Daily Digest
Google Walks Away from Yahoo
Advertising Deal
After it became clear that the Department of Justice
would try to block the Google-Yahoo advertising deal,
Google today announced that it has decided to walk
away from the deal. Google was clearly not interested in
a protracted legal battle that would potentially alienate
its partners. In its own press release, Yahoo points
out that the deal was only ’incremental’ to its product
roadmap, though Yahoo did not discuss the potential
financial fallout from this announcement. Sponsor
Is Microsoft Still Interested?
Now, of course, the specter of another round of ru-
mors and announcements around a possible merger be-
tween Yahoo and Microsoft will rear its head once more.
After all, the idea of the advertising deal with Google
was born out of the perceived necessity to fend off a Mi-
crosoft takeover of Yahoo, and Microsoft itself lobbied
against the Google-Yahoo deal in Washington.
However, it is also worth pointing out that, at this
point, Microsoft itself might not have too much inter-
est in acquiring Yahoo anymore. After all, Microsoft
itself is now trying to transform its own business and a
merger with Yahoo would only be a distraction at this
point. Discuss
Obama’s Social Media Advantage
In the course of the 2008 U.S. election cycle, which high-profile enterprise service Yammer have all made
resulted in the election of Senator Barack Obama last
night, we regularly reported about how the candidates
used the web and diggurl = ’http://digg.com/technews/ObamasSocialMediaAdvantage’;diggbgcolor
= ’ffffff’;diggskin = ’normal’;social media tools to con-
nect to their followers and organize their campaigns.
Today, we received some data from Trendrr, an online
statistics mashup tool, that clearly shows Obama’s lead
in using technology to connect to his audience, as well
as his overall lead in mindshare in the blogosphere as a millions of peoples’ work and personal lives. Sponsor
whole.
Sponsor
Blogs
While overall blog mentions of Obama and McCain
varied greatly during the last year (and we can’t say
if those were positive or negative posts), close to 500
million blog postings mentioned him since the begin-
ning of the conventions at the end of August. During
the same time period, only about 150 million blog posts
mentioned McCain (though it would also be interesting
to see similar statistics for Governor Palin as well).
Twitter and MySpace
On social networks, Obama also held a clear lead,
with 844,927 MySpace friends compared to McCain’s
219,404. Just between November 3rd and November
4th (election day), Obama gained over 10,000 new friends,
while McCain only gained about 964. On Twitter,
Obama gained 2865 new followers between the 3rd and
4th (for a total of 118,107), while John McCain’s Twit-
ter account only has a paltry 4942 followers in total.
There are, of course, a lot of reasons for why Barack
Obama’s campaign gained a lot more traction on social
networks and blogs than the McCain campaign. The
demographics of social media users tend to fall in line
more closely with those of today’s Democratic voters,
for example. However, looking forward to the next cam-
paign cycle, it seems clear that all political campaigns,
especially at this level, will start ignoring social media
trends at their own peril. Discuss
Micro-Messaging Companies Are
Growing Fast
In a time of widespread economic downturn, a num-
ber of companies powering a new form of communica-
tion are bulking up their teams with new staff. Twitter,
its leading open source competitor Laconi.ca and the
new hires or announced hires coming in the past week.
We’re tracking hires in this sector over on our new site,
Jobwire.
This growth makes sense given the rush of new users
these companies must be experiencing. It’s not just
growing hype, either. The combination of collabora-
tion, intelligence gathering and ease of use make micro-
messaging or micro-blogging a compelling addition to
Mainstream Media Love
The huge audiences of old school media outfits are
getting regular introductions to Twitter these days. CNN’s
Rick Sanchez frequently interacts with his thousands
of Twitter friends while discussing current events on
his show. Newsweek featured Twitter messages promi-
nently on the front page of its website during election
1
day. The Wall St. Journal says that Twitter is now
mainstream. That’s getting harder and harder to deny.
We wrote on Monday about the Toronto Globe and
Mail’s decision to move star technology reporter Mathew
Ingram into an online community manager role, includ-
ing being responsible for getting the newspaper better
integrated with communities on Twitter.
