Author: Frederic Lardinois

According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 61% of Americans now get some of their news online, though local TV stations are still the most popular means of finding out about the news. Local print newspapers still reach 50% of Americans and 17% read the print versions of national papers like the New York Times or USA Today.

While 38% of Americans still rely solely on offline sources for their daily news, only 2% of adults in the U.S. get their news exclusively from online sources.

Sponsor

The majority of news consumers in the U.S. (59%) now get their news from a combination of online and offline sources.

News Portals Are the Most Popular Sources – Younger Internet Users also Rely on Social Networks

When online, American Internet users generally rely on 2 to 5 different sites to get their news. Interestingly, 65% of online news users say that they don’t have a favorite online news source.

The majority of Internet users (56%) rely on news portals like Google News, AOL or Topix. Younger Internet users under 29 also tend to use social networks to look for interesting stories that their peers share with them (44%) and 13% specifically follow news organizations or individual journalists on social networking sites.

Only 4% of all Internet users follow Twitter updates from journalists and news organizations to stay on top of the news. News podcasts are far more popular than Twitter for getting news updates. About 15% of online news users over 18 listen to news podcasts from organizations like NPR or the New York Times.

What About RSS?

Sadly, the Pew study did not ask users if they used RSS feeds and feed readers to consume news (“RSS” doesn’t even appear in the report). While a lot of Internet users probably use RSS to consume news on portal sites and news aggregators without knowing it, it would be interesting to see how many people use services like Google Reader to consume news.

Sharing News

Three-quarters of all adult Internet users in the U.S. say that they get news forwarded to them by email or through posts on social networking sites. A quarter of these Internet users, however, also says that they barely ever read these stories.

Demographics

Marketers and the advertising departments for online news sources will be happy to hear that news users tend to be younger than the average population (68% are under 50 and 29% are under 30) and are likely to be employed full-time (50%) and have at least some college education (67%). Their household income also tends to be higher than the U.S. average. These users are also have faster broadband connections (84%) than the average Internet user.

The heaviest consumers of online news are between 30 and 49 years old and likely to live in a household with an annual income of over $50,000.

What do they look for?

The vast majority of Internet users goes online to find out information about the weather (81%). News about national events (73%), health (66%), business and finance (64%) and news about international events (62%) are also among the top 5 most popular categories among online news consumers . Tech news is the sixth-most popular category.

Get RWW News on Facebook

You can become a fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and get our news and analysis about the changing web delivered directly into your News feed.

Discuss

We already knew that Facebook had usurped Yahoo’s spot as the Web’s second-most visited website in the U.S. in January, but today, Web analytics firm Compete also released its data for the rest of the top 50 sites in in the U.S. Unsurprisingly, most shopping sites registered a large drop in unique visitors since December, while tax services are seeing some of the highest month-to-month growth rates.

Sponsor

Shopping Sites Down

Shopping sites like Walmart.com, Target and BestBuy both saw a substantial monthly decline of around 35% compared to December. Amazon, however, only lost 5%, which suggests that the world’s most popular online shopping destination relies less on seasonal traffic than most of its competitors.

Tax and Travel Up

With the tax season in the U.S. in full swing, it doesn’t come as a surprise that services like HRBlock.com, Intuit.com and Taxactonline.com saw solid growth since December. In total, Compete notes that sites in its “Financial Services: Accountancy and Tax Service” category were up 292% compared to December 2009. Maybe even more importantly, these numbers are also up 11.5% compared to January 2009, which is a strong indicator that more and more people now prepare and file their taxes online. Last week, we talked to representatives from Intuit’s Turbotax division, who also noted that the company’s online services now post some of Intuit’s largest growth rates.

As travelers start to plan their 2010 vacations, sites like HotWire.com (up 32% month-over-month) and TripAdvisor.com (up 24%) also posted solid gains.

Other Notable Numbers: New York Times, CNet, Twitter and Bing

Among news sites in Competes top 50, the New York Times (#50) booked a solid 10% gain since December, while CNN (#32) saw a 1.6% gain. The number of unique visitors to CNet, however, dropped by almost 13% compared to December, and is down 24% year-over-year.

Twitter, which registered a solid 294% year-over-year growth, only saw a 3.35% growth since December.

Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, is now the eleventh most-visited site. It’s worth noting that the combination of Live.com and Bing.com attracted around 133 million unique visitors in January 2010, which is on par with Facebook’s and Yahoo’s numbers.

