Google just opened up Knol, its Wikipedia competitor, to the public after announcing a private beta of the service last December. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol puts a stronger emphasis on authorship and even encourages users to start different 'knols' for the same subject. Google is also serving up AdSense advertising on the site, whereas Wikipedia stays away from any advertising on its site.

In many respects, Knol is similar to Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, though its scope seems even more ambitious and its tools a bit more refined. It does, however, validate the Mahalo model.

Authorship/Identity

Knol puts a lot of emphasis on authorship and, somewhat akin to Amazon's 'Real Name' scheme, authors can validate their identity on Knol through either a credit card or phone number.

The default setting for every Knol is 'moderated collaboration.' In this mode, anybody with a Google account can suggest changes to an knol, but the author has to accept these changes before they go live.

Authors can also invite others to contribute to their articles and given them the same rights as the original author.

There is also an option for authors to write a short bio of themselves in Knol. While this is interesting here, it will be even more interesting to see if Google might start sharing these Knol identities (and maybe even the users' reputation) among more of its properties.

Usage

Setting up a Knol is as easy as clicking the 'Write a Knol' button. The text editor, too, is pretty straightforward, especially in the face of the often cryptic mark-up language most wikis use.

Knol uses a rich text editor, which presents users with all the typical editing functions, including basic formatting options, links (all set to 'nonfollow'), and the ability to add references.

As of now, you can not embed any videos or other content, except for the New Yorker Cartoons that Google incensed for this project for reasons only Google knows.

Users who don't want to write their own articles can review and rate knols. There is also an option to leave comments on every knol.

Creative Commons

Users can choose between three licenses for their articles, the Creative Commons Attribution License, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and an 'All Rights Reserved' license. The Attribution license is the default setting. Users can chose a different license for every knol.

Advertising

Authors on Knol can enter their AdSense data into Knol. Besides the cut Google already takes from the advertising through AdSense anyway, authors will get the regular AdSense payout for every click on an ad. This seems like a smart way to reward users who write the best (or most popular) content, while still making money for Google.

In the competition with Wikipedia, this might mean that some authors could divert their attention from editing Wikipedia articles to Knol. However, the question will also be if spammers can find a way of abusing this.

New Yorker Cartoons?

While there is no option to embed any videos or other content into the site, authors can embed cartoons from the New Yorker. This is done through a rather cumbersome process where users have to first search for a cartoon in the New Yorker store and then enter the ID number of the cartoon into Knol. Why Google chose the New Yorker's cartoon archive for this is anybody's guess, but chances are that Google will announce more content partnerships in the near future.

Is Google Going After Wikipedia?

Given how often Wikipedia results appear as Google's top results, it would make sense for Google to look at this and decide to start its own competitor. By incentivizing authors through AdSense and by giving its users simple, but powerful tools to start their articles, Google might just be on the right track. While Google keeps reiterating that Knol is not meant to compete with Wikipedia, it's hard to see how that wouldn't be the case.

Knol, of course, has far fewer articles now than Wikipedia, but as it grows, it will be interesting to watch if Google is going to give preference to its own pages over the Wikipedia results. After all, Knol carries Google advertising and Wikipedia doesn't, so Google would clearly have an incentive in doing so, though the potential public outcry if Google would try to do this might prevent them from even attempting it.

New startup Pixily lets small businesses and individuals send paper documents by mail in a Netflix style envelope, then scans, uploads to Amazon S3 and lets you search them in 3 to 5 days. It's the kind of service that big companies spend a lot of money on, now made affordable enough for anyone.

Boston Globe writer Scott Kirsner tested the service last week and saw even faster turn around - his documents were available on the Pixily website in one day and returned to him in paper form in two days after sending them. That's pretty awesome.

Keeping Costs Low

Pixily offers subscription plans from $5 to $60 per month, for your first 50 to 200 pages mailed in and with 1,000 to 12,000 pages of storage. All stored documents are made available in PDF format, so there shouldn't be any concern about losing them if you cancel your subscription.

This is the kind of service that cloud computing makes possible. The Amazon Web Services blog has a brief description of how Pixily uses multiple AWS offerings to keep their prices low.

Trusting People With Your Mail

The 'mixed media' nature of this company, combining real world and digital, is one of the things that makes it so interesting. There are other services like this but each are a little different. See also Earth Class Mail, which intercepts your mail before it gets to you and lets you sort it online and Scribd's Paper to iPaper service, which is free, takes its sweet time in scanning your documents and then serves ads next to them online.

Are you willing to send important paper documents to a startup company online? Privacy and security could definitely be a big concern. We are quite interested to see how Pixily works and will report back after spending some time with our new subscription.

You can watch a 5 minute screencast about Pixily here.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Facebook, which is kicking off its developer conference today, grew 40% over the last year, while its biggest competitor, MySpace, saw a 6% drop in visits since June 2007. The numbers for average time spent on these two sites almost directly mirror the numbers for visits, with MySpace being down 4% and Facebook up 41%.

Even though Facebook is slowly catching up to MySpace, the gap between the two is still large, with Facebook having a 17% market share and MySpace 72%.

While Facebook users are starting to spend a lot more time on the site, the average MySpace users still spends about 10 more minutes there than the average Facebook user (21 min).

MyYearbook

MyYearbook, interestingly, saw the largest gain of all social networks, a trend we have observed for quite a while now. It grew by almost 320%, though it only has a market share of 1.5%. Its users are also among the most loyal and spend about 30 minutes on the site. MyYearbook, as the name implies, mainly targets the high school market.

England

The data for the UK social networking market is quite different. There, Facebook already has a 45% market share, up an astonishing 172%, while every other major social network there lost between 20% (Bebo) and close to 50% (Friends Reunited and Myspace).