It appears that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams,
also the founder of paradigm shattering Blogger.com,
now has another epochal hit on his hands. The com-
pany has received several rounds of venture funding and
announced this week that it’s getting ready to expand
its staff again with more new hires.
It’s Not Just Twitter
There’s a whole slew of microblogging services to
choose from. We wrote about a comparative survey
of just the ones useful for business users, earlier this
week. The market leader in that emerging field may be
Yammer, who report that more than 10 thousand busi-
nesses have had Yammer networks set up for employees
or co-workers. According to an update from LinkedIn,
Yammer recently brought another senior staff member
over from parent company Geni. Just like Twitter was
an off-shot of startup Odeo, Geni may end up eclipsed
by Yammer.
A different but related animal is open source mi-
croblogging service Laconi.ca. We wrote enthusiasti-
cally about this company the day it went live. It’s hard
to know how many Laconi.ca installs are up and run-
ning, but this tiny company just quadrupled its staff
this week with its first three full time hires.
We’ll be watching for more growth news from com-
panies in this sector but all indications now are that
this is a communication paradigm making a rapid as-
cent and there are business decisions being made that
demonstrate that. Discuss
Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 Summit:
There is Hope
One of our favorite parts of the annual Web 2.0
Summit is Mary Meeker’s rapid fire data deluge about
the Internet economy. You can view her PDF slides
here. She started off by discussing the recession, which
she said was quot;a long time comingquot; - but won-
dered quot;how long will it last?quot;. Meeker noted
that advertising and technology spending is closely tied
to GDP growth. From 2000 to 2002, USA spending
fell 27. Unfortunately, Meeker thinks that the current
pattern looks a bit like early 2001. In 2000-2003 tech
spending was flat or negative, however Meeker’s pre-
sentation included some rays of hope for entrepreneurs.
Sponsor
In the Internet market, Meeker pointed to quot;undermonetizedquot;
social networks, video and VoIP companies - which
2
she said are quot;driving powerful usage growthquot;
among consumers. Specifically, Facebook and Youtube
gained a lot, although Yahoo! and MSN have fallen.
Skype and Paypal were also noted as growing.
In the Mobile space, we’ve seen innovation in wire-
less products and services. Meeker noted that this is ac-
celerating. She said that Opera’s Mobile Web browser
illustrates Mobile Internet growth: data points were
˜17MM Users ( 357 Y/Y), 4.1B Page Views ( 337 Y/Y),
8/08. She pointed out that Symbian dominates the
smartphone industry, yet it is losing market share to
the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Linux - leading her to
conclude that the USA could gain the lead in Mobile
Internet innovation. In summary, mobile web - which
Meeker has been bullish on in every Web 2.0 confer-
ence speech we can remember - is now quot;evolving
very quicklyquot;.
Finally, in a very rapid fire presentation, Meeker
said that emerging markets are quot;pacing the next
wave of technology adoptionquot;. Countries she listed
included China, Brazil, Pakistan, Columbia, India, Iran,
Russia. Mobile is driving a lot of this. Meeker’s closing
thoughts were that quot;companies with cogent busi-
ness models that provide consumer value should survive
/ thrivequot;. In other words, startups and big com-
panies alike need to provide more value to consumers
- a pointed remark perhaps in light of the many web
2.0 startups that have thrived over the past few years
without a business model. However Meeker also noted
in her last slide that: quot;History Proves That Ads
Follow Eyeballs, It Just Takes Timequot;. So there is
hope!
This post merely scratches the surface of Meeker’s
presentation - see the PDF slides here for the full pic-
ture. Discuss
OpenSocial Foundation Elects Parikh,
Smarr to Board
Not to be outdone by the recent US Presidential
hoopla, the OpenSocial Foundation - a non-profit cor-
poration that facilitates the development of OpenSocial
specifications - held its elections for ”Community Direc-
tors” this week. The elections determine who will fill
the remaining two seats on the Foundation’s Board.
The votes have been tallied and the results are in.
