Venturebeat reports that Microsoft might be close to acquiring the San Francisco based semantic search engine Powerset for about $100 Million. No announcement has been made yet by either party. We have contacted Microsoft and Powerset for confirmation and will update this post once we receive more information.

Rumor"s about Microsoft"s interest in Powerset had been swirling around the Valley since last month, when Dan Farber first brought up the possibility in a post on CNet.

The consumer-facing side of Powerset currently only searches Wikipedia articles, but Microsoft is most likely more interested in using the underlying technology for its own search products like Live Search. Powerset"s specialty is providing answers through natural language queries like "When was Henry VIII born?" Powerset licensed this technology from Xerox PARC).

Having backing from Microsoft could help the small company to expand beyond Wikipedia and start indexing more of the Internet.

Mircosoft"s search products have struggled to gain any ground back from Google"s search. Currently, Google has more than a 60% share in the search market, while MSN/Live Search has about 9.5$.

Powersets capabilities have generally received very positive reviews and in his original piece on this, Dan Farber already argued that Powerset"s ability to create connections between concepts, relationships, and meanings could give it a heads-up over Google"s keyword and PageRank driven search.

Powerset was funded in a $12.5 Million Series A round by Foundation Capital, Founders Fund and various angel investors.

Recently, we"ve seen a couple of our favorite web apps go open source. The code for FF To Go, the popular mobile client for FriendFeed developed by RSSMeme creator Benjamin Golub, is now available under the MIT license and Snackr, the RSS AIR app we adore has posted their source code on Google Code. Is this the start of a new trend for niche web apps? And what does this mean for the future of their development?

Why Go Open Source?

Of course, we can"t talk about the trend in open sourcing web apps without mentioning the big news about Reddit. Recently, the social news site decided to open up so that you can now build your own version of Reddit. The difference here is that Reddit is large enough to not be considered "niche" - it has 4.5 million unique visitors per month and has grown 1000% since the acquisition by Conde Nast"s Wired Digital division.

However, when compared to competitors like Digg and Yahoo Buzz, it"s clear that Reddit is the underdog here. If anything, the decision to go open source was a move to compete in a way that Digg and Yahoo cannot. When speaking as to what they hope to accomplish by the move to open source, co-founder Steve Huffman said that they"re hoping users will tweak what they want changed and add new features. The beauty in this is that even if users develop new features, they can"t necessarily be used to go and build a competitor to Reddit - because the code is open source, Reddit could just implement those features themselves.

Small Apps Open Up

While open source might be a good thing for a community the size of Reddit, there"s still concern that when smaller web apps go this way, it means the development cycle is going to slow down.

Take for example, Enso, an app which provides an alternative way to interact with your computer, similar to what Launchy offers. In March of this year, this niche app also went the open source route via the revised BSD license. In this case, the move was most likely due to the fact that the Mozilla Foundation hired away three of the principals from Humanized, the company behind both Enso and Songza. But immediately upon the announcement of the move, there was concern echoing in the comments of the blog post:

Will the Humanized folks still be leading the charge on Enso? or are leaving it adrift?

and another pleaded...

Humanized, please don"t leave Enso adrift.

As to whether Enso has indeed been set adrift...well, no one from the Humanized team ever responded in the comments section and the Humanized blog is now promoting Mozilla. A May 6th entry even let everyone know Mozilla was hiring and provided an email address to apply. In addition, four other of the May blog posts were about Firefox.

When it comes to FFtoGo, though, creator Golub assured me on Twitter that he"s still developing the app, but he hopes others will start sending him patches soon. (We hope so, too!) Snackr also is currently going strong, but they only went open source on June 5th. Still, they"ve already posted a couple of test builds on Google Code, which implement new features like the ability to star new items, change ticker transparency, customize how old the items displayed can be, and more.

Even Bigger Apps Can Lose Momentum

However, the concern for the lack of development isn"t entirely unfounded. Take for example, another open sourced app, this one from Socialtext, maker business social software. In July of 2006, they released Socialtext Open, an open source version of their wiki software. But it"s a good thing they didn"t stop development of their own because, by the looks of it, Socialtext Open has only had one patch in 2 years:

Excited or Worried?

Those are just a handful of examples of apps going open source, but there are many more. Of course, this isn"t to ignore the fact that Sourceforge does quite well, it"s just to raise the question - does open sourcing a niche web app really encourage more development? When the community is so small, if the creator doesn"t continue to work on the app, how does the app really fare? And has a favorite app of yours ever been abandoned?

Social networking site MySpace is releasing a set of APIs later today that will allow developers to implement protocols for exchanging and synchronizing user profiles between their own applications and MySpace profiles. Users can share their basic profile information, as well as their MySpace photos, videos, and friend list.

As we reported earlier, MySpace has signed up a number of high profile partners for this launch: Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and Photobucket.

This is, of course, a direct competitor to Google"s Friend Connect and Facebook"s Facebook Connect, though, as Steve O"Hear notes on ZDNet, there are important differences between these projects. While Friend Connect relies on an iframe to exchange data between sites, the Data Availability APIs makes third-party services request the data from MySpace "on the fly" and only allows a user"s login name to be cached.

As Steve notes, if MySpace"s Data Availability API is adopted by a large enough number of sites, it could make MySpace the de facto host for social network profiles.

The details around Facebook Connect are still a bit unclear, but Facebook will probably update its developer community about its plans at next month"s F8 conference.

For users, being able to have their profiles linked between different services is a major step forward in terms of usability. It would be very convenient to have a Twitter profile automatically synch with a MySpace (or any other service"s) friend list, or only having to update photos on Photobucket and then see them directly on MySpace.

Microsoft announced this morning that it plans to acquire Portugese mobile application company Mobicomp, makers of some very cool mobile tools that we"re excited to get our hands on. Microsoft watchdogs Liveside saw the news first and have a good description of the Mobicomp offerings, which we"ll discuss below.

One thing"s for sure, though - the iPhone is not the only mobile game in town. We continue to see things that Windows Mobile phones can do that iPhones cannot and we expect that to continue after the launch of the iPhone app store. Check out what Mobicomp offers, presumably a feature set that will be included in all Windows Mobile phones in the future.

The Features

• Automatic backup and recovery

MobiComp"s MobileKeeper™ Backup & Restore is an "over the air" mobile backup and restore service that can store any kind of content held on a mobile device, including contacts, calendars, text messages, photos, videos, music, bookmarks,
ring tones and applications to business files like Microsoft Word and Excel. Backup to the web happens automatically and the web interface also allows for management of the contents of the mobile device. This reminds us of SugarSync, among other things.

• Social web integration

The MobileKeeper™ Sharing & Communities features include both read and write capabilities for blogging and participation in various social networking sites. Here at RWW we"re big fans of Facebook Mobile, Netvibes Mobile and FriendFeed to Go - and we believe that mobile social networking in general is going to be very big.

• News ticker

The company"s Active mTicker™ is an RSS-based news ticker that delivers a wide variety of content types while the phone is in idle mode. Sounds like a great idea, if a battery suck. We love the Adobe AIR desktop news ticker Snackr and we like the idea of a high quality, customizable mobile news ticker. Right now the news ticker doesn"t appear to be personalizable - it"s almost like an ad platform for customers. We would love to see users able to access this functionality directly.

In other words, this is an exciting acquisition for Microsoft to make. We hope that Mobicomp"s features can be integrated quickly.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering sweeping changes to the way top-level domains (TLDs) are assigned. Under this newly proposed plan, any organization could apply for any top-level domain (ICANN calls these new domain names generic TLDs). Google, for example, could get a .google domain, or Coke products might be found under .coke. If accepted, this would be the most significant modification of the TLD naming system yet.

Update: ICANN just approved these changes.

One interesting aspect of the new rule, according to the WSJ, is that general terms such as .news or .sports would also become available for registration.

The new rule proposes a $50.000 to $100.000 fee for the registration of one of these new domain names, effectively restricting their availability to larger organizations.