Facebook Still Trying to Catch Up

While Facebook is the fastest growing network and MySpace is bleeding users at a slow by steady clip, Facebook still has a long way to go before it will catch up to MySpace. Even though MySpace has a bad reputation in the blogosphere (though, thanks to some recent initiatives like Data Availability and OpenID integration, this tide might be slowly turning) and Facebook gets a lot of the hype, if advertisers and developers want to reach the largest number of potential users, MySpace is still the place to go for the foreseeable future.

PlayCrafter is a new web application that lets anyone create custom games by dragging and dropping elements around the screen. Built with Flex, Adobe's Ryan Stewart calls PlayCrafter part of 'a whole new world of Flex!' It's really easy to use and a whole lot of fun.

If you read our coverage of the awesome drag and drop widget building tool SproutBuilder, think of PlayCrafter as the same kind of tool but for game creation. Read on for one example game and a demo video.

PlayCrafter is another example of the way the new web is enabling users to become creators and blowing up the world of content options everyone has to engage with. We love this kind of stuff. Adobe's success in creating tools that allow other people to create tools that enable other people still to create content is remarkable.

Below is one of the games the site offers as an example of what you can build. It's fun to play. If you create a cool game in PlayCrafter, embed it someplace and leave a link in the comments below.

Casual gaming on the web must look like quite an attractive market to VCs right now. Jeff Bezos already invested in two casual gaming companies this year, Kongregate and SGN, after SGN had already raised a $15 million Series A round in January. Now, Mark Pincus' Zynga, another online gaming site, announced that it raised $29 million in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins. Zynga also announced the acquisition of YooVille, a virtual world application for Facebook.

Zynga had raised a $10 million Series A round in January, led by Union Square Ventures.

Zynga is quite similar to SGN, in that both companies mostly focus on games for social networks. Kongregate takes a different approach and makes its games available on its own site only. While this makes playing a game as simple as going to the Kongregate homepage, it also means that Kongregate doesn't have a built-in word-of-mouth marketing network to profit from.

With almost $40 million in money raised, Zynga and its VCs must be looking for a very high valuation for the company. Its main income sources are advertising and selling virtual goods to its players.

It's probably worth speculating that Zynga is going to use quite a lot of this venture money to branch out of the social networks games market and start developing for other platforms (such as cell phones) as well.

On July 15th, the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) held their inaugural conference in New York City. The group, whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and a dozen other companies and academic institutions, is on a mission to find solutions to today's information overload problems. In attendance at this first conference were both representatives from from the above companies as well as others from all over the world. Now that this event has ended, lets see what we've learned.

Thanks to IORG member and blogger Jared Goralnick, we have a great review of the highlights from the event including historical data, quotes, discussion topics, and even possible software solutions:

Information Overload By the Numbers

• $650 billion: Annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers in the United States
• 28% of a worker's time is spent dealing with interruptions that are neither urgent nor important
• 6 Hours Per Week: Time lost due to context switching (multi-tasking, pausing, etc) - Does this means the Louis Gray's and Scobles are still few and far between?

Intel also contributed their own internally collected numbers:

• Average employee receives 350 messages per week
• Average executive receives over 300 messages per day
• Employees spend about 20 hours per week managing email, 2 hours of which is unnecessary email

Discussing Solutions

When talking about solutions to the information overload problem, the key areas that were touched on were process, training, and raising awareness. Intel also mentioned a couple of solutions they have implemented themselves - one being the use of 'quiet periods' of 4 hours twice per week where people can disconnect from communication and fully focus on getting things done. They also make use of an internal software program called the 'Intel Email Effectiveness Coach,' that warns people when they're about to do something stupid, like send a message to 2000 people. (Wow - they should sell that!)

As far as software solutions go, Jared provides us a short list of the highlights. Here's what he said stood out:

• RescueTime - keeps track of not just your activities on your computer but those of your office mates, enabling you to see how you stack up and when you're slacking
• Slife - similar to RescueTime in that it gathers statistics about computer usage, but data is primarily kept locally rather than 'in the cloud'
• SmartDesktop - Imagine your computer knew what was contextually relevant no matter what you were doing on it. (Private Beta)
• Seriosity - an economics-based approach to email management whereby one attaches virtual currency to their messages
• ActionBase - Turns Outlook into a database of sorts for knowledge management and wiki-like email correspondence
• Talk2Us - Jared called this one a 'crazy voice recognition manage-your-life software that's in private beta' (no web site)
• ClearContext - Helps you to better identify important information, group relevant items together, and generally have a better workflow within Outlook
• Permessa -Enterprise unified messaging for performance and compliance monitoring

Jared himself is also the creator of AwayFind, a tool that lets you get away from email without getting out of reach.

We will take a look at some of these other solutions over the coming weeks here at RWW and let you know what we think.

Image Credit: Autoroute: Mzlle Biscotte

Is This Future for the Firefox UI?

You may remember a project called Enso, a software program developed by Humanized - the same folks who brought you Songza. The program is an application launcher which provides you with a different way to navigate and interact with your computer through the use of keyboard shortcuts and typed commands. As we noted before, Enso appears to have been abandoned by the developers who created it since they were snatched up to work at Mozilla. However, the software itself was open-sourced. But now, those same developers are using the concepts brought forth by Enso to create a whole new UI for Firefox called Ubiquity.

What's Ubiquity?

The Ubiquity project aims to solve problems involving today's web applications and how we interact with them. Atul Varma describes this on his blog:

Web applications, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it's difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is alleviated to some extent by creations like Firefox Add-ons that add toolbars or sidebars to Firefox's UI, Bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey, but while all of these solutions are powerful, each comes with its own set of problems. The buttons and bars of many Firefox add-ons don't scale well because of the valuable screen real-estate they consume; Bookmarklets are restricted in scope because they only have the access privileges of the website they're running on; and Greasemonkey doesn't prescribe any kind of interaction model, which makes it difficult to reuse the functionality of a script in a context other than the ones it was expressly designed for.

