In 1980 AT&T was a powerful institution with a lucrative monopoly on transporting long-distance voice communications, but forbidden by law from permitting the government to eavesdrop without a warrant. Then in 1981 Judge Greene took its voice monopoly away, and in the 1980s and 90s the Internet ate the rest of its lunch. By 1996, Nicholas Negroponte wrote what many others also foresaw: “Shipping bits will be a crummy business. Transporting voice will be even worse. By 2020 … competition will render bandwidth a commodity of the worst kind, with no margins and no real basis for charging anything.”

During the 1980s and 90s, AT&T cleverly got out of any business except shipping commodity bits: in 1981 it (was forced to) split off its regional phone companies; in 1996 it (voluntarily) split off its equipment-making arm as Lucent Technologies; in 2000-2001 it sold off its Wireless division to raise cash. Now AT&T long-distance bit-shipping is just a division of the former SBC, renamed AT&T.

What profit centers are left in shipping commodity bits? The United States Government spends 44 billion dollars a year on its spy agencies. It’s very plausible that the NSA is willing to pay $100 million or more for a phone/internet company to install a secret room where the NSA can spy on all the communications that pass through. A lawsuit by the EFF alleges such a room, and its existence was implicitly confirmed by the Director of National Intelligence in an interview with the El Paso Times. We know the NSA spends at least $200 million a year on information-technology outsourcing and some of this goes to phone companies such as Verizon.

Therefore, if it’s true that AT&T has such a secret room, then it may be simply that this is the only way AT&T knows how to make money off of shipping bits: it sells to the government all the information that passes through. Furthermore, economics tells us that in a commodity market, if one vendor is able to lower its price below cost, then other vendors must follow unless they also are able to make up the difference somehow. That is, there will be substantial economic pressure on all the other telecoms to accept the government’s money in exchange for access to everybody’s mail, Google searches, and phone calls.

In the end, it could be that the phone companies that cooperated with the NSA did so not for reasons of patriotism, or because their arms were twisted, but because the NSA came with a checkbook. Taking the NSA’s money may be the only remaining profit center in bit-shipping.

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According to government documents studied by The New York Times, the FBI asked several phone companies to analyze phone-call patterns of Americans using a technology called “communities of interest”. Verizon refused, saying that it didn’t have any such technology. AT&T, famously, did not refuse.

What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very clearly in a 2001 research paper from AT&T itself, entitled “Communities of Interest” (by C. Cortes, D. Pregibon, and C. Volinsky). They use high-tech data-mining algorithms to scan through the huge daily logs of every call made on the AT&T network; then they use sophisticated algorithms to analyze the connections between phone numbers: who is talking to whom? The paper literally uses the term “Guilt by Association” to describe what they’re looking for: what phone numbers are in contact with other numbers that are in contact with the bad guys?

When this research was done, back in the last century, the bad guys where people who wanted to rip off AT&T by making fraudulent credit-card calls. (Remember, back in the last century, intercontinental long-distance voice communication actually cost money!) But it’s easy to see how the FBI could use this to chase down anyone who talked to anyone who talked to a terrorist. Or even to a “terrorist.”

Here are a couple of representative diagrams from the paper:

Fig. 4. Guilt by association - what is the shortest path to a fraudulent node?

Fig. 5. A guilt by association plot. Circular nodes correspond to wireless service accounts while rectangular nodes are conventional land line accounts. Shaded nodes have been previously labeled as fraudulent by network security associates.

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Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups - either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Web News

Microsoft Invests in Facebook

The week was dominated by the news that Microsoft beat Google to an investment in Facebook. There was initially a rumor that Google had won the much hyped deal. But then the news hit that Microsoft had invested $240 million for a minority stake in Facebook, at a valuation of $15 billion. As part of the deal, and probably driving it, Microsoft expanded their advertising agreement with Facebook to international markets (they already had responsibility for US banner ads). Note however that this deal leaves room for Facebook to run its own advertising network, which we have been discussing on Read/WriteWeb. Facebook's ad system will likely use social profiling to target ads, given the wealth of such data that Facebook has.

