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Posts Tagged ‘End Users’

PollDaddy Hits 1 Billion Page Views a Month, Major Updates Coming Soon

According to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, poll/survey web service PollDaddy has just hit the one billion monthly page views mark.

Other than Gravatar, this makes the PollDaddy network the second Automattic web property – excluding Gravatar – to reach this milestone. Automattic’s holdings inlcude content management system and blogging software WordPress.com, spam blocker Akismet and more.

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In this graph from Quantcast, we can see monthly impressions sliding from around 500 million in August 2009 to one billion now:

PollDaddy’s traffic, according to Quantcast, also shows a decent breakdown of regulars frequenting the site:

Our sources tell us a major redesign is underway, one that will make using the service more intuitive for end users and will promote the use of surveys.

Moreover, users of the company’s WordPress.org plugin will now be able to add PollDaddy’s rating feature. This feature allows users to place ratings on their blog posts, pages and comments, like so:

Mullenweg writes, “Watch for some other major updates coming up soon.” As frequent users of PollDaddy on this platform, he can be sure we’ll keep an eye out for news about this service.

In honor of this momentous traffic milestone, we present you this commemorative poll, powered by PollDaddy:

What other Automattic web property has achieved one billion monthly pageviews?(survey)

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CloudCamp for Haiti: How the Cloud Can Help Aid Efforts

CloudCamp for Haiti! Organizers are conducting a virtual unconference next week and using it as fundraiser to raise money for the people of Haiti, victims of one of the worst natural disasters in modern history.

In an interesting twist, the organizers will use the online event to focus on how the cloud can be used in real-life recovery projects like the aid efforts going on in Haiti.

The cost to attend is $25. All donations will go toward relief efforts.

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The online event is next Wednesday at 11 a.m. EST (1600 GMT), and runs until 2 p.m. with a half-hour wrap up following the sessions.

Want to help this good cause and join the conversation about cloud computing and relief efforts? Sponsorships go for as little as $50.

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of cloud computing technologies exchange ideas. Discussions are open. The goal is to advance cloud computing. The event is for beginners and experts alike. End users, IT professionals and vendors are encouraged to attend.

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Make Your Own Online Magazine From Your Flickr/Facebook Photos With YouTellYou

We love site-building and story-telling applications, and social webizens love sharing their content – particularly multimedia content – in new and compelling ways.

YouTellYou is a fun and simple tool that allows users to grab, annotate, tag and share their pictures in an online magazine-type format. Users can pull in photos from Smugmug, Facebook, Flickr or one’s own computer, then go to town in a frenzy of sequences, captions and true pictorial story-weaving.

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In about 10 minutes, we created this story about SxSW 2009. We were able to get access to all the needed Flickr photos through a simple interface. Pics were then organized into layouts of one or two photos per section with optional captions for most layouts.

When we published, we were pleased to see links with each photo to enlarge it or to find the original URL for each pic. The finished product also has a thorough commenting system and the option to share zines via email and Twitter.

Our wishlist for this app would be a drag-and-drop interface for pulling photos into the magazine, Facebook Connect for easier account creation, some kind of theming for finished zines, the ability to add photos from other users and the ability to reblog or share the content we created in more ways. Finally, the site navigation and overall design needs improvement; however, for a free app with no advertising, we can’t complain too much.

We’re torn on whether we personally would use the app again – for most on the RWW team, it’d be worth the effort to just build a webpage from scratch. But for end users, this kind of tool is indicative of a trend for amateur content creation and sharing in more polished ways than a simple Flickr slideshow or Facebook set.

What do you think – would you use YouTellYou to tell a story with your photos? Let us know what you think of the app in the comments.

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YouTube Gets Short(er) Links, Too

Almost in the immediate wake of Google’s announcing short URLs (goo.gl) and Facebook experimenting with fb.me links, YouTube has made a gesture toward shorter web addresses, as well.

Today, the video site announced it’s launching youtu.be links. They’re not as short as the super-brief URLs users might see from Bit.ly or is.gd because each one contains a unique ID for the video it links to. But this extra bit of information makes the URLs more useful for developers, too.

