Author: Frederic Lardinois

According to a new study by market research firm ComScore, the majority of U.S. Internet users would use the iPad to surf the web (50%), send and read emails (48%) and listen to music (38%). Only 26% of respondents told ComScore that they were likely to download apps from the iTunes store and only 22% plan to play action, strategy and role playing games.

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We have to keep in mind that peoples’ responses to these questions often conflict with how they actually end up using devices like the iPad. Chances are that in 2007 only a small number of respondents would have said that they were planning to play games on their iPhones, too – yet games are now the bestselling category in the App Store. The iPad is a different kind of device that most people have never used. It makes sense that the respondents to this survey imagine that they will use it just like a laptop (surf the web, send email), even though their real usage patterns may turn out to be completely different.

Also, ComScore posed this question to everybody who responded to the survey, including those who weren’t planning to buy the device and maybe weren’t even really aware of it. This explains why only 26% answered that they would download apps from the iTunes store while 30% said that they would play arcade and puzzle games – which, after all, they would have to download from the store. Given these caveats, it’s worth taking this data with a grain of salt, even if it does point towards some interesting conclusions.

iPad vs. Kindle

For publishers, the fact that around 35% of respondents said that they would use the iPad for reading magazines and books should be encouraging. With regards to activities on the iPad that would involve e-commerce, e-books and e-magazines rank higher than playing games and are on par with listening to music and watching videos.

Even though the iPad is getting all the hype today, that doesn’t mean consumers aren’t still considering dedicated e-readers like the Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook and Sony’s line of e-readers. According to ComScore’s data, about 15% of U.S. Internet users are seriously considering to buy an iPad within the next 3 month and 14% are considering to buy a Kindle. Interestingly, when it comes to awareness about these devices, 65% of respondents were aware of the iPad and just as many were aware of the Kindle. It’s worth noting, though, that the iPad isn’t even available yet, while the Kindle has been around for a few years now and has become synonymous with “e-reader” for a lot of people. We should also note that ComScore’s numbers refer to “aided awareness.” It would be interesting to see these numbers for “unaided awareness” as well.

For a closer look at what magazines on the iPad could look like, also check out this survey by our own Sarah Perez.

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Google just announced two new features for some of its most popular APIs: partial response and partial update. This, according to Google, is part of the company’s efforts to make the web faster. Instead of having to pull a full feed of data from Google Calendar, which usually included lots of extra information you don’t really need, developers can now request a partial response that only includes relevant data. Developers can also use the new partial update feature to edit this data and send it back to the server without having to touch any of the unneeded data.

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As Google points out, these two new features in its APIs should allow developers to reduce the network, memory, and CPU resources needed to work with Google APIs. In Google’s example, a full calendar feed contained 160 kB of data, while a partial feed only contained 8 kB – a 95% reduction (these links point to your own calendar, so your mileage may vary). These performance enhancements should be especially noticeable on mobile devices.

Partial response and partial update are now available for the YouTube Data API, the Calendar Data API and the Picasa Web Albums Data API. The Sidewiki Data API currently only supports partial response.

You can find a more detailed description of these new features here.

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According to a new report from app store analytics firm Distimo, the average price for the most popular iPhone apps worldwide dropped 15% between December 2009 and February 2010. The price for the most popular iPhone apps in Europe is higher than anywhere else in the world. While the average price for popular apps in North America is $2.43, European iPhone users pay an average of $3.86. Given the different pricing tiers, strategies and tastes across countries, it’s hard to fully explain these price differences, but it looks like iPhone users in North America are more price sensitive than users in other countries.

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Turn-By-Turn Navigation Apps

No matter the country or continent, navigation apps always represent the most expensive app category. Here, too, Europe leads the charge. According to Distimo, this can be explained by the simple fact that almost all the popular navigation apps in Europe cover different regions (TomTom Western Europe, Eastern Europe, UK, etc.). This skews the average price compared to the U.S., where a number of $0.99 cent apps like MotionX GPS Drive and the MapQuest Navigator are very popular and where companies like Navigon have only recently started to sell regional versions of their navigation apps.