Discuss

Mobile Roadie, the popular do-it-yourself platform that allows bands, celebrities and regular users to create iPhone apps without knowing how to program, just announced that it has now expanded its service to Google Android. With this new service, Mobile Roadie users can now create and manage both Android and iPhone apps simultaneously. Dolly Parton, Ashton Kutcher and Madonna are among today’s launch partners. A Mobile Roadie-based Taylor Swift app is also in the works.

Sponsor

Mobile Roadie is mostly targeted towards musicians, athletes, politicians, celebrities, blogs, conferences and venues, though you could also use the service to create your own vanity app.

For a set-up fee of $499 and a monthly management fee that starts at $29, Mobile Roadie allows users to create apps that include integration with third-party services like YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Ustream, Topspin Media, RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook. Mobile Roadie also allows bands to integrate ticket sales through Ticketmaster and LiveNation.

Mobile Roadie will give a discount to publishers who choose to use the service for both their iPhone and Android apps. Customers can also choose to use the service to only create an Android app.

Vanity Apps for Android

While there are a quite a few DIY app-creation services (including MobileAppLoader, MobBase, Sweb Apps, App Breeder, etc.) for the iPhone on the market, this business hasn’t really caught on in the Android world yet. AppLoop, one of the first app generators for Android, for example, isn’t even in business anymore. Currently, iSites and MobileAppLoader are among the few app generators that allows users to create and manage both Android and iPhone apps.

As the market for Android apps continues to grow rapidly, however, it only makes sense for companies like Mobile Roadie to offer support for both platforms.

The advantage of using services like Mobile Roadie is that users can manage assets in both apps simultaneously. If bands want to highlight new videos or songs, for example, they don’t have to make changes to two apps to send these updates to their fans.

But Really, What Does Dolly Parton Think?

Mobile Roadie’s PR release also includes a great quote from Dolly Parton, who clearly prefers Mobile Roadie over smoke signals:

“My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good. But now you can watch TV, download music and surf the web from your phone. Sure beats smoke signals. I never thought in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today. And to think that folks will be able to watch my Video Diaries and listen to my music on the go is just fantastic.”

Discuss

There is no dearth of streaming music services on the web today, so it takes quite a bit for a new service to stand out from other popular services like Spotify, MOG and Lala. Today, we came across Bitspace, an online music player and backup service for your music files that puts an interesting new spin on this subject. This service stands out because of its great design and the fact that it’s fully based on HTML5.

Sponsor

HTML5 Only

Given its reliance on HTML5, Bitspace currently only works with Webkit-based browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome (Internet Explorer users can, of course, use Google’s Chrome Frame plugin). Firefox’s implementation of the HTML5 audio tag currently only works with Ogg Vorbis files and does not support playing MP3 files yet.

Uploading and Playing Your Music

Uploading files to Bitspace is fairly straightforward. You can either pick and choose files through the service’s web interface, or, if you are a Mac user, you can also use the company’s OSX client. Bitspace uses Amazon’s storage services for saving your files. The service can import and play most common audio file formats, including MP3, MP4, OGG, WMA and FLAC.

What’s currently missing, however, is an easy way to upload larger batches of files. While you can upload multiple MP3 files simultaneously, you can’t pick multiple directories, which slows the upload process down quite a bit.

The central focus of Bitspace is obviously the music player. Here, you can organize your tracks by artist, album name, label and year. In addition, you can also manage your playlists here. The minimalist design of the app is one of the highlights of the service The design puts a lot of emphasis on album artwork and makes very good use of HTML5 and the new features it affords developers. Bitspace also integrates with Last.fm and allows you to sync your scrobbles from Bitspace.

Paid Accounts (No Free Accounts for Now)

Bitspace currently offers three different types of paid accounts: basic (limited to 10GB, 200 albums and 2,000 tracks for €3.99/month), standard (limited to 25GB, 500 albums, 5,000 tracks for €3.99/month) and premium (limited to 50GB, 1,000 albums and 10,000 tracks for €14.99/month). Sadly, the free accounts (with a limit of 500 MB) are currently invite-only and you will have to sign up for the service and whip out your credit card (though with a free 30 day trial) if you want to test Bitspace.