There was a lot of follow-up discussion on the deal, including from our Read/WriteWeb writers. Alex Iskold wrote an intriguing article entitled Should Google Be Afraid Of Facebook?. He concluded however that Facebook isn't in the same league as Google, so the Mountain View company doesn't have a lot to fear. Josh Catone offered a contrarian view, in light of the massive influx of cash that Facebook received earlier in the week - and more importantly, who it came from.

Let us know, in the comments to the Wrapup, whose view you agreed with more - Alex's or Josh's?

Copyright Arrests

This week saw two high profile arrests in Britain, in relation to online media copyright. The founder and some staff of a directory site called TV Links was arrested last weekend and the site was shut down by British police. Tv-links.co.uk listed links to other sites where visitors could find television content, often posted without permission of copyright holders.

On the heels of that followed another copyright arrest - British and Dutch police raided the servers of invite-only public torrent tracker OiNK.cd (formerly OiNK.me.uk) and arrested the site's 24-year-old server admin. According to the IFPI, it was one of the main sources for leaked, pre-release music on the Internet, responsible for leaking 60 major albums this year.

Judging by the comments on both posts, Read/WriteWeb readers were unimpressed (to put it mildly) by the arrests and raids.

Web Products

Al Gore's Current: Re-defining TV, Using the Web

Last week while in San Francisco R/WW Editor Richard MacManus visited Current's offices, to check out the launch of their new Current.com website. He spoke to Robin Sloan (Online Product Strategist) and Joshua Katz (President of Marketing), who gave him a demo and overview of their strategy. Richard came away impressed by Current.com's stunning design - but more importantly the new Web Native functionality that Current has built into (and around) Television watching. This post explores that innovation, which may well change our television viewing habits over time.

Jango's Social Music Service Shines In a Crowded Market

Jango is a social music site that's launching formally in the middle of next month, but has decided to reach out to blogs for coverage now. Apparently a company with an enlarged sense of proportion all along, Jango says its private beta has 300,000 users. Yet it's stayed off the radar of all the leading web 2.0 review blogs to date. Read/WriteWeb readers who click through this link can access the closed beta. You'll be prompted to create an account after you enter your first artist search. According to Marshall Kirkpatrick, it's a good looking service - think Last.fm with more social features and more AJAX. Think Pandora with profiles brought to the front and more control over the playlist.

ChoiceA Takes on the Realtors of the World, 2.0 Style

ChoiceA is a new site for do it yourself, or For Sale By Owner, real estate listings. It's got a nice, simple interface that makes good use of new web technologies and it's quite pleasing to peruse the limited listings collected prelaunch. Those listings are free to post and so far are primarily based around the Pacific Northwest of the US.

Reators though, wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick, may prove to be a case study of one of those industry roles that just can't be replaced by the internet.

Instant Messaging Round-Up

There are more and more ways to get your instant messaging done, with a large number of new online and offline clients from third parties. With so many instant messaging options, it's hard to figure out which one to use. So Josh Catone created a list of online and offline instant messengers, as well the various protocols supported by each, so that you can more easily find the one that's right for you. There's really not all that much difference between each except in interface and supported protocols. The best option for you will likely be the one that supports the networks your friends connect to and has an interface that you feel comfortable using.

You can find many other product reviews and startup profiles in our Startups category.

Analysis

2007 Web 2.0 Summit Review: How the Web 2.0 Conference Has Evolved Over 2 Years

Last week Richard MacManus attended the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. For some reason, wrote Richard, the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit was harder to analyze than the previous 3 events. It was difficult to identify an over-riding theme to this conference. For a start, the cutting edge was even further away from the Summit than it was in 2006. The main themes that Richard picked up during this conference were:

* Social networking (especially Facebook); and
* The iPhone - which was seemingly carried by at least 1 out of every 2 conference participants.

