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SPDY: Google Wants to Speed Up the Web With New Protocol

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:01:00 GMT

Google just announced that it is working on a a new protocol that will minimize latency and speed up the web experience for users. SPDY (pronounced "speedy) is not meant to replace HTTP, the protocol that allows web servers and browsers to talk to each other today, but it does augment HTTP. The new protocol incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. Google has already developed a prototype web server and a version of Google Chrome with built-in SPDY support.

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Google claims that pages loaded up 64% faster in lab tests where the research team downloaded the top 25 websites. Now that the SPDY team has developed workable prototypes, Google decided to open up the process and is soliciting the "active participation, feedback and assistance of the web community."

In today's announcement, Google stresses that SPDY is not a replacement for HTTP. It uses HTTP methods and headers, but it overrides the parts of the protocol that manage connections and data transfer formats.

Google will soon release its open-source SPDY-enabled web server. The source code for the SPDY-enabled version Chrome can be found here.

Creating a Faster and More Secure Web

According to the SPDY white paper, the project's goals are to reduce page load times by 50%, minimize deployment complexity and to avoid the need for website owners to make any changes to their sites to implement SPDY. Instead, all the hard work will happen in the client and the web server.

The team also wants SPDY to allow many concurrent HTTP requests to run across one TCP session and to make SLL the standard transport protocol.

Google clearly has an interest in making the web experience as fast and secure as possible for its users. One of the reasons Google released its own browser was to get every other browser developer to focus on speed again. SPDY is even more ambitious. With SPDY, Google wants to change one of the most fundamental protocols on the Internet. .

According to Google, these are the basic improvement of SPDY over HTTP:

Multiplexed requests. There is no limit to the number of requests that can be issued concurrently over a single SPDY connection. Because requests are interleaved on a single channel, the efficiency of TCP is much higher.
Prioritized requests. Clients can request certain resources to be delivered first. This avoids the problem of congesting the network channel with non-critical resources when a high-priority request is pending.
Compressed headers. Clients today send a significant amount of redundant data in the form of HTTP headers. Because a single web page may require 50 or 100 subrequests, this data is significant. Compressing the headers saves a significant amount of latency and bandwidth compared to HTTP.

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How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:10:00 GMT

In August we reviewed Demand Media, one of the largest producers of content on the Web today. Wired Magazine recently compared Demand Media's content business to Henry Ford's production line for cars. Demand Media currently produces 4,000 new pieces of content a day. What's more, it's increasingly syndicating this content to media sites outside of its own network of vertical websites. In other words, Demand Media is becoming a very large content production factory for third party sites such as Yahoo.

In this follow-up post, we dive deeper into Demand Media's content production model - and ask questions about the quality of the output.

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This article is based on an interview I conducted with several Demand Media executives, including founder Richard Rosenblatt, at the Web 2.0 Summit in September.

Will Demand Media Soon be a Household Name?

In our previous posts, we've noted that Demand Media is rapidly rising up the comScore list of the top 50 web properties in the U.S. - in July it was #24, in September it was #15. At this rate, Demand Media will soon be one of the top 10 Web properties in the U.S. - right up there with Amazon, eBay, Apple.

Think about that: how many of you had heard of Demand Media before this year? Amazon, eBay and Apple are all household names. Demand Media (along with another fast-growing mega content site, Answers.com) could be a household name soon too, if its current growth rate continues.

Behind this remarkable growth is a very large output of content each and every day, fueled by thousands of freelance writers and content creators.

So how does Demand Media produce so much content every day? 4,000 new articles a day is a quantum leap above the 20-30 new posts a day that the most feverish of professional blogs pump out.

About Demand Studios

Demand Media produces so much content with a system it calls Demand Studios. It's a proprietary editorial system which is part human-processed and part automated.

The system starts with an automated process, crunching data and running it through an algorithm to identify story ideas that have the best chance of success. The algorithm factors in audience type, ability to attract advertising and potential for traffic.

