Philipp Heintze

Adam Ostrow wrote this weekend on the horrible state of advertising targeting on AdSense for RSS, which as we’ve learned today is the replacement for the FeedBurner Advertiser Network. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks noted exactly how disappointed he has become in this transition from Google’s $100 million folly which is FeedBurner.

As Allen says, cost-per-click advertisements just don’t seem to be that great of a fit for RSS feeds, particularly Google’s AdSense units, the stingiest of all the ad formats.  Google, in what’s becoming a trademark fashion, bought up FeedBurner and trashed the company. Instead of loudly gutting and relaunching the company, the primary draw for FeedBurner’s existence was very quietly eulogized on a Google Group posting, as noted by Valleywag today:

This is a quick note to confirm that FeedBurner’s former, independent ad network, FeedBurner Ad Network (aka “FAN”), is officially closed. No new applications for FAN publishers are being accepted and we expect the broad variety of options provided through AdSense (including the new AdSense for Feeds product, powered with FeedBurner feeds) will give publishers valuable new revenue-earning potential.

The system worked, as many have noted by personal experience, to deliver ads that payed out around a $10 CPM or even higher. Most folks are lucky to have an AdSense account that pays a fraction of that amount, and will be even more hard pressed to find joy there given the poor targeting and traditionally poor placement of ads in a typical RSS post item.

Given how long I’ve utilized AdSense, I have no expectations for its improvement, unlike some of my fellow bloggers.  Simply because the strongest reason (their monetization) for keeping FeedBurner no longer exists doesn’t mean it’s time to dump the service as Steven Hodson suggests today. It does make Google particularly weak in this product sector, and leaves them wide open for strong competition. Steven outlines the reasons:

When you consider the following

• Google closes down the FeedBurner Advertising Network
• The FeedBurner site metrics don’t even come close to jiving with other services including Google’s own site metrics service
• FeedBurner subscriber counts are not consistent or can be gamed

So tell me why are we still using this service?

The only purpose at this point in keeping FeedBurner around it portability and compatibility of data. Having a system that can read all the various flavors and manglings of RSS and Atom out there in the world and then serve it back up in an appropriate manner almost flawlessly is still a rare thing. I can’t think of another competitor to FeedBurner, in fact, that does this.

More importantly, FeedBurner accounts serve as a nice shield from the often transitory nature of Web 2.0 products.  Any time I generate a feed I want to expose to the public, I don’t care if it’s hosted by Google themselves, I run it through FeedBurner, because I know if the original feed goes away, I can instantly re-point the feed the public subscribes to towards another source.  I don’t have to lose subscribers.

This, though, is a relatively easy thing to code and get running. What isn’t easy is building a business around monetizing RSS. The first company to come up with the silver bullet in that department has only a few small hoops to jump, and they’ll be able to slay the mighty Google.

In the meantime, I suggest folks roll their own solution. RSS files are a great place for brand advertisements, and both pundits quoted in this article (Steven Hodson and Allen Stern) have cited success in selling their own ads for their feeds.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Google AdSense in Feedburner RSS Feeds, Coming. Soon. Seriously!
Feedburner Adds Self-Publishing Ads
Feedburner, aka The Splog Slayer
Feedburner Acquires Blogbeat
Feedburner Allows Bloggers AdSense Access
Google Acquiring Feedburner?
FeedBurner Handling AOL Network’s Feeds

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple Financial

Digital Daily, part of the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital site, is reporting that Apple's market value is now greater than that of Google.

The current market capitalization of Apple is US$159.37 billion, squeaking by Google's market cap of US$157.56 billion. Next in Apple's sights ought to be the old man on the block, IBM. Their current market value is around US$170 billion. It may take a while for Apple to catch up with Microsoft, though -- at the present time MSFT is worth about US$255 billion.

What's your take on when Apple will overtake IBM? I'm betting on April 1st, 2009.

Financial information from Forbes.com

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Call it the Facebook World Tour. Even though Facebook is now the largest social network in the world,—with 132 million unique visitors in June—it is also still the fastest growing.
(At least among the major social networks). According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook’s visitor growth is up 153 percent on an annual basis. This compares to anemic 3 percent growth for MySpace. Other social networks showing strong global growth include Hi5 (100 percent) and Friendster (50 percent), despite each of those being less than half the size of Facebook. Orkut and Bebo fall in at 41 percent and 32 percent growth, respectively.

If you break down Facebook’s growth into regions, its presence in North America is still growing at a healthy 38 percent rate (with 49 million visitors a month). Europe (with 35 million visitors a month) is growing nearly ten times as fast. And growth in rest of the world is on an even faster tear (403 percent growth in the Middle East and Africa, 458 percent growth in Asia Pacific, 10,555 percent growth in Latin America), albeit from a smaller base. (For another cut at the regional popularity of social networks based on Google search activity, see these maps at Pingdom)

Much of these huge growth numbers come from the fact that Facebook had hardly no presence in many of these regions until recently when it started its major push to translate the site to other languages. A year ago, it had only one million uniques a month in all of Latin America, three million in the Middle East and Africa, and four million in all of Asia Pacific. When you look at it that way, 10,555 percent growth isn’t as amazing as the raw numbers would suggest. And within these regions, it still has a lot of work to do. For instance,it is floundering in Japan.

The takeaway here is that Facebook’s growth is now coming from abroad, and it still has a long way to go in other countries. Will it get lost in translation, or are we looking at another global superpower here?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Empfohlen von Philipp Heintze
Tom Waits lässt grüssen!

Sherry Black and the Port Authority Band-Website

Over the past year, Facebook developers have been searching for new metrics solutions on the Facebook platform. While there was a basic set of metrics launched a few months into the platform, there weren’t many features on the metrics. Ultimately this has opened up a window for a number of analytics companies to provide more robust services to developers on the platform.

Yesterday, Facebook announced the addition of new metrics for all applications. There is now a “features” tab which provides “total counts for user actions including canvas page views, clicks on profile boxes, confirmation of Feed forms, and, the adding and removing of bookmarks.” It’s great to see Facebook building out their analytics services and I’m somewhat surprised that it has taken them this long to add these features.

Does this spell the death of third-party analytics providers? Not at all. There are currently a number of analytics solutions including Kiss Metrics, Kontagent, Sometrics and Developer Analytics all of whom provide a wide range of services. I will be outlining the different analytics solutions for developers in a future post. For now, you can read more about it on the Facebook wiki.

Empfohlen von Robert Scoble
Nice to see my sponsor, Seagate, on here. I was at Seagate yesterday meeting with their social media guy, Rich Harris, and they are planning a bunch of stuff that'll come out over the next month. They are on FriendFeed now too at http://www.friendfeed.com/seagate (Seagate probably makes the hard drive inside your computer).

According to a recent report by Forrester Research that looked at 90 blogs from Fortune 500 companies, most corporate blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” Sadly, two-thirds hardly ever get any comments, 70% stick strictly to business topics, and worse 56% just republish press releases or already public news. That has lead many to think that corporate blogging isn’t really worth much effort, which is a shame, because properly done a corporate blog can have tremendous value. Below is a list of 15 companies that really get corporate blogging and produce blogs that are informative, fascinating, and a joy to read even for people who aren’t die-hard fans of the company.

• Dell - Though Dell’s corporate blog rarely strays from Dell-centric news, the company posts with a great conversational voice, often breaks news on their blog (which keeps people company back), and listens and responds to customers. Dell also posts regularly (1-2 posts per day at least) which keeps content fresh and encourages repeat visits.
• Lenovo - The great collection of blogs from computer maker Lenovo demonstrate that the company really understands blogging. Lenovo intersperses posts about its product line with musings about business, design, life, and technology. Definitely don’t miss the Design Matters blog, which should be a must-read for any designer.
• 37signals - 37signals is kind of the poster child for corporate blogging. Their “Signal vs. Noise” blog has almost 100,000 RSS subscribers and there’s a good reason: 37signals rarely blogs about their products anymore (they split off a separate product-only blog for that), but instead shares advice and insights about business, design, editorial, and other topics.
• Adobe - Adobe offers a huge collection of employee blogs, many of which are great reads. By allowing employees to blog, Adobe has empowered them to evangelize their products for them — many post tutorials, advice, reviews, and other great tid-bits promoting Adobe products — while not pigeon holing them into talking only about Adobe.
• BBC - In addition to their news blogs, the BBC publishes a series of behind-the-scenes blogs. They’re tremendously interesting, especially The Editors blog, in which BBC News editorial staff dissect the broadcaster’s news coverage and the media industry in general.
• Southwest Airlines - Southwest Airlines’ “Nuts About Southwest” blog doesn’t take itself too seriously — and that’s a good thing. The company blogs about itself and the airline industry with a personal touch and has been producing a series of fun, behind-the-scenes videos that are both interesting and engaging.
• Sun Microsystems - Like Adobe, Sun allows their employees to blog. They’ve been doing it for a long time, and their blog portal has over 4,500 bloggers covering over 110,000 posts. Some of their blogs, such as that of Web 2.0 and Web Services Evangelist Arun Gupta, have become quite popular on their own. That’s 110,000 posts of promotional gold for Sun and they know it.
• Freshbooks - Taking a page from 37signals, the team at Freshbooks uses their corporate blog to share advice and insights into their way of doing things. Slowly, and in large part due to their blog, Freshbooks is turning their users into true fans.
• Marriott International - Marriott on the Move is the official blog of Marriott Hotels, Resorts, and Suites Chairman and CEO Bill Marriott. Though a self-described technophobe, Marriott uses the blog to talk about his thoughts and opinions on all sorts of things related to being a hotelier. Marriott, who was recently featured on NBC Nightly News for a story on corporate blogging, says he blogs because it is “a great way to communicate with [your] customers and stakeholders in this day and age.” We agree.
• Seagate - Penned by Seagate Global Marketing Manager Pete Steege, Storage Effect is a must-read blog for anyone in the computer storage industry. Beyond first looks at upcoming Seagate products, Steege mixes it up with musings about the industry and fun posts like a recent one about Batman’s storage requirements.
• General Motors - The GM Fastlane Blog is a great example of corporate blogging because GM has clearly realized that regurgitating press releases is not what blogs are made for. GM talks a lot on their blog about their cars and trucks and the design choices they make while creating them, but they also throw in interesting treatises on current hot-button issues, such as alternative energy.
• Quicken Loans - Quicken Loans publishes a handful of unique blogs — unique among corporate blogs in that they’re not overly self-referential. Their What’s the Diff? blog, for example, publishes stories about “things that make the difference in business and in life.” The Quizzle blog, on the other hand, posts advice about how to understand the home loan market. It is all subtle marketing for Quicken Loans, but it is done in an informative and useful manner that will win points among customers.
• FiveRuns - FiveRuns, who create products aimed at Ruby on Rails developers, also publish an excellent blog. Along with regular tutorials about how to do things with Rails and use their products, the FiveRuns team also posts weekly five question interviews with prominent members of the Rails community. Brilliant stuff.
• Accenture - Consulting firm Accenture publishes 8 blogs that are definitely worth checking out. Rather than just blog about what Accenture can do for your business, the company has tapped some of its smartest employees to share insights on business, communications, technology, consulting, and hiring. A sample of recent posts: how to balance work and life, thoughts about Twitter’s downtime, and musings on GTD theories.
• Amazon Web Services - Amazon’s Web Services blog is truly one of the great corporate blogs because it reads like a fan blog. You’d never know that Jeff Barr, the scribe behind the AWS blog, is a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon just by reading his posts. That’s because Barr doesn’t write like a corporate flak. Instead he writes with the voice of someone who is truly amazed each day by the stuff that people build on Amazon’s suite of web services, and that makes reading the blog a pleasure.

My friend and former colleague Marshall Kirkpatrick also wrote a round up of good company blogs over at ReadWriteWeb in May. His list has some other great blogs that you should definitely check out if you’re either looking for something interesting to read or trying to figure out how to take advantage of your own company’s blogging efforts.

What other corporate blogs do you enjoy reading? Let us know in the comments.

Empfohlen von yooper1019
Holy Crap, this is awesome! I need to jailbrake my iPhone ASAP!!! Or sell it and get Android!

Israeli startup TuneWiki has come a long way.

Soon after the iPhone’s launch, the company released an application that allowed users to view highly-accurate lyrics synced karaoke style to any song stored in their music library. But because there was no App Store at the time, TuneWiki was limited to users with jailbroken (hacked) iPhones. Despite this, the application has racked up over 1.2 million downloads since its launch - a number competitive with those seen by the most popular Apple sanctioned apps. The company raised a funding round from Benchmark Capital’s Israel fund.

And now, after nearly a year of developing a Karaokee-like music program for hacked iPhones, the company has developed an application that stands a good chance at becoming the standard media player on Google’s forthcoming Android platform.

At first glance, the Android version of TuneWiki has more than a little in common with the iPhone’s default media player (except with a black color scheme). Songs are sorted into spartan but easy to navigate lists, and playing a song displays its album art alongside standard playback controls. The player integrates TuneWiki’s extensive database of lyrics, which are played karaoke-style alongside your songs (lyrics are pulled from a user-modified database). There’s also support for YouTube videos - if you search for a song you don’t have, the player will automatically take you to the YouTube version, which also support synced lyrics.

Perhaps most exciting is TuneWiki’s integration with location services. Because the player can optionally tell TuneWiki’s servers what song you’re listening to, it can offer an interactive map that displays musical tastes across the world. This could be a huge hit on college campuses, where breakthrough artists tend to be discovered first. It’s also fun to find people in Dubai who listen to Kelly Clarkson (see the video below).

One of the most key features to the iPhone’s success is its ability to sync seamlessly with a user’s media library through iTunes. TuneWiki recognizes this, and is doing everything it can to make syncing as painless as possible. The company will be offering plugins for iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Songbird, and will also feature support for wireless syncing across Bluetooth or Wi-fi.

Some of these features are already offered on the jailbroken iPhone app, but the Android version is clearly TuneWiki’s focus, and for good reason. The company is one of fifty finalists in Google’s Android Developer Challenge, and has received extensive support from Google and a number of other companies during development.

Android is an open platform, which means users (or at least device manufacturers) will be able to install whatever media player they want onto the phones. Despite this freedom, there will probably be one or two media players that emerge as the platform standards. TuneWiki has positioned itself to become one of these, with features that go above and beyond those found on the iPhone, and a focus on keeping things as simple as possible.

Here’s a demo video we took on the app running on the Android emulator:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

A few months ago I was planning a vacation to Austria and Italy. I knew a few words and phrases in German and Italian, but that was about it. So I looked around for some portable language dictionaries. I thought Google Translate was great, but the web page didn't work that well on the iPhone. So I teamed up with David Singleton, a fellow engineer in our London office, to build an iPhone interface for Google Translate.

Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can't use the local data network. We wrote this using the AJAX Language API, so every time the Google Translate team updates the languages they support, the languages will automatically be added here.

I tried an early version of this interface out on my trip and it was great -- although my pronunciation wasn't. So every now and then, I would just hold up my phone to let people read what I couldn't. If you're wondering about data costs, I found that I could get between 200 and 400 translations in 1MB of data download. Although we don't charge for this service, your carrier may charge for the data usage so be sure to know what your roaming rates are. For my plan, I found that I could translate 400 phrases for less than $10 when roaming internationally.

To try Google Translate for iPhone, point your iPhone or iPod Touch web browser to www.google.com and choose the "more" tab. Or you can go directly to translate.google.com in your browser. If you are traveling this summer (perhaps on your way to Beijing?) we hope you find this useful.

Posted by Allen Hutchison, software engineer

Those interested in geotagging may well be interested in Nikon’s newly announced P6000, a $500, 13.5-megapixel compact digital camera with a built-in GPS for automatic geotagging. As a Nikon fanboy I’m intrigued; as a digital SLR user I’m jealous. Digital Photography Review, Gizmodo.

It seems Apple has picked up yet another patent application. This time, the focus appears to be on remotely streaming your iTunes library at home onto your iPhone or iPod Touch while you're out and about via WiFi or a cellular network. 

As it stands right now, you have to physically put your songs, videos or what have you onto your iPhone or iPod during the synching process. What this patent proposes is that you would only need to transfer a directory of the files in your library to the external device. When you go to play a song, it would then access your library at home over WiFi or a cell network and stream the content to your phone. 

There's no word on when or if this technology will ever be put into place, but something similar is currently used on Apple TV and Airport Express. 

[via MacRumors]