Some Caveats

We should note that we aren’t quite sure how and if Distimo adjusted its stats for currency fluctuations. In an email to VentureBeat, Distimo’s founder Vincent Hoogsteder also noted that turn-by-turn navigation apps “raised the average price in December, so that the current drop is more of a correction.”

Given all of these caveats, we have to take this data with a grain of salt, though its clear that the average price for the most popular apps in Apple’s app store continues to fall. For developers, the constant decline of the average price for an iPhone app must be somewhat unsettling. Even though prices have fallen since December, however, Distimo’s report also shows that prices have remained relatively stable since January.

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Because of U.S. export restrictions, Internet users from Cuba, Iran and Sudan haven’t been able to download Google Earth since 2007. This situation is about to change, however. According to the Ogle Earth blog, which has been monitoring this situation closely since Google first blocked these downloads, Internet users in these countries will soon be able to download Google Earth again. The U.S. government lifted its export restrictions earlier this month and Internet companies can now offer their services in Iran, Cuba and Sudan again.

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Sadly, it will still take a little bit before Google will actually make Google Earth available in these countries. In a statement to the Ogle Earth blog, a Google representative noted that the company has been working on these changes “since the day of the US pronouncement. There is much to do, actually, but we are very excited about it!”

Earlier this month, after the U.S. treasury department announced the end of these export restrictions, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin rightly noted, “as recent events in Iran have shown, personal Internet-based communications like e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking are powerful tools. This software will foster and support the free flow of information–a basic human right–for all Iranians.”

Image Credit: Ogle Earth

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Microsoft just launched a new version of its Bing iPhone app. The iPhone app gives you comprehensive access to Bing’s core services, including Bing maps and directions, as well as news and image search. Besides offering better stability and a few interface tweaks, the new version of the Bing app also integrates more tightly with the iPhone by giving you access to your contacts in the mapping feature and making it easier to copy and paste URLs and share interesting results through email.

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Releasing Bing for iPhone Worldwide was an Accident…

Just as it launched this new version of the app, however, Microsoft also pulled the Bing applications from all the non-U.S. versions of the App Store. According to a statement Microsoft sent to Neowin, the company “inadvertently made it available to all countries in which the Apple Marketplace has a presence.” Why it took Microsoft three months to pull the app, which was released in December 2009, remains a bit of a mystery.

New Features

If you are in the U.S., however, the Bing iPhone app remains to be the best way to access Microsoft’s “decision engine” on your phone. The new version now includes a number of interesting new features. One of the most useful features is the app’s ability to let you bookmark maps, websites and direction. Sadly, however, this feature isn’t integrated with Apple’s Safari, so your bookmarks don’t carry over to the iPhone’s default browser.

Other new features include better parental control settings, private search and the ability to edit your search history and support for first generation iPod touch devices.

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Until now, anybody who wanted to implement real-time ads from OneRiot‘s RiotWise network had to get these ads through OneRiot’s API and create a customized user interface around these ads. This severely limited OneRiot’s appeal for website owner who wanted to experiment with real-time ads on their sites and services but were looking for a plug and play solution. Today, OneRiot is launching a new set of real-time ads that website owners can just plug into their sites. These dynamic ads will refresh automatically and display relevant ads based on the topics that are trending on the Internet right now.

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For now, these new RiotWise display ad units are only available by requesting access directly from OneRiot. Chances are that the company will make it easier to get access to these ads in the near future. OneRiot is targeting these new ad units at services that are already in the real-time ecosystem, including social networks, real-time meme trackers and other social sharing services. Some of the services that currently use OneRiot’s ads through the company’s API include Digsby, ÜberTwitter and a number of real-time search engines.

According to OneRiot these ads lead to “click through rates at four times industry norms.” While we can’t verify this data, it doesn’t come as a surprise that these ads, which usually point to interesting and relevant content on OneRiot’s partner sites would have high click-through rates, especially if users are already on news site or are using a browser-based Twitter tool. On the other hand, we also don’t know what kind of payout website owners can expect from these ads, so a higher click-through rate could still mean that publishers end up earning just as much money from RiotWise as they currently do from AdSense or similar programs.

