Desenvolvimento e design para a Web :: Feeds

Video: History of the Internet

If you've ever wondered how the Internet was born, but can't be bothered reading a whole book on the subject, check out this short animated documentary from Milah Bilgil. Entitled History of the internet, it does a great job explaining time-sharing, file-sharing, arpanet and internet. The video uses a new type of info-graphic called PICOL icons, which will soon be made available for free on picol.org. PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language - it's a project that aims to create "a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication." PICOL is free to use and open to alter.

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History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

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There is No Money in Phishing (But It Still Won't Go Away)

Phishing, the highly illegal scam of tricking people into revealing their logins and passwords by creating fake emails, Twitter messages, and/or websites, does not actually make phishers a lot of money. A new paper (PDF) by Cormac Herley and Dinei Florencio from Microsoft Research argues that the basic laws of economics still apply to phishing. As phishing becomes easier, and as 'phishing kits' are being sold for less than $100, the actual income for each individual phisher has to come down. Phishing has become a "low-skill, low-reward business."

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While, as the authors point out, the media has portrayed phishing as an easy (and illegal) way to make money, the reality is that too many phishers have joined the fray and that the income per phisher has been greatly depressed because of this.

Phishers typically sell the logins and passwords they have harvested through their scams to other criminals online, who can then easily commit identity theft.

Losses from Phishing Have Been Exaggerated

The authors also argue that the economic losses from phishing have been greatly overstated. Herley and Florencio argue that the numbers don't 'survive basic sanity checks,' yet are widely quoted. At the same time, these mythical numbers lead more phishers into the business, which then depresses the per person income even more. According to PayPal's chief information security officer Michael Barrett, phishing "is not even in the top five threats" that could cause losses at PayPal.

Why Phishing Will Continue

The paper, however, also points out that this lack of revenue does not mean the end of phishing. Phishers, the authors argue, are not necessarily making rational economic decisions. Instead, their vision is clouded by by hopes of 'hitting the jackpot' (even when revenue is going down), and a constant barrage of reports of 'easy money' that will lead phishers to believe that revenue will go up again. Also, because phishing is generally considered to be very 'easy,' a constant stream of newcomers will replace the retired phishermen. The authors note that this cycle can only be broken through providing better information about the economic reality of the phishing business to potential phishers.

(hat tip to Steve Ragan at the Tech Herald)

CC-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user ToastyKen

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Bit.ly Plug-in Extends Tiny URLs, Shows Clickthrough Numbers

Our favorite URL shortening service, Bit.ly, has just released a Firefox plug-in that you'll probably want to add to your browser. It lets users hover over shortened URLs from a wide variety of services, including TinyURL, and see the resulting full URL - as well as how many people have clicked through the shortcut.

Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.

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We profiled Bit.ly when it launched in July and recommended using it for URL shortening because it makes use of all the valuable data that other URL shorteners leave unused.

The clickthrough data is great to see, but it's not without some serious shortcomings. Bit.ly queries a long list of URL shortening services' APIs to get traffic data and some of them don't update very frequently. There's also a lot of phantom clicks showing up; the company believes they've found a 3rd party app that's partially loading the destination pages and inflating the numbers, but we'll see if they can do anything about it. For now this data is better for determining the relative popularity of a shortened link than it is for literal numbers.

Twitter users will like the extension because hovering over any username there makes the user's information pop-up. That works quite well and is very useful. It's a fast way to see who someone is talking to in a conversation on Twitter.

The moral of the story here is that in little things like URL shortening, there's a whole lot of valuable information and room for innovation. We're glad that Bit.ly is moving to take advantage of that and we look forward to seeing what still other people will do with the data once it's stockpiled and made available by Bit.ly for further development.

You can get the Bit.ly extension for Firefox here.

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Opera: One Web Across Multiple Devices

Opera plans to unveil a new version of its SDK today that will allow Opera's partners to create a more uniform browsing experience across multiple devices and platforms. The new version of the Opera Devices SDK now gives developers access to Opera Link, the company's bookmark synchronization service. Once device manufacturers start integrating this, users will be able to easily access their Opera bookmarks from their mobile phone, desktop, or Wii.

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Opera's Devices SDK allows hardware manufacturers to build browsers for their hardware devices like TVs, media players, cell phones, or gaming consoles.

This synchronization feature was already part of Opera's desktop browser, but version 9.7 of the SDK will also give developers the ability to integrate it into their own devices. According to Opera's CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, Opera wants to give operators the ability to create a unified experience across their triple-play offerings and on phones, computers, TVs (or entertainment devices like the Wii).

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The new version of the SDK also includes Opera's new hardware-accelerated zooming capability for devices with small screens. While not as elegant or intuitive as Apple's multi-touch gestures, Opera Zoom, which saw its debut on the Nintendo Wii, does work quite well.