To solve these problems, they're developing Ubiquity which will let you apply textual commands (called 'verbs') to whatever you're looking at on your screen.

As an example, say you found a typo on a friend's blog. Instead of copying and pasting the sentence into an email, you could use the Ubiquity UI to highlight the problem text then launch Gmail's compose screen with some default information already filled in (like 'From the page Aza's Thoughts:) to introduce your email.

Atul also notes that the Ubiquity interface is currently activated via hotkeys, but that's just for the time being. Their ultimate goal is to have the program more deeply integrated with Firefox so it could be accessed from UIs that already exist - like contextual menus or the AwesomeBar.

To keep tabs on the status of the Ubiquity project or to download the code, you can visit their project page here.

The future of software development is about good craftsmen. With infrastructure like Amazon Web Services and an abundance of basic libraries, it no longer takes a village to build a good piece of software. These days, a couple of engineers can deliver complete systems.

These days, a couple of engineers who know what they are doing can deliver complete systems. In this post, we discuss the top 10 concepts software engineers should know to achieve that.

A successful software engineer knows and uses design patterns, actively refactors code, writes unit tests and religiously seeks simplicity. Beyond the basic methods, there are concepts that good software engineers know about. These transcend programming languages and projects - they are not design patterns, but rather broad areas that you need to be familiar with. The top 10 concepts are:

1. Interfaces
2. Conventions and Templates
3. Layering
4. Algorithmic Complexity
5. Hashing
6. Caching
7. Concurrency
8. Cloud Computing
9. Security
10. Relational Databases

10. Relational Databases

Relational Databases have recently been getting a bad name because they cannot scale well to support massive web services. Yet this was one of the most fundamental achievements in computing that has carried us for two decades and will remain for a long time. Relational databases are excellent for order management systems, corporate databases and P&L data.

At the core of the relational database is the concept of representing information in records. Each record is added to a table, which defines the type of information. The database offers a way to search the records using a query language, nowadays SQL. The database offers a way to correlate information from multiple tables.

The technique of data normalization is about correct ways of partitioning the data among tables to minimize data redundancy and maximize the speed of retrieval.

9. Security

With the rise of hacking and data sensitivity, the security is paramount. Security is a broad topic that includes authentication, authorization, and information transmission.

Authentication is about verifying user identity. A typical website prompts for a password. The authentication typically happens over SSL (secure socket layer), a way to transmit encrypted information over HTTP. Authorization is about permissions and is important in corporate systems, particularly those that define workflows. The recently developed OAuth protocol helps web services to enable users to open access to their private information. This is how Flickr permits access to individual photos or data sets.

Another security area is network protection. This concerns operating systems, configuration and monitoring to thwart hackers. Not only network is vulnerable, any piece of software is. Firefox browser, marketed as the most secure, has to patch the code continuously. To write secure code for your system requires understanding specifics and potential problems.

8. Cloud Computing

In our recent post Reaching For The Sky Through Compute Clouds we talked about how commodity cloud computing is changing the way we deliver large-scale web applications. Massively parallel, cheap cloud computing reduces both costs and time to market.

Cloud computing grew out of parallel computing, a concept that many problems can be solved faster by running the computations in parallel.

After parallel algorithms came grid computing, which ran parallel computations on idle desktops. One of the first examples was SETI@home project out of Berkley, which used spare CPU cycles to crunch data coming from space. Grid computing is widely adopted by financial companies, which run massive risk calculations. The concept of under-utilized resources, together with the rise of J2EE platform, gave rise to the precursor of cloud computing: application server virtualization. The idea was to run applications on demand and change what is available depending on the time of day and user activity.

Today's most vivid example of cloud computing is Amazon Web Services, a package available via API. Amazon's offering includes a cloud service (EC2), a database for storing and serving large media files (S3), an indexing service (SimpleDB), and the Queue service (SQS). These first blocks already empower an unprecedented way of doing large-scale computing, and surely the best is yet to come.

7. Concurrency

Concurrency is one topic engineers notoriously get wrong, and understandibly so, because the brain does juggle many things at a time and in schools linear thinking is emphasized. Yet concurrency is important in any modern system.

Concurrency is about parallelism, but inside the application. Most modern languages have an in-built concept of concurrency; in Java, it's implemented using Threads.

A classic concurrency example is the producer/consumer, where the producer generates data or tasks, and places it for worker threads to consume and execute. The complexity in concurrency programming stems from the fact Threads often needs to operate on the common data. Each Thread has its own sequence of execution, but accesses common data. One of the most sophisticated concurrency libraries has been developed by Doug Lea and is now part of core Java.

6. Caching

No modern web system runs without a cache, which is an in-memory store that holds a subset of information typically stored in the database. The need for cache comes from the fact that generating results based on the database is costly. For example, if you have a website that lists books that were popular last week, you'd want to compute this information once and place it into cache. User requests fetch data from the cache instead of hitting the database and regenerating the same information.

Caching comes with a cost. Only some subsets of information can be stored in memory. The most common data pruning strategy is to evict items that are least recently used (LRU). The prunning needs to be efficient, not to slow down the application.

A lot of modern web applications, including Facebook, rely on a distributed caching system called Memecached, developed by Brad Firzpatrick when working on LiveJournal. The idea was to create a caching system that utilises spare memory capacity on the network. Today, there are Memecached libraries for many popular languages, including Java and PHP.

5. Hashing

The idea behind hashing is fast access to data. If the data is stored sequentially, the time to find the item is proportional to the size of the list. For each element, a hash function calculates a number, which is used as an index into the table. Given a good hash function that uniformly spreads data along the table, the look-up time is constant. Perfecting hashing is difficult and to deal with that hashtable implementations support collision resolution.