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Google Analytics offers site owners an easy and free way to gather highly detailed analytics about their websites’ visitors. A lot of people, however, don’t feel comfortable with the idea that Google can track their every move on the Internet. After all, even if you don’t use any Google product yourself, you will still send personal data about yourself to Google through programs like Google Analytics. According to an announcement the Google Analytics team just posted on its blog, you will soon have the option to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.

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How Will This Work?

It still remains to be seen how this opt out feature will actually work. According to Google, the Google Analytics team wants to offer a “global browser based plugin.” This is a very vague statement and given that there is no standard for browser plugins, it remains to be seen how Google will implement this. It is also worth noting that a lot of users probably don’t know how to install a plugin. Those users who care about being tracked by Google Analytics will likely know how to do this, but it is probably in Google’s best interest to explain this opt out procedure in great detail.

Google plans to make these plugins available globally in the coming weeks.

Will this Make Stats Useless?

If opting out of Google Analytics becomes a widespread phenomenon, this could have wide-reaching consequences for site owners. After all, having detailed analytics about your visitors allows site owners and publishers to tweak their marketing efforts.

What About Other Analytics Tools?

It will also be interesting to see how other analytics firms will react to this. While Google Analytics is probably one of the most often used analytics services, other companies like Clicktale, Sitemeter and Woopra also collect large amounts of data from Internet users. Those users who want to opt out of Google Analytics will surely also want to opt out of other programs as well.

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

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Google just introduced an interesting new feature for Google Calendar: Smart Rescheduler. This new feature, which will be available in Google Calendar Labs today, will automatically find the best time to reschedule a meeting. If you have ever tried to reschedule a meeting that includes more than two people, a conference room, equipment and a team that is distributed across multiple time zones, you know how hard this can be.

With Smart Rescheduler, Google Calendar will give you a set of alternative dates based on a ranking algorithm that keeps everybody’s availability and other criteria in mind.

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Rescheduling Meetings Doesn’t Have to be Hard

As Ken Norton, Google’s product manager for Google Calendar, told us yesterday, the Calendar team decided to tackle this problem after realizing how much time administrative assistants spend on trying to reschedule meetings every day. Starting today, Smart Rescheduler will be available as a Calender Labs product for all Google Calender users (including all Google Apps users with access to Calendar Labs).

Now, assuming your team uses Google Calendar, you can simply click on “Find a new time” and Google will present you with a list of the most appropriate times for a new meeting. The algorithm will rank alternative times based on criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms and time zones. As Norton told us, the algorithm is actually quite complex and will also suggest a new meeting time when two participants in a larger meetings are scheduled for a one-on-one meeting at the same time or when there is a scheduling conflict but a meeting participant hasn’t RSVPed to this other meeting yet.

Users can also refine the search criteria by changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts and by setting the earliest and latest date for the rescheduled meeting.

It’s interesting that Google is only using this algorithm to reschedule meetings for now. It would also be interesting to see how well this system would work for scheduling meetings in the first place.

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Based on a patent filing that was published by the USPTO today and first discovered by Patently Apple, Apple could soon enter the location-based social networking market. The patent, which was filed in September 2008, describes a scenario where a group of users with mobile devices like the iPhone come together at an event like a concert, wedding, political rally or trade show. Normally, you would have to collect personal information from all the attendees you meet and then transfer this data manually into your existing social network if you want to stay in touch with them. Apple’s patent, however, describes a system where all of the devices in a specific location can automatically become part of a new social network based on their location. The patent filing refers to this service as iGroups.

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This could, for example, allow event organizers to provide attendees with additional content and services during the event and after it is over. The exchange of this information would be brokered by trusted devices at the event and information about the social network can be stored in the cloud and exchanged with other services.

Turning Ad Hoc Networks into Permanent Social Networks

As Apple notes in the patent (“Group Formation Using Anonymous Broadcast Information “), technologies like Bluetooth personal area networks allow modern cell phones to easily create ad hoc networks, but it is virtually impossible to recreate this network at a later time for users to continue their discussions or exchange additional content.