For a written piece of content, human editors will then check the top story contenders. Potential titles are placed into a pool for writer selection. Once a writer picks up a story, it gets written up, goes through a fact checking and copy editing process (including a plagiarism check), and finally the editorial team approves the completed article. The article is eventually published and the writer gets paid.

This is a simplification of the Demand Studios process, which happens 4,000 times every day! The system appears to be an efficient mix of automation and human labor. As we'll see on Page 2 of this post, the editorial process isn't foolproof. But even so, the scale of this system is impressive.

As at the end of October, Demand Studios had created more than one million original pieces of content, both text articles and videos. There are more than 6,000 active Demand Studios freelance creators - including writers, filmmakers, title proofers, copy editors.

In my meeting with Demand Media executives at the recent Web 2.0 Summit, I was told that an average of 11 people - and 15 unique roles - touch a piece of content as it flows through Demand Studios. The company argues that this, along with community rating of content, produces quality content.

But does it, actually?

Next Page: The Quality Question...

Demand Media: Is This Really Quality Content?

Demand Media is sensitive to criticism of the quality of its content. It's a question that ReadWriteWeb has raised a few times and which Wired picked up on in its October profile.

At the end of that article, Wired noted that Demand Media is "trying to place a new emphasis on quality." However it concludes by saying that Demand Media is "not moving far from [the] Henry Ford model."

I asked Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt about this criticism. Bristling, he responded by pointing to two things.

Firstly Rosenblatt claimed that many of Demand Media's content creators are professionals. He said that 75% of them have been published in magazines or newspapers, 25% have written a book, and 25% have held professional marketing roles.

Example of Demand Media content, on Yahoo! network site 'Shine.'

Secondly, Rosenblatt noted that Demand Media content creators have choices in the market - but they choose to work for Demand Media.

What's more, Rosenblatt said that "quality is based on relevance" - a quote he attributed to Wired editor Chris Anderson, who wrote the books The Long Tail and Free.

Who then are these people that write and shoot video for Demand Media? They're professional freelancers and they're paid anywhere from $15-30 per piece of content. This isn't a great deal of money for a freelance article. But according to Demand Media, there are hundreds of such freelancers earning thousands of dollars per month from Demand Studios (although this would be the top of the range).

4,000 New Articles Per Day - What Percentage is High Quality?

The trouble with the term 'quality' is that it's both variable and subjective. I've seen examples of Demand Media work that are poor - e.g. this eHow article about how to get Twitter followers.

Step 3 reads as follows:

"Engage in discussions. If someone on your timeline says something interesting or says something that you can put input into, do it. There's nothing worse than Twitter followers who follows for no reason. Even if you don't get responses some of the time, it doesn't hurt to try and the people you're following will know you're attemption to converse and are more likely to follow you back."

There are a couple of bad typos in that paragraph (where were the copy editors?), but worse is that the advice is mediocre. It's relevant content to many people, but is it good content? Apparently it was to the people who've read it, as it has 5 stars...

The bigger question is: there are surely many examples of good Demand Media content on the Web, but how many of the 4,000 articles it produces every day aren't?

As we posited in our previous article, the concern with fast-growing content factories like Demand Media and Answers.com is that quality is taking too much of a back seat to quantity. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

In our next post, we will look into the type of content that Demand Media is producing - and what it plans to do with it next.

Discuss

Cloud Computing In Plain English

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:39:00 GMT

Almost three years ago, Lee and Sachi LeFever created their first video to explain RSS.

They called the video RSS in Plain English. They used paper cut outs to explain the XML format. It became an instant hit. Tens of thousands of people watched it. Today their company, Common Craft, make all sorts of custom videos. They've built a business around explaining concepts.

Their latest video explains cloud computing.

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"Cloud Computing in Plain English," tells the story of a florist whose business grows. She learns about cloud computing and realizes that perhaps maybe she should not have to worry about fixing broken servers.

