?

MySociety.org, a British tech nonprofit project that builds and showcases new tools for civic good, has released a beautiful series of maps illustrating various transportation data sets around England.  See, for example, this sample map showing whether public transport (bus, light rail best is in red) or a private automobile (blue) will get you faster from the Cambridge station to any other part of the country.  (Cambridge is in the bottom right hand corner, nearish London.)  The project has created many other maps as well, illustrating a variety of data.

This is interesting, of course, primarily as a proof of concept.  I'm sure it was time consuming and expensive to create, but that won't always be the case.  If organizations like public transportation agencies expose their data via APIs then I can imagine that displays like this will only be a matter of processing power, which is only a matter of time.  Wouldn't it be great to be able to see a map like this for any trip you were planning?  "I'm at 44th and Killingsworth in Portland, and I'd like to go to 15th and Belmont.  If I'm willing to be dropped off within a few blocks, would it be faster to go by light rail or car?  How long is it likely to take me to get to a particular spot?  That particular place I'm headed isn't a public transportation dead zone, is it?"  Oh the questions you could answer!  This is just one of many maps  MySociety has published,  which is a good thing in light of Margaret Thatcher's famous (attributed) quote - "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

Found via WorldChanging

"I like your roundups of eHub!" says Emily Chang in an email.  All the more reason to keep doing the darned things.  Emily Chang's eHub is a great resource for learning about new or newly highlighted Web 2.0 services and products, but it can be overwhelming.  In the spirit of helpfulness, I've now done a number of weekly summaries of my favorite items on eHub.  The following is the most recent in the series.  No substitute for reading eHub itself, of course, these summaries are just my favorites on the weeks I find time to do a write up.

Listed in order of my excitement this time instead of chronologically:

Social-Mail
Happy day!  Send emails to an RSS feed.  I feel far more comfortable using this tool, a Big in Japan offering, than I do using my previous stand by, mail2rss.org.  Mail2rss.org has worked well for me so far, but the fact that it's remained in "extreme  alpha" mode since I found it makes me very glad to find an alternative.  I use these tools all the time to create feeds for organizations that don't offer them (many in the nonprofit sector, for example.)

Byoms (build your own mobile search)
Not highlighted directly on eHub, but the product of a company that was (Kozuro).  Custom search via IM with support for natural language queries, search sharing and RSS feeds.  Not sure how all of these will work together yet, but those are some of my favorite features for anything - so I'll be watching closely for the June 5th public beta release.  The company says you'll preselect certain sources you want to be able to search, then you can use IM to query those sources on your computer or mobile device.  Sounds pretty cool to me.

Netvibes ecosystem
Makes ajax homepage modules easy to share.  Netvibes is one of the most popular Ajax homepages, which are themselves very poor ways to read anything more than a few RSS feeds with few items in each one (in my opinion).  But it may be one of the most realistic ways to hope for further RSS adoption, and the ecosystem's sharing does help make tangible the portability of feeds. There's an API that's being used to develop new modules, a Word Press plug-in - the announcement of the ecosystem got a lot of coverage throughout the blogosphere.

Farecast
In private beta, this system will use historical data to allow users to predict future airfare offerings.  Have to wonder if another larger vendor will buy this one out, I'm sure that's the idea.  Probably one of the best examples, in fact, of a technology built to flip.  Landing page visual design at least looks totally hip.

Big Blue Saw
You may have read some of the articles around lately about low cost rapid fabrication from CAD files.  Big Blue Saw is an Atlanta based service that offers just such an affordable service.  I've read about this type of thing being the future of manufacturing in the developing world, for now this service is getting press in Make Magazine at least. 

Spinvox
Turns voice mail into text messages or email.  Sounds great, presuming that it works well.  Discussion at MobileCrunch points to two likely problems:  long voicemail messages and the difficulty of trusting a translation to text of the important subtleties in spoken language (like the world "not").  Not having tested this myself, I don't know whether the text messages I get are going to tell me what the names of the callers are as well as my phone's recognition of contacts.  That would be very important.


That's this week's highlights from eHub according to yours truly.  Don't forget to check out the whole site for hours of fun.

Steve Rubel discovers coverage and then goes in depth on eBay plans to incorporate blogs and wikis in their service offerings.  It looks like an impressive implementation, but I have a few questions about it.