In a very detailed example, Apple’s patent describes how iGroups could automatically detect that a group of users is in or around a specific location (in the example, this event is Apple WWDC 2008). The iGroups service could then invite all the attendees to join this group and create a permanent social network for everybody who was in attendance and opts in to the group.

Will Apple Actually Do Anything With This Patent?

This, of course, isn’t Apple’s first patent for a location-based service. As with all of Apple’s patents, it remains to be seen if the company will actually release any product based on this filing. Given Apple’s position in the mobile market, however, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if the company decided to turn some of these patents into actual product.

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Currently, your contacts live in address books that are distributed all over the Internet and your desktop. Because of this, chances are that you have numerous address books on the web that are often “inconsistent and disjointed.” Contacts, a new Mozilla Labs project, wants to put an end to this. The Contacts addon creates a local database for all your email and Twitter contacts that can then be used by your browser and any website that supports Contacts’ API.

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Thanks to this, you can now import all your Gmail contacts to the local database and use this contact info to autocomplete forms anywhere on the web. You can also import data about your Twitter friends and if you are on a Mac, you can import your local address book as well. Contacts will also import avatars from Gravatar whenever they are available.

Lots of Ambition Beyond Autocompletion

This email autocompletion feature is really just a first step for Mozilla, though. The real mission of this tool is to give users more control over their own data – a mission that is also very much in sync with what Mozilla considers its own mission to be these days. When you import your contacts database on most websites today to check if your friends are already online or to invite them to the service, you have to trust this service that it will keep this data private. Once more sites implement Contacts directly into their services, however, you will be able to control exactly what data a third-party site can access and retain control over this data.

The current version of Contacts consists of four pieces:

• a browser-based database that syncs with your address books. Contacts uses the Portable Contacts format to represent this data in the database.
• a generic importer system that allows developers to create importers for desktop and web-based address books
• an email autocompletion feature
• a Javascript API that third-party sites can use to access all of your data (with explicit permission and the ability to filter the data)

Give it a Try

After installing the addon, you can test both the autocomplete and the tool’s export features here.

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Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome, the company’s increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.

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Read 52 Languages

Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don’t need it for.

One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google’s servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post.

Better Privacy Controls

In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new “Content Settings” option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls.

What About the Mac and Linux?

With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn’t easy. While these new features aren’t available for Mac and Linux users yet, it’s likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome.

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Earlier tonight, the Paley Center hosted a discussion about social media and digital activism with celebrated artist, architectural designer, activist and blogger Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and ReadWriteWeb’s editor and founder Richard MacManus. The discussion touched upon a large variety of topics related to social media and digital activism in China, including translating Twitter into Chinese and Google’s exit from the Chinese market.

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Jack Dorsey joined the conversation via satellite from San Francisco. The conversation was moderated by Emily Parker, the Arthur Ross Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, who is currently working on a book about China and the Internet.

To start out the discussion, MacManus pointed out that it was the read/write aspect of the Internet that spawned the growth of social networks like Facebook and Twitter over the last few years. In the Western world, this development allowed users to connect and express their thoughts freely. In China, however, even though the same tools are available as in the West, a lot of them are currently blocked and censored. In addition to this, Ai Weiwei noted that sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as TV channels like CNN, are currently blocked in China.

Even though there are a number of Facebook and Twitter clones in China, Ai Weiwei argued that those companies work within the framework that the Chinese government has set for them with regards to what users can say on these services. Ai Weiwei’s name, for example, can never be used on these sites without getting censored. Indeed, said Ai Weiwei, using Twitter in China is “very physical and dangerous.”

Translating Twitter

Asked about the reason for Twitter’s popularity among netizens, Ai Weiwei noted that services like Twitter and blogs are easy to use, but once he got too popular, his blog was quickly shut down. Even though Twitter has a 140-character limit, Twitter’s users in China can easily express in-depth thoughts because the Chinese language allows Twitter users to express 140 words on Twitter and not just 140 characters.