Beyond the basic storage of data, hashes are also important in distributed systems. The so-called uniform hash is used to evenly allocate data among computers in a cloud database. A flavor of this technique is part of Google's indexing service; each URL is hashed to particular computer. Memecached similarly uses a hash function.

Hash functions can be complex and sophisticated, but modern libraries have good defaults. The important thing is how hashes work and how to tune them for maximum performance benefit.

4. Algorithmic Complexity

There are just a handful of things engineers must know about algorithmic complexity. First is big O notation. If something takes O(n) it's linear in the size of data. O(n^2) is quadratic. Using this notation, you should know that search through a list is O(n) and binary search (through a sorted list) is log(n). And sorting of n items would take n*log(n) time.

Your code should (almost) never have multiple nested loops (a loop inside a loop inside a loop). Most of the code written today should use Hashtables, simple lists and singly nested loops.

Due to abundance of excellent libraries, we are not as focused on efficiency these days. That's fine, as tuning can happen later on, after you get the design right.

Elegant algorithms and performance is something you shouldn't ignore. Writing compact and readable code helps ensure your algorithms are clean and simple.

3. Layering

Layering is probably the simplest way to discuss software architecture. It first got serious attention when John Lakos published his book about Large-scale C++ systems. Lakos argued that software consists of layers. The book introduced the concept of layering. The method is this. For each software component, count the number of other components it relies on. That is the metric of how complex the component is.

Lakos contended a good software follows the shape of a pyramid; i.e., there's a progressive increase in the cummulative complexity of each component, but not in the immediate complexity. Put differently, a good software system consists of small, reusable building blocks, each carrying its own responsibility. In a good system, no cyclic dependencies between components are present and the whole system is a stack of layers of functionality, forming a pyramid.

Lakos's work was a precursor to many developments in software engineering, most notably Refactoring. The idea behind refactoring is continuously sculpting the software to ensure it'is structurally sound and flexible. Another major contribution was by Dr Robert Martin from Object Mentor, who wrote about dependecies and acyclic architectures

Among tools that help engineers deal with system architecture are Structure 101 developed by Headway software, and SA4J developed by my former company, Information Laboratory, and now available from IBM.

2. Conventions and Templates

Naming conventions and basic templates are the most overlooked software patterns, yet probably the most powerful.

Naming conventions enable software automation. For example, Java Beans framework is based on a simple naming convention for getters and setters. And canonical URLs in del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/tag/software take the user to the page that has all items tagged software.

Many social software utilise naming conventions in a similar way. For example, if your user name is johnsmith then likely your avatar is johnsmith.jpg and your rss feed is johnsmith.xml.

Naming conventions are also used in testing, for example JUnit automatically recognizes all the methods in the class that start with prefix test.

The templates are not C++ or Java language constructs. We're talking about template files that contain variables and then allow binding of objects, resolution, and rendering the result for the client.

Cold Fusion was one of the first to popularize templates for web applications. Java followed with JSPs, and recently Apache developed handy general purpose templating for Java called Velocity. PHP can be used as its own templating engine because it supports eval function (be careful with security). For XML programming it is standard to use XSL language to do templates.

From generation of HTML pages to sending standardized support emails, templates are an essential helper in any modern software system.

1. Interfaces

The most important concept in software is interface. Any good software is a model of a real (or imaginary) system. Understanding how to model the problem in terms of correct and simple interfaces is crucial. Lots of systems suffer from the extremes: clumped, lengthy code with little abstractions, or an overly designed system with unnecessary complexity and unused code.

Among the many books, Agile Programming by Dr Robert Martin stands out because of focus on modeling correct interfaces.

In modeling, there are ways you can iterate towards the right solution. Firstly, never add methods that might be useful in the future. Be minimalist, get away with as little as possible. Secondly, don't be afraid to recognize today that what you did yesterday wasn't right. Be willing to change things. Thirdly, be patient and enjoy the process. Ultimately you will arrive at a system that feels right. Until then, keep iterating and don't settle.

Conclusion

Modern software engineering is sophisticated and powerful, with decades of experience, millions of lines of supporting code and unprecidented access to cloud computing. Today, just a couple of smart people can create software that previously required the efforts of dozens of people. But a good craftsman still needs to know what tools to use, when and why.

In this post we discussed concepts that are indispensible for software engineers. And now tell us please what you would add to this list. Share with us what concepts you find indispensible in your daily software engineering journeys.

Image credit: cbtplanet.com

Mixtapes just 'aint what they used to be. One of the most democratic forms of art collecting is being made even easier by a handful of fun new websites.

Is it legal? Will it last? We don't know and we don't know if we care. These services are such a joy to use that they reinvigorate our appreciation for what the social web can do.

Muxtape

The elegant simplicity, combined with the tech success of its New York founders, has made Muxtape the mindshare leader in the online mixtape market. Users upload up to 12 MP3 files and then publish their collection. The interface is like one big button and it's a lot of fun to explore different peoples' collections of favorites.

All kinds of mashups have been built on top of Muxtape. See, for example, our coverage of Muxtape With Coverflow [Mac] (pictured below), MuxtapeStumbler, MuxSeek Search Engine and MuxScrobbler - a script to synch your Muxtape listening with your Last.fm user profile.

Favtape

The newest entrant into this field is much easier to use for publishing collections. Favtape creates a Muxtape-like interface for listening to the full-length version of your Pandora or Last.fm favorited songs.

It's simple, but it's very cool. There are tie ins to Lyric Wiki, a ringtone search, the ability to listen to more songs that are similar or by the artist and other features. It's powered by the Seeqpod API, which must be one of the most popular APIs on the web lately.

Favtape just launched this week, but we really like it already.

Mixwit

MixWit is a Flash mixtape creator with a very nice interface and the ability to embed your player on a web page. See my example below. This service can have songs added by URL or through Seeqpod or Skreemr MP3 search.

