Meebo Turns Chat Rooms Into A Web Service

Today, Web-based IM and chat room provider Meebo is releasing full-fledged APIs for its Meebo Rooms that will allow Websites to embed chat functionality in an automated fashion. Currently, Meebo Rooms can be embedded on sites or blogs manually by pasting in the appropriate code, which has already led to a proliferation of such widgets. There are more than 200,000 Meebo Rooms, attracting millions of visitors a month. (See our previous coverage here and here). Explains Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg:

Now, the servers of our partners can say, “I want to create a room.” It automates the creation process on a server-to-server basis. Also, we will be putting advertising into these rooms.

In addition to the APIs, the company is also announcing the Meebo Network, which will serve ads inside Meebo Rooms across the Web, splitting the revenues with the Websites hosting the rooms. Since each Meebo Room is formed around a particular interest, ads can be targeted. And to the extent that sites participating in the network have demographic data on their members, that can be used for ad targeting as well. Only Meebo Rooms created through the API will show ads, not the ones created manually.

The launch partners joining the Meebo Network are Piczo, Revision3, RockYou, Social Project, and Tagged. Revision3, for instance, will create a Meebo room on its site where fans can watch a synchronized loop of Web TV shows while chatting. Access to the full APIs and the ad network is by invitation only at this point. Social networks could use the new APIs to automatically add chat rooms to every group page. Rock bands or movie sites could add Meebo Rooms to their sites for visiting fans.

Comparisons can be made here to Userplane, a white-label chat service which was bought by AOL in 2006 and powers many of the chat rooms on MySpace. But there are subtle differences. Most notable is the fact that Meebo Rooms can spread anywhere on the Web. Anyone can grab the embed code and put it on their blog or MySpace page as I’ve done below. Notes Sternberg:

A user cannot take a room off of MySpace and throw it somewhere else. We have all our rooms networked. A user can take the CBS Jericho room, and throw it on their Wordpress blog. Our chat rooms are networked versus islands within Websites.

It is very hard to get a synchronous conversation going. You won’ get enough people on your MySpace page to have a conversation. But with Meebo Rooms, most of the traffic is coming from somewhere else. It solves the problem of the Web being so distributed.

The power of Meebo Rooms is that they let anyone create live conversations on their site by aggregating people with similar interests from other sites. In fact, it links people between sites. And that, hopes Sternberg, will give it enough scale to become an ad network of sorts. Meebo has raised $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

SproutBuilder: Drag and Drop Widget Builder

eBay Changes Fee Structure To Drive Growth

eBay yesterday announced a major shake up in its fee structure in an attempt to revitalize their core auction business.

Amazon surpassed eBay in US traffic in December for the first time according to Nielsen, and growth rates on eBay have been either static or minimal over the last two to three years.

Under the changes, eBay will slash listing fees by up to 50%, but in turn will increase its commission on items that do sell. Extras such as including photos with listing will now be offered for free. eBay will also increase fees on specific items, including goods sold for less that $25 to 8.75%, a 67% increase according to AP.

An example of the new price structure:

selling a purse at auction for $25 would have cost the seller $1.91, including 60 cents for listing the item plus eBay’s commission of $1.31. Under the new structure, the seller would pay $2.74, including 55 cents to list the item plus a higher commission of $2.19.

Another AP report suggests that eBay sellers are not happy about the changes, with one eBay user saying that “It looks like what they are trying to do with the fees is make it more difficult and expensive to sell low-end items. The people that are selling low-end items are going to feel this fee increase the most.”

comScore stats show that eBay still retains a lead of Amazon (graph right) but the gap is closing. Amazon has continued to build a non-auction based alternative to eBay, complete with independent sellers and a used items marketplace that has seen solid growth at Amazon at a rate eBay simply hasn’t matched. With new leadership at eBay after the announcement of long term CEO Meg Whitman’s retirement this announcement will likely be the first of more to come as eBay looks to find growth from what is still one of the leading Ecommerce providers on the planet.