This new plan would have a number of ramifications, but maybe most importantly, the domain name speculation business is going to be changed forever. Most interesting and generic .com names have long been taken. The new system, however, will bring an abundance of new domains, which might drive down prices for .com domains. This is surely going to upset a lot of speculators, as Chris Morrison also points out on VentureBeat. Right now, speculators can hoard interesting domain names and auction them off for millions of dollars (business.com sold for around $350 million).

Will Consumers Care?

In the past, ICANN slowly added a number of new top-level domains such as .info, .mobi, .travel, .coop, or .asia. None of these gained a lot of mind-share among consumers and can often be bought at a discount because demand for them is so low. For the average Internet user, .com is the only domain on the Internet, with only .edu, .gov, .org, and .net having some traction as well. Not coincidentally, these (together with .mil) were also the first TLDs available on the net.

The question is if these generic TLDs will be more successful. If consumers didn"t adapt to .info, will they adapt to .coke? The .com domain has become so ingrained in our Internet culture that it has practically become synonymous with domain names and the Internet as a whole.

While some web services like del.icio.us were able to attract a considerable amount of users with their idiosyncratic domains, even del.icio.us finally bought delicious.com when it started attracting more mainstream users.

It looks like these questions might get answered pretty soon. Judging from ICANN"s timeline for the introduction of generic TLDs, we could start seeing them as early as Q2 of 2009.

YouTube"s huge lead in market share over other online video sites continues to get bigger, even as the over all video viewing market continues a decline. According to traffic analysts Hitwise, YouTube now sees 75.43% of traffic to the online video category; that"s up 26% from it"s May 2007 marketshare of 59.95%. The nearest competitor is still MySpaceTV, which was down a whopping 44% to 9% marketshare. (Full chart of top 5 sites below.)

In April we reported that YouTube"s dominance in online video was bigger than Google"s dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.

Questions

Hitwise reports that overall video viewership in May of this year fell 9% compared to May of last year, but times on site grew 6%. That"s strange. We"ve asked whether the rapidly growing Hulu is included in this batch of numbers and will update this post when we get a reply. (Update: Hitwise says that Hulu is now the 13th most watched video site and is seeing consistent growth each month.) Could it be that last year saw a large number of people checking out online video for the first time, only a certain percentage of them found that they liked it but those people are now watching more than before? If readers have any theories why the video market is declining in absolute number of viewers, we"d love to hear them.

YouTube"s huge dominance over a market that includes a wide variety of different video sites, each with different communities and feature sets, probably does not bode very well for innovation in the sector. We"d love to see more people checking out innovative services like Metacafe, Blip.tv and others. We wrote about the top video content producers in the world yesterday, many of which are bigger in places other than YouTube. Smaller up and comers outside of YouTube deserve some attention, too.

Earlier this year, we covered the launch of Xobni, an inbox add-on for Microsoft Outlook. This application is designed to tap into the hidden social network everyone uses: their inbox. More recently, another inbox addon called Xoopit came onto the scene. This one is for your Gmail inbox and provides a way to find files, photos, videos...and people, although that feature is not as obvious. Both of these applications are extending the possibilities of the inbox while turning them into hubs for for our real-life social connections.

Xobni

Xobni, a company obviously catering to business users, have, as of today, launched a new version of their Outlook plugin. Needless to say, the Xobni team really knows their audience because this new version is offering built-in support for LinkedIn, the social network designed for business use.

With the new LinkedIn integration, Xobni now automatically shows a contact"s current employer, job title, link to their LinkedIn profile, and contact photo in the app"s sidebar. This is especially helpful for those who receive a lot of email from new contacts or have a hard time putting a face to name. Along with the LinkedIn support, Xobni still offers their core features - fast people and attachment search, threaded conversations, and automatic contact profiles.

Download Xobni

Xoopit

Depending on how comfortable you are handling over your email login information, you may find Xoopit either a major security risk or one of the more useful web applications you"ve seen in a long time. Marshall has argued that Xoopit is proof that Gmail needs a better API, but I decided to throw caution to the wind and use Xoopit anyway because...well...finding attachments is hard.

The service, which came out of private beta just last week, offers a Gmail plugin that lets you search your inbox for photos, videos, and files - all of which are accessible with one click from the new toolbar added to the top of your Gmail inbox. You can also use the addon to find photos, videos, or files sent you by a specific person, and, as you type their name in the box provided, Xoopit helpfully auto-completes the entry.

On the Xoopit homepage, things get a little more interesting. Here, the latest items from your email display in a familiar lifestream-like view that practically has you looking for the "like" button. To the side of the screen, the people who send you the most items are listed and linked to - and those results may surprise you, bringing new insight into what"s really going on in your inbox. (Forwarders of chain emails be warned - you"ve been identified!)

At the time of launch, the Xoopit addon, which is available as a Firefox plugin, did not support Firefox 3, but over the weekend, the Xoopit team added that support, which now makes it worth a download...at least for those who aren"t too security conscious.

Download Xoopit

For a demo of Xoopit, you can check out this video:

Upgrading the Inbox

Considering how much of our days, if not our lives, are spent dealing with the non-stop influx of email, it"s nice to see some applications that are helping us make our inboxes more efficient while also mining them for important data. Microsoft Outlook, due to its nature of being desktop software, has always lent itself to the addition of plugins - even social ones like OutSync (facebook/Outlook sync) - but the idea of adding plugins to our web inboxes is still relatively new territory.

Because so many people use Gmail, we"ve seen the innovation begin there. First there was Gina Trapani"s Better Gmail Firefox plugin, which arose from a collection of Greasemonkey scripts. Then even Google"s Gmail team got in on the act earlier this month with their launch of Gmail Labs, the experimental features you can enable from your "Settings" page. Although some of those features are certainly less useful than others, the fact that Google is also hopping into the inbox addon game means there is definitely growing interest in this area (and say what you want - those "superstars" are really helpful).

Hopefully, the growth in this area will continue and we"ll soon find that Google Labs, Xobni, and Xoopit were just the forerunners of the upgraded inbox trend.

Watching Yahoo"s decline is rather sad. If you take any pleasure watching it, you must"ve enjoyed a weak kid getting beat up by a couple of bullies in the schoolyard. Yahoo"s decline is the result of nothing more or less than creative destruction. Meeting that challenge head-on is incredibly tough. Very, very few companies make the transition. IBM, led by Lou Gerstner, met the challenge of the PC era in his epic turnaround (described in the book Who Says Elephants Can"t Dance). Microsoft has struggled mightily to remain relevant in the Web era and they are as smart and driven as it gets. What"s so incredible is seeing the speed of these transitions - to see a big successful Web start-up like Yahoo marginalized by technology shifts.

The companies that faded from view in earlier transitions are far too numerous to mention. Most of them suffered from the boiling frog problem. They never hit a crisis that forced fundamental change. They were profitable and had plenty of cash reserves. Customers (not all but enough) loved them.

The problem was always "too little, too late". Faced with creative destruction, a radical strategy is usually needed, something that looks almost crazy and high risk. It also has to be really simple to understand, so that employees, investors, partners and clients can understand.

FWIW, here is my unsolicited advice to the Yahoo Board:

* Jerry Yang has to go. He is too associated with the past. Radical turnarounds need a new leader. His 1.0 act was brilliant and he can enjoy the financial fruits of that. His post Semel 2.0 act was dismal.

* Nix both the Google and the Microsoft deals in a way that it is clear they mean it. Signal an independent path. So what if investors dump your shares? Another investor will buy. This happens all the time, it is just "noise on the line".

* Understand what happened, without any rose-tinted glasses. Basically Yahoo is not a player in the two major shifts - search and social. It is still very good at Web 1.0 and that still makes a lot of money, but Yahoo missed both of the big transitions.

* Come up with a simple strategy that everybody can rally around.

Here is my attempt at a simple strategy for Yahoo:

1. Re-energise the current core money-makers.

2. Disrupt the current leaders with a new proposition for developers.

The first is not really a new strategy, it is just better execution. When Lou Gerstner took over IBM he got a lot of flack for saying something like "the last thing IBM needs right now is a new vision". What he realized was that the company simply needed better execution and that was not simple to do, it required a massive cultural shift internally. The same is true for Yahoo today.