Hint - click the play button below, or if you're reading this by RSS - click here to see this embedded player in action.

It's a relatively full featured Flash authoring environment and exemplifies the design possibilities that emerge from a confined space. The cassette tape border around images users upload is really visually appealing. It's all pretty easy to use and it's a whole lot of fun. It's more fun to use as a publisher than either of the services above and it might be more fun for listeners too.

It appears that there are some performance issues, though, as the 'menu' command often doesn't work with Mixwit. That should bring up a collection of other mixtapes.

The Changing World of Mixtapes

Different mixtape services serve different purposes. The point though is that this art form is becoming easier than ever before.

Mixtapes used to be something you put a lot of time and effort into, typically making one copy to give to one other person. The loss of that art form is a little sad. These services are something very different, they are very public and considering the free music widely available online - scarcity is no longer an issue.

Are these services legal? That's unclear; they are riding a thin line and legal decisions may be made about services like this in the coming years. Streaming, as opposed to full, direct downloads, is a different animal. The original mixtapes were arguably illegal as well, though, and what a loss the world would have suffered if that medium had been strangled.

Where's Your Mixtape?

We find the new mixtape publishing scene pretty heartwarming, in fact. We hope you'll enjoy testing out the services above - and leave us a link in comments to your mixtapes so we can all know what kind of music the RWW community likes to listen to!

CC photos used above include the following from Flickr: radio:cassette drawing from my primary school days by Alicia Yeah, 'The Tree' by helmet13, An intense morning break over the Angels Bay, French Riviera by mamjodh

The calendar syncing and sharing company Calgoo has decided to release all its products for free. Until today, Calgoo made a free version of its software available and charged $30 a year for its more fully featured pro 'Connect' accounts. User who bought a license for the pro account before today will continue to receive free email support for the duration of their licence.

At its core, Calgoo is a calendaring tool that allows you to sync calendars across platforms, including iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook, and 30 Boxes. While it started out as a very basic service about 2 years ago, Calgoo has developed into a mature calendar sharing solution with three separate products: Calgoo Calendar, an online calendar, Calgoo Connect, its calendar syncing application, and Calgoo Hub, an online calendar sharing service.

Judging from the change in business models, however, it would seem that Calgoo couldn't attract enough paying users. It's interesting that Calgoo couldn't make its 'freemium' model of free basic services and paid advanced feature work.

According to Calgoo, it is making its products available for free in order to 'move to in-calendar advertising business models.' While Calgoo hasn't outlined what these in-calendar ads would look like, this move is also consistent with the overall trend on the web towards advertising financed products.

As Svetlana Gladkova also points out in this context, users have simply become so accustomed to not paying for anything on the web that even charging for premium features is becoming very difficult for some companies. Calgoo must have surely felt the same pressure. In the short run, this is probably to the users' advantage.

Google added walking directions to its Google Maps product today. The walking directions ignore one-way streets and Google Maps tries to give pedestrians the most direct and flat route possible. As Google itself acknowledges, the Maps database does not currently have a lot of information about sidewalks, pedestrian bridges, or if a specific street is simply too busy to cross. They are, however, working on improving these aspects of their maps.

Walking directions are available everywhere Google offers driving directions.

Google will only allow users to chose the walking options for routes shorter than 6.2 miles (or 10 kilometers). Because of the limitations in its database, it is calling the walking directions a 'beta' products, but, of course, that doesn't mean much when it comes to Google products.

Currently, Google is the only mapping service that offers walking directions. Ask.com used to offer walking directions, but that feature went away when Ask migrated away from its own mapping platform to Microsoft's Virtual Earth three weeks ago.

While Microsoft's Virtual Earth updated its imagery with another major (14 terabyte) update today, it's routing functions have not seen any updates lately. In terms of overall functionality and user interface design, it is very much on par with Google Maps (and, in terms of its imagery, often much better than Google Maps). However, it never quite achieved the popularity of Google Maps.

The walking directions are currently only available through the web version of Google Maps. As of now, you can not chose them in the iPhone Maps application, though that would obviously be a very useful feature to add and hopefully Apple and Google will do so soon.

MySpace is announcing this morning that it will become an OpenID authenticating party and offer developers a deeper level of access to user data than was previously available.

As Facebook prepares to mark the one year anniversary of its heralded application platform and the new iPhone App Store lures developers with groundbreaking features and customers willing to pay for applications - competition for the attention of the developer community is heating up. Once again, when platforms compete for developers - users win.

OpenID for MySpace

MySpace announced today that it will authenticate users for third party sites that support OpenID. It's not clear how this will work yet, MySpace user profile URLs aren't authenticating and there hasn't been any mention of OpenID on the developers blog today, but we hope that usability won't be an issue here as it has often been for the OpenID world. MySpace now joins AOL and Yahoo! as major providers of OpenID accounts.

Initially MySpace will not act as a relying party, meaning you can't log into MySpace using a Yahoo! OpenID, for example. That's typical and we hope it will change soon.

Most important though is that MySpace is offering a system to verify identity across multiple sites. Verified identity allows for all kinds of interesting data mashup possibilities and that's ultimately going to be more interesting than simple authentication and single sign on. As OpenID Foundation Chair Scott Kveton told us this morning: 'its great news that MySpace is not only supporting OpenID but really looking at ways to integrate data and real functionality that is beyond authentication. This will be the real driver of OpenID adoption.'

Data Mashups

Already this morning a number of partner sites are taking advantage of the new ability to cache user data from MySpace. Movie review site Flixter and events site Eventful are the initial examples. Flixter users can now create an account and log in using their MySpace account via the secure standard protocol OAuth. They are then able to see movie reviews on Flixter that were made by friends on MySpace. Eventful integration will send alerts via MySpace when favorite musicians are in visiting a user's home town. Those are good and useful examples.

