Web 2.0 Archive

Yahoo is bringing their “Open Hack” developer conference to NYC next weekend. The Open Hack will be held on October 9th and 10th. Yahoo says they are still accepting registrations although they manually approve each person. There’s a wiki with more information about agenda, location and speakers.

Here’s Yahoo’s description of Hack Days: “Yahoo! Hack Days started back in 2005, when a team of engineers designed an event to see what sort of interesting and innovative applications people would build using Yahoo! tools and technologies over a 24-hour period. At the end of the day, they presented working hacks to roomful of colleagues and peers. Since then, “hack” has become an integral part of culture at Yahoo!. ”

The sessions run through the night and you can nap at the conference center. They say there will be lots of “geek food” – let’s just hope they don’t bring any Twitter cupcakes – we all know how those ended up for me :)

I am hoping we will learn why we should use Yahoo tools and developer platforms over their Google counterparts.

Over the past year the NYC MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) has been going after Web developers who use schedule data to create applications to help public transportation passengers make better use of the system. As a railfan, I’ve always found this policy absurd. Google has been able to get access to this same data set since the launch of their Google Maps with subway directions last year and HopStop has the data as well.

Michael Grynbaum from the NY Times has a great story today about the progress that’s been made with the MTA in opening up the schedule data. Complaints against two web developers have been dropped. Grynbaum discusses how a variety of cities across the U.S. share their schedule and transit data with the public. Up north, Toronto held a “transit camp” in 2007 to help create a better TTC website.

At the end of the column, there’s a comment from Internet law expert Jonathan Zittrain who noted, “I love that the subversive act of the 21st century in the subway is not graffiti, but mapping out the stations so you can know where to exit the car. Twenty years ago they would have been tagging the cars. In both cases, the city is upset.”

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In my past life I was responsible for creating archives of content after our consumer products went live. This was pre-Web 2.0 and was typically a painful process trying to make sure that I grabbed every product mention.

Today there are a variety of services that make it easier to archive content around a term or product. A new offering from Portland-based Iterasi launching today is hoping to do the job even better. The service is named Positive Press and is setup to capture, archive and report on any content across the Web. The core of the product is Iterasi’s archiving service which saves actual web pages from the time of the save including all contents. I spoke with CEO Pete Grillo who showed me that you can even archive full RSS feeds and the archive is of the webpages that the stories are from not just the plain RSS content.

Positive Press can also archive Twitter messages in the full Twitter style and the messages are retained for all time. It’s very simple to use – just enter a search term and any time that term is used on twitter, Positive Press will archive it. Apparently Twitter only saves 30-days of messages.
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By now I am sure everyone has heard of the cash for clunkers (official name CARS - car allowance rebate system) program run by the U.S. government. It’s a $3 billion dollar bailout program for the auto industry paid for by tax dollars. If you are new to the program, here’s how it works. If you have a car that’s considered a clunker, you can get up to a $4,500 bottom line discount on any new car.

In my new role I see a lot of websites that are clunkers. Many of the sites haven’t been touched in a decade, are broken, are out-of-date, missing any current functionality or aren’t indexed in Google. How many dollars of revenue are these businesses losing out on because their website is a clunker?

I am not even talking about any sort of social networking or social media optimization. Just simple updates so that the sites are usable and, more importantly, findable. By investing in creating better small business websites, the local economy will benefit which in turn will provide more jobs and strengthen local businesses for the long term. Some of the concept overlaps with Robert Scoble’s 2010 web concept.

With that I’d like to introduce the concept of the “Cash for Clunkers Website Edition”. I’ve posted my initial thoughts on the concept and program in my Information Week column. Have a look at the concept and let me know your thoughts!

Swiss-based online scheduling tool Doodle has announced the launch of Doodle Premium today. I would have preferred if they called it Super Doodle but I guess Doodle Premium will have to do. The last time we covered Doodle they were launching an online scheduling tool inside of Facebook.

Doodle and MyDoodle will remain free while the Doodle Premium will cost $28/year. Basically Doodle Premium allows the user to customize the look and feel of the site. It’s a way to personalize the events that Doodle users create and send to their participants. The price seems a bit on the high side as $9 or $14 feels about right but I am sure the Doodle team researched the right price. Pricing is always the hardest part of any business, whether web-based or brick-and-mortar.

The company also notes that Premium Doodle is ad-free and customers can also request personal information from their event participants, such as postal address, e-mail address, and phone number.

If you are as much of an analytics nut as I am, then the video below is for you. It features Dr Matthew Hindman, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University discussing online analytics. Dr. Hindman uses a variety of data from Hitwise to go very deep into the true analytics and much further than a basic web report.

From the overview, "Using three years of daily Web traffic data, and new models adapted from financial mathematics, this talk examines large-scale variation in Web traffic. These data show that Web traffic is highly heteroskedastic, with smaller sites having orders of magnitude more variation in the relative number of visitors they receive. These consistent patterns allow us to provide reasonable estimates of how likely it is Google will still be the most visited US site a year from now".

Dr. Hindman talks about rank volatility, items that are missing from traffic, the audience distribution curves for newspapers and news/media websites, and how big media plays musical chairs and how those chairs might affect staffing levels in the future. He also looks at whether the Web and online media can help save newspapers.

It’s 45 minutes long and while Hitwise data is not perfect, the analysis is worth the time.

Not only are most of the hottest Web 2.0 startups unprofitable, quite a few lack viable revenue models altogether. This has led cynics like me to criticize these startups quite harshly over the past several years.

Twitter, for instance, is the perfect example of the prototypical Web 2.0 startup that has captured the hearts and minds of the Web 2.0 "community" but hasn’t captured any real money (outside of venture capital).

When confronted with questions about the financial viability of their hottest startups, Web 2.0 proponents usually have a similar response: Rome wasn’t built in a day. When Google launched, we’re reminded, it didn’t know how exactly how it was going to make money. For young Web 2.0 startups that are growing rapidly, we’re often told that growth and "critical mass" are more important than revenue models and profitability.

As we recently learned that Digg was still losing money on revenue numbers that look quite paltry, it occurred to me that Digg and some of Web 2.0’s other hot young startups really aren’t hot young startups anymore.

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