Verdict

Other services, including Lala, also offer similar streaming music services that allow you to upload your music to the cloud. Lala’s big advantage over Bitspace is that it’s offering its service for free and doesn’t cap its users’ uploads. Given that Lala has been acquired by Apple, though, the service’s future remains unclear.

Compared to Lala, Bitspace is definitely the prettier service and it’s reliance on open web-standards is commendable. Even though the service offers a 30-day trial, the fact that you do have to enter your credit card information or PayPal credentials when signing up will surely keep quite a few potential users from giving it a try (though the prices for the paid accounts are quite fair).

It’s important to remember that these are still the early days for Bitspace and the company’s co-founder Niklas Holmgren tells us that Bitspace is also working on mobile apps and integrating more social networks into the service.

Discuss

Seesmic will release a major update of its web-based Twitter client Seesmic Web today that will introduce a number of new features like drag and drop list management, TweetMeme integration, threaded conversations and a new way to view and manage your retweets. Seesmic Web now also includes a very handy new contact manager for Twitter.

With this new version, Seesmic Web continues to blur the line between desktop and web-based Twitter clients.

Sponsor

Drag and Drop List Creation

The nicest new feature in Seesmic Web is the ability to drag and drop contacts to any list. Compared to TweetDeck and other desktop tools, this makes managing and creating lists a lot easier and makes for a more efficient workflow.

Contact Manager

Another interesting new feature is the contact manager, which allows you to quickly get information about your followers. The contact manager displays the basic information from the user’s profile: number of followers and tweets, favorite tweets and information about the lists this user follows. In addition, Seesmic also displays the names of this user’s top 3 most publicly contacted friends on Twitter.

Better Integration with Third-Party Tools

One area the Seesmic team has focused on for this release is the integration of third-party tools. A small icon appears next to every shortened link now and clicking on this link will bring up some basic information about the link, including the name of the site the link will take you to and the number of retweets (powered by Tweetmeme).

Seesmic Web now also allows users to share pictures from the web interface and also offers picture previews right inside the app for pictures that were shared on most of the popular Twitter photo services.

Geolocation

As long as you use a browser that supports Google Gears, Seesmic Web now also makes it easier to share your location. Whenever you write a new tweet, you can choose to attach your location to this message. Just make sure you have the location feature turned on in your Twitter settings. As we reported last month, only a very small number of Twitter users currently makes use of this feature, which isn’t a surprise, given that only a handful of Twitter apps currently support this functionality. It’s good to see that Seesmic is making this feature a priority in its apps.

Verdict

Overall, the experience of using Seesmic Web comes very close to using a desktop client. There are a few features that are still missing in the web version (resizable columns, for example), but otherwise, Seesmic Web is a very good replacement for a desktop Twitter client.

Using a web-based client brings a number of advantages with it, including the absence of any Twitter rate limits. If you like the Seesmic interface give it a try in a site-specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Mozilla’s Prism.

Discuss

Most experts agree that Google won’t make us stupid. Indeed, 76% of technology stakeholders and critics interviewed by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University believe that the Internet and search engines will enhance human intelligence by 2020.

For this new report, the Pew Research Center conducted in-depth interviews with over 800 experts about what they think the Internet will look like in 2020.

Sponsor

Here are some of the key quotes from the report:

Will Google Make us Stupid?

“I feel compelled to agree with myself. But I would add that the Net’s effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”- Nicholas Carr

“Google will make us more informed. The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world.” – Hal Varian, Google, chief economist

“It’s a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things (‘more stupid’) requiring rote memory of information that is now available though Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information (‘more intelligent’).” – Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada

“The problem isn’t Google; it’s what Google helps us find. For some, Google will let them find useless content that does not challenge their minds. But for others, Google will lead them to expect answers to questions, to explore the world, to see and think for themselves.” – Esther Dyson, longtime Internet expert and investor

“People are already using Google as an adjunct to their own memory. For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support, and Google comes through for me. Sometimes, I see I’m wrong, and I appreciate finding that out before I open my mouth.” – Craig Newmark, founder Craig’s List

“The Internet has facilitated orders of magnitude improvements in access to information. People now answer questions in a few moments that a couple of decades back they would not have bothered to ask, since getting the answer would have been impossibly difficult.” – John Pike, Director, globalsecurity.org

Will The Internet Enhance and Improve Writing, Reading and the Rendering of Knowledge?

