LSQHA Blog Reviews

Email may be old fashioned, but it's still where we spend a lot of our time online. Today Google announced that its webmail service Gmail is becoming all the richer with the inclusion of support for sending Google Calendar invitations inside the email composition window. In addition to being able to insert invitations, you can also cross reference your calendar availability with the availability of anyone included in your email thread that you have given permission to see the Google Calendar. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty neat and it demonstrates the potential for building cool new features on top of our email inboxes. Sponsor Mashups and platforms are all about cross referencing multiple sources of data or functionality, as in this case: email plus calendar. We wrote earlier this spring about a startup called Rapportive that cross references email and social media data about an email's sender (see also competitor Etacts ), and earlier this month we discussed the incredible potential in Google's announcement of a way to give developers secure access to the contents of your emails for analysis and the creation of innovative services. Yahoo has been calling this kind of approach Inbox 2.0 and has been working on it for more than two years. Here's what we wrote in our November 2007 coverage of Yahoo's vision - how do you think it's worked out? ( Yahoo Says the Future Will Be Modeled on Facebook ) The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by email. The big players won't put a major push into building a new social network. "It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand," are the words Google's Joe Krause. Your email account isn't valuable because it's got the email adresses of other people who could be solicited commercially - it's valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you. [Yahoo's] Garlinghouse says that in the future email and IM will be prioritized depending on the importance to you of the people who send it to you. We're not talking about the number of times people email you - we're talking about the percentage of times you open those emails, the keywords used in them relative to your personal/work profile, there are metrics so crazy we can hardly imagine that are available for determining the importance of people in your life. In your email. Facebook's people-search uses some similar math already. Various Ways Email Gets Innovated On Clearly there are all kinds of different levels of sophistication that can come with these sorts of developments. In fact, two plus years after Yahoo's call to action, things still seem relatively elementary. Rapportive displays data uniquely well but Etacts displays more data. This new Google Calendar integration with Gmail offers some visibility into your and your contacts' availability, but it doesn't tell you what you've got scheduled at a given time. Etacts offers inferior invitation sending but has a whole set of reminder and follow up features that Gmail doesn't offer natively. And Yahoo Mail more closely ties into Facebook than any other email, something millions of people are sure to enjoy. So while all the kids rant and rave about Twitter, Facebook, augmented reality, iPads and location based social networking, don't let them deny: email can still be very exciting. Discuss

