According to a report from Inside Higher Ed, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of the Big 10 universities and the University of Chicago, released a position paper laying out the universities’ concerns with working with private online learning companies and raising the possibility of developing their own shared infrastructure.

To date, many CIC universities have been active participants in the MOOC movement, with courses from their schools accounting for about 16 percent of Coursera classes, for example. But, going forward, the schools say they need to lead the innovation and, potentially, develop their own platform.

“While new and cost effective technological capabilities make certain changes in higher education possible, it does not necessarily follow that such changes are desirable, or would be endorsed or utilized by our existing students, faculty, or community members,” the schools say in the paper. “Nor does it mean that we fully grasp the costs and business models that might surround new strategies for broadly disseminating course content.”

The report comes as critiques of MOOCs from college professors across the country have grown louder. In April, the faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX and in May, professors at San Jose State University refused to teach an edX course, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to their university.

Provosts of some of the Big 10 schools told Inside Higher Ed that their concerns with working with private MOOC providers range from losing control of their courses to spending more money than they’d need to, to compromising student data and faculty intellectual property rights.

Despite the ongoing debate around how MOOCs will shape the future of higher education, MOOC providers Coursera, Udacity and edX are continuing to gain traction from a wide range of institutions. Last month, Coursera added 10 state schools to its list of more than 80 partners and edX doubled the size of its platform with the addition of 15 international partners.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Disrupting the university: near-term opportunities in the digital-learning market
• Flash analysis: Xbox One
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

On Wednesday the company announced the general availability of its product, Sqrrl Enterprise, which is a cleaned-up and more-functional version of the open source Accumulo software. That means users will get an experience a lot more similar to what NSA data analysts get than what the core database code allows.

How do we know this? Because Sqrrl’s co-founder and CTO Adam Fuchs helped build Accumulo and the applications that run on top of it during his previous life working for the spy agency. (If you want to know more about the history of Accumulo and the types of massive graph analyses the NSA is using it for, you can check out my coverage of the NSA citizen-spying scandal from two weeks ago (here and here).) So, instead of just downloading an open-source take on Google’s BigTable data store, Sqrrl users get things like built-in analytic functions and search; support for JSON data structures; and data encryption both at rest and in motion.

The Sqrrl architecture

It’s the latter features around security that Sqrrl Co-founder and VP of Business Development Ely Kahn said have many early Sqrrl users most excited. Health care companies, in particular, highlight an ideal use case for security features like those that Sqrrl provides. Because of its cell-level security and access control, Kahn explained, providers can try to do new things around data sharing while still keeping compliant with regulations such as HIPAA and the data requirements that come along with the Affordable Care Act.

But the applications of Accumulo and Sqrrl could be much broader across industries. Because it’s based on Hadoop, Sqrrl gives companies peace of mind when it comes to storing big data securely, Kahn said, which has been a big reason that many companies are afraid to do Hadoop in production. And Sqrrl’s analytic capabilities make it easier to analyze all that data, including log files and network data that could help a company track down the causes of any cyberattacks they might suffer.

At this point, said Kahn, who was previously director of cybersecurity strategy at the National Security Staff in the White House, that should be a major concern. For most organizations, he said, it’s not a question of whether they’ve been breached but “a question of whether they know that they know they’ve been breached.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud security market landscape, 2013–2017
• How data warehousing is now a cost-effective solution for businesses
• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization

By adopting the plugins, customers will be able to keep an eye on the performance of lots of other tools they already use, in one place, said Bjorn Freeman-Benson, vice president of engineering at New Relic.

For starters on this platform, there are plug-ins for CouchDB, F5 Networks, Memcached, Microsoft SQLServer, MySQL, Redis and Riak. Amazon Web Services plug-ins are available, too, said Bjorn Freeman-Benson, New Relic’s vice president of engineering.

New Relic isn’t charging for these plug-ins; it wants developers to work together as a community on making and sharing new plug-ins. Of course, developers are free to roll their own plug-ins, a process New Relic will allow through software-development kits.