Two interesting trends to be sure, but not the cutting edge of web technology. Was this year's Web 2.0 Summit a case of 'Steady As She Goes'? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Google vs. Systran: Mountain View Does Their Own Translation

Google has switched to its own in house translation system for all 25 available language pairs. Previously, the site used Systran for almost all of its translation processing, turning to its in house software only for Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. AltaVista's Babelfish, one of the first and most well-known online translation services, still uses Systran for language processing.

Josh Catone put the two head-to-head to see which produced better results - also check out the comments to see what our readers thought.

TwitterWhere Tracks Tweets from Any Location, Like San Diego

There was lots of coverage around the web this week of the role that social media played in reporting about the wildfires in Southern California. Twitter and Google Maps received the most coverage but there are probably infinite permutations of those two tools and others, as well. One tool that just happened to launch this week was TwitterWhere, a service that makes tracking Tweets from any location easy to do. Marshall Kirkpatrick couldn't help but think of San Diego when he saw it.

You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.

R/WW Network Blogs

last100

This week our Digital Lifestyle news blog last100 covered some new features from TiVo - including multi-room viewing and the ability to transfer content to a PC for DVD burning. In online music news, last100 reported that Amazon MP3 may be the No. 3 online music store in just 30 days.

For an interesting counterpoint view to the iPhone craze, check out last100 Editor Steve O'Hear's analysis of why he bought an iPod Touch and not an iPhone.

Alt Search Engines

AltSearchEngines this week took a look at the Top 3 Alternative TV Search Engines. ASE Editor Charles Knight also analyzed the future of search. As we approach 2008, wrote Charles, the “Future of Search” seems to be less and less a guessing game every day. Check out his findings here.

Also, did you know that Alternative Search Engines collectively have a 1.7% Market Share in search? Now you do. Check out this image, courtesy of Internet World Stats:

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

The revelation that Comcast is degrading BitTorrent traffic has spawned many blog posts on how the Comcast incident bolsters the blogger’s position on net neutrality — whatever that position happens to be. Here is my contribution to the genre. Mine is different from all the others because … um … well … because my position on net neutrality is correct, that’s why.

Let’s start by looking at Comcast’s incentives. Besides being an ISP, Comcast is in the cable TV business. BitTorrent is an efficient way to deliver video content to large numbers of consumers — which makes BitTorrent a natural competitor to cable TV. BitTorrent isn’t a major rival yet, but it might plausibly develop into one. Which means that Comcast has an incentive to degrade BitTorrent’s performance and reliability, even when BitTorrent isn’t in any way straining Comcast’s network.

So why is Comcast degrading BitTorrent? Comcast won’t say. They won’t even admit what they’re doing, let alone offer a rationale for it, so we’re left to speculate. The technical details of Comcast’s blocking are only partially understood, but what we do know seems hard to square with claims that Comcast is using the most effective means to optimize some resource in their network.

Now pretend that you’re the net neutrality czar, with authority to punish ISPs for harmful interference with neutrality, and you have to decide whether to punish Comcast. You’re suspicious of Comcast, because you can see their incentive to bolster their cable-TV monopoly power, and because their actions don’t look like a good match for the legitimate network management goals that they claim motivate their behavior. But networks are complicated, and there are many things you don’t know about what’s happening inside Comcast’s network, so you can’t be sure they’re just trying to undermine BitTorrent. And of course it’s possible that they have mixed motives, needing to manage their network but choosing a method that had the extra bonus feature of hurting BitTorrent. You can ask them to justify their actions, but you can expect to get a lawyerly, self-serving answer, and to expend great effort separating truth from spin in that answer.

Are you confident that you, as net neutrality czar, would make the right decision? Are you confident that your successor as net neutrality czar, who would be chosen by the usual political process, would also make the right decision?