With regards to how Twitter is being used in China, Ai Weiwei noted that the most active Twitter users in China often use the service for political and philosophical discussions.

Jack Dorsey, after recapping the basic history of Twitter and his fascination with maps, and open, public databases, noted that messages on Twitter, even though they are often trivial, do show that “we are human” and remind us that we are all the same. Twitter, which he called a utility, was extended by the user and the developer ecosystem that grew up around it. Internet users across the world can now use it to communicate, talk to their governments, build a business and create political movements.

Ai Weiwei told Dorsey that the “Chinese people think you are some kind of God” because Twitter allows people to express themselves without worrying about censorship.

A lot of the discussion with Jack Dorsey focused on had to do with what Twitter can do to to help its users in China. Ai Weiwei directly asked Dorsey why Twitter doesn’t provide its users a Chinese-language version of Twitter. According to Dorsey, it is just a question of time and mostly a technological issue. Given Twitter’s problems with scaling the service, making it work for every character set creates some issues for Twitter because of the legacy framework that Twitter established in its early days. Currently, the company doesn’t really have the resources to devote to this. Doresey did, however, argue that users already know how the service is meant to work and understand the setup of the Twitter page.

Dorsey also noted that Twitter isn’t sure that it really wants to move into the Chinese market, but would like to offer a Chinese translation of its service at some point. Indeed, Dorsey noted that he wasn’t even aware that Twitter was blocked in China until just a few weeks ago.

Censorship and Twitter

MacManus then asked Ai Weiwei if the Chinese government couldn’t just censor Twitter or force Twitter to censor its service. Ai Weiwei, however, pointed out that Twitter could easily translate Twitter’s registration page to help Chinese users. He noted that he isn’t asking Twitter to set up an operation in China – he just wants Twitter to make the service easier to use for Chinese users and to translate large parts of the service. The Internet companies in China, as MacManus noted, tend to “self-discipline” themselves and censor their own content. MacManus wondered what would happen to a Chinese language version of Twitter, and if it wouldn’t just get blocked and censored just like other international services.

Ai Weiwei noted that a lot of international companies that would like to enter the Chinese market have a responsibility to not give up on basic human rights. While the discussion didn’t go into depth with regards to the issues surrounding Google’s exit from China, MacManus noted that Google was one of the few Western services that entered the Chinese market, even though it faced a strong Chinese competitor. According to MacManus, leaving the Chinese market was a “brave move” by Google that sends a strong message that these companies are willing to stand up to the Chinese government.

Twitter’s Moral Responsibility

Twitter and other technology companies have, said Dorsey, a responsibility to follow basic moral guidelines, and in his view, many technology companies have helped to push the messages of the U.S. government (and other governments) forward with regards to acknowledging human rights violations in China.

Asked specifically if companies do have a moral responsibility, Dorsey said that Twitter – as a company – is focused on opening information as completely as possible and wants to ensure that everybody can participate in the conversations on the service. Twitter, which according to Dorsey was founded around the principles of immediacy and transparency, allows users to create a shared experience among users around the world and create more empathy.

Towards the end of the discussion, Dorsey said that Twitter is just a tool and that it can’t change any governments itself, but that it is the users who can use it to change governments.

As MacManus noted during the discussion, it is people like Ai Weiwei that are using these tools effectively. One day, Ai Weiwei noted towards the end of the discussion, we won’t need tools like Twitter to change our governments anymore.

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During his SXSW keynote interview today, Twitter’s Evan Williams announced the service’s new @platform. While the keynote interview itself was rather forgettable (a large part of the audience left before it was over), the @platform will have wide-reaching consequences for Twitter and its ecosystem. This new platform will allow publishers to integrate Twitter deeper into their site and recreate the “open, engaging interactions” their readers expect from using Twitter “without sending them to Twitter.com.”

