Weekend Web, Tech, Commerce, Music, and Entertainment News from the Reader

It seems like there were a lot of small, interesting, news stories that came up in Google Reader (My RSS Reader) in the last three days, so I thought I'd lay them out briefly:

• Fred Wilson calls for companies to implement purchasing through text messaging, noting that texting is now a primary way that most people communicate, and small things like movie/song purchases could easily be activated through SMS. Jott is showing how much can be done via short voice and SMS. Interestingly I read in the same weekend that Pizza Hut and Papa Johns are now accepting pizza orders via text message; I don't advocate eating their pizza, but if sub-par fast pizza chains can leverage modern technology, I'm sure other commercial companies can take the next step.
• Facebook continues to refine the way information is added to the newsfeed, and what rights 3rd parties (applications) have in interacting with users en mass. I'm a big fan of the information stream (I wish people leveraged social resources more), and expect that it will change in a big way this year. Companies like friendfeed are showing more interesting progress, and that same technology could be used in Facebook to make the newsfeed more all-encompassing and more valuable. In any case it's good to see that Facebook is continually looking to improve user-experience and information value. [see my friendfeed page here or at the right of my blog or left of my facebook profile]
• Google Operating System has an interesting article outlining how Google Reader could benefit from features that exist in Gmail. All of the suggestions are strong, could leverage long term value out of Google Reader (similar to how adding search functions changed the information store value of Google Reader), and when you think about it, seem obvious. Another interesting web application, ReadBurner, is leveraging the shared item function from Google Reader to create a Digg competitor of sorts; this seems like an obvious application that Google could do natively stronger than ReadBurner could do, and I don't see how they can stay out of this space. Hopefully innovation rolls out in a big way in Google Reader this year.
• Mark Cuban wrote about how musicians need to let go of the concept of the music album, and recognize the success of micro-payment / micro-purchasing, i.e. the $0.99 cent single. He says 27 single tracks sold more than 100k times in a single week, which shows how big the single is, how big our threshold for small, inexpensive purchases is, and calls for bands to start offering subscription-type single track models. It's a good idea, and the next in a long line of suggestions that are being made across the web about how the music business could reform to fit the changing digital entertainment sales landscape. The larger point is this - the music industry is not dead; there is a lot of money to be made, all it takes is recognition that making money will require flexibility and innovation.
• EA announced they will begin offering games to be downloaded and ad-supported. This is newsworthy because it's the first real venture into ad-supported video games beyond the Pogo / Real Arcade / etc. free online casual games subset. EA is recognizing that there can be more engaging, higher-level games that fall between the casual game and the hard-core game, which will attract players if the price is right, which means if the price is free. By offering these games by online download, it also means that they can sell dynamic advertising to be streamed in like Massive does with XBox360, and that's a valuable opportunity for advertisers, which means it's a valuable proposition for EA. This could be a market-changing move by a company that has traditionally relied on a few big key franchises that come out at a significant price year after year to the same fans.
• HBO has started testing an online offering where HBO subscribers can access content via streaming broadband. On-demand movies seems like a must, with Netflix, Apple, and others offering it. The real question, though, is how they are going to combat piracy. Networks are finding that offering free content with ad-support online is a great alternative revenue stream and alternative offering to make illegal downloading less worthwhile (it is often about content accessibility). HBO isn't addressing this problem by only having offerings for their current subscribers. Ultimately all content that people can get for free somewhere (legally or illegally) needs to be unlocked and offered via value proposition to the masses.

Technorati Tags: google reader,gmail,sms,rss,text messaging,texting,hbo,broadband tv,streaming content,EA,video games,free,download,music,mark cuban,readburner,digg,facebook

Google's ulterior motive of collecting more information, and Google profiles

There's an interesting interview with Marissa Mayer, Google's VP, where she discusses how Google sometimes makes moves for ulterior motives - her example being 1-800-GOOG-411.  Engineers were really looking for data to analyze in working on speech recognition modeling:

"The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy."

It's an interesting point and makes you think of Google products and Google decisions in a different light.

Seperately, Google has started integrating social features into more of their tools, and are beginning to develop the Google profile, which will follow you across their products.  Right now you can see it in Google Shared Stuff, in Google Maps, in Google Reader, and more.  In Google Reader, you can now see your gmail and chat contacts' shared feeds in a separate dashboard.  Soon you will hopefully begin to receive information flow about more actions directly within the same contact dashboard, just like the newsfeed in facebook (these same contacts are updating shared documents, adding photos to Picasa, building maps, etc).

View and subscribe to my shared items feed here (visible on the right of this page) - and let me know if you use Google Reader.

If you want to follow the Chuck Darrow Courier Post Phillies Blog via RSS thanks to Dapper

Philadelphia Courier Post Online writer Chuck Darrow has a blog you can find here that covers the Philadelphia Phillies baseball season "from a fan's perspective."  While I used to really enjoy reading it, it unfortunately got discarded since the supposed 'blog' had no RSS feed allowing me to see when postings I would like to read and comment on were published.

Now despite the Courier Post's short-sightedness and capitalization of the blog buzz-word without the  prototypical blog element (RSS feed), I have my solution: Dapper.  I've now created an RSS feed that updates as the content on the standard html Chuck Darrow article page updates.  Dapper lets you specify non-RSS content sources and it scours the site for updates, feeding it through in numerous ways once new content is discovered.  Now be alerted of Chuck Darrow's new articles via RSS.

The picture above is in honor of ESPN writer Jayson Stark nominating both Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins for NL MVP.

Technorati Tags: dapper, courierpost, philadelphia courierpost, philladelphia phillies, phillies, chuck darrow, rss

Twitter Life Blogging and the Facebook Wall

Is anyone using Twitter right now? I imagine most people aren't even familiar with it, but the basic idea is short form blogging (a few sentances) that can be subscribed to via RSS and SMS (tex messaging) so that people can make mass statements to their circle of friends. It's basically text messaging to a group, but integrated into RSS so it can be mixed with other messaging sources.

I'm playing around with it, subscribing to a few feeds, but I'm not sure how it can add value to the average person. I suppose if everyone got into it this could replace or supplement the Facebook wall, which people use to update their social circle on their life, but would join up with news and information sources.

In any case, the average person in my life doesn't have a phone they receive RSS feeds on, doesn't have a pocket pc phone that makes it easy to receive 10 text messages a minute for information purposes. Without the ability to easily manage and consume mass information via mobile, does Twitter make sense for the average audience?

Speaking of the Facebook wall - how easy would it be for Facebook to become the start page for millions of people? They already spin in advertising directly into the news feed; let us ad our own news sources to our news feed, ad a Google search box up top, and you have a customized start page that would attract most of the 18 - 24 audience. Think about it, this would be so easy for Facebook to implement, and it jump ahead of Google Personalized or Netvibes in a second.

Technorati Tags: twitter, facebook, news feed, netvibes, google personalized, start page, text messaging, sms, rss