“Most writing online is devolving toward SMS and tweets that involve quick, throwaway notes with abbreviations and threaded references. This is not a form of lasting communication. In 2020 there is unlikely to be a list of classic tweets and blog posts that every student and educated citizen should have read.” – Gene Spafford, Purdue University CERIAS, Association for Computing Machinery U.S. Public Policy Council

“This is a distinction without a metric. I think long‐form expressive fiction will suffer (though this suffering has been more or less constant since the invention of radio) while all numeric and graphic forms of rendering knowledge, from the creation and use of databases to all forms of visual display of data will be in a golden age, with ordinary non‐fiction writing getting a modest boost. So, English majors lose, engineering wins, and what looks like an Up or Down question says more about the demographic of the answerer than any prediction of the future.” – Clay Shirky, professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

“When I was a boy, homework consisted of writing a paragraph. Now, youth writing paragraphs in a blink of an eye. They are mastering language only to reinvent it. They are using it in new forms. Tags. Labels. Acronyms. And the game becomes a written game of who can use written word most effectively. Reading, writing, and communicating will become much more fluid as youth are more engaged in the practice of these skills, and have a greater motivation to practice their skills.” – Robert Cannon, senior counsel for internet law at Federal Communications Commission

“When writing itself appeared, philosophers feared that it would weaken memory and degrade intelligence. But it allowed for a great, albeit externalized memory and an enlarged, albeit shared intelligence. […] The Internet will have similar effects, with some losses but, on balance, more gains.” – Mark U. Edwards, senior advisor to the Dean, Harvard University Divinity School

“More people are reading and writing, and in more ways, for more readers and other writers, than ever before, and the sum of all of it goes up every day.” – Doc Searls, co‐ author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”

Will Online Anonymity Have Gone the Way of the Dodo by 2020?

“The privacy and civil liberties battles over the next decade will increasingly focus on the growing demands for identity credentials. New systems for authentication will bring new problems as more identity information will create new opportunities for criminals. Identity management companies will also go bankrupt and try to sell off their primary asset ‐‐ the biometric identifiers of their customers.” – Marc Rotenberg, executive director, Electronic Privacy Information Center

“Anonymity online will gradually become a lot like anonymity in the real world. When we encounter it, we’ll take a firm grip on our wallet and leave the neighborhood as soon as possible ‐‐ unless we’re doing something we’re ashamed of.” – Stewart Baker,

“‘It will be an archipelago of named users, who get a lot of value from participating in that part of the ecosystem, but still set in an ocean of anonymity.” ‐‐ Clay Shirky, professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

“Anonymity will continue to have its place; that is the architecture of the web and it will be difficult to change that. Nonetheless, I believe that verified identity will come to be seen as an added value in transactions (including conversations) and as a way to recognize more value (reward in financial or ego terms).” ‐‐ Jeff Jarvis, prominent blogger, professor, City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism

You can find the full report with almost 50 pages of quotes about a number of additional topics on the Pew Center’s website.

Discuss

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) just gave Google the clearance to buy and sell energy in bulk. While it’s interesting to speculate if Google wants to sell energy to consumers, the company has already declared that it has no plans to sell energy to consumers or to speculate in energy markets. Instead, Google says that it wanted this authorization from FERC in order to manage its own energy supplies better.

Sponsor

Google’s Energy Needs

Google puts a strong emphasis on making its data centers as energy efficient as possible. Google doesn’t release any data about its energy consumption, but according to some estimates, Google’s data center in The Dalles, OR could require as much as 103 megawatts of power to run once it is at full capacity – enough to power the city of Oakland, CA for four months. Getting FERC’s approval means that Google now has the ability to negotiate directly with energy producers, which will likely help the company to reduce it’s massive energy bills.

Earlier this month, Google granted $5.7 million to 12 university projects in the U.S. to fund research that will look into ways to reduce the energy consumption of large data centers.

Even though Google isn’t likely to start selling energy to consumers anytime soon, the company does offer one energy-related product to consumers: PowerMeter. This is a gadget the company offers for consumers whose power companies have already installed smart-meter technology. Google is also using solar panels to power it’s Mountain View, CA headquarters and has invested in a number of green energy projects and companies, including eSolar, a company that plans to develop numerous large solar energy projects around the world.