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Cloud computing is one of those topics that confuses and confounds people. Larry Ellison loves to poke at it. It's the hot topic so it is refreshing to see Lee once again explain the topic in simple terms that pretty much anyone can understand. It makes everyone's job a bit simpler.

Which takes us to the last point of the day. We get so many pitches from companies. The services are explained in terms that often need deciphering. What if more companies in the enterprise space spent more time explaining what they do? What if companies did something like what Common Craft did for Twitter or with Google to help explain Google Docs?

We covered indicee yesterday. Why? We think their product looks pretty valuable. But you know what set them apart? They made a great video. It was compelling to watch. It made us laugh. We started to think about what they do. Pretty soon we were writing about them!

Here's a challenge. Make a video about what your enterprise software does. Show us a page with all sorts of ways we can learn what you are all about. If it really does explain what you do then that will deserve some mention here. Just leave a comment pointing to where we can see what you've done and we'll get back to you. Promise.

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Twitter Data Dump: InfoChimps Puts 1B Connections Up For Sale

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:57:00 GMT

Data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages was released today by a tiny Texas startup company that forward-looking geeks have been watching for a year. Austin-based Infochimps announced this afternoon that it is now selling two important and very large sets of Twitter data. Limited samples of the data are available for free and a third, most important, set of data still won't be ready for a few more hours.

"What we want is to see people use this to build web apps," Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer told us today. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps - and you've got a web app."

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This is particular, extracted data though - not the full text of Tweets. "We're trying to be careful," Kromer says, "we are not yet exposing the contents of tweets." And this data isn't cheap, if you want the numbers broken out by the hour instead of the month.

This is a very big move because most developers struggle to get access to a large quantity of data from Twitter.

Here's what InfoChimps is putting on sale:

Tweet #38 in the History of Twitter: "oh this is going to be addictive" - by @dom

Hashtags, links and smiley emoticons used across Twitter on an hour by hour basis.

@ messages, RT and favorites and who they came from - 1 Billion relations making what the company calls a "conversation metric."

A useful if less exciting set of data that will help developers map user ID numbers from search.twitter over to the different ID numbers used in the primary Twitter API. These systems were never merged and it can require a lot of API calls to merge user data.

The company believes it is capturing about 10% of the total data on Twitter right now but Kromer says that he believes he can ramp that up to 30%.

Data As a Pot of Gold

InfoChimps is a bulk data marketplace with more than 5000 data sets in its catalog so far. The vast majority are free and were added by the company's own staff, but not all. The decades-old polling firm Zogby International, for example, is selling some Iraqi polling data through InfoChimps. Cross-reference that polling data with publicly available data about civilian casualties in Iraq and you can see some interesting patterns, InfoChimps' PR rep Josh Dilworth told us. (Dilworth is known as the most data-savvy PR guy in the Web 2.0 world and also represents Wolfram Alpha and Twine.)

The company hopes that it can sell the data derived from sitting on the Twitter API as a demonstration of the value that this and other data sets have. InfoChimps says it can help companies monetize data that they'd otherwise be paying to serve up through repeated API calls, if at all.

From sentiment analysis (not yet an option with the current InfoChimps data set) to social graph discovery (definitely an option), we've written extensively here before about the impacts that social data could have on business, social and political policies in the future.

John Zogby, founder of polling firm Zogby International, talked to us at length (in a separate phone interview several months ago) about the value of using online social networks to measure public opinion. "We've been particularly known for innovating and polling new technologies," he said.

"83% of all households are online today and 92% of likely voters, so with online polling we are today about where the country was with telephone penetration when telephone surveys started. Social networking is not as representative as online access [in general] yet, but I'm comfortable with caveats: that you can do a random sampling, so long as you claim that's what your universe is, as long as you don't extrapolate to all Americans, etc. It has tremendous, tremendous value.

"I know that the landline era is coming to an end - not today or tomorow but we've got to find new and different ways of doing our work. It's the same kind of cross roads as the 70's when we moved away from the door to door, mail-in the results, to the land lines.