Syncing Bookmarks as Competitive Advantage

Opera already syncs its bookmarks with the online version of Opera Link, but it would be great if Opera also allowed you to sync with other online bookmarking services like Yahoo's delicious. Other devices like the iPhone also allow users to sync bookmarks between the desktop and mobile phones.

Now that web browsing is slowly becoming a standard activity on mobile devices, being able to keep bookmarks in sync is clearly starting to become more important. Opera is in a good position to leverage its experience in cross-platform development here, though Mozilla and other browser developers are also working on similar projects.

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Wibe7.tv: Visually Oriented Search for YouTube

Searching by terms is great. But some things are just easier to find when you can actually look at them - especially if you tend to be more visually oriented. Book dust jackets, album covers, and product packaging, for example, tend to register with some people far more easily than names. And, then of course, there's video. When you're looking for a video, you're likely looking for that video. So, wouldn't it be great if you could quickly scan thumbnails to find that YouTube video you were seeking? Now, you can with Wibe7.tv.

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Wibe7.tv allows you to perform YouTube searches and return results based on relevance, views, rating, or publish date. Granted, nothing earth-shattering there. Instead, it's the way the results are arranged that makes finding that video you're seeking much easier. It's strikingly similar to PicClick, a visual search of Amazon and eBay we reviewed last year.

Rather than present an obtrusive column of thumbnails coupled with large blocks of text - like YouTube's search results - Wibe7.tv discards the text, opting instead for a mosaic of thumbnails - giving you the visual content you were seeking. Suddenly, scanning the screen for your favorite video becomes a great deal easier.

Just as important, Wibe7.tv's matrix of thumbnails helps you weed out the inevitable duplicate videos that crowd YouTube. (In fact, I found myself entering a number of search terms just to see how many duplicates existed for popular videos.)

Once you find the video you want, clicking on the thumbnail begins playing the full-size video in the lower corner of your browser window. Or, you can always click through to YouTube.

While the mosaic is a helpful first pass, I found myself wishing for some mouseover functionality to deliver additional information on the content. Having to play each video to get more information becomes a bit laborious if you don't see what you want right off the bat.

Still, the ability to quickly scan for the video - instead of scrolling through multiple pages of YouTube results - made the service a welcome improvement over searching on YouTube for content.

To start looking for those YouTube videos you've been seeking, visit Wibe7.tv.

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Encouraged Commentary: Bringing Natural Conversational Dynamics to Commenting

Commenting on blogs is - by and large - broken. Designed with the hope of proffering interaction among bloggers and readers, commenting has generally devolved into a series of one-off responses with little actual conversation. Why? It's not designed to facilitate conversations. That's why you see any number of people - Intense Debate and Disqus, most notably - working to provide technology that enhances the conversational dynamic. Now, a new open source project from Jim Jeffers promises to enhance commenting in a way that is both natural and conversational. Meet Encouraged Commentary.

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The new commenting features - built using jQuery - take their inspiration from Ubiquity, allowing users to highlight the sections of text that prompted them to comment and immediately respond. Using that context, Encouraged Commentary begins to string conversations and content together.

Encouraged Commentary currently offers three compelling features:

First, highlighting any section of a post avails a "respond" button that allows users to immediately comment. Clicking respond grabs the highlighted text and adds it - in blockquote - to the content of the comment, simply and easily referencing the exact passage that the user is discussing.

Second, working with comments, themselves, offers additional functionality. Highlighting and clicking respond within a comment automatically establishes the familiar "@user" addressing to make the intended recipient aware of the conversation directed at him/her. The highlighted text, again, is brought into the comment for reference.

Third, the connections among comments are tracked. Mousing over any commenter's name reveals a list of his or her other comments in the thread. Clicking on list items allows users to "jump between related comments and responses quickly" - something that threaded conversations have been working to capture. Reply and Quote buttons allow the user to jump into the conversation without highlighting.

Granted, the young project is not without its rough spots. Users are reporting issues with IE (shocking, I realize). And some of the implementation of the concepts could use refinement. No doubt that will come as more people engage in the project.

But those issues are easily overlooked. Because what is most compelling about this approach is the natural conversational dynamic that Jeffers has captured. You do what seems natural: highlight and respond. And you do so with context. That dynamic provides both Encouraged Commentary with content and the "hooks" to track the history of the conversation without adversely impacting the user. What's more, it provides a series of reference points that encourages new users to enter the discussion - and to do so just as easily as the conversation began.

If we see widespread adoption of this sort of thinking, it's quite possible that we may see the conversation returning to comments.

To see Encouraged Commentary in action or to try it yourself, visit Don't Trust This Guy, Jeffers' blog. To download the source code, visit the Encouraged Commentary project on GitHub.