Discuss

While haven’t been able to confirm this yet, it looks like Google Reader now consumes PubSubHubbub feeds in real time. Until now, it often took half an hour or longer before new posts from popular blogs and news sites would appear in Google Reader. Now, however, posts from PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds (including our own RSS feed) have started to appear in Google Reader almost immediately after they are published, which leads us to believe that Google has turned on the consumption side of the PubSubHubbub protocol for Google Reader.

Sponsor

From Slow to Real Time

Bloggers and readers started to complain about Google Reader’s delays shortly after Google launched the service in its current form, but until today, Google hadn’t really done anything to address these complaints.

Google began to publish real-time feeds for shared Google Reader items in August 2009. Until now, however, Google did not consume the real-time updates from PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds, even though most of Google’s own blogs and FeedBurner now publish in real time. Google’s App Engine, too, offers support for PubSubHubbub and some of the most popular real-time notifications bots are hosted on App Engine.

It’s important to note that these real-time updates (assuming our observations and those from other bloggers turn out to be true) will only work for PubSubHubbub-enabled blogs. One of the major problem with Google Reader is that it pings relatively obscure feeds very infrequently and this won’t change anytime soon if these feeds don’t support real-time updates yet.

We have asked Google for confirmation and will update this post once we hear more.

How to Enable PubSubHubbub on Your Blog

If you use WordPress and want to enable PubSubHubbub on your own blog, you can do so by installing the PubSubHubbub Wodpress plugin. By default, all blogs hosted on WordPress.com already use this protocol to send out real-time updates, as do all blogs on Blogger and Posterous.

If you’re using Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds, you can also turn on Google’s PingShot service and sent out PubSubHubbub announcements in real time.

Discuss

The European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice just cleared the proposed search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo. Under the terms of this deal, Microsoft’s Bing will soon replace Yahoo’s own search engine on Yahoo’s sites, while Microsoft will get an exclusive 10-year license to Yahoo’s search technology. Yahoo will receive 88% of all the revenues from search ads on its site for the first five years of the agreement and handle the sales for Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s premium search advertising inventory.

Sponsor

What Does this Mean for Consumers?

First of all, it’s important to note that while Yahoo will incorporate Bing’s search results, the company has no plans to scrap any of the auxiliary search products that currently surround Yahoo’s search results. This means that Yahoo will continue to show results from it’s own news product on its search results pages, for example. Yahoo’s Search Pad and Search Scan apps that allow users to filter searches will also remain on the search results pages.

According to Yahoo’s own announcement, this deal also means that the company can now focus on providing even more additional services around search, without having to focus on maintaining its own search engine.

Nothing New for Yahoo

For Yahoo, using somebody else’s search technology isn’t really anything new. Before launching its own search product, Yahoo had a partnership with Google that lasted from 2002 to 2004.

Overall, Bing offers better search results than Yahoo’s own search engine. Besides better search results, Yahoo’s users probably won’t notice any major differences once Yahoo begins to use Bing. According to Yahoo’s statement, this implementation will begin in the next few days, though the exact date for the transition isn’t clear yet.

More Competition for Google

Bing, which is already growing at a steady clip will not become and even more important rival for Google’s search engine. While anybody would be hard-pressed to argue that Google isn’t innovating fast enough, this renewed competition from Bing will surely put some pressure on Google to innovate even faster.

In addition, this deal also makes Microsoft and bigger player in the search engine advertising business, a field that Google can currently dominate because of the sheer size of its market share.

And What About Developers?

Yahoo also just posted some information about what it plans to do with its developer tools now that this deal has been cleared. The overall message in Yahoo’s announcement to developers, though, is that the company doesn’t really know what it will do yet.

For BOSS, Yahoo and Microsoft are considering a fee-based structure, the future of SearchMonkey is unclear (“we’re working hard to determine which path provides the best value for site owners and end users”) and with regards to Yahoo’s Site Explorer, Yahoo is also still considering its options.

Click here to read the full text of the joint Microsoft/Yahoo press release.

YouTube is, by far, the most popular online video service, but we actually know very little about how bloggers use the service to embed videos on their own sites. Sysomos, the Toronto-based social media analytics and monitoring firm, just took a closer look at how the blogosphere links to and embeds YouTube videos. Overall, the company analyzed over 2.5 million YouTube videos that were embedded in blog posts between July and December 2009.

Sponsor

The most popular YouTube videos in the second half of 2009 were the JK Wedding Entrance Dance, the Evian Roller Babies, the Muppets’ version of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a video of musicical stairs in Stockholm and “United Breaks Guitars.”