Yahoo’s OpenID Service Launches Public Beta

Yahoo has launched a beta version of their OpenID provider initiative, which was announced earlier this month. Starting today, you can use your Yahoo credentials to login on a number of different sites, including Plaxo, Jyte, and Pibb.

I tried it out on Plaxo, and it’s definitely an improvement over previous integrations of OpenID. Versus needing to enter a URL such as username.myopenid.com before providing your username and password, you simply follow a “sign in with Yahoo ID” link, where you can enter your Yahoo credentials. Several pages of education on how exactly your Yahoo ID can be used to sign into other web sites follows, and from there you simply sign up for Plaxo and can then use your Yahoo credentials to sign in on future visits.

Now that I’ve seen it in action, I feel like Yahoo’s effort may be fairly effective in driving OpenID adoption. To mainstream users, OpenID is probably a completely foreign concept. On the other hand, seeing the Yahoo brand with no explicit mention of OpenID is a concept users should be able to grasp, and Yahoo has gone through great lengths to educate users throughout the sign-in process. Most everyone out there has a Yahoo ID, and given the choice of yet another username and password or using your existing Yahoo one, I think users may start to opt for the latter.

Kudos to Yahoo for getting this out quickly. Now we’ll see if they take the next step and start allowing users to sign into various Yahoo services with the OpenID provider of their choice.

Blogged with Flock

The New Browser War: Mobile Firefox vs. Opera Mini

Last October, Mozilla announced that they were working on a mobile version of the Firefox browser. As it turns out, they were working on two versions: one designed for touchscreen devices like the iPhone and another for traditional phones. Now Mozilla has finally given us a glimpse of their designs by posting the plans, mockups, and details of these two upcoming mobile browsers on the Mozilla wiki.

Non-Touchscreen Firefox Mobile

The non-touchscreen browser introduces a virtual cursor that is controlled with the keyboard navigational keys. Using short presses (clicks) on the directional pad's left key will quickly navigate through clickable elements. Longer presses on the left key will begin smooth scrolling. When scrolling, after a set amount of time the page will gradually zoom out to give you a view of the entire layout which will allow for faster scrolling. When you stop pressing the directional pad button, the browser will gradually zoom back in on the element that the cursor is positioned over.

The right key of the directional pad will bring up a menu that provides access to navigation functionality, including items like the Address Bar, Refresh, Back, History, Bookmarks, Tabs, Bookmark This, and Quit.

Touchscreen Firefox Mobile

The touchscreen version of the Firefox mobile browser seems to borrow from Apple's mobile Safari browser with some familiar-looking buttons which include the back and forward navigation arrows, a bookmarks button, and a retractable address bar. The star-bookmarks button will show you a list of your bookmarks if you tap it once; tap it twice and you can bookmark the current page you are viewing.

However, this UI also includes some new features like Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons, which are on the bottom toolbar, as well as a tabs button that will display up to four tab previews displayed 2x2 on your screen for fast tab switching.

Weave Integration to Come?

Although not detailed in these specifications, many sites are speculating that these new mobile browsers will provide bookmark syncing through Weave, Mozilla's new project for data and metadata portability. This is likely since mobile syncing was one of the listed "Use Cases" in the Mozilla Labs forum on the project. With Weave, though, bookmark syncing could really be just the beginning. Weave could, in theory, also sync up browser settings like sessions and passwords from desktop to mobile to laptop and beyond.

Another big possibility is the development of extensions designed just for Mobile Firefox. This would be a break-out feature that could make Mobile Firefox unique in this space. However, no plans for this type of development have been announced yet.

The Mobile Firefox browser should arrive sometime in late 2008.

...But Opera Mini Already Does That

What's interesting about the Mobile Firefox announcement and surrounding hubbub is that Opera Mini today offers nearly the same features that Mozilla is still developing.

Most notably, Opera Mini 4 can already sync your mobile phone bookmarks with the bookmarks on your computer by using something called Opera Link. Although not as seamless as the possible Weave setup (perhaps), syncing bookmarks with Opera is fairly simple.

You click "Synchronize Opera" on the Start Page and then sign in with your Opera Account. Opera Mini will continue to synchronize your data until you log out.