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Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?

In what appears to us to be a new addition to many Google search results pages, queries about birth dates, family connections and other information are now being responded to with explicitly semantic structured information. Who is Bill Clinton's wife? What's the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears' mother's name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the information is structured in the traditional subject-predicate-object format, or "triples," of semantic web parlance.

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The answers aren't found structured that way on the web pages they come from - Google appears to be parsing the semantic structure from semi or unstructured data. That's something Microsoft paid over $100 million to try to do this summer when it acquired Powerset. Check out these screen shots below.

We're sure that Google's been doing this analysis for some time behind the scenes, but for the company to expose the data in this structured way and to include a link to view other sources appears new to everyone we've asked about it so far. We've got inquiries in with some people who specialize in search but our semantic web contacts say they've not seen it before. (Update: Some readers have said in comments that they've seen variations of this for some time, including a three year old Google program called "Direct Answers." None of the coverage we've seen of that program offers the kind of examples we're seeing here - but we're not sure what to think! We'll see how feedback goes.)

It appears that the feature isn't being bucket tested, either, it is globally available. Could 3rd parties make use of the data now that it's available in a structured format? Possibly. The search results pages aren't being marked up with RDF in the HTML, which is a shame.

Is Google Creating Structured Data Where There Was None Before?

Bruno Haid of Austrian enterprise semantic startup System One pointed all this out to us and offers the following:

What's interesting is that while Justin Timberlake's mother is being parsed, amongst others, from http://www.celebritywonder.com/html/justintimberlake.html , there is no structured source visible that holds "Lynne" as string for Britney Spears mother. So either Google utilizes a trusted source that is not listed in "more sources" or they really extract that information from the unstructured text at http://ububu.com/BritneySpears.html . Which would make this whole thing quite huge.

This is really the crux of the question. To conclude that there is semantic analysis going on just because some of the info displayed appears in subject-predicate-object format would be a mistake (an after the fact, therefor because of the fact fallacy) but if those connections were being discovered by Google automatically when they where not displayed in a structured or straightforward way before - then we could conclude there's some semantic analysis going on. That appears to be the case, but we may be wrong! (Update: For what it's worth, Google's Matt Cutts, often company's public face when it comes to search algorithm changes, gave this very blog post a thumbs up on FriendFeed. On the other hand, ex-Googler Jonathan Betz says in comments that he lead Direct Answers when he was at the company and believes we're just seeing an expansion of that program.)

Yahoo, Ask.com and Live.com are all unable to answer these same questions so clearly.

Many of the data points are being pulled in from the structured part of Wikipedia entries, which is interesting. Other sources are wide ranging, from a license plate website to Jason Calacanis's Mahalo.

We're not sure what to make of this - have readers seen it before? We think it's new and we think it's pretty interesting.

Why is This Important?

As we've said about the semantic web before: Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there's a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights. Structured data is a layer of standardized abstraction upon which new innovation can be created.

That's why we're interested to see what Google is doing.

The answers aren't always accurate - try searching the birth date of Jesus Christ, for example. Yahoo! has far more clearly articulated what they intend to do with semantic data. None the less, Google now appears to be doing something that no one else is doing. Maybe readers here search for "Britney Spears' mother" all the time, though, and have already seen this. We believe this may be different from the kinds of info-tips that have been shown above search results in the past, however.

If this speculation based on limited observation and Google is not exposing semantic data in search results - then a logical question would be, why not? Creating structured data where there previously was none is much harder than you might think. We hope that's what Google is doing!

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Report: Cloud-Based Email Cheapest Option for Most Companies

A new report from Forrester presents a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises, such as Google Apps or Yahoo!'s Zimbra. In the report, Forrester argues that cloud-based email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees. What's more, Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions and other cloud-based email services - even for very large enterprises. This could spell trouble for Microsoft, as we explain below.

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Despite the cost benefits, at this point most companies (56%) are looking to implement a 'hybrid' model of on-premise and external email services. Just 19% plan to migrate their entire email base to a hosted or managed email provider.

Forrester's cost analysis (outlined in full in its report) shows that for the "Information Worker" segment, a large portion of many modern enterprises, cloud-based email is often cheaper. Forrester concluded that "cloud-based email is always cheaper for companies with fewer than 15,000 users".

The following chart of various options is interesting, because Google Apps comes out significantly cheaper than Microsoft Exchange Online - and other cloud based email options. Also interesting is that Microsoft Exchange Online Standard is about 10% cheaper than many cloud-based providers - due to its economies of scale no doubt. One wonders whether Microsoft will be forced to drastically reduce its pricing for Exchange Online, in order to compete better with Google Apps; although that of course comes at the risk of under-cutting one of the company's cash cows, Microsoft Office.