The possibilities here are many and remind us of the kinds of things the Google Social Graph API enables web-wide and the kind of functionality that Facebook apps are able to leverage on-site using Facebook friend networks. The MySpace functionality will let any site know who your MySpace friends are and highlight their activity on that 3rd party site and apparently 3rd parties will also be able to write to your MySpace account as well.

Profile data can now be cached for up to 24 hours at a time. Supported fields from MySpace include About me, Body type, Children, Drinker, Ethnicity, Has app, Heroes, ID, Interests, Jobs, Looking for, Movies, Music, Name, Network presence, Profile song, Profile URL, Relationship status, Religion, Sexual orientation, Smoker, Status and TV shows. Picture MTV.com noticing that you've changed your relationship status, playing a music video for your favorite song and recommending that you light up an American Spirit to celebrate. That brave new world is right around the corner!

Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Google vs. Apple

The competition is heating up from all the major social networks vying to get developers to build applications on their platforms. That means those companies are racing to offer the most advanced, wide ranging and user-seductive platform for application developers to tie their imaginations to.

The end result should be some really exciting applications. Facebook proved that a simple development environment will lead to 3rd parties building apps if not businesses inside your website. Google is embracing some standards but is also aiming for the long tail of small social networks and individual websites through OpenSocial and Google Friend Connect (iframes). Apple has proven that users are willing to pay for applications and that brand new features like a touchscreen, location awareness and mobility are hard not to fall in love with. LinkedIn is holding its upper class user demographic close to its chest and entering into selective strategic partnerships, like last night's with the NYTimes.

Enter MySpace and its large, broad base of users. Though much maligned in some circles, MySpace is evolving quickly in the face of competition and offers huge mainstream audiences.

It should be an exciting contest. We're excited to see the next steps these platforms take as they seek the upper hand and we're at the edge of our seats to see how the developer community will take advantage of what's offered. Say what you will about MySpace - it's a key participant in this era of powerful innovation.

Today, eMusic launched a major redesign of its site. The new design not only looks a lot fresher, but eMusic now also draws in information from Wikipedia, videos from YouTube, and photos from Flickr. EMusic is the second-largest online music retailer after iTunes, but it often doesn't quite get the coverage newer music sites like Pandora or Last.fm get.

Most of the effort of the redesign was focused on the album pages. The homepage has been updated in a few spots, but the overall layout hasn't changed.

In March, one of our commenters here argued that it was time for iTunes to become more social in the face of competition with Last.fm, Pandora, and the big social networks. While iTunes hasn't taken up this challenge, eMusic has and this redesign is the first step in this direction.

Better Album Pages

The new design for the album pages comes with a great number of usability improvements. It has now become a lot easier to bookmark an album or to add it to a list, for example. Both of these functions existed before, but they were relatively hidden.

Rating an album has become a lot easier too, as the ratings function, which also determines which albums eMusic recommends, is now immediately visible on the page, right under the cover art.

The new design also spotlights eMusic's own content more directly, by putting editorial reviews and interviews into the left sidebar.

EMusic is also in the process of updating all its cover art and will slowly make high-resolution images available for all of them. The highest resolution available will be 1400x1400, which almost seems like overkill, but it definitely looks good.

While the focus of the new design was clearly on pulling in information from the web, eMusic also added the ability to send out information to Twitter, or bookmark an album on Facebook, Digg, reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and a number of other social networks and bookmarking services.

Dig Deeper

The most important part of the redesign is the 'Dig Deeper on the Net' section, which is collapsed by default. It contains links to entries in YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia, all of which display right on the site.

When we talked to eMusic yesterday, they stressed that they were trying to replicate what its users were already been doing anyway - going out to the web to gather more information on their favorite musicians. Given eMusic's focus on more obscure, independent bands, this makes perfect sense. Especially having the Wikipedia articles available gives users the option to dig a bit deeper into the history and background of an artist they might never have heard of before.

Verdict

EMusic's users have responded overwhelmingly positive to the changes so far. In my own experience, the new pages are a major step forward in usability. Just within the short time they were available, I rated and saved more albums that ever before, simply because it has become so easy to do. The new design puts a lot more emphasis on being visually pleasing, yet it is very usable at the same time.

There are still a few minor problems on the new site, as some albums didn't display user comments, some didn't display cover art, and the Flickr images sometimes refused to close, but that is to be expected with a major redesign like this.

One issue with the new design, though, is that the user reviews are now less of a focus of the album pages. Whereas before, they would take up the bottom of the page, they are now squished into the left sidebar and only up to four of them are displayed at any given time.

Coming Soon

For the future, eMusic promises to launch a new feature every month for the rest of the year, including a new recommendation engine, an updated homepage, and new search features. If they turn out to be as good as this re-design, then eMusic is definitely heading in the right direction, though its subscription model, while keeping the cost per track down, will continue to limit its appeal for a number of potential subscribers.

Do you have an iPhone? Are you a blogger? Then you're going to love this news - there's now a WordPress app for iPhone available for download from the iTunes App Store. The software lets you update your WordPress blog from anywhere. We're not forgiving Apple for that MobileMe nonsense just yet, but we have to admit, this is pretty good stuff.

WordPress on iPhone

The new WordPress App for iPhone supports both WordPress.com installations as well as self-hosted Wordpress.org blogs that are version 2.5.1 and above.

The app includes the following features:

- Embedded Safari previews of posts
- Full support for tags & categories
- Photo support for both camera phone pics and library photos
- Support for multiple blogs
- Ability to password protect a post, save as draft, or mark for later review
- Auto-recovery feature recovers posts interrupted by phone calls

You can see WordPress on the iPhone in action in the video below or check out screenshots here:

More information can be found on iphone.wordpress.org where you can review the Frequently Asked Questions and/or report issues with the application.