Opera Link Photo via Opera.com

Opera Mini also has many useful navigation options, too. For example, pressing * # switches your screen to Landscape Mode, a setting that can be enabled as the default.

A virtual mouse is also provided: you can move the cursor towards what you want and it quickly snaps the view to the link or the content. When you first visit a web page, Opera Mini shows you an overview and suggest where to begin reading. Click once and you can zoom in on the content.

Before you click on a link, however, you can focus the cursor on the link to see where it's going to take you. You can then choose whether you want to open the new page with images turned off, a feature that can be turned on or off at any time.

Opera Mini also has several keyboard shortcuts. Power scrolling shortcuts (2, 4, 6, and 8 keys) let you quickly move around the web page and the 5 key zooms you in and out. Pressing 1 bring up the Context Menu where you can hit reload or switch to Mobile View. This unique Small Screen Rendering feature lets you fit any web page to your screen's width. Opera Mini 4 will adjust the page structure on the fly, so you can browse up and down without having to also deal with horizontal scrolling.

Blackberry users have built-in menus designed just for them and for Windows Mobile/Symbian users, there's an even more feature-rich Opera Mobile browser to use.

Why Firefox Might Win

Although Opera Mini is a great mobile browser with tons of features, back on the desktop, Firefox has more users. So, when it comes time to choose a mobile browser, the one that syncs with your desktop browser of choice is likely to win out. Plus, if add-ons are developed for Mobile Firefox, it has the possibility of becoming a killer mobile app.

Vicito News: Personalized News Aggregation Via IM

Vicito News is a new personalized news aggregation service that operates over instant messenger using an IM robot. The service currently works with AIM, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger. Vicito is something akin to Google News alerts for IM -- you tell the service what to watch for, and it updates you at preset intervals via instant messenger when it finds new news matching your query.
Vicito would fall under the single stream aggregation category of news aggregators, in that it combines news from multiple sources about a specific topic into a single stream. You set up Vicito entirely through IM by telling the bot what keywords you want to track, how many stories you want maximum per update, and how frequently you want updates.

I told Vicito to track stories related to "baseball" and this afternoon I compared the results to those from SportsSpyder's MLB page. Not surprisingly, they were both dominated by news about the trade of Johan Santana -- baseball's top pitcher -- to the New York Mets. Somewhat surprisingly, though, I actually found Vicito's news to be more varied. Beyond Satana I was getting stories about Roger Clemens visits the Astros training camp, pitcher Andy Pettitte, and Major Leaue Baseball's umpire background check policy that were nowhere to be found amid the Santana noise (or were buried) on SportsSpyder.

Tracking "yankees" news on Vicito.

A lot of that might have to do with the source list. Vocito right now is drawing from 750 large and mainstream news sources that cover the gamut in terms of topic. SportsSpyder, on the other hand, is drawing from specialized sources that deal exclusively with baseball -- so certainly the overlap and number of reporters covering the same big story will be greater.

But the experience does highlight one major problem with single stream aggregators like these: there is a lot repetition. Because Vicito is just posting a river of news that matches your search query, you end up getting the same story from multiple source. Unlike with meme-style aggregators like Google News or Techmeme (or perhaps, more on topic, Ballbug), which group similar stories, Vicito's stream loses some appeal once you've seen the same story 5 times.

Nat Burke, founder of Vicito, is aware that eventually some sort of filtering will be necessary. "As we continue to grow our source volume, having something to weed out the noise will become essential," he told me. "What eventual form that takes is up in the air at this point."

Even with the noise problem, though, Vicito remains a useful service for getting breaking, topically filtered, news updates over IM. If instant messenger is your preferred method of communication, then you might find some utility in Vicito. Vicito is free to use, with a premium for-pay package that ups the limit on the number of news stories you can receive per update and how often.

MySpace opens doors to developers

MySpace has about 200 million registered users

MySpace will open its doors to software developers allowing them to create games and media-sharing applications for the popular social network.

MySpace will formally launch its "Developer Platform" next Tuesday but is already allowing people to sign up.

The tools have been developed with Google and will allow programmers to create programs similar to those used by millions on rival site Facebook.

Facebook opened up its site to outside developers last year.

It has since had great success, with nearly 15,000 applications written for the site.

These include photo-sharing and music recommendation tools as well as games such as scrabble.

However, despite its popularity, Facebook still lags behind MySpace in terms of overall users.

MySpace has around 200 million registered users, compared to 63 million who use Facebook.

MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580m in 2005.

Last October it announced that it would join OpenSocial, Google's platform designed to allow developers to build applications that will work on any website.

Other networks such as Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut already use the tools.

The tools, available from 5 February, will allow developers to build applications that make use of MySpace member profile information and their connections with other users.

According to the new CTO of MySpace, Amit Kapur, developers will also be able to make money out of their applications.

"I will be focused on making a platform for developers to monetize and promote their applications," he told Reuters.

Google’s Departed Godfather of AdSense Joins the Tumri Project

After Gokul Rajaram, the “Godfather of AdSense,” left Google at a seemingly inopportune time for the search company, no plans were indicated on Rajaram’s part as to what direction his new solo career would head. Today, however, we’ve learned that Rajaram is indeed sticking with his expertise in consumer and business ads, and has joined the board of directors at Tumri, a one-to-one online display marketing solution. Tumri works as a consolidated, one-stop-shop for brands to create their online campaigns to be delivered across platforms, media types, etc. It is one of several companies looking to provide a centralized service that does some of the heavy lifting for the brands that bcome their clients, extending certain projections and other data to form a targeted display ad campaign that will reach end users and consumers. Tumri has in fact spend quite some time building up its staff of notable veterans in the field, including Calvin Lui. From the looks of it, Rajaram is attracted to Tumri because of its technology, which is central to its service as a differentiating factor. Dubbed the AdPod, Tumri constructs a brand’s online ad campaign as a platform, combining existing creatives and marketing messages with offers and listings, turning it into a dynamic ad widget. Rajaram’s presence on Tumri’s board of directors helps solidify not only Tumri as a company, but dynamic ad widgets as an effective and scalable form of targeting advertisements. The way I see it, widgets incorporate reporting and an ability to change, which are primary reasons for why they are being experimented with so heavily at this time.

Digg Joins DataPortability, Will Support OpenID

Digg has just announced that they have also joined the DataPortability Workgroup, adding to a laundry list of companies in the Web industry who have signed on to work together towards allowing you to own your data and take it with you to other sites.

In a blog post this morning, the company writes:

“Want to sync your Digg friends network with another service? We want to help you do that. Want to use your Digg activity to get recommendations from another web site? We’re working on that, too.”

Additionally, the post indicates that the company will soon support OpenID, though it’s unclear if that means you’ll be able to login to Digg using OpenID, or if they’ll simply join a long list of companies including Yahoo and AOL that are allowing you to use your credentials from their respective services to login on other sites.

All of this sounds good to me. As we now know, most of the main players are already in on DataPortability, including Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Mashable readers were fairly split in a recent poll where we asked whether DataPortability was all hype or the next big thing:

Welcome, Digg. Now let’s see what happens.

The killer Twitter-tracker just arrived and its name is Tweetmeme

It had to happen sooner or later. We’ve had Technorati. We’ve had TechMeme. Now we have Tweetmeme, which will track what’s hot on micro-blogging platform Twitter. The business of tracking the online conversation just a got shot in the arm a big hit with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine.

Built by the makers Fav.or.it, a yet-to-launch blog commenting system, and based on an idea by Marjolein Hoekstra, Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others.

But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio). In addition Fav.or.it will integrate Tweetmeme into its API so you’ll be able to comment on blog posts through Tweetmeme. [For an explanation of how Fav.or.it will work see here and here].

The knockout punch is that Tweetmeme will Twitter the original person who first mentioned the item if it makes it onto Tweetmeme. This is going to be fun…

SmugMug’s Private Photos Aren’t Really Private

Photo hosting site SmugMug apparently has a huge security hole which allows anyone to easily access other users’ photos which have been marked as “private,” reports Google Blogoscoped. What’s worse, the folks at SmugMug are aware of the issue, but claim this is intended behavior, separating the notions of “privacy” and “security.”

In a nutshell, the problem is this: if you set your photos as “private”, they can still be accessed simply by URL manipulation; for example, I randomly typed in this URL “http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/1021″ in my browser and got someone’s gallery that, perhaps, was not intended for the whole world to see. It is possible to prevent this behavior by setting a special password for your image/gallery, but how many people understand this?

Here’s an excerpt from SmugMug’s CEO Don MacAskill’s long conversation with Google Blogoscoped:

“…we view security and privacy as two separate, but related, issues. Security is like locking your front door (no-one can get in with out a key) and privacy is like closing your window drapes (no-one can look in from the outside, but you can tell people where you live and they can visit without a key).

At SmugMug, the feature you’re talking about, private galleries, falls under the privacy umbrella, not security. It’s intentionally designed so that you can “tell other people” about your photos (share a URL in an email, embed or hyperlink on your blog or message forum, etc) without having to share something like a password. Only people you’ve shared this URL with can find the gallery and/or photos in question.

The problem here, of course, is the fact that most people don’t care about semantics in cases such as this; if they set a photo to “private,” most of them probably expect that no one else can see this photo, period. A similar discussion arose recently when it was discovered that Google Reader shares your “shared” items with everyone in your Gmail account, but this is a far worse problem, because private photos are at stake. As usual, it will probably just take some media attention (such as this article) for the folks at SmugMug to get to their senses, but why does it always have to be so?

Blist: Making Spreadsheets Fun?

The latest to tackle online database and spreadsheet creations: Blist. Launching today at DEMO, blist is a more flexible way in which to create those dreadful spreadsheets we all have to do for one reason or another. The company’s aim is to simplify the process by tailoring the application according to your needs, as opposed to your having to configure your data according to the existing parameters of a spreadsheet.

It does so by offering an array of templates that can be selected for a variety of purposes, from wedding guest lists to fantasy football stats. Data can be viewed in multiple formats, like tables, calendars or widgets. Incorporating multimedia items like photos or videos means that users can do with these spreadsheets whatever they like, for any purpose they see fit.

With an intuitive interface, the target user is the non-technical folks out there that don’t really like the complications of a spreadsheet. Blist spreadsheets are collaborative, web-based tools, so the social aspect of sharing data is built into this application. From the looks of it, blist’s offerings also extend to the construction of queries, meaning this tool has the potential for enabling non-technical users to create tables and perhaps even mashups.

There is a handful of applications out there that are taking on the challenge of creating an easy-to-use, web-based mashup tool that will translate into a high user adoption rate based on a simplified and intuitive process, like Strata. As web surfers find more ways in which to control and use their own information (or third-party information for their own purposes), mashup tools will become an increasingly integrated aspect of our every day use, so tools that help us towards this direction will become more valuable.

Print Screens Without the Paper: Iterasi

Iterasi is a new company launching its service at DEMO today. The product of serial entrepreneur Pete Grillo, who sold his previous company WeSync to Palm in 2000, Iterasi is another way to organize your web. While the premise of the service is very straightforward, Iterasi pulls from so many schemas that we already have applied to the organization of the web that I’m having trouble figuring out the best way to describe how it all works in comparison to what we already have. But here goes:

Iterasi is a bookmarking tool that lets you take a snapshot of a website in its native format. That means that whether the site is dynamic or static, these web pages can be bookmarked, saved, searched, retrieved, shared, and tagged. This is handy for saving online receipts, submission/application forms, content and images, to name a few. Think of it as a web-based print screen function  without the paper.

As with other bookmarking tools, Iterasi comes complete with a browser bookmark so you can amass websites as you surf the web. Similar to StumbleUpon, Iterasi will let you “notarize” your saved site, adding in tags, showing tags that others have applied to the same site, and providing your own title. These saved items will display in your Iterasi account as thumbnail images, similar to JigJak or Hyperigo.

But if Iterasi is anything like a bookmarking site, it’s main point of differentiation is the personalized ways in which you can organize all your bookmarks. Think of a glorified version of the browser sidebar that lets you place all your bookmarks into various folders. There’s also an option to set a timer for notarizing a webpage at a specified time. If you do this regularly, then you’ve got a time-lapsed glimpse at how a website changes over time, kinda like archive.org.

Now that we’ve taken a look at Iterasi’s main features and likened it to pieces of several existing tools out there, what can Iterasi be used for?

The searchability of Iterasi is very key to the overall value of this service, as this enables users to truly create their own web. Should this data be gathered as an aggregated look at web behavior, multiple things can be inferred, from shopping habits to new perspectives on web search, or a combination of several of these things. It could also be used in conjunction with other tools out there like Shoeboxed that collect your receipts to help you with your own budgeting.

Given the outlook for personalized web experiences, data portability, and a number of other customized tools for mashing up varied parts of your own Internet, Iterasi offers a compellingly simple look at the potential for the tailored web. Is this a better way to handle personal bookmarks than Clipmarks‘ social attempt at sharing items?

[Source: Mashable.com]

eBay Acquires Fraud Sciences For $169 Million

eBay through Paypal has acquired fraud detection provider Fraud Sciences Ltd for $169 million.

Israel and Palo Alto based Fraud Sciences offers automated anti-fraud systems including SpotLight VFX and SpotLight T2T, merchant solutions the provide transaction verification with fraud prevention. In an October 2007 profile, Israelplug said that Fraud Sciences products “help online retailers verify the identity of buyers and accept orders that they would have seen as suspicious in the past - thus enabling them to increase their sales.”

eBay said the acquisition will assist them in significantly improving trust and safety across its sites in 2008. Fraud Sciences’ risk tools will be integrated with PayPal’s fraud management system.

Personnel from Fraud Sciences, including Yossi Barak, Fraud Sciences’ COO, and founders Shvat Shaked and Saar Wilf, will join PayPal’s technology and fraud management teams.

This acquisition is expected to be completed within 30 days.

Globally, Baidu Beats Microsoft in Search; Yandex Creeping Up On Ask

While Google dominates the top slot in search both in the U.S. and worldwide, with a global search market share of 62 percent, there is still a lot of elbowing going on below, especially when you look beyond the U.S.

In a comScore ranking of the top-10 global search engines as measured by number of searches during the month of December, 2007, Yahoo comes in at a distant No. 2 with only 13 percent of global share. (Although, in the U.S., Yahoo actually gained a half-point of share in December, whereas Google dipped 0.2 percent).

The big surprise, though, is the strength of local search engines in countries that don’t use the Roman alphabet. No. 3 on the list is not Microsoft, but Chinese search engine Baidu (with 5 percent share, versus Microsoft’s 3 percent). No. 5 is Korea’s NHN Corporation, which operates the Naver portal and search engine. Creeping up on Ask’s No. 8 spot, is Russian search engine Yandex. And Alibaba (which may include Yahoo China) brings up the rear at No. 10.

Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? These market share figures suggest that culture and marketing play a big role as well—unless, of course, you are Google.

Pay Per Play: Break Internet Style Rules, Make Lots of Money

We’re solicited, on average, by about two or three different ad networks of varying types on a weekly basis here at Mashable. Some of them are great ideas, and some of them are downright stinkers. I’m not in the business side of things here at the blog, so I’m generally not privvy to where those conversations lead, so I can’t speak to exactly who does what in terms of sponsorship for this site. I do get to see most of the offers on the way in through the editorial mailbox, though, and one that’s slid past us a few times is an outfit called Pay Per Play.

Subject: Get paid for every visitor to your site

Body: This is a brand new program called Pay Per Play. It’s a bit like Google Adsense except that it’s a 5 second audio ad. Like Adsense, it’s totally free … just a small piece of code and you get paid for every visitor. No one has to click on anything. There is a time limit and also a limit to the number of people who will get to promote it. If it takes off, as I expect it to, someone is going to do well as a result.

Due to the stigma associated with autoplaying audio ads, I’ve been assured that we won’t be taking advantage of that program here at Mashable. I have to wonder, based on my own experience, whether or not that stigmas is deserved or not. Conventional wisdom says that one of the biggest screw-ups a webmaster can make is to throw an advertising program on their site that will autoplay an audio clip. Surfers will complain louder and quicker about autoplaying audio ads than if you were to change the algorithm on Digg.

The debate as to whether this is acceptable practice ranges to many different circles. MySpace and Digg have both been called out before in the comments and emails we’ve recieved here at Mashable for occasionally letting an advertisement slip by that has autoplaying advertisements. The podcasting world also goes back and forth on whether it is kosher to have your podcast or video episodes autoplay on pageload. On my own personal blog and video ventures over the years, I’ve been experimenting with the benefits and negatives of autoplaying for years, and have generally come to the conclusion that if I have audio or video that I want to showcase in a website, I will make it autoplay.

Back when Art and I were doing the RizWords podcast, it typically ran between forty five minutes to a little over an hour each daily episode. We found that the growth of the podcast was a bit slow in the beginning, in terms of both downloads and subscribers. We chatted over it and came to the conclusion that we should give autoplay a shot.  Within weeks, our downloads shot predictably up, and our subscribes shot through the roof (and an unintended consequence occurred - a large portion of the long term podcast subscribers ended up being from China, Iran and the United Arab Emirates).

How did it affect our site viewership, though?  Well, we monitored everything pretty closely before and after the switchover, and the bounce rate has only shifted unfavorably by 2%.  Interestingly enough, the average length of visit went up substantially (by around six minutes or so). So what was my tradeoff for all the extra listens? Weeding out a few finicky visitors, and Tom Merritt and Molly Wood telling me I should change it to not autoplay on an episode of Buzz Out Loud.

Granted, there is a significant difference between an autoplaying advertisement, and a fifteen second autoplaying advertisement followed by a podcast full of relevant content, but having said that, the Pay Per Play concept isn’t so aesthetically repugnant as the design snobs among us might originally think. Certainly the thought of it is counter-intuitive at first, but aren’t most revolutionary new concepts that way?

WebMynd Could Change the Way You Bookmark Websites

A new YCombinator startup called WebMynd launched today. It’s a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive.

The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something.

Users can turn off recording at any time, and can delete saved pages that they don’t want to have around for any reason. To see saved pages, you click on an icon at the top of the browser and the local saved copies pop up, along with a search bar.

The idea is that, like Gmail, good search means you don’t have to spend a lot of time bookmarking and tagging websites to find them later. WebMynd records everything in the background, and a quick search will locate the page.

One thing I’d love to see added is a text box somewhere on the browser where you can type in tags to describe any page you are on, and to have that data saved along with the virtual page. The result could make searching easier down the road.

The basic add-on is free and keeps pages for a week. Users pay $10 for six months of history or $20 for a full year. After testing this I can tell it’s a service I’ll continue to use to quickly find sites I visited. Simple service, basic business model, and useful. Classic YCombinator stuff.

Facebook Apps On Any Website: Clever Move

Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website.

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Nick O’Neil at All Facebook writes:

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

Google Releases Docs Uploader

Google today released a simple Windows compatible utility to simplify the sometimes annoying task of importing multiple documents into Google Docs. Google released it to demonstrate some of the functionality within the Google Docs API (download the app here).

It was possible already to mass upload documents into Google Docs by way of email, but anyone who has tried that in the past has most likely run into the size limitations (500k, for most documents).

A cursory glance over the API showed me that there are a number of other applications that could be written on the platform, including document synchronization with MS Word or other stand-a-lone Office-style applications, or a Google Docs export utility (certainly in keeping with the principals of data portability!).

[screenshot credits: Google Operating System]

Google Releases Docs Uploader

Google today released a simple Windows compatible utility to simplify the sometimes annoying task of importing multiple documents into Google Docs. Google released it to demonstrate some of the functionality within the Google Docs API (download the app here).

It was possible already to mass upload documents into Google Docs by way of email, but anyone who has tried that in the past has most likely run into the size limitations (500k, for most documents).

A cursory glance over the API showed me that there are a number of other applications that could be written on the platform, including document synchronization with MS Word or other stand-a-lone Office-style applications, or a Google Docs export utility (certainly in keeping with the principals of data portability!).

[screenshot credits: Google Operating System]

9 Facebook Applications To Make You Money

Did you know you can sell things on your Facebook profile? Well, you can with the help of a couple handy applications. Whether it be your own music if you’re a musician, a shirt you designed, or old junk you have laying around, there’s probably an application out there that can help you earn some extra dough.

CafePress - Pretty much everyone has heard of CafePress, and with this Facebook app you can start selling whatever you have on your store via your profile.

e3buy Auction - Works with the e3buy auction site so you can add auctions to your profile as well as open a store.

eBay - From the best known of the online auction houses, highlight anything you’re selling on eBay to your friends on Facebook.

FlameTunes - Are you a musician? Want to sell your own music on your profile? This is the application for you.

Garage Sale - In association with Buy.com, Garage Sale allows you to sell your items to your friends, like that box of old books, your bike, etc.

Lemonade - Works just like it’s parent site, Lemonade.com. Pick items you like from a selection of sites, add the widget to your profile, make a commission on anything that sells.

Music Blaster - An application that works with BlastMyMusic. Promote small musical acts and earn a 5% commission on sales of their music.

My Merch Store - Create your products with Zazzle and then you can sell them on their website as well as via your Facebook profile.

Shopit - Got some spare CDs you need to dump? Regretting that HD DVD player you bought? Create a simple store and sell off your items to your friends via this store application.

[Source: Mashable.com]

Grouply Brings A Bit Of Facebook To Yahoo/Google Groups

Grouply is a startup trying to improve the online “groups” systems (Yahoo/Google Groups) currently used by over 100 million registered users. Their first goal was to create a simple management tool for easily tracking updates across your groups on the two networks. You give Grouply your account credentials and they organize your accounts in a more convenient manner (see our earlier review). Their second goal, has been to bring those systems up to speed with the latest social networking enhancements.

The newly launched features are collectively called “Grouply Social” and include all the social networking features you’d expect. User profile pages show your interests, personal history, and contact information. The pages also support multimedia like most social networks, allowing users to share photos, videos, and “widgets” from sites like YouTube and Slide. Members can also befriend each other, with full privacy controls. You can decide who has access to your profile and what portions they can see, similar to Facebook.

The rest of the internet is clearly blowing past these older “groups” services when it comes to usability and engagement. Sites like Tangler, Wetpaint, and Klostu are creating whole new systems to bring online forums up to speed. As we’ve said before, Grouply is taking an evolutionary approach by absorbing users and data from existing systems and enhancing their functionality. Grouply recently raised over $1.3 million.

Wakerupper: Free Wake-up Calls from the Web

Wakerupper is a nifty light-weight text-to-speech web app with a great name that will call any phone at a preset time. The site is currently in private beta, though its basic features are publicly available now (advanced features such as scheduling and a snooze function are only available to beta testers). I tested it out earlier this week and it never missed a call.

The way Wakerupper works is simple: you give it a phone number and a time and date to call, and optionally you give it a short message (under 140 characters). At the entered time, the app will call your phone and read back your message in a surprisingly non-computer-sounding voice. A cancellation code is emailed to you in case you want to call off your reminder.

As the name suggests, Wakerupper is ideal for things like wake-up calls and appointment reminders. But because most houses have alarm clocks, most hotels have wake-up call services, and most cell phones have a built in calendar app with a reminder function (and alarm clocks, as well, for that matter), I began to question the utility of the service.

However, while Wakerupper may not be necessary for its most practical applications, some of the more whimsical suggested use cases on the web site actually make a lot of sense. For example, "Escape from a boring date or meeting." Want a built-in escape hatch for a blind date? Schedule Wakerupper to call you around the time you should be midway through your entree -- by that time you'll know if you want to bail. Or how about, "Remind child or spouse to do chores." Now parents don't even have to lift a finger to nag their children in far off places.

The service is currently free to use, and an item in the site's FAQ suggests that Wakerupper might someday deliver advertisements along with wake-up calls.

[Source: ReadWriteWeb.com]