"Online, frankly just like telephone, doesn't have the minority population, but for market surveys you may be looking for a different kind of consumer.

"We know that the landline phone is pushing us away, we know that we can't use the cellphone in the same way, and we know that we've got to reinvent this industry [of measuring public opinion]. What's happening are simultaneous new technologies and at the same time growing penetration of these new technologies. We're riding a bucking bronco."

Use Cases

The conversation metric data InfoChimps is selling is the most exciting to me. Imagine a 3rd party app using historical social conversation data to filter Twitter or other messages based on the strongest social connections that I or other people have. Imagine, for example, social Q&A service Aardvark combining the Twitter Lists API with this InfoChimps data set for a scenario like this: "You have a question about stock options? How would you like us to find a person who knows about that, is regularly conversed-with by people on Robert Scoble's Twitter list of Venture Capitalists and is available right now?" That sounds pretty great to me.

The possible applications are many. "I see Twitter as a data acquisition device for what people talk about and how they relate to each other," InfoChimps' Kromer says.

Right now InfoChimps is selling the hashtag and link dataset for $8,000 and the social metric data set for $9500. Eventually the company will likely move to a subscription model.

How They Got the Data

How did InfoChimps get the data? The company hits the Twitter Developer API 20,000 times an hour (the standard for developers) but takes big swaths of data each time it does. "I have a priority queue," Kromer told us.

"I can set a search term, for each search term I can get 1500 tweets per API call. If I get 1500 tweets at a time then the number of wasted tweets at the end of a series of searches is the smallest. If I'm searching for a term and get less than 1500 results back, then I forecast how long it will take to fill that number of results back up to the maximum and move it down the priority queue accordingly. On the lowest priority I have searches for RT or http. There will always be 1500 results for that. It's only API calls that limit me. As is, it's like a fisherman setting nets, what matters is that dinner is tasty."

Does that sound so hard? Worth thousands of dollars? Here's what Kromer says:

"It's not magic. If you talk to people who use Hadoop and do social networking analysis this is underwhelming. You take 30 million users, 1 billion links, adorn each link with info at the end of the link and acrue it with the person at the head of the link. That breaks conventional databases; the plumbing is hard. The math is easy but when you do it a billion times a billion times it starts to get interesting. You have to be careful and clever. We plan to do stuff that is structural, a clustering co-efficient, true pagerank."

Ultimately it's about specialization and data as a service. "The people we need to come in and connect this info with human beings," Kromer says, "aren't the people who should be wasting their time on the math. And the guys who are good at doing these things should not be building web apps."

But Can They Get Away With It?

There's some question whether Twitter will allow InfoChimps to sell data based on Twitter data. Kromer says he'd much rather resell the data on a commission than have to do all the work he's done to set up the extraction system. But it was a year ago that InfoChimps caught the eye of people who love data - by releasing a large collection of scraped Twitter data.

The InfoChimps blog post read: "Big huge thanks to twitter.com: they have given us permission to share this freely. Please go build tools with this data that make both twitter.com and yourself rich and famous: then more corporations will free their data."

But then Twitter founder Evan Williams asked InfoChimps to take those data sets down until a Terms of Service for them could be figured out. That never happened, and communication between the two companies hasn't progressed very far over the last year.

InfoChimps does not have Twitter's permission to do what it did today, but Kromer says Twitter hasn't contacted them either. No one from Twitter headquarters has responded to our request for comment yet.

"We talked to our lawyer about this a lot," Kromer told us, "we are on absolutely solid ground with regards to copyright, user privacy and use of the API. This is clearly for the benefit of their community."

That's nice that Kromer feels so assured, but his attitude seems a little unrealistic.