To download this app from iTunes, click here.

Thanks to Digital Inspiration for breaking the news.

After a rocky start which involved post-launch outages and subsequent apology letter not to mention the big reveal that MobileMe wasn't exactly the 'push' service they advertised, Apple finally has MobileMe up and running. But now, after updating iTunes to the latest version, many Windows users were surprised to find a new MobileMe icon in their Control Panel. Apple is once again sneaking software onto our PCs - the question is, why are we letting them get away with this?

MobileMe Bundled With iTunes

This isn't exactly the first time Apple has sneaked additional programs onto our machines. Already notorious for bundling QuickTime with iTunes, Apple was finally taken to task last March, when they bundled Safari with their iTunes software update. (QuickTime is one thing, apparently an entire web browser is quite another.)

Yet, they didn't learn their lesson from that experience, or even more likely, they just don't care. They're Apple. You love them. They can do anything right?

Wrong. The truth of the matter is, outside the tech blogosphere (which, ironically, doesn't seem to include that many blogs about computer software), the MobileMe 'malware,' as it's being called in some cases, is a hot topic for discussion.

When clicked, the icon launches a window that essentially functions as an advertisement for the MobileMe service with text that reads:

"Try MobileMe

MobileMe stores your email, contacts, calendar, photos and files in an online "cloud," and keeps your Mac, PC, iPhone, or iPod touch up to date. Sign up now and experience MobileMe today."

And guess what happens when you click the "Learn More..." button? You are, of course, taken to a web site where you are able to purchase the MobileMe service.

To remove the icon, you have to go into the Control Panel, Launch 'Add/Remove Programs' ('Programs and Features' on Vista), and uninstall the program "Apple Mobile Device Support." Since the name of that program doesn't actually say "MobileMe," a more novice Windows user might not know that it is the program responsible for the new icon on their machine and leave it be.

If any other company did the same (especially Microsoft!) the outrage would be deafening. So why aren't we hearing more complaints about this behavior when Apple does it? Can they really do whatever they want?

In a brilliant move that's sure to make both newspapers and social networks around the web jealous, the New York Times and LinkedIn, the leading US social network for professionals, are announcing a content partnership tonight that could substantially increase the value for users of both sites. The announcement will be made at the top of the hour, but the integration is live now.

LinkedIn users are now being shown personalized news targeting their industry verticals on the Business and Technology sections of NYTimes.com and will then be prompted to share those stories will professional associates.

We're big on LinkedIn here at RWW and though a wide open developers platform has yet to emerge, moves like this are inspiring. The deal is an important step beyond the previous integration of sharing hooks on NYTimes.com from other services.

A number of other social networks and bookmarking services have 'share this story' links on NYT stories, but it's unclear how much traction those links alone are getting. Last month we wrote about one of those services, social news site Mixx, that's still seeing fewer than 1 million unique visitors per month despite 'share this on Mixx' buttons on a long list of the biggest news sites in the world, including NYTimes.com.

How much more compelling is this partnership? We think it's a lot more compelling; check out the screenshots below and imagine the feedback loop this could create between the NYT and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has 25 million registered users and the NYT sees 17 million + unique visitors per month, but the partnership will need none the less to introduce more people to LinkedIn in order to really be a home run. See this NYT page for an 'introduction to LinkedIn.' That's pretty classy, though it's unclear yet when that link will be displayed and when it won't.

We'll see how the recommendation process works; we hope it doesn't rely exclusively only on explicitly shared links, but we'll see. This certainly gets the mental juices flowing about any number of other integration and recommendation possibilities.

One question we have is about money changing hands. There has been extensive discussion around the web of late about LinkedIn using partnerships as a revenue source and it wouldn't surprise us if the NYT is paying for this integration. LinkedIn may not be a huge social network, but its user demographics are some of the most financially desirable in the world.

We expect to see more partnerships like this emerge, perhaps from a chastised Facebook attempting to relaunch its Beacon program in a more acceptable fashion.

There has been a lot of development around Microsoft's Live Mesh platform in the last few days. Just last week, Microsoft opened up Live Mesh to all users and quietly released a mobile version. Today, Microsoft has also announced that is is rolling out a major update of the Live Mesh infrastructure tonight and that it will allow users to sync files directly between different devices without having to sync to the Live Desktop first. This will allow users to bypass the 5GB limit of Live Mesh's online storage.

Going P2P

Allowing users to bypass the Live Mesh online storage by directly copying files from one machine to another is a major enhancement to Live Mesh. 5GB are not a very large amount of storage anymore, especially if you want to share videos or photos. Bypassing the Live Desktop of course means that those files are not available online from anywhere anymore, but for a lot of usage scenarios (backup, syncing between desktop and laptop etc.), the online storage wasn't really necessary anyway. Still, it would be nice to see Microsoft up the 5GB limit, or allow users to purchase more space.

Strangely, users will have to turn of syncing to the Live Desktop on the Live Desktop itself. It is not possible to directly configure a folder to bypass the Live Desktop from the desktop, which might have some technical reasons, but mostly seems like an unnecessary hassle.

The new version of Live Mesh will also allow users to manage potential file conflicts on the Live Desktop, something that was sorely missing before.

Going Mobile

Microsoft also quietly released a mobile version of Live Mesh, which allows users to access their files from their mobile phones or any other Internet connected device through an optimized site. While it works best on Windows Mobile phones, we have tested it out on the iPhone as well, and found that it worked surprisingly well. The iPhone displays all photos and documents, though it doesn't play back mp3 files. The site feel a bit better integrated on a Windows Mobile device (you can upload files to Mesh from the phone, for example), but it works well on other mobile platforms as well.

This is not, however, the promised mobile client for Live Mesh - it is only a way to access your files more conveniently from a mobile device. The mobile client is still 'coming soon.'