Source: Forrester; the above figures are based a scenario for 15,000 employees with email.

Even as the staff numbers increase, Google Apps remains by far the cheapest option. Of course there are other factors to consider other than price, but even so these figures are striking and are likely to be very pursuasive for many enterprises over the coming years.

Lastly, there are some interesting comments in the report about about the low price point of Google Apps. Google told Forrester that it "uses automation and massive scale to achieve an order of magnitude lower cost of service than a typical enterprise." This led Forrester to believe that "Google can make money at this price, and that the service will handle some firms' or users' needs well, including its bigger customers like Genentech and Avago Technologies."

However Forrester noted that it is unsure how much focus Google will give to the service. Also Forrester suggested that Google Apps still needs "better mobile support, an offline email and calendar client, and a clearer view of the product road map."

Note: Forrester released a companion report, entitled Should Your Email Live In The Cloud? An Infrastructure And Operations Analysis, that digs deeper into the technical issues around cloud-based email.

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WebEx Brings Online Meetings to the iPhone

While today's Apple Keynote was slightly underwhelming, a lot of other companies have made up for this by releasing their own products during MacWorld. One of the more exciting applications that launched today was WebEx's new native iPhone application (iTunes link). Thanks to this, you can now join meetings hosted on Cisco's popular WebEx service directly from your iPhone.

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When you host a WebEx meeting, you can now choose to add a special iPhone link to the inviations that allows others to join from the iPhone. While we haven't been able to test this, the application should also work on the iPod touch, though you would obviously have to use another phone for the actual call.

The application has most of the features you would expect from a full-featured online meeting client on the desktop. Users can view the shared content, see a list of participants, and chat with other attendees.

The FAQ on WebEx's iPhone site explains the feature of the app in more detail.

Some Limitations

One limitation of the WebEx iPhone app is that you can't schedule meetings on the phone, though you can start pre-scheduled meetings. Another limitation is that you can only attend meetings, but not actually  present from the iPhone.

Productivity Apps on the iPhone

The iPhone is clearly getting more of a foothold in the enterprise, even though early concerns about security slowed its adoption. Productivity applications, too, are getting more popular on the phone. Just yesterday, we reviewed Soonr, which lets you access and share your documents right from the phone.

Note: the sound in the YouTube video is not great, but this video is far more informative than Cisco's ad on YouTube.

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iTunes Goes DRM Free - But No Social Network Just Yet

At the Macworld 2009 keynote today, Apple announced that by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs available on iTunes will be DRM free [Digital Rights Management]. As of today, 8 million songs will be DRM free, with the other 2 million done by end of Q1 09. This is long overdue, especially considering that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry in February 2007 asking them to abolish DRM. Since that time, many of Apple's key competitors have gone DRM free or have significantly loosened the restrictions - Amazon in September 07, Rhapsody in June 08, Yahoo Music in July 08, and Walmart in October 08, to mention just some. So it's great to see the market leader in online music, Apple, actively killing off DRM too.

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DRM-free upgrades to your existing iTunes collection are now available via iTunes Plus, Apple's program for DRM-free music tracks featuring high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding.

Apple also announced a new pricing structure for iTunes, which will start from 1 April 2009. The iTunes service up till now has sold songs for 99 cents each, which when it first launched in April 2003 was a major reason for its initial success. However times change and Apple has decided to offer more flexibility. The new pricing has three tiers: $0.69, $0.99, and $1.29.

At the keynote, Apple noted that it had sold 6 billion songs through iTunes up till now - making it "the world's largest media library". iTunes is also now the number 1 retail channel for music in the U.S. - above Walmart, BestBuy, Amazon and Target. iTunes currently has 75 million accounts with credit cards.

Apple also announced that on the iPhone 3G, starting today the iTunes music store will no longer just be available via WiFi - it will be over 3G too. It will be the same pricing model, same selection of music, and no loss of quality. Users can then sync music from the iPhone back to their computer.

What Didn't Get Announced

There were no technology innovation announcements today regarding iTunes. Last September Apple released iTunes 8 and its 'Genius' recommendation engine. We were impressed by it, although we've noted since that third parties have come up with better music recommendation plug-ins for iTunes and there are other innovative twists on iTunes functionality. So we think Apple could do more technology innovation with iTunes; although the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' strategy is entirely justified while iTunes is number 1 in its market!

The other major thing missing from the iTunes announcements today, which was among our Web predictions for 2009? Social network functionality for iTunes! Oh well, we're sticking with that prediction until the end of 2009 ;-)

Conclusion: Meh

Overall, there were no big surprises at the Macworld keynote in 2009, which surely was the main reason Steve Jobs wasn't on stage. The iTunes news above was probably the highlight - no shiny new products this year.

