Home / readwriteweb.com rss archive / October-05-2007


Trillian Astra Coming to OSX
Trillian Astra, the next version of the popular Windows multi-client chat application Trillian, is being developed for the Mac. Cerulean Studios, the makers of Trillian, has released a limited and experimental Mac version to approved testers of their new Astra platform. Hopefully a working version will be made available for general release someday; Astra itself as been in invite-only Alpha stage for nearly a full year now.Testers can grab the download here and readers interested in becoming testers can go here.Trillian on Mac is something that many people have waited for for a long time. It's an aesthetically pleasing, feature rich service with a very loyal group of users. Trillian Astra users can chat seamlessly with friends on Yahoo!, ICQ, AIM, Bonjour, Windows Live, Google Talk and MySpace IM. There's a web component of the new service, an RSS ticker and more - see a screenshot of the pared down Mac version below.The particulars of this service as opposed to others are...

Survey: Young Adults Think Facebook is #1; Women More Into it Than Men
A new survey released this week by the marketing analysts and consultants at Anderson Analytics found that Facebook is now the #1 most liked website among US respondents between the ages of 18 and 24. In other words, it's not just tech bloggers talking about Facebook all the time.The sample set for the survey consisted of 1,000 young people suckered into answering questions and viewing ads at the "analyst" company's website, Brandport.com, and 500 Facebook users - for a total of 1500 respondents. Perhaps our headline should then read "Young Facebook Users Think Facebook is #1." The release is here, I found it via Kathleen Mazzaco. Last year's #1 spot was held by MySpace and presuming the study surveyed 1/3 of its respondents on Facebook then as well, this is a big change. I can say anecdotally that everywhere I look I see laptops (other than mine) on Facebook all the time.Gender DifferencesGender differences in the survey were marked; use of social networking sites was twice...

Can A Thousand People Working Together Beat a Chess Grandmaster?
In August we wrote about Stan Oleynick, an Internet developer who was selling the rights to his name to finance a web project. At the time, his top bid was $16,000. Now, it's $25,500 (and he's actually only received one new bid since we wrote about his interesting, if a little wacky, idea). That's still well off his goal of $250,000. But Stan still has 3 days to attract bidders, and now they might have a bit more incentive to pony up the big bucks.Along with the rights to give Stan his new name, the winning bidder will also receive a 10% stake in the web company he is attempting to launch. When we last wrote about Stan, his web project was stil under wraps, though he promised it would be revolutionary. This week it was finally revealed: the winner of Stan's name will also become a shareholder in CrowdChess.As the name would suggest, CrowdChess is a crowdsourced version of chess. Teams made up of hundreds or thousands of players compete against one another by voting for...

1000 Docstoc Invites for Read/WriteWeb Readers
Docstoc, which demoed at the TechCrunch40 last month, is offering 1000 private beta invites to Read/WriteWeb readers. Docstoc is aiming to be the YouTube or Flickr of professional documents, by allowing users to upload and share (via an embeddable flash widget) professional documents. Docstoc has been in private beta and approaching official launch, but they were kind enough to give 1000 Read/WriteWeb readers a chance to preview the service early. Just navigate to http://docstoc.com/User/register.aspx and enter "RWW" (without the quotes) as the invite code to claim your invite. These are released on a first come, first serve basis.A video introducing Docstoc to Read/WriteWeb readers (you!) is embedded below.Remember, go to http://docstoc.com/User/register.aspx and enter "RWW" (without the quotes) as the invite code to check out Docstoc. Let us know what you think of it.

Dear New York Times: The Pay Wall Was Only Half the Problem
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times removed the pay wall in front of its TimesSelect service, which controlled access to much of the paper's archives and its popular columnists like Thomas Friedman and Frank Rich. Unfortunately, much of the paper's non-wire service content still sits behind an utterly useless and annoying registration wall.The Times says the reason they ask for registration is to be "able to offer people around the world free-of-charge access to news, reviews and more." But is it really necessary? Can't they do all those things without annoying users? Do to they get anything out of it? I don't think so.I think the New York Times registration system is hurting them for a handful of reasons:It's annoying. On more than one occasion I have simply left the Times site for Google News to find a different source for the news I was trying to access because I couldn't be bothered by a registration wall. The NYT nixed TimesSelect fees in the hopes of exposing...

YouTube Spam Panic Emerging; Why Don't All Networks Have Spam Control?
Multiple press outlets are reporting this morning about the increasing use of YouTube's messaging and basic video hosting features for spam. There's nothing that many people hate more than spam, apparently feeling obligated to read every email that lands in their inbox. Why the new world of social networking and social media hasn't taken the most basic steps to stop spam and pre-empt this criticism I don't know. Perhaps like MySpace's page-load intensive but awful site design, YouTube doesn't stop spam because it serves their interests in driving traffic and selling ads.Google's video sharing site still hasn't instituted as much as a captcha requirement in order to send a message through its service, something that even MySpace did only last week. If the proliferation of spam blogs on Google's Blogspot is any indication it may be a long time before YouTube does anything about spam emails driving users back to their site.Unfortunately even if the sitemail spam was brought...

Notes From the Field: Future of Web Apps Conference
[Richard] The Future of Web Apps conference was held again this week in London. John O'Shea and Fergus Burns of nooked were there (a company I am an advisor to) and John offered up some comprehensive notes for Read/WriteWeb. I read through them and decided to post 'as is', because there are plenty of nuggets there - and I'd hate to edit out any of the good stuff! So here you go, John's notes from FOWA in their unedited glory:Wednesday High Performance Websites - Steve Souders Steve is Chief Performance Yahoo! at, well Yahoo!. He has worked extensively on improving the page load performance of various Yahoo 'properties' including the main search engine homepage. His talk centered primarily on the topics covered in his new book - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529307/ which covers how following his 14 different 'rules' will improve the page load times, leading to a better user experience. His book concentrates on optimizing the front end HTML/script/resource loading...

Creative Entrepreneurs: The Next Masters of the Universe
For decades financiers of one type or another have been the “Masters of the Universe”. People who, as Bob Dylan once sang, “make the rules, for the wise men and the fools”.In the 1970’s, with stagflation and oil crises, it was the commodities traders who ruled the roost. As the 1980s kicked in, the forex traders had their day; when Tom Wolfe published Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987, the leading character was a bond trader. From 1995 to 2000, the VCs in Silicon Valley had inherited the formula for turning base metal into gold. Today the crown is shared by Private Equity (PE) and Hedge Funds. When you see the PE big shots selling shares to the public, you know the PE party is nearing its riotous end. And the Hedge Fund party is getting crowded, with too many lesser talented investors dragging average returns down - to levels similar to buying an index fund (but with massively bigger fees).So who will be the next 'Masters of...