Going Mac Soon?

As if all of these updates weren't enough, the enterprising folks over at the Live Side blog today found a Mac version of the Mesh client on Microsoft's servers (though Microsoft promptly took it down). While this wasn't an official release, it is clear that Microsoft is taking the Mac platform seriously in its Mesh strategy and chances are that we will see an official Mac client in the near future.

Lots of Developments

Microsoft is putting a lot of resources behind its Live Mesh platform. It's good to see that the company is releasing so many updates and upgrades in such a short time. The syncing application is only the beginning of what Microsoft could do with Mesh and they surely have greater plans for it than just making it a glorified syncing app, of which Microsoft already has a few anyway.

The live streaming video service Qik just opened up its previously closed beta to the public. Apparently, the public is so interested in the service that the site crashed completely just after the announcement was made (the site is back up now). Once it is back online, users will be able to stream live video from their supported mobile phones directly to the web without having to wait for an invitation from Qik.

New Features

Besides a few other relatively minor upgrades, Qik now supports more granular permissions and the grouping of videos. Qik has also released an update to its video player, which, next to some cosmetic updates, now includes the option to chat with other users from within the player.

Qik also announced some new distribution partners, including Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut. Also, as we reported last week, CoverItLive not allows for embedding Qik videos into its live blogging application.

Live streaming now also works on the Verizon and Spring networks, whereas it was previously restricted to the AT&T and T-Mobile GSM networks.

Competitors and the iPhone

Qik's main competitors are Kyte and Flixwagon. Both of these services, however, are currently only available for phones running Nokia's S60 operating system, while Qik also works on Windows Mobile phones.

None of these applications work on the iPhone, yet (thanks to the lack of a video camera) - though Qik has shown a demo of its product that works on a jailbroken 1st generation iPhone. Kyte also has an application for the iPhone, but it can only be used to share photos.

While most live video streaming services like Justin.tv or Stickam have focused mostly on streaming from webcams (and Kyte also allows for this), Qik is fully focused on mobile video. This is clearly a growing market, especially as more consumers start considering video on mobile phones as a basic utility. With its broad range of supported phones, Qik is well-positioned against its competition.

Qik already has a number of high-profile users, with Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose, and Jason Calacanis regularly using the service to stream interviews or other events live to their followers.

Now if only its users wouldn't flood Twitter regularly by announcing that they are 'streaming live now, come chat!'

Union Square Ventures, the VC shop that funded Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Etsy and Twitter, has placed its latest bet in the clouds. Cloud computing service 10gen has taken $1.5 million from the high profile early investors, both the fund and the company announced today.

Most interesting perhaps is that the service is entirely open source, offering anyone a full copy of all its source code. Customers will pay for hosting, a Service Level Agreement and customer service. Today 10gen compares itself to Google App Engine and offers hosting for server side Javascript and Ruby.

Cloud computing, the use of hosted storage and processing power provided by 3rd parties specializing only in such functionality, is red hot. It's also not without its risks, see our coverage of industry leader Amazon's S3 downtime this weekend. We've also got an extensive introduction to cloud computing here.

Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson is one of the most publicly visible venture capitalists in the market and his backing is sure to lead to interesting connections. USV + open source in cloud computing may or may not work well - but it won't be boring. 10gen was founded by Kevin Ryan, the former CEO of DoubleClick, the massive display ad company that Google is currently going through court trying to buy.
Above, versions of the 10gen SDK currently available.

Other open source cloud computing platforms include Toronto's Enomaly and UC Santa Barbara's Eucalyptus. There's a good round-up of coverage on this topic over at Gigaom.

A Pew study of US newspapers released today finds that national and international news coverage is declining as ad revenue plummets an emphasis shifts toward local stories. While those survey results may not seem so bad, newspaper editors also report that the biggest customer protests are being seen in response to cuts to crossword puzzles and TV listings - not decreasing news quantity or quality.

Comics we'd understand - but protesting the loss of crossword puzzles? In all seriousness, the survey's respondents reported widespread optimism and excitement as well as fear and decreased employment. We question how long that optimism will last.

Investigative Journalism?

Survey respondents claimed that there had been an actual increase in investigative efforts, despite theories (see Nick Carr, for example) that the web would cleave entertainment news ad revenue from the investigative journalism it has long subsidized.

Respondents reported a decline in institutional knowledge but an increase in use of the web for research. Web publishing included, the editors report that they are publishing a greater quantity of stories than ever before - but with fewer editors watching those stories for quality.

The Rise of Local News

Newspapers are increasingly delegating national and international coverage to the biggest news organizations among them. Local news is where local press shines. While that makes sense, we wonder whether the rise of location-aware computing devices could lead to a shift in even local advertisers and be the last nail in the coffin after Craigslist.

There may be other ways for even local news to be monetized, though. How many online news organizations make their biggest money from events? Newspapers could certainly organize sponsored events concerning topics of local interest. While that's one interesting idea, there are probably a limited number of viable ideas to keep the revenue flowing long term.

This is What Change Looks Like

The fast paced firehose of the web seems to beg for shallow, poorly edited reporting - but perhaps things are just changing. We don't write in Old English any more, either.

Here at RWW, many of us love the print newspaper and don't want to see it go away. We'd also like the newspaper companies to stop delivering giant piles of paper to our houses each morning, though.

Declining revenue and staff is probably not good for any institution, but the editors interviewed by Pew said their remaining staff is fired up with competitive enthusiasm. That's something that's been missing in the newspaper business for awhile.

These are changing times, clearly, and we believe that news is just one of countless industries that will be upended by the changing web. For a look at one way newspapers might thrive in these times, check out our coverage of the Guardian's recent acquisition of leading business blog PaidContent.

Photo: 60's Paper by Flickr user DaisyBush,