Re-energizing the current core money-makers is possible if Yahoo accepts that there is really very little synergy at the end user level. People use different services because they work for them at the time, there is no lock-in at all. Recognizing this would mean managing these lines of business more like a Private Equity Fund manages a portfolio of companies:

* Lots of autonomy for managers
* Ways for managers to make a ton of money if they perform (more than the CEO)
* No mandate to use any other part of Yahoo - can use external resources if that is better. Synergy is loosely coupled and voluntary
* Very low corporate overhead

This model will work well for current lines of business as well as new acquisitions. There are plenty of start-ups looking for an exit that has public stock, but will give them autonomy to perform.

The second part (disrupting current leaders with a new proposition for developers) should not be unveiled until there is something substantive. Yahoo has an opportunity to take a leaf out of Amazon"s AWS book, but go a lot further. Yahoo can open up all their search, content, communication and community services to developers via well-defined interfaces. If they do this really radically, Yahoo could lead the next wave of the "programmable web" or the "web operating system". This has to be radical. More "too little, too late" won"t work. Radical means:

1 Simple pricing. This is where Amazon did well. A start-up can understand how to build their costs into a plan.
2 Cost plus pricing. This is again where Amazon did it right. They look at it like a retail "I buy infrastructure at $x and sell it at $x plus y%". Nothing wrong with that model at scale.
3 Loosely coupled. You can use just the services you want. But you end up using lots of services as it is simply easier to integrate than something else and the price is right.

Yahoo has lots more to offer than Amazon. Nor do Yahoo need to worry about cannibalizing their core e-commerce business (which does constrain what Amazon is willing to offer).

This developer offering has some risks. Theoretically, any start-up can compete with Yahoo"s existing cash cows, using Yahoo"s own assets. In practice a) start-ups will tend to focus on new markets and b) start-ups can compete with Yahoo anyway, with or without their help.

Yahoo can score four ways with a really open suite of services for developers:

1. They make money immediately from fees for the services.

2. They empower start-ups to compete with Google and Facebook.

3. They become exciting again, getting talent back on board.

4. They get a steady flow of acquisitions with zero integration cost.

Yahoo has occasionally done things that excite developers, such as Delicious, Pipes and SearchMonkey. They need to take that to a much higher level and offer everything they have via interfaces and promote that like crazy. That is how Microsoft won the PC era. With the right leader, Yahoo could still do this in the Web era.

This afternoon at Structure 08 an interesting discussion was had about the birth, growth, trials and tribulations of Salesforce.com. Om Malik from GigaOm was joined by Michael Copeland from Fortune Magazine and Parker Harris from Salesforce.com. While the "fireside chat" was titled The Endgame for Boxed Software?, the focus was on what lessons can be learned from the venerable CRM vendor.

According to Harris, in the consumer world, everyone must think not only on one level, but on several. Salesforce.com thought about software, scale and the Internet; questioning what it would take to build this "thing" they were thinking about.

"When we met Marc [Benioff], he had a vision and had written a two page e-mail detailing that we need to make this as easy as buying a book on Amazon," Harris says. At the time, there was Amazon, Google and E-bay.

In early 1999, they built a prototype. Stealing tabs from Amazon and buttons from Yahoo!, they built a site.

Om: What has the transition been from then and now and why?

Harris: As a technology, we wanted to build a platform first. One that is beautiful from a technology perspective. But you risk losing touch with why you"re doing it. Originally it was going to be for sales people and there were various abstract layers; we quickly realized the need to unify them. We continued adding layers in response to our customers; columns, end user interface. At that point we realized it could be a platform; we didn"t consciously do that.

When we started, a lot of people said they didn"t want to trust their information to anyone; data, privacy, these were all big things, and people were concerned with trusting their customer records and leads with another company. We made the huge step, and now people trust the information services.

It"s still very early days in platforms--are you going to use someone else"s platform (app engine from Google, Amazon) or use your own?

It"s all about the database. Databases have evolved. Today you don"t really go into business to write it, you find one. I see platforms heading in the same direction.

We sell to business. We do a lot of work on compliance and security issues to meet the needs of enterprise. For business we are very appropriate; for websites, go to Google. Amazon gives you CPU time or storage. We too have a lot of technology that is pre-built that you can leverage if you want; analytics, search, 24.7 web services, API, it"s all there.

Michael: What about compliance and security and is anything Salesforce.com can do to get apps to go viral.

Harris: We want to have a directory where people can go find pages quickly. Free pricing models are one way to drive a viral model. We are looking at ways how to work with Facebook. We are looking to involve developers more.

Om: Infrastructure; what are the challenges

Harris: About two years ago we did go through some serious issues and part of it was due to eBay. They could give us more power but no space, or space and no power - so we moved everything to new data centers.

We made two big mistakes: we changed everything all at once, which is a big risk for any business, and moved onto large scale systems. Pushing scale in a vertical sense created a complexity that was just too hard. Then we hired the guy from eBay to make sure it never happened again.

There is no blueprint on building a scalable service; you never replace it with V2 so you are forever changing it. There are best practices that have evolved, and people should follow them if they want to do this.

Early on we thought of tech innovation as software and infrastructure, and that innovation can occur on one or the other. To truly innovate you need to think of it as one thing and change all areas.

Cooliris" PicLens is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest browser add-ons currently available. When we first reviewed it in February, Josh Catone called it "nifty" and "gorgeous." Both of these adjectives still fully apply to PicLens, but since then, the company has added a large number of new features. These include a stronger emphasis on displaying videos and integration with Amazon, as well as support for a few more photo sharing sites.

A Wall of Pictures

At its most basic level, PicLens, which is now at version 1.7, allows you to quickly browse through images from photo and video sharing sites on a full-screen 3D wall. This wall looks a lot like Apple"s Cover Flow and the screen-shots here really don"t do it justice.

One thing that might come as a disappointment to users is that PicLens doesn"t work with every site. However, PicLens does support a wide range of photo sharing sites, social networks, and image search services, including Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, DeviantArt, Smugmug, MySpace, Facebook, and Google Images. In its newest version, PicLens now also supports searching for videos in YouTube. PicLens should also work on any other site that has a Media RSS feed enabled.

Cooliris has also made a plugin available that allows owners of self-hosted WordPress sites to enable PicLens" functionality for their blogs.

As for browsers, PicLens supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Window Shopping in 3D

One interesting function PicLens has added, is the ability to do a visual search through Amazon"s online store. Scrolling through the covers of books, CDs, and videos, or even browsing the apparel section is surprisingly fast and actually turns out to be quite a lot of fun. Clicking on an item enlarges it and brings up the price and a short description. One limitation of this search is that you can"t specify anything else but keywords. Items can"t be organized by price or any other filter normally available on Amazon such as brand or seller. This is even more limiting because you can"t do a search on Amazon and then have PicLens display the results of your search, making the feature quite a bit less useful.

It"s Pretty, But Is it Useful?

Whenever a piece of software looks as good as PicLens does, the question that comes up pretty quickly is how useful it can actually be.

The Amazon integration is most useful when you are searching for a specific look or just browsing through books for the sake of it, but otherwise, it feels more like a gimmick than a useful feature.

PicLens is at its best when displaying objects from photo and video sites. Having the ability to visually browse through a large number of items gives it a clear heads-up over the functionality of these web services themselves, and, at the end of the day, it"s also plain fun to use.

Lidija Davis is reporting for ReadWriteWeb from the Structure 08 conference in San Francisco

In a recent report, Gartner predicted that early adopters will forgo capital expenditures, and instead purchase 40% of IT infrastructure as a service by 2011. Alistair Croll, senior analyst at Bitcurrent, and MC for the first Structure 08 conference in San Francisco, sees things differently. According to Croll it will be a lot sooner: "Right now, almost every company has someone in their IT department using the cloud to some degree." Croll predicts that by 2009 it will no longer be almost every company; it will be 100% of companies.

Led by Alistair Croll, panelists included: Geva Perry, GigaSpaces, Jason Hoffman, Joyent, Tony Lucas, XCalibre, Lew Moorman, Rackspace, Christphoe Bisciglia, Google and Joe Weinman, AT&T.