“We supply an SDK in Ruby,” Freeman-Benson said. “We have another one in Java. We have a straight API. If you want to write in some other language, like Node, you can call the API directly and juse set up a loop that checks for data from whatever source you’re looking at.”

The application-performance management (APM) space has been busy this year, with funding coming for AppDynamics and AppNeta, not to mention New Relic. Those other guys might well decide to add their own plug-ins for external tools.

More broadly, this sort of aggregation of monitoring of many services makes sense in the cloud age, where startups perform specific tricks as a service, and it’s up to end users to figure out how to integrate them all. At least New Relic wasn’t beaten to the punch here, as it tees up for a 2014 public offering.

It’s not unreasonable to think the plug-ins will come up in conversation when New Relic Founder and CEO Lew Cirne (pictured) sits down with my colleague Barb Darrow and RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady to talk applications at our Structure conference on Thursday.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators
• How devops can reduce cycle times
• Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine

Reports have been filtering in during the last few days that consumers on Verizon and Time Warner Cable’s network are experiencing degraded service when they try to watch Netflix or YouTube videos. It may seem trite to whine about someone’s Arrested Development episode buffering, but the real issue is how big ISPs are trying to remake the agreements that underpin how the internet works.

As they do so, they are taking agreements that used to be negotiated by engineers based on web traffic and changing them into disputes negotiated behind closed doors in boardrooms, executives fighting over who has access to the end consumer. This could fundamentally change the way the internet works — making it more expensive to do business and erecting unnecessary barriers to innovation.

This is the new battle for the internet. The telcos and cable providers, intent on protecting their margins and their pay TV businesses, have taken network neutrality from the public world of consumer pricing and throttling to the data centers. Instead of banning Skype, or charging more for it on their networks, they want to change they way they charge content providers, demanding that they pay more for ports on the network when traffic starts filling them up.

The weapon in this battle is a concept known as peering. Peering is essentially an arrangement between two bandwidth providers — the companies that control the physical backbone of the internet — in which they send and receive traffic from each other for free. The logic is that the traffic sent from one network to another is reciprocated without adding extra costs and hurdles. This makes the web more efficient and redundant because companies don’t need to build out a network to connect every single service to every person who wants to consume that service.

There are about 50 major internet bandwidth providers around the world that connect to each other and work under that arrangement. There are about 5,000 other networks who then work with these major bandwidth providers to bring the internet to our homes, offices, iPads and iPhones. Of course, I’m being simplistic when I describe the notion of peering, but you get the gist. And this idea of peering — on which much of the modern internet is built — is coming under attack, thanks to ISPs like Verizon and Time Warner Cable that provide us (the consumers) with connectivity.

Two examples of this shift

Here’s how these battles tend to play out in the real world.

Picture a conference room in Arizona. In such a room last year, executives from Cable One, a cable broadband provider with 720,000 subscribers, asked the chief technology officer at one of world’s largest bandwidth providers to pay Cable One a fee each time it needed to add more ports to deliver content to Cable One’s end subscribers due to an increase in demand for certain types of content. The CTO of that bandwidth provider, who declined to be named, refused. He walked away rather than add a new, and to his mind, unsustainable, cost to the company’s bottom line. (A representative from Cable One did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this incident.)

Now consider another scenario, which is more in tune with how the internet currently works. Picture a data center in California, where Sonic.net, a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based independent broadband and phone company, also keeps its servers. Sonic.net, which has about 50,000 subscribers, sees a bit under 10 gigabits per second of Netflix traffic a day.

In order to deal with that traffic, Dane Jasper, the CEO of Sonic.net, has put a Netflix-designed box to cache Netflix content closer to the edge of the network where the ISP network meets the big bandwidth providers’ networks. This helps Sonic.net cut the cost that Netflix traffic can impose on its operations. Essentially, Netflix pays for its traffic to travel across most of the network before dropping it at Sonic.net’s door.

Telcos want to make the internet like the phone system

Open Connect, Netflix’s content delivery network, is a new wrinkle in the old idea of networking peering. But it tries to keep the same relationship, namely that both parties (those sending and those receiving content) share in the costs of delivering traffic to the end consumer. This model has worked for years, but some ISPs want to change it.