• First, if people wanted more in depth discussion - wouldn't the product descriptions and the buyer/seller feedback be less mass produced than they are now?  "Great customer!  Would sell to again for sure!" over and over again.  What percentage of the auction pages are mass produced by huge eBay store owners?
• Given that this will be a pure commercial space it seems like the promised land for comment spammers.  Will eBay be able to fight spam in a way that doesn't shut down discussion but works for users?
• Not sure that these mediums are the best suited for this context.  It seems like kind of an awkward application of two very hip, exciting tools.
• Tag support makes sense if implemented in conjunction with pre-selected categories and full text search.  Given the nature of this particular market, though, I wonder if this will be the space where we really see tag spam emerge in a big way for the first time.
• Internationalization of discourse will be an interesting mess to watch, I'm guessing.  Most businesses large enough to do a lot of international business mitigate language and cultural differences by hiring specialists to help with these issues.  Micro-businesses will not have these resources and I'll be curious to see how many miscommunications, previously silent prejudices and other communication issues emerge.
• Business blogging often helps build relationships between companies and their customers.  How much loyalty do you feel to any particular eBay store?  I'm guessing not very much.  Thumbs up, thumbs down on reputation may be enough reputation/communication system for the vast majority of eBay users.
  

I'm not sure how much adoption these tools are going to see.  Blogging takes time and energy.  I'm not sure that people will find that investment worthwhile when sprucing up product pages and optimizing for search is already doable.  Does conversation drive commerce, as Rubel says?  Or in this case are we dealing with an intention economy - where people come to eBay intending to purchase something and only need help finding the best option at the best price?   I've never been too clear on how great an option it was to be able to call a seller on Skype, so I'm not sure how great an idea this is.  I've only been ripped of on eBay once, though, so perhaps I don't understand other peoples' need for communication. 

I just watched Hong Eun-taek,  Editor-In-Chief of the of South Korea based citizen journalism project OhMyNews speak at the NetSquared conference (disclosure: I work for Net Squared).  Amongst the interesting details of  Eun-taek's talk was a statement that the organization aims to become a global news wire similar to the AP and Reuters.  One of the most recent steps towards that end is a partnership begun in recent weeks to swap headlines between the prestigious International Herald Tribune.

I think there is an important difference between the recent high-profile partnerships between the AP and Technorati and between Sphere and Time Magazine and this partnership.  Specifically, while it is meaningful for a mainstream media organization to include links indicating "what the blogosphere is saying about this topic" - I would contend that it is meaningful in a different way for prominent parties in the citizen journalism camp and in the traditional media camp to permanently display each others' headlines in a box on their sites.  It's an interesting form of mutual recognition that goes beyond the relatively casual link list to the medium in general.

The IHT/OhMyNews partnership is also clearly important because it involves two parties that are not based in the United States.  Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online is speaking now about the huge explosion of content producers from China, Africa, Brazil and the Middle East/North Africa that is on its way.  This partnership is liable to be remembered as a key development in the relationship between old media and new media on the global stage.

Call them memediggers, community moderated news sites, or digg clones. User submitted news moderated up or down by other users and available for comments. Call them whatever you wish, this new class of social media warrants close examination in order to make the most of the potential it presents. Which of these sites get the most use, see the most conversation and are most useful to their readers? How should people looking to launch new digg-style sites organize things in order to maximize adoption and impact?

One first step could be to examine a variety of leading sites of this type and that is what I've done below. It's arbitrary, it's unscientific and I think it's interesting. Last Friday evening I looked at the front page of 4 interesting memedigger sites and wrote down some numbers. Digg is clearly the standard, but also examined below are Reddit, the Spanish-language site Meneame and Hugg.com, a project of the hugely popular environmental blog Treehugger. I would have liked to include Newsvine, but was unable to find numbers to compare.

An overview of some observations:

• Front page items are more commented on in Reddit than Digg, relative to the number of points those items have recieved.
• Meneame seems to be successful in terms of votes but receives fewer comments.
• Hugg isn't being used very much. I am curious why.

For each site I counted:

• the total number of points listed for all items on the front page of the site
• the number of items listed
• the age of the oldest and second oldest items on the front page
• the total number of comments listed on the front page
• the estimated number of registered users in the system

ActorTracker.com is a very impressive mashup of feeds from TV talk shows, movies and more mixed with affiliate links for videos and other memorabilia concerning your favorite actors.  Most commercially oriented mashups seem a step away from cheesy splogs, but this one is very nice.  Many features and a nice aesthetic let you know that the people behind ActorTracker spent a lot of time on it.  Unfortunately, there appears to be some problem with the  MyTracker feature, as I'm not able to log in to accounts I create.

The site has been around for awhile, but it may take some time before mass media loving consumer audiences are comfortable dealing with data like persistent search results and the like.  If and when that day comes, the right marketing (and a log in proccess that works) could put this site in a good place to get many users.  The service has an unintimidating interface, including e-mail subscription for new results.  It's a good example of the way that RSS could end up being implemented by small players for mass audiences without waving the acronym around too much.