The reality is that Apple, ReadWriteWeb's Best BigCo of 2008, is in a fairly dominant position in a couple of key markets now - music and mobile - so it just needs to tweak the business model rather than astound us with tech innovation (again).

Update: Here's the official release from Apple. Regarding the pricing changes, Apples notes that "many more songs [will be] priced at 69 cents than $1.29."

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January Kicks Off With Cool Hires in Tech

The economy is depressing but there's no shortage of cool new individual hires in tech to report already this year. Mozilla, Dell, AOL Sports and some of our favorite startups have picked up new engineers and executives this week. The biggest tech job news of the New Year, though, may be that Lifehacker's long time editor Gina Trapani announced yesterday that she's leaving her position.

Check out some of the young year's first highlights in tech hiring as reported by our site Jobwire below. Jobwire is sponsored by VisualCV, which is a service for job seekers. Jobwire reports on 10 to 15 completed new hires in tech and new media every weekday.

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• Changes at Lifehacker After four years at the helm of the wildly popular productivity blog, lead editor Gina Trapani announced yesterday that she's "stepping down from the site lead position to work on Some New Stuff." Will that be Lifehacker work? Gawker work? Something entirely new? We'll see! Read our full coverage of Gina's announcement.
• Mozilla Developer Tools Lab Adds a Crew Member Who in web tech wouldn't love to work in the new Mozilla Developer Tools Lab? That's what Kevin Dangoor gets to do now, we found out this week.
• AideRSS Grows Its Team One of our favorite companies on the web, AideRSS/Postrank, has hired two more engineers. Fresh from a new round of funding, we're really excited to see what kind of technology they develop. See our coverage of this Canadian startup's new additions.
• Old Media and New Media Make a Trade Former Chicago-Sun sports columnist Jay Mariotti got scooped up by AOL Sports and Talking Points Memo blogging star Greg Sargent has come on board the Washington Post.
• Louis Gray Joins SocialToo as Advisor Web 2.0 uber-early-adopter Louis Gray took an advisory position at an otherwise unknown startup, he announced this week, and in comments Gray explains exactly what he'll be doing for the company.

Head on over to Jobwire to find out about other new hires at RedHat, MindTouch, Stack Overflow and more.

We're reporting on 10 to 15 new hires in tech and new media every day at Jobwire. From executives to engineers, if you've got a new job or your company has made a new hire - let us know!

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Apple's iWork Goes (Partly) Online

Apple today announced an online component to its iWork productivity suite. This, however, is not the rumored online version of iWork we were hoping for, as it only allows you to share documents online through iWork.com. After you share a document through the newly released iWork '08 desktop software, your friends and co-workers can comment and leave notes on your Keynote, Pages, or Numbers documents, though the documents themselves can't be edited online.

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Apple is releasing this as a free beta today, and Phil Schiller announced this as "the beginning of a great new service," which leads us to believe that Apple is indeed working on a more advanced online version of iWork.

According to Schiller, iWork.com will work on all the major browsers, including Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Documents are not only viewable online, but can also be downloaded.

Apple also announced a Keynote Remote iPhone app, that will be available in the App Store for $0.99, as well as major updates to its iWork and iLife suites.

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Co.mments Bites the Dust

Conversation tracking service Co.mments has announced this morning that it will cease operations at the end of the week, one month before its 3rd anniversary online. The service was at one time reviewed favorably compared to similar services that have gone on to be acquired or funded by investors. A respectable number of users quickly bemoaned the decision in comments on the company blog.

Thousands of services are launched online every year and only a small number of those prove to have as much longevity. Today's new paradigm trailblazer will often be tomorrow's dead-end hassle for its developer. Such is the nature of a rapidly iterating web and such is the fate of Co.mments.

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Co.mments had some trouble differentiating itself from competitors, but with the acquisition of IntenseDebate by WordPress parent company Automattic, the widespread popularity of Disqus, the innovation and war chest of JS-Kit and the hip new entrant Backtype, this market is as crowded as ever. Co.mments was compared most to CoComment when it launched; that company recently announced a partnership with JS-Kit.

There's a reason why so many people start comment tracking companies - online comments are filled with valuable user data and there's a compelling human element to keeping track of responses to what you've said on blogs. It's not hard to imagine Facebook Connect owning this space within a year, though. We're cheering, none the less, for open standards in the portable identity, data and contacts sphere.

Co.mments hasn't announced any plan for users to export their data. Update: The company just posted instructions on how to export your tracking data.

Project founder Assaf Arkin has a day job as the CTO of open source business process management company Intalio. You can track his other development work at GitHub.