They see their pipes becoming commodified — dumb, as it were. So they want to build a new internet model: one based on terminating traffic that looks a lot like the old-school telephone networks, where ISPs serving the last mile can charge content companies and bandwidth providers for upgrades they make to the network in order to carry the increase in traffic. The point of connection and negotiation has become the ports where traffic hops from the bandwidth providers onto the ISPs’ network.

An OECD report on peering and internet exchange points from last October explained that because many areas of the world have efficient and cost-free peering relationships, the prices for data are around 100,000 times lower than the price of a voice minute.

As consumers, we are experiencing this underground tussle via poor video streaming and what are effectively throttled connections. For example, earlier this week Om and I wrote about Verizon’s refusal to work with Cogent because it was carrying traffic for a large video provider. Verizon was letting its connections to Cogent (multiple 10 gigabit per second ports) run hot — a euphemism for getting crammed with traffic. And that’s because Verizon has refused to open more ports — the equivalent of opening lanes of traffic on a highway — to Cogent.

Normally when this happens the two parties come to some sort of agreement about adding another port, and then the problem is solved. But in this case, Verizon doesn’t want to play. We don’t have details about what’s happening in the Verizon/Cogent spat, but we can share how these fights have played out in the past, thanks to a public peering squabble that happened in 2010.

We’ve been here before

On the final weekend of November 2010, engineers at Comcast were stunned to find themselves overloaded on ports that connected to Level 3 Communications. These ports — where Level 3 terminated its traffic destined for Comcast’s last mile subscribers — were getting slammed with 10 to 100 times the bits they normally saw. And since overloaded ports result in a crappy experience for the end customer, Comcast needed to figure out what was happening.

Engineers trying to determine where the huge influx of traffic was coming from finally settled on the culprit — a deal that Level 3 had signed earlier that month to carry traffic for streaming video service Netflix. At the time, Netflix traffic made up 33.7 percent of North American web traffic, and in that one weekend most of that traffic suddenly came into Comcast’s network from Level 3 as opposed to Akamai, Netflix’s previous content delivery partner.

The internet is flexible and redundant, but it’s still grounded in actual physical infrastructure. So when all those bits suddenly came into Level 3′s ports instead of the ones Comcast had designated for Netflix/Akamai traffic, packets started dropping and Netflix customers on Comcast network experienced poor service. It’s not all that different from when the police shut off access to a major highway and send people onto local streets: Traffic backs up and everyone’s unhappy.

Luckily, building new roads on the Comcast network isn’t as labor-intensive as building out roads in real life. Even so, when it came to adding new ports for Level 3, Comcast took the opportunity to try to renegotiate peering contracts with Level 3. “These fights over peering can be like third-graders squabbling on the playground,” said Patrick Gilmore, chief architect, network infrastructure for Akamai, in an interview last summer.

While the fuss over the Comcast and Level 3 spat eventually died down after the two parties agreed to some form of give-and-take on getting new ports on the Comcast network, it highlighted a basic fact of life on today’s internet. In many cases, as the big get bigger, the internet’s core weakness isn’t technical; it’s the fact that the main players are now so large that they are in the midst of negotiating a new balance of power.

It’s an IP version of the treaties and shifting alliances in Europe in the late 1800s that then fell apart during the first World War. And while lives aren’t exactly at stake in these peering battles, the outcome of these fights might change the way the internet works, making it more expensive to build a business on the internet and allowing ISPs to become a new gatekeeper.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Netflix may suffer from limited mobility

The latest iteration of the database, version 2.1, helps people who don’t speak the popular database query language SQL by allowing imports of old data in .CSV files, which can be created from familiar Excel spreadsheets. And loads of large data sets can happen fast, because MemSQL directs lots of compute cores to handle the work in parallel.

And the notion of making it easier to view and analyze more data is an area where MemSQL wants to expand over the next few months. “You’ll continue to see a lot of extended functionality in the system related to data sources and data types,” said Eric Frenkiel (pictured), CEO and a co-founder of MemSQL, which can take on both transactional and analytic tasks.