We asked technology journalist Robert Scoble what he thought of the dilemma and his opinion was pretty clear. "If Twitter wants to be a platform they have to behave like a platform," he said. "Don't be king-makers, let the marketplace choose the winners. If they are going to say nobody should study the data because we're going to sell that, that's not being a platform. Twitter tries to pick the winners and it pisses me off. They admit that they are king-makers. All that does is make everyone vote against them and hope a competitor comes around."

Perhaps time will tell - but these are very early days in what looks to be an era of widespread innovation built on top of social data analysis.

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7 Apps We're Falling in Love With

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:03:00 GMT

We test a lot of software around here, on the web, on our desktop and on our phones. It's a great job to have, but only so much of what we test really sticks and becomes a part of our daily routines. Every once in awhile we like to compare lists in our team chat room and then share them with you.

Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.

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Posterous

Think you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is here and Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real time this week, too.

Topify

Ever feel frustrated by the emails you get from Twitter? We did, until we signed up for Topify. From really smart "X is now following you" emails to the ability to reply to direct messages by email - Topify delivers Twitter emails like Twitter ought to. It's another project from Ouriel Ohayon, who's also behind the wonderful iPhone app sharing service AppsFire. Ouriel makes cool stuff.

Seesmic Web

The never-ending battle between Seesmic and Tweetdeck to see who can make the coolest Twitter client is great for users. Tweetdeck ate my groups last night in an upgrade, after I'd spent hours building them, and so I decided to give Seesmic another try. The Seesmic Web app is awesome and Mac users can turn it into its own app on the desktop using Fluid. The best of many cool features? List support! You can turn any list you're following on Twitter into its own column in Seesmic. Frederic Lardinois says he's been using this combo for a few weeks, I still have some kinks to work out.

See also: Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future (From 18 months ago, how did our prediction turn out?)

Tweetie 2

The iPhone app Tweetie (iTunes link) made a major upgrade last month and we're loving it. Sarah Perez put this one on the list but everyone agrees - this is hot stuff. Will the forthcoming Seesmic Mobile app be as good? Will Tweetdeck's eventual support for Twitter lists turn into an awesome iPhone app? We'll see - but Tweetie's many rich features make it the app to beat right now. My favorite feature? The way the replies page can be pulled down like a spring to prompt a refresh. It's a little thing, but it's fun.

Aardvark

Aardvark leverages what it calls "the real-time web of people" to deliver answers to any question you have - from people in your social circle who know about the topic and are available at that very moment. Vark gets mixed reviews from some people, but I love it. From technical questions to practical ones about life to opinions about questions I have at work - I've been getting a lot of fast, helpful information from people on Aardvark lately. It's another app that scores very high on User Experience, especially in its iPhone and IM interfaces.

Chrome/Chromium

Google's web browser is fast, it's really fast. It's hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful Firefox extensions we've been using for years - but it's harder to use any other browser once you've been using Chrome for awhile. We have high hopes for Chrome plug-ins, but even without them it's a joy to use. You can download Chrome for Windows here and Chromium for Mac here.

LazyFeed

LazyFeed is a topic-driven "discovery engine." It's basically a blog search client that brings in the freshest posts about topics you're interested in. A couple of months into using it, I'm still finding great content every time I fire it up. I've got this running in Fluid and it works great.

Want some serendipity on the iPhone? Try out competitor YourVersion's app. The first version isn't easy on the eyes, but it delivers roughly the same experience on the go.

Those are some of our favorites lately. What apps have you fallen in love with this season? We'd love to know.

See also our previous installments in this series:
30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using One Month After Finding Them From one year ago!
Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later From this Spring.
What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC) Video screencasts.

Discuss

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:22:00 GMT

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. With that in mind, over the coming weeks ReadWriteWeb will look back on the defining Web trends of the past 10 years. From the dot com boom, to the nuclear winter after, to the passion and enthusiasm of the pre-Web 2.0 innovations (such as RSS and podcasting), to the highs and hype of Web 2.0, to the current era of the real-time Web, to the near future of the Internet of Things. We'll explore all of this and more.

We're starting with online music. No industry, except arguably the newspaper one, has been rocked (pardon the pun) more by the Internet than the music industry.