You can find our full list of top 10 YouTube videos of all time here.

What YouTube Videos do Bloggers Embed?

Bloggers mostly embed music videos (31%) and entertainment clips (15%). Sports (6%), animation (3.2%) and science videos (2.9%) rank at the bottom of the most often-embedded YouTube videos. Interestingly, the film (3.6%) and how-to (3.1%) categories also ranked very low in Sysomos’ index.

We would have thought that how-to videos would have ranked higher, but while videos about how to make a BristleBot can be quite popular, they can’t quite rival the popularity of Miley Cyrus and the Muppets.

Who is Embedding Them?

The study also looked at the demographics of bloggers who embed these videos. In general, 20-to-35-year-old bloggers embed most of the videos (57%), followed by teenagers (20%) and bloggers over 35 (20%).

While music videos are the most popular category across age groups, older bloggers tend to embed far more videos in the news and politics categories than younger bloggers.

A few more interesting YouTube stats from the report:

• Videos about news and politics get the highest average number of comments (561), followed by sports (490) and entertainment clips (436).

Sysomos did not find any clear correlation between how high users rated a video and how often they were viewed. The most popular videos actually had rather average ratings (2-3 stars).

• North American bloggers link to a lot more News and Politics videos with a specific interest in health care, global warming and U.S. political issues.
• 20-to-35 year old bloggers are most active in embedding and linking to videos within their posts with 57% of total videos coming from this demographic group.
• The average length of a YouTube video is 4 minutes and 12 seconds.
• The average number of views for the YouTube videos Sysomos analyzed in this report was 99,160.
• European bloggers embed even more music videos than the rest of the world.

Click here to see the most popular music videos on YouTube.

Over 97% of all searches on real-time search engine and infrastructure provider OneRiot are now driven by the company’s partners who use OneRiot’s API to serve real-time search results. Today, OneRiot is announcing the next version of its API, which – among other things – gives content owners the ability to create real-time search engines for their domains and sites. The new API will also allow developers to integrate OneRiot’s real-time ads with the search results. OneRiot is also introducing a new ad format for Twitter apps. These ads are limited to 140 characters and include shortened URLs.

Sponsor

The first site to use OneRiot’s new domain search is the Guardian. The newspaper’s new “Zeitgeist” tool – which gives readers a visual overview of trending topics and articles from the Guardian – is powered by the new version of the OneRiot API.

Twitter-Style Ads and Vertical Searches

In addition to this update, OneRiot now also offers developers new tools to filter search results for vertical searches such as news, videos and images, as well as for niche searches that only return results about topics like gadgets, politics and music.

Given that virtually all of OneRiot’s growth and traffic dependents on keeping its partners happy, these updates are an important step for OneRiot. In this same context, it’s also an important move for OneRiot to offer Twitter-optimized results. The company already offers a wide variety of advertising solutions, but for Twitter developers, being able to just plug these new ads into their products will surely prove to be very helpful.

Discuss

According to a new study by Milan-based consultancy firm Lundquist, Apple has the best Wikipedia entry among Fortune Global 500 companies. Lundquist ranked Wikipedia pages according to the quality of the data in the infobox, page features like links and citations and the quality and availability of page sections like company history and charts.

Today, 489 out of the Global 500 companies are featured on Wikipedia, though the majority of companies scored very low on Lundquist’s scale. The average score was just 11 out of a possible 25 points. Apple’s entry scored 22 points.

Sponsor

Wikipedia is one of the first entry points for Internet users who are looking for more information about a company. A lot of companies score very low on Lundquist’s scale, however. Quite a few entries, for example, don’t even mention what geographic area the company serves or display any data bout the company’s board members or number of employees. According to the company’s researchers, entries for companies in the computer and IT services industry have the highest average score, while the entries for pharmaceutical and health care companies rank the lowest.

According to Lundquist, Sumitomo Electric Industries and the French financial services group Crédit Industriel & Commercial have the worst Wikipedia pages of all the Global Fortune 500 companies.

What Can Companies Do to Improve Their Pages?