Given the huge amount of consumer goods available online around various celebrities and pop culture, matching affiliate links and listings shouldn't be too hard.  Not always perfect, though, as the 700 Club's listing ends up next to an affiliate link to buy the movie Fight Club.  I suppose millenarians do have to stick together!

Found via Programmable Web.

Being bought by the owner of the Fox empire hasn't scared MySpace away from partnering with Al Gore's high profile film about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth."  Announced last week but receiving little play in the blogosphere to date, the partnership appears to be more low-key online than the previous X-Men promotion but set to leverage the online community for real-world public events.  The movie's main site doesn't appear to make any reference to the partnership, as it is described on MediaPost, but MySpace friend to all Tom does have a Truth badge and link to the film's MySpace profile.

According to MediaPost,  "the campaign will culminate in a 10-city MySpace theater buyout on June 16, with free tickets going to select members of the film's MySpace community.  MediaPost also reports that MySpace is contributing a significant amount of ad space to raise climate change awareness.  The MySpace music channel is reported to be planning  an artist-on-artist interview between the former vice president and a to-be-announced rock star who is also happens to be part of the MySpace community. The MySpace movies channel will spotlight an interview with the film's director, Davis Guggenheim.

The partnership between the film and the high profile online social network appears to be remarkably low-profile.  No press releases appear on PR Web, few bloggers outside of MySpace have written about it and a Google News search brings back surprisingly few results.  The MySpace community itself appears to be responding well, however, as almost 45,000 users have added the films as a friend to their profile in just less than a week.

EarthLink announced today that they have been approved to provide wifi service to New Orleans.  According to the company's blog:
"The network will have two tiers -- a free (and ad-free) service at up to 300kbps during the city's rebuilding efforts, and a paid service at 1mbps up/down. EarthLink will also allow other providers to offer their services over the network, allowing for open access and competition."

There was some seriously strange legal wranglings about whether the city would be allowed to contract with anyone to provide this service and apparently it was the local state of emergency that allowed it.  Given that, and the incredible reliance on the wireless network there during the rebuilding - why doesn't the federal government just subsidize the top-tier service for everyone?  That's a silly question, such a policy would obviously interfere with the market's ability to monetize human suffering.  I can't imagine that Earthlink would mind.  At least permission has now been granted for the market  to partner with local government so that some service at all is available.

I'll be watching Esme Vos's Muniwireless.com for analysis of this deal.  See also New Orleans Voices for Peace, a liberal grass roots group "providing Internet access, website hostng, media development and training for partnering organizations and communities effected by the Hurricanes Rita and Katrina."

Update:  There's an email excerpt just added to the Earthlink blog from the New Orleans CIO about he's having people hug him on the street about the fact that free wifi is on its way.  It's an interesting account, nearly a tear jerker.

Working on a presentation for a conference where I'm going to talk about RSS and am wondering - what are the coolest examples of nonhuman generation of RSS feeds?  I know that technically every search feed, stock report feeds and things like that are generated without the immediate involvement of humans.  But some time ago Lisa Williams told me about a buoy at sea that publishes a feed of hourly updates to all kinds of weather conditions.   That's from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS).   She told me she would like to be able to subscribe to a feed that would tell her when her home's heating oil was running low. 

There's got to be more examples out there - anyone care to point to ones you know of?  I know there are systems to track package delivery (like FedEx).  There have to be some RFID systems that utilize RSS.  I know there are quite a number of  innovative examples of RSS feeds generated in libraries.  Limited  traffic reports for particular cities from Yahoo and Traffic.com.  Incidentlog.com is a cool use of police reports, mashing up feeds and Google Maps.

Really far out examples of RSS feeds being generated for a useful purpose without substantial human input is what I'm looking for.  I really believe there will be a lot of this in the future, but the sooner we can find examples the sooner we can prepare ourselves and others for the idea.  Please do post examples in comments if you can think of or find any that I haven't.

To be honest I'd be curious to see peoples' favorite applications of RSS in any context.  Anything already listed by Tim Yang or Basement.org excluded.

Steve Rubel just wrote that his employer Edelman has acquired the Silicon Valley PR company A&R Partners.  Rubel says that many of the company's clients are already blogging.  Edelman leadership appears focused on bringing corporate communications into the new world of social media in some very cool ways, albeit learning from mistakes like the Walmart bloggers situation.  Here's a client list for A&R, you might notice that Mozilla is on there.  Interesting.  There are a number of people using these new social media to remake PR and save it from it's unsavory past.  Those efforts are said to be based in honesty - and that's a radical concept.

Valleywag has a more Valley-centric take on this.
Nicholas Carr has a hilarious response to Rubel style cheerleading of honest conversation as being of central importance.  Fair enough, and don't miss the comments.