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Jing Goes Pro: One of Our Favorite Screencasting Tools Just Got Better

Jing, one of our favorite free screenshot and screencasting tools, just received a major update. Besides adding a new look and feel, TechSmith, Jing's parent company, also announced a new Pro version of Jing, which, for $14.95 a year, allows users to record their screencasts in HD H.264 video, directly upload them to YouTube, and remove the Jing logos that appear at the beginning and end of videos produced with the free version of Jing.

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The free version also got a major face lift. While there aren't too many new features, one new function we definitely like is the ability to customize Jing's buttons according to your own workflow.

High Quality Video and Direct YouTube Uploads

For just about $15 a year, the Pro version is quite a bargain. Thanks to using the H.264/MPEG-4-AVC video codec, Jing now not only makes it easy to capture high-quality video (including online videos), but also to take those videos to other editors like iMovie, or to video sites like Vimeo or Viddler. The free version of Jing records videos in the SWF format, and TechSmith's Camtasia Studio is one of the few programs that can actually edit those Jing-produced videos.

The Pro version also lets you upload videos directly to YouTube. As with the free version of Jing, you can also use TechSmith's own Screencast.com to host your videos.

In this new version, Jing fixed the one issue that had always annoyed us when we tried to embed videos captured with the software: resizing the height and width of embedded videos now finally works.

New Help Center

Besides updating its desktop software, Jing also released a new 'Help Center,' with lots of tutorials and tips for getting the most out of Jing.

Screenshots and Screencasting

We mostly use Jing to take screenshots every day, and with this update and a subscription to the Pro version, Jing has also become an even more flexible and useful screencasting tool than ever before.

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TripSay: Tell Your Friends Where to Go

With tools like Dopplr, FireEagle, and BrightKite, many of us make it a regular habit to inform our contacts as to where we are and where we'll be. But sometimes, our paths of travel don't provide the most important insight: Why do we go there? TripSay hopes to change that by giving people a way to share information about the places they go - and why they recommend their friends go there, as well.

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TripSay lives somewhere in the conflux of location-aware apps, personal mapping apps like Google Maps and Platial, and review sites like Yelp and BooRah, providing users with the ability to plot reviews and recommendations for other travelers.

Using content from Flickr, YouTube, and other services as well as user-entered information, TripSay helps travelers create detailed firsthand accounts of their experiences, recommend particular locations to likeminded travelers, suggest must see sites, and warn of potential dangers. Throw in some interesting icons, voting ala Digg and Reddit, and metrics on most visited places, and you've suddenly got a very vibrant community of crowdsourced travel information - with a central dashboard to manage it all.

In short, it's a virtual tour guide, courtesy of the hive mind.

But what about the economy? Given the current economic conditions, you might think that traveling would be low on the priority list. TripSay offers something for both the have-to business traveler and the want-to vacation traveler. And, no matter what shape the economy, budget-conscious travel is always a popular topic.

While TripSay is still in beta, the service spent a substantial amount of time in private testing before opening in the fall of 2008. Meaning? There's a good chunk of content available for perusing.

To try it for yourself, visit TripSay and register for an account. Maybe that next business trip can be a little more interesting - or that next vacation could be more affordable.

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Skype 2.8 for Mac: Your Online Demo Is Calling

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're not usually in the "report it before you've tried it" camp, but a couple of trusted sources - Dan York and Rafe Needleman - are reporting that the latest version of Skype for Mac - Skype 2.8 - will include the ability to share your screen during a Skype call. And that's a feature that is sure to change the way many of us engage in Web-based demos.

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Given that we're big Skype users around here and we see more than our fair share of Web-based demos, we're excited to see Skype finally offering the the ability to combine the two. No more setting up WebEx or LiveMeeting. Just share your screen via Skype during your next briefing call.

In addition to screen sharing, Skype 2.8 promises to offer a number of other features including improved chat and per-minute calling access via wifi hotspots like Boingo.

Granted, screen sharing has been available through Skype add-ons, but having the features core to the client - and easily accessible - will only help increase the use of Skype for these kinds of online conversations.

Perhaps more importantly for Skype, it's something which is sure to attract new users. At five years old, Skype is among the old guard of this generation of Web apps. This long-awaited screen sharing feature could help revitalize the product, encouraging a whole new crop of business users to add Skype to their cadre of online tools.

And when you couple these new features with Skype's latest hire, it leads one to wonder if 2009 could be a comeback year for the company.

The latest version isn't available for download yet, but it is slated to be released on Tuesday, January 6.

[Update] The download is now available.

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Brave New World: More Digital, Less Physical

Yesterday, I was with my wife in the L'Occitane store. The shelves were filled with fragrances, soaps, lotions: all sorts of handcrafted beauty products. It occured to me while looking at the labels that I have no idea how these products were made. I am reasonably versed in chemistry, but the process of manufacturing perfume is not something I know anything about.