OpenSocial Foundation members have selected Jay Parikh
of Ning and Joseph Smarr of Plaxo as their community
representatives. Sponsor
Parikh and Smarr join the five ”Corporate Direc-
tors” currently serving on the Board: Anil Dharni, hi5;
David Glazer, Google; Joe Greenstein, Flixster; Allen
Hurff, MySpace; and Sam Pullara, Yahoo!
Sixty-eight percent of the OpenSocial Foundation
membership voted in the election. Parikh and Smarr
were selected by members from 13 nominees. Each will
serve a one-year term on the OpenSocial Foundation
Board. Discuss
Video Coverage of Web 2.0 Summit
Thanks to our partners at TechWeb, co-hosts of
the Web 2.0 Summit along with O’Reilly Media, Read-
WriteWeb is pleased to present ongoing video coverage
of the event. You can select sessions in the widget be-
low, as they are released on video to ReadWriteWeb
over the next couple of days. We will also be highlight-
ing some of the sessions in separate posts. The first day
of Web 2.0 Summit featured an interview with John
Doerr of the famous VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield
Byers (which invested in Amazon, Google and many
other success stories). Sponsor
Later in the interview, Doerr had 12 tips for en-
trepreneurs to cope with the current economy, which
are well worth noting down...
Discuss
How To Navigate Google Search Results
With Keyboard Shortcuts
A post on the Official Google Blog reminded us of a
recently launched search experiment from Google called
Accessible View. With this opt-in experimental version
of Google.com, you can navigate through your search
results using keyboard shortcuts. For those of you who
are already heavy users of Google Reader, the inbox for
the RSS-obsessed, these shortcuts will be very familiar
to you. Although designed for people with disabilities,
we gave the keyboard shortcuts a whirl to see if it made
sense to use them on a regular basis. Sponsor
In the Google Accessible View search experiment,
you can navigate through the search results using the
following shortcuts (see below).
Current keyboard shortcuts include:
j or DOWN160; -160; Selects the next item.
k or UP160;160;160;160;160;160; -160; Selects the
previous item.
l or RIGHT160;160; -160; Moves to the next cate-
gory (results, sponsored links, refinements).
h or LEFT160;160;160; -160; Moves to the previous
category (results, sponsored links, refinements).
lt;Entergt;160;160;160;160;160;160; -160; Opens the
selected result.
/160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;
-160; Puts the cursor in the search box.
n160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;
-160; Moves to the next result, and fetches more results
if necessary.
p160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;16
-160; Moves to the previous result, reloading earlier re-
sults if necessary.
=160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;1
-160; Magnifies current item
-160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;16
-160; Shrinks current item
A160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;
-160; Switches to Accessible Search Results
W160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;160;
-160; Switches to regular Web Search Results
The ”A” switches you Accessible Search Results,
which identifies and prioritizes search results that are
more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users.
The ”W” switches you back to regular results.
Keyboard Shortcuts For Everyday Use?
For now, the only way to use this search experiment
is to use the Firefox 3 browser. If you have ”find as
you type” turned on in your options you may run into
trouble navigating through results using the keyboard.
Instead of moving you to the next item, Firefox starts
looking for the letter ”j” on the current page. However,
with that feature shut off, navigation was a breeze - you
could j / k back and forth through the list of results
with ease.
This isn’t really a feature that would work that
well for everyday searches where you need to scroll
through multiple pages of results in search of relevant
articles. However, for informational searches such as
those where you want to quickly learn about a subject
well-documented on Wikipedia and other highly-ranked
and respectable sites, navigating through the results
with keyboard shortcuts could be a handy option.
The Accessible View Experiment is something that
we could see using more often if there was a way to
easily go from the regular Google.com homepage to the
experimental Google.com site (perhaps via a keyboard
shortcut?). They would also need to work on the find-
and-you-type bug because that’s a feature not worth
giving up for a bit of navigation ease.
Keyboard shortcuts aren’t for everyone, but for those
of us who really enjoy the option, adding shortcuts to
Google is something we could get excited about if the
kinks were worked out. Discuss
Clearer, sharper pictures on TravelPod
First extensions arrive for mobile
Firefox browser
Mozilla has launched a new section at the addons.mozilla.org
web site to accommodate extensions that are developed
for the Fennec mobile browser.Read More...