Even without a regulatory czar, wheels are turning to punish Comcast for what they’ve done. Customers are unhappy and are putting pressure on Comcast. If they deceived their customers, they’ll face lawsuits. We don’t know yet how things will come out, but it seems likely Comcast will regret their actions, and especially their lack of transparency.

All of which — surprise surprise — confirms my position on net neutrality: there is a risk of harmful behavior by ISPs, but writing and enforcing neutrality regulation is harder than it looks, and non-regulatory forces may constrain ISPs enough.

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Comcast’s apparent policy of blocking some BitTorrent traffic, which has been discussed on tech sites [example] for months, has now broken out into the mainstream press. Comcast is making things worse by refusing to talk plainly about what they are doing and why. (This is an improvement over Comcast’s previously reported denials, which now appear to be inconsistent with the facts.)

To the extent that Comcast has explained itself, its story seems to be that it is slowing traffic from heavy users in order to keep the network moving smoothly. This would be a reasonable thing for Comcast to do (if they were open about it) — but it’s not quite what they’re actually doing.

For starters, Comcast’s measures are not aimed at heavy users but rather at users of certain protocols such as BitTorrent. And not even all users of BitTorrent are targeted, but only those who use BitTorrent in a particular way: uploading a file to non-Comcast users while not simultaneously downloading parts of the same file. (In BitTorrent jargon, this is called “seeding”.) To get an idea of how odd this is, consider that an uploader who is experiencing blocking can apparently avoid the blocking by adding some download traffic.

It would likely be easier for Comcast to simply measure how much traffic each user is generating and drop the heaviest users’ packets, or just to discard packets at random (a tactic that falls most heavily on those who send and receive the most packets).

Beyond its choice of what to block, Comcast is using an unusual and nonstandard form of blocking.

There are well-established mechanisms for dealing with traffic congestion on the Internet. Networks are supposed to respond to congestion by dropping packets; endpoint computers notice that their packets are being dropped and respond by slowing their transmissions, thus relieving the congestion. The idea sounds simple, but getting the details right, so that the endpoints slow down just enough but not too much, and the network responds quickly to changes in traffic level but doesn’t overreact, required some very clever, subtle engineering.

What Comcast is doing instead is to cut off connections by sending forged TCP Reset packets to the endpoints. Reset packets are supposed to be used by one endpoint to tell the other endpoint that an unexplained, unrecoverable error has occurred and therefore communication cannot continue. Comcast’s equipment (apparently made by a company called Sandvine) seems to send both endpoints a Reset packet, purporting to come from the other endpoint, which causes both endpoints to break the connection. Doing this is a violation of the TCP protocol, which has at least two ill effects: it bypasses TCP’s well-engineered mechanisms for handling congestion, and it erodes the usefulness of Reset packets as true indicators of error.

People have apparently figured out already how to defeat this blocking, and presumably it won’t be long before BitTorrent clients incorporate anti-blocking measures.

It looks like Comcast is paying the price for trying to outsmart their customers.

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Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Web News

MySpace Evolves - Developer Platform Details, Partnerships, Growth Figures

This week News Corp chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, and MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, were the featured speakers at the Web 2.0 Summit. It is the two year anniversary of the News Corp acquisition of MySpace, so there was some discussion on the growth of MySpace and how it is evolving. The pair also discussed, in a roundabout way, aspects of the upcoming MySpace Platform.

It was revealed that MySpace will formalize relationships with the developer community and "roll out a new platform in the coming months".?? The steps to MySpace's developer platform strategy will include:

1) In the coming weeks MySpace is launching a catalogue of all widgets and tools available on MySpace;

2) In "several months" they will make industry standard APIs available through a new platform where developers can try new things in a sandbox environment;

3) MySpace users will have the opportunity to participate in an opt-in beta test program, to determine usability;

4) Users will vote and ultimately determine which of the third party widgets get tightly integrated into MySpace;

5) MySpace will formally introduce the best widgets into the community, with what they term "highly developed integration".