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The new platform, for example, will allow users to identify and follow Twitter users on third-party sites without leaving the third-party site. Some of the sites that will soon use this new service include Amazon, Yahoo, Digg, Bing and the New York Times. This, according to Evan, will allow publishers to make sure that their audience is aware of their Twitter feeds, and allow users to follow a site’s or columnist’s feed without every having to leave the site. According to Williams, this will allow publishers to find more followers, and it will also allow Twitter to bring in more users to the site as well as make more non-Twitter users aware of the service. According to Williams, Twitter is launching this service because it wants to lower the barrier of using the service. Given that Twitter’s growth has slowed down in recent months, it only makes sense for the company to try to bring the service to more mainstream users.

While many pundits expected Twitter to announce its ad platform or make an announcement about how the company plans to monetize the service (besides its partnerships with search companies like Google and Microsoft), Twitter did not offer any major insights into its plans today. When asked about the company’s plans, Williams noted that Twitter is not going to go after “low-hanging fruit” and is more interested in creating a sustainable platform.

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Last night, during Digg‘s annual SXSW party, Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson announced a set of significant changes to Digg. Among the changes Adelson announced are a streamlined submission process, a personalized homepage, an unlimited amount of topic pages, a new commenting system and better curation tools. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to sit down with Adelson to discuss these changes in greater detail. Some of these changes will surely be extremely controversial in the Digg community and might also make some publishers who rely on Digg’s traffic a bit nervous.

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It’s hard to underestimate the influence these changes will have on the Digg community. Not only did the Digg team create a completely new backend architecture, but Digg is also making a lot of changes to how the site will work from a user’s perspective – some of which will surely be controversial among Digg’s most active users.

Digg will launch the new site in alpha in a few weeks. You can sign up for an account here. It’s important to note that Digg plans to work directly with its users and is looking for feedback from its alpha users. The alpha site, for example, will feature a large feedback bar at the bottom of every page.

Personalized Homepages as Default

On the new Digg, every user will get a personalized homepage which will be populated with stories that are popular among this user’s friends and relate to topics this user has expressed interest in. This personalized homepage will become the default Digg frontpage for all users who have signed in to Digg. Users who are not signed in will still see the old Digg homepage. With this, the Digg team is clearly looking to get more users to sign up for the service. Digg will also update its users’ profile pages.

Submitters Lose Power

Another major change to Digg – and one that will surely create some controversy among the most active users of the service – is that the new Digg will de-emphasize the power of submitters and put an even stronger emphasis on who votes for stories, as well as on outside signals from third-party services like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, the new Digg will now allow publishers to auto-submit their stories through RSS feeds and a number of other mechanisms that the company plans to unveil in the next few weeks. Until now, while Digg didn’t forbid publishers to submit their own content, this behavior was generally discouraged by the Digg community.

As Adelson told us, on the new Digg, submitting a story will basically mean that you are the first voter. Currently, a relatively small group of submitters has a lot of power over which stories will appear on the Digg frontpage.

Signals from Twitter, Facebook and Co.

While there will still be a role for those users who regularly discover new and interesting content, the new Digg will put a strong emphasis on votes and signals from your friends on third-party sites like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, Digg will create a social graph for you that will take all of this information into account when it create your personalized homepage. On the homepage, Digg will also expose why a story appeared in your feed.

While Adelson couldn’t go into details, it seems like Digg has established a very good relationship with Twitter and has had access to Twitter’s firehose feed to almost a year.

Once the new digg comes out of beta, anonymous users will also be able to vote on stories. While the team is still working out the details, it is clear that Digg is looking to get as many signals as possible to augment the current voting process. It will be interesting to see how Digg will weigh all this information in the creation of personalized pages and the new topic pages.

The submission process for stories that haven’t been submitted to Digg already will now be a one-click process.

Digg will also soon use third-party sign-on systems, including Google, Twitter Connect and Yahoo to allow its users to sign in.

Working With Publishers: What Will Happen to the Digg Effect?

Obviously, quite a few publishers will worry that the old Digg effect – which would often take sites down because of the huge amount of traffic a story on Digg’s frontpage can create – will now disappear. Adelson, however, who also noted that Digg “wants to be a good source for traffic for publishers,” thinks that this new system will create a more regular stream of traffic to publishers.