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Napster & Kazaa: Online File Sharing

The online music decade started with Napster, a music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning that operated between June 1999 and July 2001. Napster enabled people to freely share MP3 files over the Internet; however it quickly ran into major legal trouble. Napster was the subject of lawsuits in 2000 by touchy metal band Metallica and others. It was eventually shut down by court order, after several major record labels went after the service.

After Napster's demise, a P2P application called Kazaa became the most popular service for music file sharing. But it too eventually succumbed to record industry attacks.

Curiously, both Napster and Kazaa were recently reincarnated as law-abiding services. After years of re-launch attempts, Napster was acquired by Best Buy in September 2008 and was born again in May 2009. Meanwhile Kazaa turned into a legit music subscription service in July this year.

iTunes / iPod: Digital Music Goes Commercial

While Napster and Kazaa tried to skirt around the commercial imperatives of music, like paying artists, Apple took on the record industry in an entirely legal way. In January 2001, Apple launched a digital music player for music called iTunes. Then in April 2003, the iTunes Store was launched. It offered the ability to buy songs for 99 cents each, which had a major impact on the music industry.

Soon after Napster's demise in 2001, Apple launched what was to become a revolutionary device in the music industry. The iPod was launched in October 2001 and it became the most popular portable music player since the Sony Walkman in the 1980s.

Fast forward to 2009 and iTunes continues to evolve. In January Apple announced that iTunes would go DRM-free. In September 2009 Apple launched version 9 of iTunes, which included a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and 'iTunes LPs' - a feature that brings liner notes and artwork to digital albums.

MySpace: Music & Social Networking

MySpace was launched in August 2003 and soon became a popular hangout for local bands, especially indie rockers. MySpace provided a way for those bands to promote their music and reach a wide network through social networking.

As ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez wrote last month, it was a virtuous circle for MySpace. The bands' presence on MySpace "began to attract a young, hip crowd of users who were interested in following pop culture, and, in particular, the up-and-coming artists they discovered while browsing through the network. Only eight months after its launch, MySpace began to experience exponential growth, as its users created profiles and friended others who would then, in turn, invite more users to join the social network. Thanks to the "network effect," MySpace soon became the place to be online. Everyone was there."

However by 2008, MySpace had ceded the social networking crown to Facebook. In 2009, MySpace is once again trying to reclaim its heritage as a music service. In October MySpace launched "Artist Dashboards" and integrated its music video vault with recent acquisition iLike.

Pandora & last.fm: Online Music Discovery

Online music services have flourished in the 'web 2.0' era, when the ability to find new music and share it with others via the Web became increasingly sophisticated.

Two services in particular stand out. One is Pandora, a free online music discovery service. Pandora was founded in 2000 and continues to grow, despite various legal issues over the years. As ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois noted earlier this year, Pandora derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes.

Last.fm is another online music discovery service. It was founded in 2002 and was sold to CBS in 2007. It continues to innovate in 2009, for example in May this year last.fm announced combo stations, allowing a user to create a station with up to three artists or tags.

Conclusion

This post and series was inspired by one of my favorite blogs and podcasts, NPR's All Songs Considered. They're currently looking back at the decade in music and much of the discussion is about how the Internet helped define it.

And it's true, when you think of music at the end of 2009 you think of iTunes, Pandora and last.fm - MySpace even. The record industry is still coming to terms with these and other changes.

Tell us your online music memories of the past 10 years. What's been your favorite online music product or service during that time?

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Good Bloggers Make Good Neighbors, New Survey Shows

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:01:00 GMT

Back in the day, it was assumed that heavy Internet geeks were a bunch of basement-dwelling, trenchcoat-wearing, socially maladjusted introverts.

However, a new study from the Pew Internet Project shows that geeks, including IM users and bloggers, are more likely to help neighbors, get out of the house, volunteer, and behave as upstanding members of their IRL communities.