As the report’s authors point out, companies are strongly discouraged from editing their own articles on Wikipedia. There are some things, however, that these companies can do to enhance their entries. Here are three recommendations from the report, which don’t just apply to large companies:

• respect the rules of Wikipedia
• make copyright-free images available to the Wikipedia community
• only edit factual information like quarterly results or management changes (Wikipedia actually encourages companies to do this, though it’s probably best to explain the edit in detail)
• use discussion pages to interact with editors
• engage and help editors who are interested in the company or the company’s products
• monitor your company’s Wikipedia article for updates and vandalism

Discuss

MySpace and Google just announced that starting today, status updates from MySpace users will appear in Google’s real-time search. MySpace announced its real-time Stream API in December and Google launched its real-time search feature just a day before the MySpace announcement. While Google was one of MySpace’s launch partners (together with OneRiot), it took Google until today to include MySpace updates in its real-time search.

Sponsor

Currently, Twitter dominates Google’s real-time search results, though Google also plans to include updates from FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca in its search results in the future. Google also has a deal with Facebook to show status updates from groups, companies and celebrities in its real-time search results.

Will these Status Updates be Useful?

Starting today, updates from MySpace users will appear in Google’s real-time search results on the default search results page. Users will also be able to see these updates by selecting the latest and updates mode in Google’s search options bar.

On average, MySpace users don’t tend to share as many links as Twitter users, so it remains to be seen how useful these MySpace status updates will be for Google users. For now, Google doesn’t offer its users the ability to filter real-time searches by source.

Discuss

Social Media monitoring service Radian6 just announced that it now offers support for Google Buzz. Given that Google Buzz already has more than 9 million users after less than one week on the market, it only makes sense for the large social media monitoring and analytics services to offer their clients the ability to monitor and react to conversations on this new platform. Radian6 currently covers about 4.5 million Google profiles and is expanding its index rapidly.

Sponsor

While Buzz doesn’t offer a firehose feed of its content yet, Radian6 is using the Pubsubhubbub-enabled public Google Profile feeds to discover updates.

Public Buzz Messages Only

To filter out noise, the company has decided to only index public messages that users post directly to Buzz. Radian6 won’t index re-posted items for Twitter or blogs, which makes sense, given that the company is already monitoring these items on Twitter and through RSS anyway. Interestingly, the company has decided to classify Buzz updates as blog posts. According to Radian6’s founder and CTO Chris Newton, Buzz updates closely resemble blog posts, as they support ” long-form commentary and threaded comments.”

Buzz doesn’t restrict users to Twitter’s 140-character limit, so this looks like a sensible solution, though it seems rather early to assume that Buzz’s users will want to use the service to post long-form content.

More Companies Integrate Buzz: Viralheat and Sendible – Sysomos Coming Soon

Earlier today, social media metrics platform Viralheat also announced support for Google Buzz. Just like Radian6, Viralheat will monitor conversations on Buzz. Social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos also just told us that it is working on integrating Buzz as well.

Another company that just announced support for Buzz is Sendible, which allows companies to run social media, SMS and email campaigns and track the online response to these updates.

Discuss

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this morning, Facebook announced Facebook Zero, a new stripped-down mobile version of the popular social networking site. Zero, which will go live within the next few weeks, will allow users on slow connections and basic phones to access the service through a very basic version of the site. By default, Zero will not feature any images or other bandwidth-heavy features. Facebook also plans to offer a more feature-rich version of Facebook Zero through deals with select mobile carriers.

Sponsor

Given that over 100 million Facebook users now access the service’s mobile site, it makes sense for the company to try to cater to the widest possible variety of potential users.

With Facebook Lite, the company already offers a very basic version of its service for desktop users on slow connections. This version is mainly aimed at users in the developing world.

If you try to go to zero.facebook.comright now, this message will appear: Sorry, your carrier does not support zero.facebook.com. As Robin Wauters notes, chances are that Facebook plans to offer carriers the most basic version of Zero for free. Mobile operators will be able to charge for the premium version. It’s not clear if Facebook plans to take a cut of these fees.

Discuss

Thanks to the Weather Underground, the weather just started to look a lot nicer. The popular weather-tracking site just launched fullscreenweather.com, which does exactly what the name implies. The new site gives you a full screen Google Maps display and overlays it with current weather reports from the over 16,000 personal weather stations that report data to the service. The map can also display a precipitation layer or cloud layer and you can, of course, see local forecasts and sever weather alerts.

Sponsor

Most importantly, though, the maps just look gorgeous. By default, the map will show temperature readings around your location from the Weather Underground’s vast network of personal weather stations. That network could be a liability if the data wasn’t good, but as RWW’s resident weather expert (and webmaster) Jared Smith just told me, the company has a very good reputation among weather geeks for weeding out bad data.