In the long run, Adelson noted, Digg also plans to open up its advertising platform to share revenue with publishers. This project is still in its early stages, but according to Adelson, this could involve using a widget on the publisher’s site or by using Digg’s salesforce to sell ad inventory on these sites directly.

To make all of this work, Digg completely stripped out the old infrastructure and started over by building a completely new platform. This, said Adelson, will allow Digg to easily make changes to the frontend and react to user feedback during the alpha and beta phase. At some point in the future, Digg might also open this platform up to third parties.

A Completely New Platform

Digg is clearly taking this new version extremely serious. The company plans to hire 50 engineers this year to help with scaling the architecture. Adelson was clearly proud of the work his team has done on the backend architecture. The new site will be “wicked fast,” thanks to a complete retooling of every aspect of the site, up to the point where the bottlenecks for Digg are now network speed and latency. This is quite a feat, given that Digg now offers an almost unlimited amount of topic pages and a personalized homepage for every user – all of which will have to be recalculated constantly.

How Will Users React?

It will be very interesting to see how users will react to all of these changes. Adelson and the rest of the Digg team are very aware that this will create some controversy, but Adelson clearly thinks that this is the right way to go for Digg. The topic pages will allow Digg to cater to users who care about every type of news, be it the Boston Red Socks or the latest gadget news.

Discuss

During today’s SXSW keynote, social media research Danah Boyd, who works for Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about online privacy. Specifically, she focused on how users can navigate issues around online privacy and how developers can help them to do so.

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Boyd, who has researched how mainstream users use social media for the last couple of years, argued that developers have to focus on questions about privacy and publicity as they use and develop these new applications and experiences. According to Boyd, privacy is not dead and users care about it – both online and offline – and often react quite violently when their expectations of privacy are broken.

Google Buzz: Privacy Fail

Looking at the example of Google Buzz, which she called a “privacy fail,” Boyd argued that Google didn’t do anything technically wrong when it release Buzz. Instead, Google made a number of non-technical mistakes that interrupted a set of social expectations its users had.

Google’s mistakes:

• Building a public system in an environment that most people consider to be private (their email service). A lot of users actually believed that once they started using Buzz, Google would expose all of their private emails to the world.
• Google assumed that users would simply opt out if they didn’t want to participate. A lot of Google users, however, thought that they would cancel their Gmail accounts if the opted out of Buzz.
• Technologists assume that the optimal solution is the best and forget about social rituals. Boyd noted that users expect to be able to choose their friends, for example, a social ritual that Google interrupted when it automatically populated its users Buzz accounts with people they tended to send a lot of emails to.

To explain these issues, Boyd distinguished between articulated networks (address books, Facebook, Twitter), behavioral networks (based on common behavior, location, etc.) and personal networks. According to Boyd, people don’t necessarily want to bring all of this info together (which Buzz did). Instead, they want to be able to separate different groups.

It’s also important to remember that private and public are also not always clear binary opposites. While technology often makes it looks like this, in real life, things tend to get a lot messier. If you are out in a café, for example, you are in a public space, but you expect a certain community to be there – while you don’t expect others to be there – and you still expect a certain degree of privacy while you are talking to your friends.

Facebook’s Privacy Fail

Users generally don’t handle change well, which can have serious privacy implications. When Facebook asked its users to reevaluate their privacy settings a few months ago, the default choice was “everyone.” People encountered the Facebook popup with a notification about these changes, however, clicked through without reading it and suddenly all of their data was public. According to Facebook, only about 33% of users made changes. As Boyd noted in her talk, most Facebook users simply didn’t understand the privacy settings.

Public by Default, Private by Effort

By default, most conversations on social media services are now public, while making them private takes a conscious effort. By and large, teenagers, according to Boyd, are more conscious about what they can gain by being public, while adults worry more about what they could lose. That, however, can lead to shortsighted decisions and have serious consequences – something developers need to think about as they create their social media applications and especially aggregators.