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While the resulting URLs aren’t significantly shorter than a regular YouTube link, users will have the added benefit of knowing exactly what kind of content they’re being redirected to, which isn’t always the case with many shortened URLs.

Also, with the video ID as part of the short URL, writes YouTube engineering manager Vijay Karunamurthy, “developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly or track how a video is spreading in real time.”

End users can shorten links manually simply by putting the video ID (the part of the YouTube URL that comes after the equals sign and before the ampersand, if there is one) after http://youtu.be/. For example, “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1acVM7_rWw4” is the regular URL of an interview we did over the summer with a great startup advisor in Boulder, CO. The short version of that link would be “http://youtu.be/1acVM7_rWw4“.

Or, for those copy/paste-averse folks among us, links will be automatically shortened when broadcast thought the site’s sharing mechanisms.

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AdWhirl Spins Its Own Open Source iPhone SDK And Server

AdWhirl is a mobile advertising service that allows app developers to easily switch ad networks without being a hassle to the end users. They were acquired by the ad network AdMob back in August, but that hasn’t stopped them from doing what they do. And today, they’re making their offering even better by open sourcing the whole thing.

With the new AdWhirl iPhone SDK, developers can now customize which ad networks they’d like to use, rather than being forced to include them all. This can significantly cut down the size of app, the company writes on its blog today. But the open sourcing of the project means that developers can now also use ad networks that weren’t previously supported by the service, and can let other AdWhirl users how to do the same. AdWhirl notes that developers currently using the service won’t have to change a thing to accomodate this new SDK.

The other announcement today involves their AdWhirl Server. This the the backend infrastructure that makes the whole system work, not only serving up the ads, but allowing users to monitor statistics. AdWhirl says it has redesigned this server from the ground up and it’s now using Amazon Web Services EC2. And beginning today, the company is providing the code so that developers can run their own AdWhirl servers. The move to EC2 should allow running their own servers to make it easier to scale as well, they note.

You can find all the new code on Google code.

Earlier this month, .App/Ads launched its own open ad platform.

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Google Officially Launching Chrome Extensions Next Week

A couple weeks ago, Google unveiled its Chrome Extensions site after clues began popping up that a full-on push for extension support in their browser was imminent. Unfortunately, that site was only meant for extension developers who were allowed to upload their creations to Google. On the page, Google promised that end users who were looking for these extensions would have a way to do so “soon.” That will happen next week, we’ve learned.

Two sources close to the situation say that Google plans to unveil its Extensions Gallery at some point next week, probably in the middle of the week. This makes sense since Add-on-Con 09, a conference devoted to browser add-ons, is taking place next Friday, and Google Chrome is a Gold Sponsor of the event. Obviously, Google will probably want to have something they can actually show off at the event, rather than just a developer dashboard.

Apparently, the Extensions Gallery will be much like the Chrome Themes Gallery. It will be a page that lists a bunch of extensions and has a button to one-click download the ones you want. Presumably there will also be a link to learn more about what each extension actually does.

Several developers already have their extensions ready to go for Chrome. We’ve profiled Aviary’s and Shareaholic’s recently. And actually, there have been hundreds of extensions unofficially available for Chrome for some time via sites like Chrome Extensions. This morning we profiled 11 of the best ones found there.

Initially, Extension support will only be for the Windows-based version of Chrome. Even though the launch of the beta version of Chrome for Mac is imminent, that version will not have extension support built-in. However, the latest builds of Chromium (the open-source browser that Chrome is built off of) for Mac does support extensions, and even has an extension manager that works. It would appear that the Linux build of Chrome will support extensions whenever that beta is available.

Extensions will be very important for Chrome as it attempts to hit Google’s stated 10 percent market share goal in the next couple of years. Extensions have been one of the keys to the success of Firefox, as it continues to steal market share from the once utterly dominant Internet Explorer.

Disclosure: Add-on-Con is advertising on this site.

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The Day The Highway Went Coast-to-Coast: 70+ SocNet Feeds Normalized by New API

Cliqset is a Florida-based technology startup that end-users have had a hard time understanding. The company just released a new product that developers should have no trouble with at all and that could send waves of innovation across the social web.