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One of the most interesting findings of the study completely neutralizes the stereotype of the antisocial tech geek. "Mobile phone use, internet use, frequency of use, or participating in social networking services, blogging, photo sharing, or instant messaging, was found to have no relationship with the likelihood of face-to-face contact with neighbors." That is, Internet geeks are as likely to know and speak to their neighbors as are non-geeks. Factors such as age, marital/cohabitation status, and gender have a much greater impact on local social activity, actually.

And although the study found that Internet users were less likely to rely on neighbors for help, its findings also tell us that frequent or dedicated Internet users are a mighty friendly and helpful bunch when it comes to giving support to neighbors. Bloggers are almost 80 percent more likely to do small favors for their neighbors than other groups, and they're 84 percent more likely to help a neighbor care for a family member, e.g., offer babysitting help. And while Internet users, including photo-sharing folks and IM fans, are more likely across the board to help and hang out with people in their neighborhood, the study also showed that Internet users are almost 50 less likely to lend neighbors money. Insert a pun about teaching a man to phish here.

Folks who use sites such as BuildingBulletins or NeighborGoods to connect with people who live near them are also more likely to engage with their community, especially in terms of actively discussing community issues, listening to a neighbor's problems, or helping a neighbor with chores or errands.

Bloggers and mobile phone users are also 72 percent more likely to belong to a local group or organization such as a charitable organization, a youth sports league, or a religious group. For example, an average single, white person with no children has a 40 percent chance of belonging to at least one local voluntary group. However, that chance increases to 54 percent if that person users a mobile device and 72 percent if that person is also a blogger and frequent Internet user.

Another fascinating set of findings completely negate the stereotypical image of Internet geeks as agoraphobic recluses. Internet and mobile users are far more likely than non-users to hit up coffee shops, parks, and restaurants in their communities. Internet users in general are around 50 percent more likely to find themselves in public places than non-users, and bloggers specifically are 60 percent more likely than non-bloggers to spend time in a public park.

The study concludes, "As with other local community activities, the relationship between Internet use and participation in public and semi-public spaces is likely a combination of self-selection and an outcome of internet use... The Internet may also enable visits to public spaces through opportunities to coordinate rendezvous and search for new places to visit."

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Palo Alto Networks: Twitter Usage Soars in the Enterprise

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:57:00 GMT

The news from Palo Alto Networks reinforces what we should probably expect will be the norm for the foreseeable future. According to the company's Application Usage and Risk Report, social technologies and collaborative applications are moving deep into the enterprise with Twitter seeing a 250 percent increase in use since Spring of last year.

In face of a report like this, it makes sense that Enterprise 2.0 technologies would be a fit for companies. Employees understand how social technologies function. Collaborative applications make sense for getting the work done.

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Here are some more results from the Palo Alto study:

Sharepoint adoption increased 48 percent compared to last year.
Google Docs showed up in 82% of the organizations, compared to 33% a year ago. Bandwidth increased 290 percent since spring of this year.
Facebook increased 59 percent when measured by the frequency in which it was detected on corporate networks. Organizations saw big bumps in bandwidth consumption, increasing 294 percent to 6.3 gigabytes per organization.

The study comes in the wake of a number of announcements, most notably from Cisco, which seems to have an understanding of the social network dynamics at play in the enterprise. At a press conference on Monday, John Chambers outlined a number of initiatives.

Notable were his insights into how collaboration is the best way to quickly invent new products and enter new markets. He said this is especially true with younger workers entering the workforce. Young people are familiar with social networking and increasingly see it is the best way to foster collaboration.

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Find Your Whole Social Graph on Facebook at Once With FBFriendFinder

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:15:00 GMT

We've just found a new application for finding your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and other friends from around the web on Facebook - all at once and all quite simply.

This tool is called FBFriendFinder. It comes from the Dutch web dev shop Open & Sociaal, and it works like a charm by using OAuth, Facebook Connect and contact export functions to gather enough data to organize a user's social graph. The most interesting part, however, isn't the technology but the business model. You have to read it to believe it.