Here are my real-time notes from the panel, followed by a primer on cloud computing.

Grid vs. Cloud

Jason talks about how grid computing is more about running multiple batch jobs. He predicts that there will be a proprietary stack and an open business model based on the cloud. Simply put, if the cloud is not billable it"s a grid; the difference is the notion of pay-per-use.

Geva insists there is room for both models. The major goal is to build applications that are platform agnostic.

Are we selling our souls - or should we not worry about lock in?

Of the panel, five deal with general purpose clouds; only one, Christophe, deals with specialized clouds.

Jason explains that in this emerging market, standards haven"t been set. This produces lock in issues, but hopefully as time goes on, we"ll have standards. Specifications are a major issue to what an open "loving" cloud should do and we need to be able to reach open protocol standard and give people assurances the cloud is a good place to be.

Because we are trying to convince people that buying hardware and software is a bad idea, we need be open source and trustworthy.

Tony says that Google"s Big Table is basically a lock in and Christophe responds by pointing out that it is still just a developer preview; the theory is that it will be a very open platform.

Alistair asks what the setup is for Google; put everything in the cloud or put more out at the edge.

According to Christophe, Google has geographically distributed clusters with a lot of their services being replicated to keep customers safer. They want to ensure that if you trust them with your e-mail, the most current may be in a datacenter close to you.

What has to change for enterprise to buy into cloud computing?

Christophe says we need to allow people to do what they do best and gives the example that originally even banks were not considered safe. People kept money under mattresses. As time went on, they realized their home could also be broken into, so storing it at a bank is a smarter solution. He expects that over the next couple of years we"ll see companies keeping data more safe, and enterprise more willing to buy in.

Joe thinks benefits will come from a commitment to the enterprise space and ensuring the infrastructure is secure.

Geva is concerned that companies don"t want quick credit card access as afforded with most cloud computing solutions. They want contracts and support; they want help. It needs to be given. Lew thinks the definition the concept is very confusing for enterprises. The word cloud is starting to mean less and less, yet at the same time it is cheap easy and it"s getting into enterprise through the back door (IT departments are beginning to investigate).

The session went well and was held before a standing room only audience.

Cloud Computing: A Primer

The "cloud" is a well known metaphor for the Internet. IT folk have been drawing puffy blobs to represent it for decades. The latest buzzword "cloud computing" however, is not as well defined, and not as familiar.

However, the general consensus is that cloud computing has become an umbrella term covering various solutions. Here"s a basic rundown:

SaaS

Software as a Service is a subscription based application that is hosted on a remote server, and accessed through the Internet. Subscription based because you don"t pay a licensing fee--as long as you"re subscribed (whether the service is paid or not) you have access to it. Accessed through the Internet because the software is not downloaded onto your computer; the program and the data is accessed via the Web. Think Gmail as the basic SaaS, salesforce.com as the larger model.

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service offers computing services on the Internet designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost effective. You no longer need to buy servers, network equipment, memory, CPU, disk space or data center facilities; they are provided as a monthly service, generally based on capacity used.

Given there is no up front capital to purchase hardware, software, or facilities, corporations and developers are quickly moving to this a smarter option. Amazon"s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, is a prime example of IaaS.

PaaS

The idea behind Platform as a Service is to deliver development environments as a service; offering programmers everything they need to create applications via the Web - including building, testing, deploying and hosting services - without the need to ever install anything on their own computers.

Examples of PaaS: Google App Engine, Yahoo Pipes, and Force.com from SalesForce.com

According to a post on the Facebook blog, Facebook will add the ability to comment on items in the Mini-Feed today, making it even more similar to Friendfeed. Within the last few months, Facebook started to allow users to aggregate their items from various external social media, photo, and bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icious, and StumbleUpon.

With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed"s territory.

According to the announcement post on the Facebook blog, you can now "easily converse around friends" statuses, application stories, new friendships, videos, and most other stories you see on their profile. Just click on the comment bubble icon to write a comment or see comments other people have written." This is, of course, exactly what you would do in Friendfeed.

Facebook will also handle long comment threats very similar to the way Friendfeed deals with them. The feed will show up to 8 comments by default, with the ability to click and show more - which is exactly the way Friendfeed handles this as well.

Facebook, however, is not going to change the order of items in the Mini-Feed the way Friendfeed does. Friendfeed pushes items with new comments to the top of the page. This approach would probably not be too useful in Facebook, where users typically see far fewer items in their feeds than the typical Friendfeed user.

While Friendfeed aggregates items from a far larger pool of services than Facebook and has a lot of features that Facebook still has to copy, it is clear that Facebook is at least getting some ideas from Friendfeed"s (and also Plaxo"s) playbook here.

Curl is another player in the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) space, going up against Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe"s Flex platform, and OpenLazlo, among others. The Curl platform provides developers a way to build web-based apps that can"t be easily built using Ajax or other web-based technologies. Those apps can be deployed both within the web browser or on the desktop via Curl Nitro, an extension of the Curl platform. To show off what Nitro can do, the company has recently released a demo app featuring a visual representation of the Facebook social graph.

The Curl Platform and Curl Nitro

Where the Curl platform itself competes with Flex and Silverlight, Curl Nitro competes more directly with Adobe AIR, Mozilla Prism, Google Gears, and other applications that allow content from the web to run on the desktop while also providing asynchronous communication with various back-end services.

This recently released Nitro demo app called CurlGraph was designed by Manuel Lima, the founder of VisualComplexity.com (our coverage) and it allows you to visualize a circle of up to 128 friends from your Facebook account. By examining the ring of friends and the arcs that indicate the relationships between them, you can visualize what your personal social graph looks like.

Of course, in order to run the app, you"ll need to have Curl Nitrol Beta RTE already installed. You can then download the app, CurlGraph, from here and the code from here (note: zip file).

When installing the app, the dialog box looks very familiar - much like Adobe AIR - and the process was just as easy. You login to Facebook via the app and then it will graph out all of your Facebook friend connections.

Fighting For the Desktop

While the app itself is an impressive way to showcase Curl"s ability to support a visually engaging desktop application, the company itself is going to be up against some tough competition to gain a foothold on the desktop.

At the moment there"s the popularity of Adobe AIR"s desktop widgets to deal with, especially among early adopters and other enthusiasts, not to mention Silverlight and other players in the RIA game, including OpenLaszlo, NexaWeb Enterprise 2.0, Dojo, Altio Live, UltraLightClient and JavaFX.

Curl"s best bet may be with their enterprise efforts or with their open source web services development kit (WSDK), shipped earlier this year as a part of the Curl Rich Internet Application Platform 6.0. But even then, they"re up against Microsoft"s Silverlight offering which was ported to Linux by some Novell developers as Moonlight.

Fighting big companies like Microsoft and Adobe isn"t easy for a smaller shop, nor is competing against JavaFX and others in the enterprise. Yet that doesn"t mean that Curl isn"t trying. Curl"s VP of Developer Relations, Richard Monson-Haefel, left a comment here on RWW not long ago which was very critical of Adobe AIR"s security model, a subject recently noted by Adobe platform evangelist Ryan Stewart on his blog.

Stewart references a recent presentation by Ethan Malasky called Developing Secure AIR Applications, and then says that "security is one of the things that gets talked a lot about with regards to AIR and the team spent a huge, huge amount of time thinking about the security mode."   (Slides from the presentation are below).

If the Curl platform is truly more secure, then they may be able to find success in the enterprise space, an area which AIR and Silverlight are both trying to reach now. However, Curl will have to be up for the battle because those two companies have a lot more resources to fight aggressively for RIA marketshare.

Social news site Mixx introduced a new feature today: Mixx Communities. Mixx always had a strong emphasis on "groups," but the Mixx Communities take this to a different level by offering a higher degree of customizability and a stronger emphasis on communication between group members.

There has been a recent trend of allowing groups of users to take greater control over their experiences on social news sites and Mixx"s efforts add some interesting ideas to this.