In general, I am just not good with physical things, because I am a software person. I've always been fascinated by people who can easily make sense of physical objects, because for me it takes a lot of effort even to put together children's toys. My brain is wired differently, to see patterns in software, not in hardware. But most people are the other way around.

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Yet, while looking at the bottles in the L'Occitane store, I wondered: could it be that the world is shifting from physical to digital? At first glance it is impossible, because we live in a physical world. But increasingly, we are surrounded by all sorts of software that fundamentally works differently from hardware. In this post, we'll look at the interplay between physical and digital and argue that we are, in fact, heading towards a world dominated by digital.

A Brief History of Making Physical Things

Before we dive into the realm of software, let's look briefly at how we got here. Clearly, the history of humanity is the history of hardware. Since the Stone Age, when we invented the hammer, the world around us has been, so to speak, a nail. For the past several thousand years, we figured out how to use physics and chemistry to make physical objects. For a long time, we were craftsmen, until the industrial revolution brought scale and systematic manufacturing.

The main thing we learned is patterns in physical objects. We know that we can bend them under certain conditions. We know that there is friction. We know that things react differently to heat. The millions of facts that occupy our lives have to do with how we interact with the physical world and make physical things. These patterns get wired into our brains and help us live our daily lives.

Software 1.0: Why Computer-Phobia Happened to The Mainstream

Computers have software inside that does not behave like physical objects do. The key thing about software is that it is soft and that the conventional laws of physics do not apply to it. As a result, it's hard for people to picture what is going inside. It is hard for people with brains trained to deal with physical things to understand how software works. Because there are no physical laws we are used to, what are we to expect?

I constantly meet really smart non-technical people -- doctors, lawyers, teachers -- who have no clue how computers work. They treat them as magic black boxes that randomly break and never make sense. Why? Because software is a fundamentally different kind of system. It does not behave like the other things around us that we are used to.

On top of being different, software was really hard to use as recently as 5 years ago. PCs and Windows are to blame for the computer-phobia that still dominates the mainstream. My wife works for a large pharmaceutical company, and her Dell with its Windows 2000 is a monster. I do not blame her for being confused. In addition to being unbearably slow, the computer just makes no sense with its crazy administration scripts, incompatible drivers, annoying popups, endless choices, and daily crashes.

There is nothing in the physical world as complicated or confusing as her computer. All of the systems in our home work with the push of a button; all her daily routines are much simpler than figuring out how to turn off auto-spellcheck in Microsoft Word. Like most people, my wife is perplexed by the complexity of her work computer. But thankfully, things are turning around.

Software 2.0: Apple, Ajax, Video Games, and the New Laws of Physics

We changed our household computer to an Apple in 2004 and later on got one of the first iPhones when they came out. Obviously, my wife has no trouble using Apple products, because they are simple. More important, they, like physical things, behave as expected. Every user action results in a reaction that makes sense. There are way fewer choices, and things do not pop up out of nowhere.

Even better, this new kind of software proves to the user that the digital world can be superior to the physical one. There is no friction; things move around effortlessly; and they do work. This is not happening just with Apple products; it is happening all over the web. With the advent of AJAX, a new breed of web applications is teaching users that software can indeed work better than hardware. And that it can be way more fun.

It's the fun element that is likely going to be the tipping point, because it involves kids, our future. The latest video games are simply stunning. Like Apple software, they feature a lot of physical realism and behave as users expect. But in addition, they add a lot of special behavior only possible in the digital world. And it's not just about flying or instantly transporting from one place to another. Video games are creating a whole new reality that is an intricate blend of physical and digital.

Our kids are growing up native to this new digital world. To them, the new rules of digital physics are what the rules of physical physics are to us. They take these new rules for granted, because that is just how all our brains work.

Techies + Mainstream + Kids = Software Revolution

I never had trouble grasping software. To me, its inner workings and abstractions always made more sense than the physical things around me. But this is not so for many other people. Yet, the shift is on its way. Good software is becoming an integral part of our lives. Apple is one of the first and most visible examples of how software is taking over the hearts and minds of mainstream consumers. Its software is beautiful, simple, it works the way we expect it to, and people are starting to love it.

And this love is the first step to truly getting it, to understanding how something works. Because this new software is simple and fun, people are becoming attached to it and are willing to spend more time with it and, ultimately, to understand it well. This new software has a shot at making people get it, just like they get hardware.

And kids, of course, are already there. For them, all of this novelty is effortless and natural. It's a ton of fun, and they do not think twice about which buttons to press; they just know. So, with techies, the mainstream, and kids on board, we are poised to enter this brave new world dominated by software. The impact of this new world is going to be huge because, whether we like it or not, we will no longer be the same. Our brains, while never forgetting the laws of physics, will increasingly adapt to the laws of this new, digital physics.