For now, in addition to the .CSV uploading, Version 2.1 also lets customers start choosing what columns they want to shard. It also provides a new way to easily install and manage the database using a Linux packet manager. That feature is aimed at “helping out new users, new developers get onto the system very fast,” said Frenkiel, who was a sales engineer at Facebook before he and co-founder Nikita Shamgunov joined Y Combinator with little more than a startup idea.

Version 2.1 becomes available next month. Earlier this year MemSQL released a distributed version of its database.

As one of our 2013 Cloud Trailblazers, Frenkiel will talk about the company at our Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
• What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution
• The Red-Hot Data Warehouse Market: Who’s Buying Next?

According to its public traffic page, the website usually sees an average of roughly 1.75 million queries by individuals every day, or around 54 million per month (including bot searches). But after the NSA scandal broke, the search engine’s query load increased sharply — finally breaking the 3 million barrier this week and peaking at 3.1 million yesterday. The company is now on target to have an average of 2.2 million queries per day for the month of June, nearly a million more queries per day on average than the same month last year.

That’s a drop in the bucket compared to Google’s 20 billion monthly queries in ComScore’s recent analysis, but DuckDuckGo’s increase in traffic is interesting following the NSA news and the company’s sensitivity to privacy. According to DuckDuckGo’s policy, the company does not keep “search leakage” — bits of private information that slip out with every query that tie the terms to an IP address —  and redirects private information that a website would normally get if a user clicked there directly from search.

It’s worth noting that DuckDuckGo does make money from serving contextual advertising — meaning that relevant ads will pop up after a search is made based on the terms (searching for “puppies” might bring up an ad for dog shampoo). But the lack of cookies or any trailing identifiers mean the ads won’t follow users from site to site.

Because of its privacy settings, DuckDuckGo actually operates as an exit enclave for Tor, an anonymous network that leaves no trail of a user’s browsing. DuckDuckGo has also been vocal in requesting the government to be transparent about the NSA, calling for action alongside Reddit and 4Chan. Of course, Google has already made some waves in that area as well, filing a petition to flex its rights to the First Amendment and release court letters detailing the government’s security measures on citizens.

DuckDuckGo could be getting the benefit of knee-jerk reaction in the wake the NSA scandal, a user’s natural reaction to turn to a website that does out of its way to not collect data. But it’s worth knowing that there are options out there — and many people are willing to take them.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

The same map with layers for buildings, parks and roads, respectively. Using Map Stack, I employed a watercolor background and GigaOM blue as the base of the color palette.

It took 5,000 years to transition from cave maps, anchored by place names and pictures, to a coordinate system, where a place is simply a mathematical X and Y point on a map, according to renowned data visualzer Edward Tufte.

These days, between Street View, social media and loads of geolocated content online, we’re dealing with more than we can handle. Instead of worrying about getting from point A to point B, we’re bombarded by data that can hide what we’re actually looking for.

Enter map designing for the masses.

Stamen Design, a studio in San Francisco, last week released Map Stack, a free online platform that allows users to tailor how their maps look. Users not only specify the place and type of map (buildings, parks, streets) but the way each of those maps looks: its brightness, palette, texture, opacity and more.

The program is similar to the new Google Maps, where users can search for a location and type of map, overlaying geographic, social and online data, and follows a general trend toward better map design.

Has anyone noticed that the typography in Google Maps has gotten a lot more sophisticated recently? pic.twitter.com/WGmScS66RX

— Hoefler&Frere-Jones (@H_FJ) June 15, 2013

However, while Google changes its designs based on the type of map one selects (for example, driving directions will move highways into focus whereas a mass transit search will cede the view to subway and bus routes), Stamen gives the user those design choices. They can make the highway bright red or send it to the background. They can bring buildings, parks, roads and satellite images to the foreground, or simply render a whole city as a washed-out pastel abstraction.

The process is much like using Photoshop—except preloaded with map data from the Open Street Maps, easier and free. And as of now it’s only available from 11 am-5 pm PT Monday-Friday.