Building a Community

Setting up a Mixx community is very straightforward. Besides deciding on obvious things like a name, color scheme, and categories, users can chose to pre-populate their community with content already available in Mixx by importing items tagged with up to ten different keywords.

The communities also feature their own message boards and the ability to add polls. There is also a "member lounge", where the recent activities of group members are displayed. Karma points a user earns in one of the communities are added to the "general Mixx karma pool", an important feature for many power-users who tend to jealously guard their status on the site.

Mixx communities are somewhat similar to Reddit"s sub-reddit feature, which also allows users to create their own hosted communities. Reddit, however, does not allow for any degree of customization, but it does have more granular access controls than Mixx. All Mixx communities are open to all users, while Reddit has public, restricted, and private modes. Update: Mixx does actually have very similar access controls to Reddit"s - but they are not part of the set-up procedure like Reddit"s are and have to be set after the community is created.

Now that Reddit has open-sourced its code, anybody can of course create any kind of reddit-clone, but the communities on Mixx cater to a different audience.

Making Money

The 5th step in the set-up process is probably the most interesting one for publishers: Set Up Advertising & Revenue Share. Mixx allows publishers to link their Google AdSense account to their Mixx Community page and then shares 50% of the revenue with the publisher.

This will probably help Mixx to gain a larger following among small to mid-sized blogs and maybe even some larger publishers who will create their own communities on the site. Still, social news sites are notoriously hard to monetize through pay-per-click ads and I wouldn"t expect most community owners to make a lot of money from this.

Making Users Happy

Allowing users to take greater control of their experience seems to be a trend among social news sites lately. As these communities grow, some users often start to feel alienated. Allowing for the creation of more formalized sub-groups most likely helps to retain a lot of these users who still feel very attached to the service.

It will be interesting to see if Mixx"s competitors like Digg, Newsvine, and Propeller are going to follow suit here anytime soon. Digg especially, because of the sheer size and diversity within its community would probably benefit from allowing users to create smaller Diggs on its site, too.

Popular video sharing website MetaCafe just announced the launch of a fascinating new experiment it"s calling WikiCafe - the ability for any registered user to "edit, enhance, and even translate video tags, descriptions, and other types of metadata."

Somehow Metacafe has a much lower idiot-to-civil commenter ratio than YouTube, where we can only imagine what kind of disaster such an experiment could lead to. For MetaCafe, though, this could be another experiment that works out really well.

The Options

Hiting the "edit options" button that appears above every video leads to three buttons appearing. Edit video details, translate and "advanced wiki." The advanced wiki is a MediaWiki page dedicated to discussion about each video. Unfortunately editing those pages requires another account creation and login. We don"t expect to see them utilized extensively.

MetaCafe"s History of Experimentation

MetaCafe is no clone of YouTube. The company was offering a revenue share to a large portion of their top users since October 2006 through the successful Producers" Rewards program.

Unlike YouTube, MetaCafe said it had an exclusive focus on user generated content. And most unlike YouTube, the company employed an army of video editors to vet, highlight and keep an eye on all the content coming through the site. All of these strategies have worked quite well for the company, whose founders have cashed out to investors, as well.

But a Wiki for Video Metadata?

Could this possibly work? There"s no clear explanation yet about how the site will handle versioning or the other nitty gritty of the wiki way - but we"re sure they"ve got plans. The prospect of users enriching show descriptions and categorization is a really exciting one.

Translation of metadata from one language to another is a valiant idea - but translation is something that other sites like DotSub (subtitles) and Lingro (dictionaries) have figured out great ways to do already. We have a hard time imagining that the translation that can go on at MetaCafe will come close to what can be done by those other communities.

Who knows where it will all lead, though. It"s a brave step by MetaCafe. Who"s next to allow users to edit file metadata?

In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired upstart Canadian photosharing web site Flickr and the web hasn"t been the same since. Yahoo, on the other hand, didn"t change nearly as much as everyone expected it to. Pre-CEO Jerry Yang told then-Business 2.0 writer Erick Schonfeld six months after the deal "I look at Flickr with envy, it feels like where the Web is going."

Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have now cashed out and officially left the company. Though Yahoo! doesn"t appear to have internalized many of the lessons of Flickr, it"s not too late for the rest of us to look at those same key lessons for inspiration in our work on the web.

Industry Context

There"s a lot of photo sharing services on the web, but here"s where Flickr stood. Flickr was the trailblazer, the high-profile media darling and one of the first major Web 2.0 acquisitions. Webshots was much older, had been bought and sold for twice as much money but never embodied the social media ethos the way Flickr did. PhotoBucket is a year older than Flickr, has always been much larger and was acquired by Fox for almost 10X Flickr"s pricetag in the same week that Flickr was pegged to replace the entire Yahoo! Photos property.

We"ve been critical of some of Flickr"s strategies around everything from censorship to data portability, but the big picture is that the service is fantastic. Even though it wasn"t the first and it wasn"t purchased for a particularly large sum (est. $35m) Flickr is still the beacon of innovation in this sector. Here"s why.

Customer Service is The New Marketing

One of the most important elements of Flickr"s early success was its incredible engagement with its users. Flickr management spent what might have seemed like a totally unreasonable amount of time welcoming new users to the site, participating actively and promptly in forums and highlighting the best photos uploaded.

That kind of engagement can turn passing early adopters into ongoing community stakeholders and advocates. It"s something that any startup could benefit from emulating and a role we"re seeing formalized in an increasing number of companies hiring community liaisons.

The Bleeding Edge Can Go Mainstream

Flickr proved that experimental, bleeding edge web 2.0 features didn"t have to be limited to early adopters. When Flickr brought geo-tagging, the addition of location data to photo metadata, onto the site - more than 1 million photos were geotagged in the first 24 hours. Now that location aware services are heating up, who"s in one of the best positions to serve media up in that environment? Flickr is.

Flickr"s APIs have been wildly successful. Mashup and API directory site ProgrammableWeb lists more mashups using Flickr APIs than any other API on the web, short of Google Maps. More than Amazon, more than eBay, more than YouTube.

Flickr"s FlickrAuth user authentication API was a key model for the standards based oAuth protocal - now employed by Google"s OpenSocial and hopefully soon by countless other applications.

Flickr broke new ground in numerous ways and proved that technical experimentation didn"t have to remain in the early adopter niche.

Being a Freak Will Not Kill Your Business

Butterfield wrote a great letter of resignation, which was leaked to the bottom feeders at Valleywag but is a great little read none the less. All parties say it"s hardly out of character and indeed, in my own passing interactions with the man, he was never a fakely-nice typical business type worried about what might come around someday from being nasty to any little blogging piss-ant that got in his way.

Flickr came from Vancouver, British Columbia - in Canada. They must be the national web 2.0 pride and joy of that freakishly wonderful country.

The next time someone gives you a hard time for being a freak at work, just cluck at them knowingly and think about Flickr.

Other Lessons

Other people have raised other issues that they think are key to learn from the situation as well. Flickr power user and exec at rival startup Zooomr Thomas Hawk offered some obviously heart-felt feelings about what the Flickr story said about acquisition and innovation.

(In response to Hawk"s comment, Robert Scoble humorously replied that Yahoo! "reminds me of Podtech. Had lots of superstars under their roof and then couldn"t listen to them to make things happen.")

Dave Winer told us that the move makes him concerned about all the data that users have entrusted to Yahoo! "Whatever emerges from this, the new company should immediately embark on a program to make users" data portable," Winer said. "Users have been an abstract thing to Silicon Valley, it would be great if now that the superstars are leaving Yahoo, the industry could turn to the users for inspiration, and start to trust them with their own work."

Flickr"s handling of user data was generally accepted as a fairly good work in progress. Now that the original minds behind the company have left the building, it would be great for the new leaders there to cement user trust in regards to their data by instituting some formal, easy-to-use measures for users to make sure their photos are safe and secure.

Conclusions

It would be fantastic to see Fake and Butterfield start something new but they"re certainly due all the relaxation time they want, too. Once you"ve got a few million dollars in the bank, though, starting more internet businesses may be a sign of limited imagination more than anything else. For the rest of us still plugging away, Flickr offers some great inspiration.