Called Cliqset FeedProxy, the service consumes user activity feeds from more than 70 online services like Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.fm, Yelp and LibraryThing and then produces an outbound feed that’s compliant with the ActivityStreams standard format.

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That means activities from all those services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works.

The most common analogy for explaining the impact of data standards is the history of the railroads in the US. When all the railroad networks adopted a standard size of track, then transport companies could carry goods cross-country over multiple rail networks. That opened up a new world of commerce.

ActivityStreams is an Atom feed standard under development by many social web companies large and small. It aims to normalize the language that user activities are expressed in across multiple social networks. It’s intended to facilitate interoperability and cross-network delivery of user activity payloads. It’s important, exciting and inspiring work.

Non-standardized activity feed publishing is like creating a high-way that only one brand of car can drive on, with one proscribed type of journey in mind. Standardized feed publishing provides a platform for a world of open innovation. This API enables user data to pass freely from one network to another or through multiple applications, unhindered by network-specific markup and namespaces.

Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don’t.

As we explained in the ReadWriteWeb research report The Real-Time Web and its Future:

An extension of the Atom feed format, the spec explains it like this: “An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the subject), usually on some social object (the object). An activity feed is a feed of such activities.”

In the current draft spec, you can perform such actions as Post, Share, Save, Mark as Favorite, Play, Start Following, Make Friend, Join and Tag Object. An Object could be an Article, Blog Entry, Note, File, Photo, Photo Album, Playlist, Video, Audio, Bookmark, Person, Group, Place or Comment. These actions can have such contexts as Location, Mood and Annotation. Stream aggregator Cliqset publishes Activity Streams feeds that don’t require API authentication to view. You can see a sample one at:
http://cliqset.com/feed/atom?uid=dbounds.

The aim of Activity Streams is to have multiple social networks use a common language and have a common understanding of what all those things mean, so that messages can be read across different networking sites.

Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less.

What does this mean? It means that applications developers could build interfaces to display books read, music listened to, reviews written and more across multiple different services with as much ease as they can display standard RSS or Atom feeds today. It’s a powerful new level of granularity.

Social media center Boxee and a Sun Microsystems community product currently consume activity feeds. Cliqset says many more projects are in development now.

As the ActivityStreams community builds out more sophistication in the standard, there may be things like cross-site reputation included in such feeds.

Cliqset has done a valuable service creating these normalized feeds for developers, but the obvious downside is the reliance on a middleman. Cliqset says it is talking to Superfeedr about creating some real-time feeds as well. That would be great, but would be another layer on top of existing publisher feeds.

Perhaps if the developer community builds the kind of market-moving applications and features ActivityStreams advocates expect from the Cliqset feets, more publishers will begin publishing standardized feeds natively. While Cliqset has put a lot of work into normalizing numerous network feeds, the idea behind standards is that they can facilitate technical integration between parties with no prior knowledge of each other.

Either way, Cliqset is putting the ActivityStreams agenda to the test. The company’s release could have some very significant consequences.

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OCZ’s Colossus desktop SSD gets reviewed: oh yeah, it’s fast

It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it? OCZ Technology’s Colossus is the outfit’s first in the desktop SSD space, and with capacities scaling as high at 1TB, it’s certainly tempting for performance junkies who just can’t pry themselves away from their tower. The benchmark-minded kids over at PC Perspective were able to get a drive in with final firmware a few weeks back, and they’ve pushed out a full review just prior to these things hitting retail en masse. Needless to say, all the numbers in the world won’t make this any cheaper, but for those willing to spend at least $3.24 per gigabyte on internal storage, there’s hardly a better option out right now. Reviewers found that read and write speeds seriously pushed the SATA 3Gb/sec limit, and the latter were “faster than on any SATA device tested to date.” Sadly, the lack of TRIM support and the inability for end-users to upgrade the firmware put somewhat of a damper on things, but if neither one of those tidbits bother you, pulling the trigger just might be the right thing to do.

OCZ’s Colossus desktop SSD gets reviewed: oh yeah, it’s fast originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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