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First, FBFriendFinder makes the friend-finding part of the process as user-friendly as possible, eliminating clicks and needless navigation whenever possible:

FBFriendFinder has take the much maligned approach of actually requiring users to pay for the service. Users are charged around one American penny per friend found, give or take. The site integrates with PayPal, so the process is quick and painless.

After we paid our fee, we were able to scroll through a slideshow of our social graph (albeit with a lot of same-name duplicate accounts) to find and add those friends to our Facebook network. This process was a tiny bit buggy and required some back-and-forth navigation (it seems our friends at The Next Web had the same problem), but overall, the experience was well worth the five bucks it took to find these friends without having to manually hunt them down ourselves or rely on Facebook suggestions.

Also, we appreciate the app's acknowledgement of our "crazy lifestyle." And now, we're off to ditch these pajama pants we've been sporting since the weekend and just go bananas. It's our crazy lifestyle calling to us - the crazy lifestyle we never knew we had.

A sincere congratulations to the FBFriendFinder dude for creating a handy and monetizable application.

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UNIX Co-Creators at Google Release New Programming Language: Three Developer Reactions

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:24:00 GMT

Google just released a new open source programming language called Go. Go is intended to offer built-in support for concurrent processes, make the most of modern hardware and deliver a super-fast coding experience. Google says in its announcement that "Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++." Go was created by a five person team that includes UNIX co-creators Ken Thompson and Rob Pike.

It's not for everyone, but we talked to a variety of developers who are looking forward to kicking the tires. Below are opinions before launch from three developers we have a lot of respect for. Two are enthusiastic and one is skeptical.

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Rob Pike also gave an hour-long talk about Go late last month.

Developer Reactions

GitHub Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath

I'm definitely on the lookout for C-like languages with good C integration and solid package support (for organization). Hopefully Go provides the former with its "syscall" package (or something similar) - building on existing libraries is a huge boon to young languages, as Scala and Clojure have shown with their Java integration.

Organizing big C projects is always a challenge, and borrowing packaging ideas from higher level languages like Python could really help.

Can't wait to see the site and play with a few examples.

Alex Iskold, founder and CEO of Adaptive Blue

Go appears to be procedural language, based on C/C++ syntax, skewed heavily towards C. It has C memory manipulation model with addresses and pointers, which is complicated and not used in Java, PHP, Ruby, etc.

There is nothing in this tutorial that attracts my eye, other than built-in parallel processing capability. C historically lacked threading (although current versions have it), but having it built in natively into the language is always great.

I am a fan of Java and Object-Orientation, so new procedural languages sound like a thing of the past to me.

If this is positioned as alternative to JavaScript, I do not see why this is necessary. Why not take JavaScript and make it better / add richer libraries like JQuery as part of the language. What Google has done with Gears for example, is built stuff using native C/C++ code and wrapped it into JavaScript calls - I think that is a better way to move forward and to make things faster.

Larry Price, Computer Systems Consultant

This is a very clean and powerful language. It's a direct descendant of C with elements of Haskell, OCaml, python and erlang visible as influences. It seems like yet another attempt to make a "better C than C", and from a first shallow glance it seems like a clear winner.

Objective-C fans (mac programmers) will probably sniff that it's nothing new, and that clean message passing semantics have been available to programmers for decades, but there are some deep differences; Go is not an object oriented language although you can use it in an objected oriented manner. In many respeccts Go is not a new language, it will seem very familiar to anyone who has used C or C descended languages; and most of the advanced features that it adds to C are implemented in other languages.

Go strikes a good balance between legibility, low-level functionality and high-level functional programming features. It will have a strong appeal to programmers who are interested in the type safety and concurrency friendly features of Haskell or erlang, but want to access them in a more familiar C-like syntax.

It has a good chance to make type-safe concurrent programming a mainstream choice.

What do you think?

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