As the company points out, the web service should also work very well with touch-enabled devices, including the iPad.

Overall, this isn’t a groundbreaking new application, but it sure is a very nice way to browse through weather data on a large interactive map.

Discuss

Over the last few days, there has been a lot of buzz about how much private information your public Google profile contains if you don’t choose the right settings. The URL of your profile alone can already give away your Gmail address. To hide this address from public view, you can switch your profile URL away from showing your name to using an address that features a 21-digit number instead of your username. However, as it turns out, this isn’t a foolproof method either. By using a very simple trick, anybody can quickly figure out your Gmail address from these numbers.

Sponsor

Security blogger The Harmony Guy just told us about how this hack works. While the way to reveal these addresses isn’t obvious, you can easily follow along and try this method out yourself.

How does it work?

First, you simply copy the numbers from a user’s Google profile and then append these numbers to http://picasaweb.google.com/[numbers].

For some users who haven’t customized their Picasa page, the username (which is also their Gmail address) will come right up. If the user has customized the account and added a nickname, you simply have to replace the URL in the address bar with javascript:alert(_user.name); and a small pop-up window will show you the username.

Caveats

It’s important to note that this only works for Google users who also use the Picasa web service. This, however, is likely a large percentage of Gmail users.

How to Protect Yourself

In Picasa Web Albums, go to the settings page and add a new username. Then, select the new username for your gallery URL. As The Harmony Guy points out, you may also want to edit your nickname.

Is this a major issue for Google? Probably not. But given the ruckus around privacy, Buzz and Google Profiles these days, it is disheartening to see that it is this easy to circumvent the only way to hide your Gmail address from public view. After all, if you want to use Google Buzz, Google forces you to have a public profile.

Discuss

Google Buzz, which launched two days ago, has been widely criticized for making the lists of who you follow and who follows you public by default. Until now, the check box to turn this “feature” off was hidden in your Google Profile settings – which many people never even realized they had. Now, however, Google announced that it is making it more obvious to new users that these lists will be public and will offer clear instructions to turn the public disclosure of this information off. In addition, Google now also allows Buzz users to block people from following them, even if they haven’t created a profile yet.

Sponsor

Even though Buzz now makes it clearer that your public profile will include a list of users and makes it easier to turn this feature off, this remains an opt-out feature. We think that it would be far better for Google to make this an opt-in feature so that those users who don’t read the disclosure information closely when they first use Buzz won’t inadvertently share information they would rather keep private.

“Tens of Millions” of Users Already

In addition to announcing these changes, Google also notes that “tens of millions of people have checked Buzz out, creating over 9 million posts and comments.” In addition, Google is currently registering over 200 posts per minute through the mobile interface. Given that Google is giving Buzz a prominent spot in the Gmail interface, this doesn’t come as a surprise, but it also shows Buzz’s potential as a mainstream geo-social network.

Discuss

If you’ve been on the Internet for long enough, you may remember the old UNIX finger command. With finger, you could just type in a command like finger [email protected] and the email server would return more information about this person. Today, Google enabled the next generation of the finger command – WebFinger – for all Gmail accounts. WebFinger provides users with a standardized and decentralized way of sharing their profile and identity information online

Sponsor

Google began a small beta test of WebFinger in August 2009. Today, Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick announced that the company has now enabled WebFinger fall all Google accounts with public profiles.

Making Your Email Address More Useful

You can think of WebFinger as an email-centric cousin of OpenID. While OpenID associates your identity with a URL, WebFinger links your identity to your email address. WebFinger can store metadata about your account and make it publicly accessible. This data can include your public profile data, information about other services that are used by this email address, a URL to your avatar, or – if you choose so – a declaration that this address doesn’t have any metadata associated with it. The WebFinger metadata can also point to an alternative identity provider, which can be an OpenID server.

Currently, there are not a lot of user-facing projects that expose this data, but you can find a small demo service written by Google engineer DeWitt Clinton here.

Adding Value to Google Profiles

With Buzz, Google already put a lot of emphasis on Google Profiles and today’s announcement increases the value of these profiles even more. It’s important to note, though, that WebFinger is an open and free protocol, so any email service and identity provider can implement it. You can find more detailed information about the WebFinger protocol here.

Image Credit: Flickr user purpelslog.

Discuss