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Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, product managers, entrepreneurs and executive management. At both companies, you see the influence of social technologies in the discussions and what their partners are offering. With this social wave comes a variety of new methods to crack the biggest nut: "The most effective way to organize, discover and share information." We've been pounding on that last issue for the past week. We have numerous examples for how web applications can be aggregated into environments like SugarCRM but its the complexity of organizing that data which becomes the biggest challenge. Sponsor The consumer social networks give people lots of ways to use applications. For example, Twitter is a hub for delivering messages to external sites from the application or services such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. It is a bridge for external services that provide data services that aggregate Twitter data to be uses for specific uses. Recommendation services like Mr. Tweet provide a person with references to other people the individual may want to follow. The enterprise is a different beast. It is not the most popular for the hungry young entrepreneurs and developers we met at companies like Twillio Tuesday night on the eve of Chirp, the Twitter developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Still, in conversations there, we met a few people who are developing for the enterprise environment. What they bring is a fresh look at how the social technologies apply in a world where compliance issues abound, complex processes rule the day and knowledge often exists in ERP silos and email archives. What these young people see are front-end tools like Google Wave that serve as the foundation for collaborative services. These are platforms, for instance, that seek to eliminate email from the process. These young developers create a certain effect. They've developed ways to organize and share information that the enterprise accepts. So much so that the giants have developed their own services, again, in many respects, inspired by the developers building web oriented platforms. And it is having a transformative effect. On Sunday night, we sat in a conference hall at the Washington Convention Center. It was the 35th anniversary of the SAS Users Conference. It was our first time attending. Twitter was the focal part of the opening. Large screens showed the Twitter updates. Their vice president of marketing used his time on stage to push out his second tweet...ever. The singing group even tried to collaborate with the crowd to create an improvised song from their Twitter stream. We learned the next day that this was a first for SAS. Twitter and the variety of other social technologies in the market are giving this conservative, data analytics company a new view, best illustrated in the launch this week of its Social Media Analytics platform. It's a complete, powerful service that takes structured and unstructured data from social networks, applies it to preset rules and delver the results in a dashboard environment. It's lacking a certain level of automation. It's not self-service by any means. It requires SAS to do the analysis and then present it through a web site. But that's okay. The service acts as a pivot that gives SAS the capability to move into new markets. It moves them from the back of the deal to the front of the deal. In the back of the deal, for instance, SAS helps analyze customer guarantees. They do a lot more than that but it's an example of the textual analysis the company provides. Now they have greater access to the front side of the deal to. They can use the platform to reach into agencies where they can help customers craft brand strategies. That should have an effect all of its own. It gives SAS the opportunity to interact with marketers, designers and UI specialists. They may recruit a few people or take the knowledge inside the company and turn it into something. That should help SAS improve the Social Media Analytics platform, making it a service that is more easily available for users to do more on their own. At SugarCon, the story is also a social one. Perhaps best summed up in the second day keynote by Paul Greenberg: "Do You Really Have To Worry About the Social Customer?" I am not so sure you have to worry about a social customer. But it might be a good idea to get know them a little bit better so you can build on your own transformations, whatever they may be. Discuss

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From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything

Our selection of the 10 most popular YouTube videos about the Web is of course based on page views. But we also filtered the results for videos that are most true to explaining the big-picture version of what the Web is. The selection includes some of the most creative ways the growth of the Web has ever been explained. The fast paced growth of the Web too often keeps us focused on the latest and greatest, to the point were we lose perspective for how the Web has changed over time. So let's take a step back and get a more culturally-oriented overview of the Web. From a 1969 film about an internet that didn't have a name , to the most recent video on the Future of Publishing - as both nostalgia and analysis, we offer you these videos to help you reflect. Sponsor Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us 10,892,454 views Internet People! 3,316,195 views History of the Internet 1,944,479 views Social Media Revolution 1,734,985 views Internet Party: When Google's parents leave town... 841,295 views 1981 primitive Internet report on KRON 643,333 views The Internet in 1969 567,941 views Web 2.0 544,862 views The Internet Stars Are Viral 434,424 views The Future of Publishing 431,759 views Discuss

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Top 10 YouTube Videos About The Web

In the midst of the SXSW festival last month, we reviewed a mobile social network called LoKast . Our one lingering question about the app's utility, at the time, was were we really going to run around town staring at our phone to see if someone else nearby was running the same app? The answer was "no" then and is "no" now, but the difference now is that the iPhone OS 4.0 that was announced yesterday allows for background location multitasking . This opens up a whole new realm of experiences for the iPhone. Sponsor First, LoKast. LoKast is a self-described "disposable" social network. That is, as you move about and come near other people running LoKast, you can quickly interact with them. Then, when you move ot of range, you may never see them again. It is social networking based on location, without a persistent friends listing. So now, with background location monitoring, an app like LoKast is actually feasible. I can turn it on, leave it running and wander around town and perhaps have it notify me when I'm within range of someone. As Kim-Mai Cutler notes, background location also brings up some "slightly creepy" privacy concerns relating not only to applications running in the background, but also location based advertising. But what if you think about location based advertising like you think of iTunes' "Genius" function or all the other recommendation engine software you use? It may be tough to realize that you are not quite the unique snowflake you thought you were and that, indeed, everyday around three you end up at the same coffeeshop, but wouldn't it be nice for your iPhone to realize this and get you 20% off? Without you even having to lift a finger? Well, fine, maybe you have to lift an iPhone. The list of ideas for background location are endless. Of course, we'll have to see how quickly a battery gets drained with persistent GPS monitoring. Having the ability to let our phones deliver us information, as we move about the world, based on our location has some amazing potential. Think of EveryBlock , the hyperlocal news aggregator that Marshall Kirkpatrick went ga-ga over when it arrived in Portland. The block-level delivery of news wouldn't even need to wait for you to check it any more - it could simply deliver relevant information as you move about your day. Real-time rideshare services like Avego and Flinc suddenly become that much more feasible, in fast-paced, real-life situations. We could go on, but we have another couple of months before the next version of the iPhone OS comes out and we're already too excited as it is. What crazy, creepy or otherwise cool potential do you see with the new background location capabilities? Discuss