Eric Rodenbeck, who is Stamen’s Founder, CEO and creative director, sees these design options as pragmatic as well as aesthetic.

“The amount of data is increasing all the time,” he told GigaOM. “If we don’t think about aesthetics, we’re doomed to make conclusions from that data that other people want us to make.”

Google Map of Amsterdam

As an example, Rodenbeck discussed how a map of Amsterdam could fail to capture the essence of the city.

“If you look at a map of Amsterdam on Google, it looks like a freeway around some canals,” he said. “My experience with Amsterdam has more to do with canals than freeways.” Rodenbeck likens the democratization of mapmaking to the introduction of desktop publishing in the ’90s. Publishing still needed good designers, but the program did extend the possibility of publication to many more people—and their new ideas for design.

Google Map of Amsterdam with all available data options selected.

Rodenbeck applauds the continual design improvements of Google Maps, but thinks more customizable options will lead to greater possibilities. For Rodenbeck, looking at a map is for exploring more than looking for directions. “Everyone knows what a map of their house looks like,” he said. New design “gives you a chance to reconsider places that are familiar.”

Map Stack relies on geographical information from OpenStreetMap, a wiki for cartography. The program provides its own layering design as well as layers from map design platform MapBox. The result is beautiful or ugly depending on how you make it.

Traditionally, cartographers have used an array of fonts, weights, colors and opacities to show users, at a glance, what they want to know.  State names are a different size than capitals, while hues are different for terrains and parks. The same thing happens—if to lesser mastery—online, where we can drill down on locations, spanning the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the sea.

Google Maps, which first revolutionized the world of mapping eight years ago, has come af long way aesthetically. Look at how they’ve changed even since 2009:

Google Maps of New York, 2009, 2010, 2011

Google Map of New York, June 2013

With the acquisition of Waze, Google will be able to leverage the startup’s realtime crowdsourced traffic updates. Google Maps Engine API will let developers leverage it for their own applications, combining their own data with that of Google Maps.  The data options are plentiful. Fortunately, you can easily sort for venues, directions or recommendations.

Updates to online maps both inform and react to technology. Faster processing made possible the inclusion of additional information, but it also requires the ability to turn off that flood of data and the ability to design maps that accurately reflect what it represents.

Audio interfaces and visual aids like Google Glass mean maps have escaped the 2D realm and have become immersive.  To wit: Dennis Crowley wants to use Foursquare’s location data to change the way we interact with the physical world and create something like Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map, so that you can see in realtime the locations of your friends and places you may want to visit.

Maps are layered upon the planes of everyday life, commanding us forward and backward. Good design will get us there.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies

Javier Soltero (pictured on right), who left VMware earlier this year and has since spent his time as an entrepreneur in residence at Redpoint Ventures, wrote in a Monday blog post that he and “a small team of very bright people” are starting a new company called Acompli.

The post was short on details — we had to call to get some of those — although it did convey that Soltero wrestled with the notion of whether he should actually go forward in a new direction the way he is:

I was going back and forth attempting to reconcile my experience from the prior 8 years as an entrepreneur with what lay ahead. Struggling to answer questions which I only knew to ask because this time wouldn’t be my first time around. I had been going through that struggle for a few days before that moment in the car, but until then, I kept getting stuck in a mental stalemate which prevented me from taking the necessary next step.

Of course, he was able to decide to keep going, because here we are discussing his startup. But the experience is nonetheless worth noting given that it proves there is a palpable shift at work here, that the tectonic plates of technology are changing under us and that he is rolling with it.

On the phone, Soltero explained that Acompli (pronounced uh-KOM-plee, in case you were wondering) will indeed be different from what’s in Soltero’s wheelhouse.

It will not be like the underlying e-commerce and internet infrastructure such as web and application servers he developed at Netscape — the sort of stuff “most people today take for granted,” he has said. And it will not be like the open-source infrastructure management he helped construct at Hyperic, the company he co-founded before it got bought by SpringSource, which in turn was bought by VMware — which is how he ended up becoming that company’s chief technology officer of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and application services.