We"re sure there are readers here who have been much more engaged in the Flickr community than we have. What kinds of business lessons have you learned from the company?

This is post #2 of a 2-part post on today"s information overload problem and how we can cope. Please read part 1 here.

The information overload problem has reached a critical point. Workers drowning in their inboxes and jumping from task to task have now cost the nation $650 billion in lost productivity. A research group attempting to understand and combat the problem has recently been formed. We can either wait for answers for them, or we can start finding solutions ourselves. Let"s do what social media addicts do best: let"s crowdsource this thing!

Nature vs. Nurture

Without a thorough understanding of psychology, it"s hard to determine whether those who keep up with the overload of information are somehow wired differently than those who become overwhelmed. We do know that there are varying levels of distractibility in children - the severely distracted are sometimes even diagnosed as suffering with a medical disorder. They are often treated with pharmaceuticals to combat this, so it seems entirely possible that that nature plays a role in how well we cope.

However, that"s not to say that we all can"t learn a few tricks to better manage our information overload. Below, we"ll present some ideas to help fight this problem, but please share your ideas in the comments too, so we can all learn from each other.

Create a Routine

When facing a full inbox, new tweets, new posts on FriendFeed, and an RSS reader with 1000+ unread items, the stress often comes from not knowing where to begin. This is where having a routine can be important. An everyday ritual where you deal with A, then B, then C, etc. can help you put everything in order. Not everyone"s routine will be the same - the trick is finding one that works for you, then sticking with it.

Last month, Jeremiah Owyang shared his morning habits on Twitter, which prompted a discussion on FriendFeed. For Jeremiah, he like to begin his day by reading then blogging for two hours before delving into email or work.

An earlier post by social media enthusiast Louis Gray also had him sharing his daily routine, something he called his "social media consumption workflow." This post seemed to conflict with a later post he wrote about continuous parallel attention, but, after speaking with Louis, we cleared up the confusion. For him, the trick is to begin the day with the routine, then continue the day in the parallel attention mode (more on that later).

For Louis, the routine is 1) Email, 2) Read RSS feeds, 3) Twitter, 4) FriendFeed, then 5) Miscellaneous Additional Activity. Others responded in the comments of that post and via blog posts with variations on this routine, but the elements were either very similar or the same, just in a different order.

Yes, structuring social media consumption sounds a lot like work, doesn"t it? Well, considering the 8 or 10 hours some of us put in a day behind the computer screen, I"d argue that it most certainly is work. No matter what your personal routine is, the bottom line is to stick to it.

Easily Distracted? Dial Down the Noise...Temporarily

While it would be great to treat noise pollution like the goldmine it should be, the truth is, a good many people are easily distracted. Twitter, FriendFeed, email, IM, and RSS take away our focus when we"re really concentrating and switching to and from each task can mess us up. Instead of pining away for the overstimulated sponge-like skills of Scoble, it may be time to embrace this quality about yourself and use it to your advantage. Just because you"re not able to write a great post while concurrently dealing with new email and IMs, that doesn"t mean there"s anything inherently wrong with you that needs fixing.

Even the great American novelist Steven King admitted that when he"s writing a novel, he locks himself in a room and commits to no distractions. In his book, On Writing, he says this about his writing room:

"Writing room: really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk...The door closes the rest of the world out; it also serves to close you in and keep you focused on the job at hand...No telephone. It"s wise to eliminate every possible distraction. If you continue to write, you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it"s best to try and take care of them before you write."

Want to eliminate your distractions, it"s easy. Disable email alerts. Exit Twitter, sign out of IM or set yourself as "busy." Trying to write? Launch Darkroom, Notepad, or Windows Live Writer. Then just work...in peace.

Later on, as you become better at whatever it is that you"re doing, noisiness can be slowly added back in, but you can"t go from zero to sixty overnight.

That being said, it"s not a good idea to spend an entire day in this state - as our own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote not too long ago, there are many reasons why online noise is good for you. However, if you need a quite half hour or hour to really focus, there"s no harm in that. It"s not the end of the world.

Learn To Embrace Distraction

No this isn"t a contradiction to the section above, it"s just what"s next. You may find yourself easily distracted when performing a certain task whether at work or at home - like solving a complex problem, for example - but after that task is complete, you can turn up the volume again.

To get a crash course in this behavioral technique, we"ll turn again to the post on "continuous partial attention" where Louis described how he deals with info overload. While it may seem unbelievable to some, Louis claims to be able to watch TV while writing blog posts or write emails while listening to music while reading RSS feeds and watching Twitter update.

"No way!," you think? It is possible - it might not come naturally to everyone, but you can, in fact, learn to do this...at least a bit. The trick here is to start small and not try to do this when performing those tasks that require the most concentration (as mentioned above). What throws people off is thinking themselves incapable of this type of multi-tasking because certain aspects of their work require more of their focused attention than others. You must first identify the areas of work where you need less distraction and turn down the volume. When those tasks are complete, crank it up again. Simple, right?

Create Your Own Filters

In order to process mass amounts of information, you"ll also need to identify and attack what we"ll called the unfiltered noise. This may be in the form of "bacn" in your inbox, busy Twitterers, RSS feeds spliced with links from del.icio.us, or extraneous information on FriendFeed. To get back in control, you have to invest time in structuring the noise.

For example, most email programs have rules or filters that you can use - whether it"s Outlook at work or Gmail at home, you have to take the time to set these things up. Unless you"re using the GTD method to immediately combat every piece of mail as it arrives - something which only certain people have been able to master - then you"ll need to establish a routine to deal with the lower priority mail at a particular time. For social media users, the big problem in our inboxes is "bacn" - these are the informational, but non-critical messages from the networks and services we"ve signed up for. A suggestion here is to not let these messages constantly steal your focus - deal with them en masse on a regular basis, but have them automatically archived upon arrival.

For RSS, the trick is using folders wisely. Not all feeds are created equal. You can separate lower-priority feeds from high-priority ones, classify feeds by genre, or move the feeds from bloggers who write long, thoughtful blog posts into a folder so you can thoroughly read them at a later time. Whatever the method you choose, it"s important to set up a structure so you know what to read and when.

For example, less important feeds could be in a folder that you can hop into at any point in the day and flip through quickly when you have a minute. Feeds that you only browse if you have time to kill can be put in a "Can Miss" folder. Feeds where you like to comment and participate can be put into a "Great Blogs" folder. Blogger Mrinal added he likes to use people as filters. for example, in Google Reader, your friends" shared items is a great place to find human filters for content. These are just a few ideas - all that matters is that it works for you.

For Twitter and FriendFeed or any other social network or service you"re involved in, it"s just a simple matter of time management. Don"t get so caught up that you"re spending every minute of your day there. Set a time of day when you"re going to delve in and really participate and for the rest of the day just keep jumping in and out when you want to. Yes, you might miss something here and there, but it"s OK. Really.

Conclusion

This is by no means a definitive guide to dealing with information management nor will these suggestions work for everyone. This is only meant to spark a conversation about the subject so we can learn new tips and techniques from each other. Please share yours in the comments.

Image Credits: Mobile Email: natala; Noise: GetEntrepreneurial

Popular mobile IM and VOIP service Fring just launched an Application Programming Interface that could bring some awesome new applications to mobile phones around the world. The new API offers the Fring mobile interface, IM, presence indication, file transfer and other features to developers seeking to build apps in standard server-side languages. Fring ties in to users" Google Talk, MSN Messenger, ICQ and Skype IM accounts.

While the iPhone App Store will open some day soon, will be available around the world and will be usable on more affordable handsets than is the case today - Fring may still be more globally accessible than iPhone apps will be.

At launch the API is only available for Symbian S60 9.2 phones and there are no working examples of apps yet. The platform should expand and a catalog of applications open by the end of July.

What would you like to see tied into Fring? I"d love to see some FriendFeed integration, perhaps Qik and I imagine interesting things could be done with VOIP and Yelp and Fring presence and Fireeagle location tracking. How about a notification when I"m near a contact"s physical location and they are available online for IM contact? That would be great.