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Soonr Lets You View All Your Documents on the iPhone

We are still hoping to see a full office suite on the iPhone, but while there are already some apps that allow you to edit documents on the phone, the device's size currently makes it more useful for reading documents than actually creating them. Today, Soonr launched an application in the App Store (iTunes link) that allows you to sync files from your desktop to Soonr's online storage and then view them on your iPhone. Soonr can handle over 40 different file types and provides you with 500 megabytes of free online storage.

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UI and Features

While you currently have to complete the registration on your iPhone, the central hub for getting started is really Soonr's desktop client, which is basic, but gets the job done. The client, which is available for Mac and Windows, lets you choose which files to sync to Soonr's servers and gives you an overview of how much online storage you have been using and the latest status updates. Soonr also provides a web interface that lets you manage all your documents.

The iPhone interface was clearly designed with the user in mind. A dashboard provides you with all the latest updates like newly added files and folders, or printed documents. You can also browse through your files and view them with a more traditional file browser.

One feature we would like to see here is the ability to bookmark folders that you often use, so that you don't have to navigate the directory tree every time you want to access a new file.

Finding and Sharing Files

While the file browser is useful, those of us with a large number of files on their computers will surely welcome Soonr's search function, which allows you to search inside your files.

Soonr also makes it incredibly easy to share files. You can share files directly with other Soonr users, or send an email or SMS with an invitation. You can also forward files as attachments to any email address.

One feature we would like to see here is integration with the iPhone contacts application. It would also be great if you could upload files to Soonr by forwarding an email to the service. That way, whenever you get a document that isn't natively supported by the iPhone mail client, you could access it through Soonr.

Remote Printing

Another useful feature of Soonr is the ability to print files remotely. The desktop client automatically discovers the default printer on your computers and the print job completes without any further interaction.

Verdict

Soonr is one of the most useful productivity apps we have seen for the iPhone. Some web apps like Syncplicity also let you access your cloud storage, but they can't provide the ease of use and compatibility with a large number of file types in the same way a native application like Soonr can.

In the long run, it would be great if Soonr would also let you edit files on the iPhone, but even without this feature, it's already incredibly useful.

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RWW Live: Running a Startup in a Down Economy

In the first RWW Live of 2009, we tackle an issue that is of vital importance to all startups right now - how to navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. Join the ReadWriteWeb authors and special guests on our live podcast show. Our guests are entrepreneurs from BrightKite and Zoho, two startups that were recognized by ReadWriteWeb in our annual end of the year awards: Zoho won 'Best Little Co' and BrightKite won 'Most Promising Little Co'.

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In the podcast, we'll discuss the lessons our guests have learned over the last year and how they plan to continue growing in 2009. The show will be broadcast LIVE at 3.30pm PST Monday (6.30pm EST). We invite you to tune into the show, and interact with us via the chat, by clicking here. You can also use the Calliflower Facebook app to tune in and participate.

We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook.

Here are the details of our guests in this show:

• Sridhar Vembu, CEO, Zoho
• Raju Vegesna, Evangelist, Zoho
• Martin May, co-founder, BrightKite
• Brady Becker, co-founder, BrightKite

UPDATE: the audio is available now.

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Hype Machine Zeitgeist: Listen in Full to the 50 Most Blogged Albums of 2008, For Free

Music mashup site shows how User Experience is done.

MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine launched a new microsite today called the Music Blog Zeitgeist. There you can listen, for free, to entire albums from the most blogged-about musicians of 2008. Bringing together a whole host of different technologies to create one experience, the site is beautiful and a lot of fun to navigate.

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Lots of sites have published top album lists for the past year, but Hype Machine tells us objectively who the most popular musicians on the web have been, at least among the army of music bloggers it's been tracking for years. The Top 50 lists will be published throughout this week, starting with the 50th through 41st most popular songs, bands and albums posted today.

Technology combined with Hype Machine's own aggregation and parsing includes:

• Imeem Flash players that let you listen to entire albums for free. Not thrown haphazardly on the site, either, they are displayed beautifully.


• Creative Commons photos of the bands are used to illustrate each entry. The effect is really nice. Reminiscent of what we've see at travel social network Dopplr but actually inspired, they say, by this similar city guide to Berlin.


• Blog Fresh Radio has produced embeddable "shows" about all the music, including interviews with the artists.


• Musebin has been used to automatically create 1 line album reviews, parsed from all the blog coverage discovered via Hype Machine. Visitors can click through multiple reviews without leaving the page.

The end result is an awesome site that we'll be visiting all week and beyond. When it comes to data driven media mashups, we ca