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What Background Location Brings to the iPhone

For all the hype and all the discussion, the thousands of apps surrounding the service and our constant amazement at how fast or slow it grows, one point noted in a Twitter blog last night might bring us all back down to Earth for a moment - Twitter just became multilingual less than six months ago. If you're wondering, there are as many, if not more, Spanish speakers in the world as English. While Twitter is bragging about its expanding international audience , the next time you find yourself wondering why the service hasn't absolutely exploded on the worldwide stage, look at its translation issues. Sponsor Now, this wasn't the main point of Twitter's blog post , which tells us that more than 60% of Twitter accounts come from outside the U.S. But, it didn't seem like a rather noteworthy point. According to the company, the addition of a Spanish-language Twitter website saw an "immediate 50% boost in signups from Spanish-speaking countries." After the earthquake in Chile, signups "spiked 1200% and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language." The reason we make this comparison is to remind ourselves of how infantile Twitter really is. We compare it to Facebook all too often, and that much-repeated statistic of 400 million users, but we don't bother to note that Facebook is also translated into more than 60 languages . So, while Twitter is not only striving to reach mainstream America, it is still only offered in two languages and it's a bit of a surprise that it's become as international a service as it has. While the blog brags that Indian politicians have spurned a recent growth in India, the country is also host the second largest number of English speakers worldwide. Jack Dorsey on Translation When ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus recently spoke with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and artist, architectural designer, activist and blogger Ai Weiwei , the question of translating Twitter was a central theme of the discussion. "Why don't you provide a Chinese language access to Twitter? Once you have this, you will have 100 times more audience," asked Ai Weiwei. "Is it possible for you to provide Chinese access to Twitter? I need a clear answer, yes or no." "I would say yes, its just a matter of time," replied Dorsey. "It's a matter of getting over techinical restraints." Dorsey explained that translation was an issue of scale and said that, just as was the case with Facebook, Twitter was being translated by its users. Dorsey admitted that if Twitter were translated into a local language, the people would immediately understand it, but that "it's a major failing of the technology right now that it's not." "The end goal," Dorsey said "is end-to-end translation in every language." Our own Frederic Lardinois detailed Dorsey's explanation of the translation setbacks on Twitter: According to Dorsey, it is just a question of time and mostly a technological issue. Given Twitter's problems with scaling the service, making it work for every character set creates some issues for Twitter because of the legacy framework that Twitter established in its early days. Currently, the company doesn't really have the resources to devote to this. Doresey did, however, argue that users already know how the service is meant to work and understand the setup of the Twitter page. We do have to ask - how hard is it to translate the little text we actually interact with on Twitter? Facebook, with all of its advertising pages, account pages, settings pages, and whatever else, is absolutely huge. Twitter, on the other hand, is rather small. We're pretty sure Twitter would have no problem finding some Chinese speakers to translate the login page and the account settings and whatever else, pro bono. And, as noted in the conversation with MacManus, Ai Weiwei and Dorsey, the benefits of a more translated Twitter could be world-changing. What say you, Twitter? We say get to it. Discuss

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Twitter's Translation Problem