The company is well funded, has an app for the jailbroken iPhone and reports that it"s seeing more than 100k new downloads every month around the world. Here at RWW many of us are happy Fring users and we"re excited to see what the developer community can add to our IM, VOIP and file transferring mobile experience. Presence data, knowing when contacts are online and off, adds a particular exciting dimension to any application - mobile apps leveraging presence could prove wildly useful.

Firefox has already surpassed the 5 million download mark it set out to meet in its first 24 hours. As I write this, the browser just passed the 7 million download mark for its version 3.0 software, and with over 6800 downloads per minute (and rising) is on track to do 8 million or more by 1pm ET (24 hours since the download went live). Whether that"s a record is hard to say, but it"s very impressive nonetheless. Are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade?

You can watch the live count as it streams in from Mozilla"s raw server logs, and according to the download day page, the majority of downloads have come from the US. Despite some hiccups yesterday, Firefox had no problem setting the record (though no one really seems to know if there was any old mark to break -- so anything might have been a record with Guinness watching).

Net Applications has been tracking the uptake of Firefox 3 since yesterday morning, and it is now at around 4.5% -- not bad for its first 24 hours. Firefox on the whole is closing in on 20% market share and is higher among tech savvy crowds (over 50% on this blog, for example). That 4.5% of Firefox web browser users are already using version 3 indicates that about 25% of its user base has upgraded overnight -- that"s very impressive.

If you"re still on the fence about upgrading, check out the pair of great overviews of FF3 from Lifehacker here and here.

Are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade? Let us know in the comments and vote in our poll below.

Social news site Reddit"s secret announcement -- which people have been speculating about for the past 24 hours -- is out of the bag: Reddit is open sourcing their code. "We"ve always strived to be as open and transparent with our users as possible, and [open sourcing our code] is the next logical step," said Reddit in a blog post. Reddit, which was built and maintained by just 5 people, also posted a list of the more than 15 other open source projects that the site relies on.

The code is available at an official Trac page and is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License, which means that anyone running the code must publish changes publicly, but that the software is free for commercial use. Some of Reddit"s code is not being made public, mostly stuff that deals with anti-spam and anti-cheating algorithms, according to Reddit.

"Since reddit"s beginning, we have stood on the shoulders of giants in the open source world. Every library, tool and platform we depend on is open," said the announcement blog post. "Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn"t freely available is reddit itself. We are proud and excited that we"re finally giving back to the community that has given us so much."

It makes sense for Reddit, which has grown because of very passionate and technically savvy community, might go this route. Open sourcing Reddit"s code will very likely lead to a stronger product and tighter community, and not to the birth of strong competitors. Anyone who wants to create niche Reddits on topics that the site doesn"t adequately cover is now free to do so, however.

Reddit is written in Python. An explanatory video from the company is below.

Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.

Information Worker Overload

This $650 billion dollar problem made the headlines this week, getting write-ups in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Thanks to a research study by Basex, we now have new data on productivity in the workplace. The findings reveal that a typical information worker checks his or her email more than 50 times per day, uses IM 77 times, and visits 40+ web sites. These numbers were calculated by tracking software installed on the machines of the 40,000 people taking part in the study.

Often, workers are dropping high-level tasks to deal with mundane, low-priority tasks that come through via these unnecessary interruptions. The end result is fractured attention where the big loss comes from the time it takes to recover from the interruption and get back to work.

"Productivity" Apps

Although we should know better, it may already be too late for us; we"re conditioned creatures who are drawn to these distractions. A pop-up alerting us to new email? We must check it. A flashing IM window? Just try to ignore it. These "productivity" apps, it seems, by their very nature, have been designed to steal our focus.

Big tech companies are worried, too. They"ve put together a group called IORG (Information Overload Research Group) whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and a dozen other companies and academic institutions.

This group"s mission is to:

"Conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload."

It will be interesting to see what they come up with as far as solutions because they"re certainly not the first to attempt a solution to the problem. Earlier this year, we covered five methodologies to deal with email overload, which included popular techniques like the GTD method and the 4-Hour Workweek Method. Despite numerous proposed solutions such as these, no one has really hit the sweet spot when it comes to providing real solutions that work for everyone.

Social Media Addicts - Sink or Swim?

For social media addicts, which likely includes readers of this blog, the problem can be even worse. In addition to having our focus pulled away by productivity applications like email and IM, we"re also pulled in a number of different directions as well - checking FriendFeed, Twitter, social networks, and more. (I wonder how many billions of dollars we waster per year?)

For many people, these distractions are overpowering. No matter the time commitment, social media addicts can"t help but spend entire chunks of their day online playing with the new, shiny internet toys. When we profiled several social media addicts earlier this year on Twitter, we discovered that a good many people spent several hours - even as many as 10 hours per day - online, immersed in the web and social media tools.

It seems we"re at a crossroads - there"s so much information, but not enough filters. We can either drown in the lost productivity time sink that is the internet or we can swim...swim for our lives. The question is: how?

Image Credit: Autoroute: Mzlle Biscotte

At Supernova 2008 this week we got a glimpse of what’s next for mobile; and it has little to do with hardware like the iPhone, software like Google’s open-source operating system Android, mobile platforms put forth by Apple, Google, Nokia, Research in Motion, and the carriers.

What’s coming is life profound. Put billions of sensors in cell phones - regardless of hardware, operating system, or carrier - and affect the way we understand traffic or the weather.

Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog

With continued advances in chipsets, accelerometers, compasses, we can change the way we interact virtually with the physical world around us. We can turn monthly cell phone bills, which are difficult to use beyond paying, into living information integrated into our working and personal lives and social networks.

“We’re just getting started,” said Bob iannucci, Nokia’s chief technology officer.

Iannucci, a computer industry veteran, feels like “I am kind of watching the same movie” as the mobile industry transforms itself from early hardware and software into technology deeply ingrained into our lives and the world around us.

In one example Iannucci discussed adding mobile sensors in cell phones that can detect any number of things — location and movement, barometric pressure and the weather around us, even our own personal health. What we will have in the near future are near-field communication, indoor positioning, and environmental analysis.

Iannucci mentioned a recent project involving Nokia, the world’s leading handset maker, and students from UC Berkeley. Nokia planted 100 N95 smartphones into 100 cars used by 150 students. These cell phone “probes” were able to measure real-time traffic.

Imagine if tens of thousands of data points from motorists in an area were collected, anonymized, uploaded to servers for aggregation and analysis, then pushed back to individual users. The phone, which already knows your route to work and your daily schedule, will be able to tell you that a traffic snarl is forming on the 405 and that you’ll never make your 9:30 meeting with a client in time — so here’s an alternate route.

In another example Iannucci noted that barometric sensors could be placed in cell phones — you can already buy sports watches from Suunto with weather sensors — that will monitor the environment around you. Include your data point with billions across the U.S. and the science of weather prediction undergoes a profound change.

“The ability to move information changes societies and livelihoods,” Iannucci said.

Cell phones can also impact the world around us in ways we cannot see, at least physically. Dean Terry, the director of the Mobile Lab at the University of Texas at Dallas, demonstrated the use of mobile devices in augmented reality, or the ability of people to leave behind virtual artifacts like text, photos, video, avatars, and game clues for people to discover with their phones.

As an example, you can enter a building, view the lobby through your cell phone, and see messages and art pieces left behind by others for you to see and enjoy. Or, if you’re at a conference downtown, you can view a restaurant or bar through a mobile device and see comments made by other diners and patrons on food, service, atmosphere, anything they want to leave behind.

“Imagine what it would look like at the Washington Monument if people left behind their comments,” Terry said.

In a more practical, immediate example, Jason Devitt of Skydeck showed an example of data generated by your cell phone — the calls you make, to whom, when, how long — and how this information can be mixed with your address book and social network to become more dynamic.

See also: ReadWriteWeb"s interview with Skydeck"s Jason Devitt

“You can see who you talk to most frequently, who is most important to you, and you can drop out the noise,” Devitt said. “All friends are not equal. Some are more important than others.”