So what exactly will Acompli do? Soltero won’t answer directly, although he did suggest that the company will offer up enterprise software that could run on shared infrastructure. In other words, think SaaS running on a public cloud.

It sounds like the software won’t be the kind of product a few IT admins will use.

“The next great enterprise software businesses are all going to start with end-user-led products — things that users choose on their own, and IT gets involved in blessing and purchasing in some capacity (only later on),” Soltero said. Needless to say, the approach is different at VMware.

He cited cloud-storage provider Box as an example. That product is often first adopted by a few users here and there before the enterprise signs up as customers. Small wonder Box CEO Aaron Levie talks about providing “a consumer-grade experience.”

As for whether the software will be open-source, the answer is no, Soltero said, even though Hyperic was, and even though the spirit is something Soltero believes in.

Whatever Acompli turns out to be, Soltero and his team are taking their time to build it from an office in San Francisco, with an eye on launching it this fall. Given that it’s such a departure from Soltero’s bread and butter, and that it appears to be in step with the times, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Krejci.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Microsoft Azure: What It Is, What It Costs and Who Should Care
• Getting your organization ready for SDN: Part 1
• How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013

The survey was conducted by Northwestern University in Qatar, and involved interviews with more than 10,000 people from Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (which includes Abu Dhabi and Dubai). Although the Arab television networks Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were the top source of news in most of the countries that took part in the study, on average Facebook was the third most popular.

If you look more closely at the numbers, the average for Facebook is hugely influenced by Tunisia, where more than 50 percent of all respondents said the social network was their number one source of news — in Bahrain, only 11 percent said the same, while Facebook’s ranking in the UAE was 10 percent and in Qatar it was 3 percent. The only countries to mention Twitter were Bahrain, where 8 percent gave it as a top source, and Saudi Arabia where it had 3 percent.

Social media is much more influential

Northwestern journalism professor Justin Martin, one of the researchers who did the study, told the media news site Journalism.co.uk that “if you look at the percentages of internet users who are active on social media sites, it’s much higher than the United States and Australia or Western European countries.” Martin said that this fits with earlier research that shows Arab countries are much more social in their use of media than many Western nations:

“Arabs, maybe more than any other culture around the world, have these anchored communities where they receive and share news and information and they tend to go there often for news and they tend to trust the information from their anchored communities.”

As a number of media theorists have described, social media’s effect on our news consumption is in some ways a throwback to the way news used to be consumed and distributed before newspapers existed — when coffee shops and other social outlets were the main source of information for communities (it’s also not clear from the study how much of what is shared on Facebook is news from a traditional source such as a newspaper or television network).

What is clear from the study is that people in some Arab nations don’t trust the traditional media much at all, which could also be driving them towards social networks as a source of news: in Egypt and Tunisia — both of which experienced revolutionary uprisings as part of the Arab Spring — only a quarter of those surveyed said they thought the media was a credible source.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written about how social-media use influenced the revolutions in Tunisia and other Arab countries, and how social networks helped to overcome some of the barriers that kept popular dissident movements in those countries from turning into revolutions in the past.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Richard Engel / NBC

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

Feedly has also launched a web-only version, which it says was the top user-requested feature. Feedly already had Chrome and Safari apps, but this means that users of other browsers, like Internet Explorer, can access the service.

Finally, the fact that Feedly’s now operating in its own cloud means that developers can build apps for it. In its blog post, the company announced the first Feedly apps — including an IFTTT (if this then that) Feedly channel that lets you “connect your feedly account to 63 other services (including Evernote, Google Drive, Gmail, Pocket, Instapaper, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.),” social media management platform Sprout Social and RSS readers for various platforms from companies like Nextgen Reader, gNewsReader, Press and Newsify.

Meanwhile, we’re planning a guide to Google Reader alternatives to help you prepare for the switch, if you haven’t switched over to a new service already. If you were a die-hard Google Reader user, what product are you using now — or are you clinging to Google Reader until the bitter end? Let us know in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust