readwriteweb Archive

This morning I headed down to the Apple Soho neighborhood to meet with the team at Betaworks. I wanted to find out more about the URL shortener that’s apparently a tech blogger’s dream. The name of the URL shortener is bit.ly and bloggers including Marshall Kirkpatrick were in love with the tool like nothing else. Before we get into bit.ly, here’s some details on Betaworks.

Betaworks is a NYC company that helps startups move forward. They were quick to say they aren’t a vc or an incubator like Y Combinator is. They have a variety of NYC-based companies they either work with or invest in. The Betaworks company list includes: microblogging service Tumblr, location service Outside.in, conversational search service Summize (recently acquired by Twitter) and casual games site iminlikewithyou.

Alright, now back to bit.ly. Bit.ly is a URL shortener. What that means is that if you want to share a long URL in an email, it can create a nice short one that doesn’t break onto multiple lines, etc. That’s the basic concept for all URL shortener tools. The idea for bit.ly came from another project the Betaworks team was working on. They needed a URL shortener for Twitabit and the current 70+ shorteners didn’t fit the bill.

In my chat with Betaworks executives Andy Weissman and John Borthwick, they called bit.ly the “professional” URL shortener. There’s statistics, an archive, page thumbnails, and a platform and API which is open to all third parties. The real key they say is in the API and the ability to process pages for “entities”. Entities are bits of content on the page that bit.ly can extract and display them to help find other content that matches one of the entities you select.

Currently they use Amazon Simple Database for the database functions but are in the process of moving to MySQL. They also use Amazon’s S3 storage option for the site thumbnails. There have been 40,000 bit.ly URLs created so far with 5,000 added everyday. They are a Mac shop and here’s bit.ly lead developer Nathan Folkman cranking out code:

Betaworks is now an investor in Twitter after the Summize acquisition. I was curious to find out if they planned to push Twitter to move away from TinyURL and instead use bit.ly as their primary URL shortening service. John replied with a “no comment” but noted that they want to earn respect as the best URL shortener first. Here’s my bet… the switch over will take place by the end of 2008.

Lastly we spoke about the bit.ly business plan. While they wouldn’t share any specifics yet, the model is centered around data, data usage and there will also be a set of premium upgrades available for publishers and companies using the bit.ly service.

The bit.ly team is currently working on a sign-in option which will allow vanity URL’s to be changed. They are also working on continuing to improve the API and on datastream access.

Can a URL shortener become a real business? I guess we will see as bit.ly moves forward on their product roadmap.

Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb has a great look into how users consume content in one place and discuss the content in another place. Larry Dignan at ZDNet has a variety of questions we should be asking ourselves based on Sarah’s post.

The net discussion is around keeping up with all of the places discussion may take place based on the content (video/text/audio) that one produces. Sarah has a list of all of the 400 tools and methods needed to track everything related to a piece of content. I’d like to look at the topic from the content publisher side.

About a year ago when CN was only live a couple of months, I asked why Digg allows comments. Now we have even more services to attempt to follow, track and join the conversation around our content. Here are a few examples: Facebook, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller, Twitter, Pownce, Disqus, and FriendFeed.

When I took a look at FriendFeed last week, the first thing that smacked me straight in the face is that they allow comments on my content. Why? Would it be so hard to integrate my comment form into FriendFeed and let the comments reside on my content?

Sure, I lose page views, traffic, monetization of those visitors, ability to move them to a loyal status, learn more, etc. But the bigger issue is that readers to my article miss the discussion. No reader is going to hit up all of the services listed above to try to track and join the conversation. Instead all they get is my viewpoint as the author and miss what could be a variety of excellent complementary points or other views into the content.

There’s a business idea in all of this. What’s needed is a way to centralize the conversation back on the original content source while still allowing users to get involved on the platform they choose. While the new commenting services have moved commenting a bit further, centralization would spark real innovation.

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at RWW has the lead on a major announcement by the DataPortability workgroup. To summarize the announcement, a Google representative and a Facebook representative will be joining the DataPortability group. 

Marshall notes, "If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet." I have checked in with Marshall and he is recovering nicely from the shock.

From the release, "The DataPortability Workgroup is, among other things, actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability. This means users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems." 

The new representatives are: Google – Brad Fitzpatrick, Facebook – Benjamin Ling. Plaxo is also sending a representative, Joseph Smarr, to the table after breaking one of the "laws" of Facebook.

Here are the other members of the group: Chris Saad (Faraday Media), Stephen Kelly (Peepel), Ben Metcalfe (Consultant to Seesmic and Myspace), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency, Microformats), Daniela Barbosa (Dow Jones), Phil Morle, Ian Forrester (BBC), Kristopher Tate (Zooomr), Paul Keen (NineMSN), Brian Suda, Emily Chang (eHub), Danny Ayers (Talis), Robyn Tippins (Yahoo!), Robert Scoble (PodTech).

I’d love to get involved – how does someone from the east coast apply?

Update: Appears we were right, unfortunately no TechMeme lead love. Also, VentureBeat has been added since the inital site went live.

Just noticed this on the Techcrunch toolbar, "Crunchies". It appears to be a partnership between Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. Webware/CNET had their similar Webware 100 earlier this year.

From the site, "The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony for the most compelling startups of the year."

Looks interesting and awards for the hard work and effort startups put in should be rewarded. If you think about it, all those startups is what keeps a good bit of the press moving! The Crunchies are sponsored by Sun.

I am curious as to the name choice – wouldn’t something general enough for all 3 sites make more sense? Will we see Mint win this too? LAWL :)

Update from a CN reader: Mashable launched "Mashable Awards" this past weekend though it seems to focus more on social networking and new social sites.

Calling all CN readers – we need to band together to help our friends at ReadWriteWeb win the Best Technology Blog award. RWW is a huge inspiration for me and when I think about overall analysis, RWW is the tops. Maybe it comes from the fact that all the writers have beards! :)

Anyway, get out and support one of our own and help RWW beat the others. One vote per day and the voting ends on the 8th so you best have 5 votes each!

This morning Josh Kopelman followed up my "Psychology of the Internet" post from yesterday with a great review of bloggers and journalists predicting a bubble since 2004. His closing sums up it perfectly, "Even a broken clock is right two times a day.  By proclaiming a bubble every year, everyone can say they ‘called it.’" I believe this is true of many of the stories that are hitting the ‘Net these last few weeks. Because you know it’s all about being "First."

Apparently my friends over at Read/WriteWeb top Josh’s list of bubble mentions. I am certain Richard didn’t make these quotes to be first like many of the other bloggers do. Here are their calls from 2004 forward:

• 2004 – "The web is entering another bubble of optimism…" – Read/Write Web
• 2005 – "At the Web 2.0 conference, I’m sensing the buzz of a bubble" – Read/Write Web
• 2006 – "Are we in a bubble? Absolutely" – Read/Write Web
• 2007 – "..Is the recent acquisition (Google/DoubleClick) fever a sign of a bubble?" - Read/WriteWeb

We can’t control external factors (idiots buying real estate outside their means, wars, International Trade, etc.) but what we can control, let’s make sure we are smart.

This just in from Read/WriteWeb: Marshall Kirkpatrick is leaving SplashCast Media and joining Read/WriteWeb as a Lead Writer. RWW already has the most impressive tech blogger lineup (like the NY Yankees of tech blogging!) with Head Blogger Richard MacManus, Josh Catone and part-timer Alex Iskold. Marshall is a great free-agent pickup. Looks like I have to pick up my game again (thanks Richard NOT!)

It was just this morning that Marshall and I were discussing the updates to SplashCast and after Marshall’s twitters about his own consulting practice Web site, I have wondered about his ability to handle everything for a couple of weeks now but decided not to ask.

Congrats to Marshall and to Richard and the team. Reports are Marshall picked up a 10 million dollar signing bonus (linden dollars) and some are wondering if Richard will keep his shave policy in effect (Marshall has a beard). :)

More details on the RWW blog and Marshall’s blog.