The Public-By-Default Environment is Not the Great Democratizer

Just because something is publicly accessible, for example, doesn’t mean that people want it to be publicized. The launch of Facebook’s news stream, fore example, caught users by surprise as it broke the social contract on Facebook. While the data in the news stream had always been available, aggregating it violated the privacy expectations of most users. Developers, according to Boyd, have to ask themselves how the people whose content they are remixing and aggregating would feel if all of this data was suddenly available in one place.

What Can Developers Do?

• There is no magical formula: privacy exists in social contexts and these contexts are complex and change constantly. For technologists, this is what makes it so hard to deal with these problems. Developers, said Boyd, have to learn to navigate these complexities and interact with their users. Developers also have to consider that privacy slip-ups can have real-world consequences for users.
• Developers have to ask themselves how they would feel if this information they aggregate would be disclosed. Just because you can see somebody, doesn’t mean they want to be seen.
• Wanting privacy is not about having something to hide, but about control and creating space to open up.

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Google just announced that the mobile version of Google Product Search can now tell you if a certain product is in stock at nearby stores. Currently, Google is only working with a handful of retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and West Elm, but the company is actively looking for more partners. To see these results, just browse to Google.com on your mobile phone (Android, WebOS or Android), click the “more” link and then “Shopping.” The local inventory will be updated in real time and is currently only available for users in the U.S.

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Google obviously thinks that providing the best local results possible is the future for a large number of its services. Now that most modern mobile browsers can forward your location data to web apps, it’s become even easier for Google to offer these kinds of local results and Google’s initiatives around Google Maps and Place Pages show how serious the company is about local search.

For now, with this small number of participating retailers, this isn’t necessarily the most useful feature yet. If Google actually manages to get more businesses to use this feature (and/or to expose their inventory through an API), then Google Product Search – which has remained relatively underused – could easily establish itself as the go-to local shopping service.

For more details about the mobile version of Google Product Search, have a look at this video (the introduction of Product Search starts about 19 minutes into the presentation)

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Most hosted blogging platforms offer their customers a set of standard templates with relatively few options for customizing these sites. Starting today, however, bloggers on Google’s Blogger platform will be able to take full control over the layout of their sites thanks to Google’s new Blogger Template Designer without having to edit a single line of HTML and CSS code. The Template Designer will give Blogger’s users the ability to change the layout, fonts, colors and background images of their blogs through an easy to use WYSIWYG editor.

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For now, the Template Designer will only be available through Blogger in Draft, Google’s experimental section for new Blogger features.

Features

Every template allows users to choose different body layouts with up to four columns. Google partnered with iStockphoto to bring more background images to Blogger. For now, Google won’t allow users to upload their own background images yet, but advanced users can always use the CSS code to point to their own images.

In the template designer, users can also change the size and number of the columns on their blogs and edit the design of their blogs’ footers.

Change your Color Palette With One Slider

One of the niftiest new features in the Template Designer involves the option to change the complete color palette of your blog with one simple slider. Based on your choice, the application will simply set all the colors of the fonts and other design elements on your site based on your preference while still ensuring readability.

As Siobhan Quinn, Google’s product manager for Blogger told us yesterday, Google’s users really want to be able to customize their sites and make them look as unique as possible. Just offering a set of rigid templates, Quinn noted, simply isn’t enough to give users the feeling that a site is truly theirs. Until now, customizing Blogger sites – while possible – was a bit of a hassle and making any major changed involved editing the HTML and CSS code by hand, which a lot of Blogger’s users weren’t quite ready to do.

Other blogging platforms like WordPress.com and TypePad and also allow their users to individualize their blogs to some degree. On WordPress, however, editing the CSS code comes at a price ($15/year) and unless you are an advanced user, changing the layout of your blog on most hosted blogging platforms is going to involve a steep learning curve.

According to Google, Blogger currently has over 300 million active users and more than 388 million words are published on Blogger every day.

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Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play. Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google’s Fast Flip. It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader’s ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences.

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Big on Recommendations

As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and “like.” You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader.

Play will even work if you don’t have a Google account. While you can’t star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don’t want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds.

Get Started

To use Google Reader Play, just head over here or look for “View in Reader Play” in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second.

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