This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.

Top image taken from Augmented Reality: My Mobile Pet; Flickr video by Dean Terry

MIT Alumni, technologist, venture capitalist, marathon runner, Colorado dweller, thinker, blogger, and all around super human, Brad Feld (LinkedIn, Twitter) has made a huge impact on startups. With posts on his personal blog, Feld Thoughts, and on Ask The VC (a must read for anyone interested in venture funding) Feld has played a major roll in lifting the curtain on the traditionally mysterious venture process. We recently caught up with him for a quick interview.

Background

The venture investing process used to be largely a mystery. Young entrepreneurs were not sure how to value their companies, nor were they sure what to make of the term sheets offered to them - largely because the mechanics of venture math weren"t open to them. But recently the rules of the game have changed. The venture process is now much more open, in no small part because of Brad Feld.

Feld is also responsible for building what is today a thriving tech community in Colorado. When he moved to Boulder 15 years ago with his wife Amy, there was little to no tech presence. Today Boulder is a boom town, buzzing with some of the sharpest brains in tech. Companies like Lijit, Me.dium, and Gnip, as well as a whole pack of TechStars (which Feld started with Dave Cohen) alumni headquartered in Boulder.

Besides making a huge impact as a VC, Feld is one of the most inspirational people I"ve met. It is my pleasure to connect our readers with him via this interview.

What is your background?

I grew up in Dallas. I got an Apple II computer for my bar mitzvah and quickly became a reasonably well adjusted teenage computer nerd way before it was cool. I went to MIT, got a few degrees from there, and started my first successful company (Feld Technologies) when I was a sophomore. With a partner, we grew Feld Technologies into a decent sized (20 person) software consulting firm before selling it in 1993 to a public company (AmeriData Technologies). I worked for a few years at AmeriData while making angel investments with some of the money that I made (companies like Net.Genesis, Thinkfish, Harmonix, and Critical Path).

My wife Amy and I randomly moved to Boulder, Colorado from Boston in 1995 (Boston wasn"t home for us) and have never looked back. In 1995 I started working with the Softbank making investments with them and in 1996 teamed up with three of the other guys working there to start Softbank Venture Capital (which turned into Mobius Venture Capital). I"ve been actively investing as a VC since 1996 in a wide range of software and Internet companies around the US. Last year (2007) I started a new firm with four of my friends from Mobius and we launched our new fund (Foundry Group - www.foundrygroup.com) in the fall of 2007.

How did you get interested in the Venture Capital business?

While Feld Technologies never took in any investment (we only raised $10 to start the company) a number of our customers were Venture Capital firms. We wrote back office software for the VCs to help them manage their portfolio accounting and reporting which - prior to us coming along - was a nasty spreadsheet exercise. I got to know some VCs and after we sold Feld Technologies did some consulting work for a few of them as I was investing as an angel investor. My connection with Softbank was random but timely, as Softbank was making an aggressive push to invest in Internet companies in the US (which directly overlapped with my angel investing). I woke up one day and had co-founded what became Mobius Venture Capital.

What are the top 3 things that you look in a company before you invest? Is there any one thing that always kills the deal for you?

I am a thematic investor. I like to pick a few themes - either deep technological protocols or what I anticipate to be broad market changes in the adoption and use of technology - and invest in the themes over a 10+ year period. Historical themes including email and RSS; current themes include these along with the Implicit Web, Human Computer Interaction, Digital Life, and something we call Glue.

So - thing #1 is "does it fit a current theme?" If no, we pass unless it is an entrepreneur that we know or have worked with before (we aren"t a slave to our themes, but the bar for looking at something outside a current theme is usually having an existing relationship.) The next thing we look at are the people. Are these people we want to work with? Do we think we"ll have fun creating a company together? Do we trust each other and believe we can have an open conversation regardless of the circumstances? Will we be able to kick ass together? If we get past these two gates, then we go deep.

What was your best/worst investment ever?

Best: Based on combined financial metrics and realized absolute dollar returned, probably Service Metrics. Worst: In terms of heartbreak, probably Interliant. I co-founded it, it maxed out at a $2.5b public market valuation in 2000, and was bankrupt in 2002. I"ve had plenty of bad investments that didn"t ever get off the ground; the toughest ones for me have been the ones that had huge value at some point and then got decimated when the Internet bubble burst.

What are the top technologies that you want to invest in over the next 3 years?

Implicit Web, Human Computer Interaction, Digital Life, and Glue.

How did you become a marathon runner?

I was a cross country runner in high school and always loved running. When I hit age 35 (around 2001) I was a blimp, way out of shape, and physically worn out because of how intense work had become. I decided I needed a big goal that would force me to spend time away from work that would benefit me. Marathon running was a logical one since I had always loved to run. I decided that I would run a marathon in every state in the US by the time I turned 50. I"ve knocked down 10 of them (the 11th is happening on June 21).

Which business leaders, past or present, do you admire the most and why?

Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, George Soros, and my grandfather.

What is one insight, business or technical, that you want to share with our readers?

"Do, or do not. There is no try."

What is the meaning of life according to Brad Feld?

When it"s over, they dig a hole in the ground, put you in it (or spread your ashes somewhere), print your picture in the newspaper and write some nice things about you, and then life goes on for everyone else but you. Live every minute that you have.

Two months ago, Portland, Oregon-based Jama Software -- the makers of a web-based project management app called Contour -- began a program called "You try. We give." The idea was simple, for everyone who signed up for a free trial of Contour, the company would set aside some money to invest in microloans at Kiva. In theory, word of their philanthropy would help spread their product and more people would sign up to try it out, get hooked, and pay for the full version. Today, Jama made a bold decision: stop advertising on Google AdWords, and instead funnel the money from their advertising budget into Kiva.

According to Jama, the average cost-per-click and cost-per-lead for Google AdWords -- which was eating up 80% of their monthly marketing budget -- was 2-3x their target despite their best optimization efforts. So in short, Google wasn"t providing the ROI they were after.

"So, we had an idea. We had been sponsoring Kiva.org for the past few months as an organization we really admire and believe in - they"re the online micro-lending site that helps entrepreneurs in the developing world. And, we wanted to figure out a way to funnel the dollars we were sending to Google ads over to Kiva loans," wrote Jama"s Director of Customer Outreach & Marketing, John Simpson in a blog post today.

The idea is the same as the original "You try. We give." program. Jama is hoping that press coverage of their unusual marketing plan (such as this), as well as word of mouth, will send as much traffic -- perhaps higher quality traffic -- as Google AdWords. And because Kiva loans are theoretically repaid (currently 97.97% of the time), any traffic Jama receives via this experiment is bound to end up being a lot cheaper, and perhaps even free.

"In the pursuit of growing our own business, we decided we"d much rather help a small store owner in Uganda feed her village than support the Google billionaires" hobby of flying to space," said Eric Winquist, CEO and founder of Jama Software in an emailed press release. Simpson told us he"s excited to see if innovative social marketing tactics can out perform traditional search marketing.

"This program just gives people an added incentive to try our product versus the traditional enterprise tools from IBM and Telelogic, or to pass it along to a colleague or friend," Simpson told ReadWriteWeb in an email. "We"re going up against "the institutional big blue" so we differentiate ourselves by being a company with personality and more of a personal touch - we could never outspend them. The Kiva programs serves as a positive first impression and it illustrates our commitment as a company to giving back, whether big or small."

According to Simpson, eventually Jama might supplement their social public relations strategy with more traditional ad buys from Google or elsewhere. Once loans start being repaid, Jama could theoretically put last month"s ad budget toward traditional advertising while this month"s ad budget is being used to fund a microloan in the developing world.

Kiva co-founder and chief marketing officer Jessica Jackley Flannery was overjoyed by Jama"s decision to choose Kiva over AdWords. "We"re thrilled when a company like Jama Software develops an innovative program that supports both our global mission at Kiva and their own goals. It"s such a simple concept, but that"s the beauty of it," she said. We tend to agree, and we wish Jama the best in their efforts, and luck to anyone who receives loans via Kiva.

Last week, when we heard that Technorati had raised another $