Microsoft Partners with Atlassian & NewsGator - SharePoint Goes Web 2.0

This week Microsoft announced two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft's SharePoint product with Atlassian's wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called 'NewsGator Social Sites', a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and "social computing" capabilities (Microsoft's term for 'web 2.0', according to this page on Microsoft's website).

The aim of the partnerships is to add more "social computing platform" capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an "enterprise productivity platform". In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator.

Other News

• Telephony News Abounds: iPhone SDK, Google Docs Mobile, Skype on MySpace
• Adobe Partners with BBC on Streaming Video
• Napster Relaunches - Take 57

Web Products

Twine: The First Mainstream Semantic Web App?

On Friday Radar Networks announced a new Semantic Web application called Twine. Founder Nova Spivack showed us a demo of the new app, which he described as a "knowledge networking" application. It has aspects of social networking, wikis, blogging, knowledge management systems - but its defining feature is that it's built with Semantic Web technologies. Spivack told us that Twine aims to bring a usable and scalable interface to the long-promised dream of the Semantic Web.

Vimeo Offering HD Video Option

Vimeo, one of the classiest players in the online video world, is now offering High Definition transcoding for user uploaded video. At 4 times the industry standard bitrate, the new videos look really nice. Unfortunately, the HD quality videos can only be viewed on the Vimeo site and cannot be embedded in HD elsewhere. We hope that will change.

You can find many other product reviews and startup profiles in our Startups category.

Analysis

The Future of Software Development

In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called The Mythical Man-Month. In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster. The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication. [...] We have come a long way since then and learned a lot about making software. In the real world, software projects have ill-defined and constantly evolving requirements, making it impossible to think everything through at once. Instead, the best software today is created and evolved using agile methods. These techniques allow engineers to continuously re-align software with business and customer needs.

Adobe Preparing Full Shift to Web Apps

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that the company is working toward shifting all of their apps online, but that it would probably take about 10 years for a complete shift. While the web as the computing platform of the future is currently a popular idea, and while prognostication 10 years out is rarely a good idea, we're skeptical that Adobe could pull off a full shift of its software catalog to Internet apps.

You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.

Conferences

Web 2.0 Summit

Richard's post-summit wrapup will be coming soon (after he recovers from jet lag). For now here are his posts from the conference:

- Web 2.0 Summit 2007: Mark Zuckerberg
- Web 2.0 Summit 2007: Mary Meeker and Internet Trends
- Web 2.0 Summit Video
- The New Era of Semantic Apps

Mobile 2.0

Richard was also at he Mobile 2.0 event this weekin San Francisco. Here were his posts:

- Mobile 2.0 - The 7th Mass Media & Business Opportunities
- Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 1
- Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 2
- Taptu Launches New Type of Mobile Search

R/WW Network Blogs

last100

Check out a wrap of the week's Digital Lifestyle news on last100. Lots of mobile news this week, the biggest of which was probably Apple’s decision to finally open the iPhone to third-party developers. At the Symbian Show in London, Nokia also showed off the new version of the mobile OS S60, which offers an optional iPhone-like touch interface — watch the mobile Internet space heat up.

In Internet TV-related news, the BBC has partnered with Adobe to add an iPlayer streaming option with Mac and Linux support; and Sony — which just launched a cheaper PS3 — talked up its forthcoming online video network for the PS3 / PSP.

Alt Search Engines

AltSearchEngines this week was at the Search Marketing Expo: Social Media conference in New York City. Here is some of their coverage:

• Session 1: Social Media Marketing Fundamentals
• Session 2: Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Session 3: Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• Session 4: A Marketer???s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Session 5: Keynote Q & A with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Session 6: Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
• Session 7: Evangelist - The Marketer???s Role in SMM
• Session 8: Micro Communities
• Session 9: Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and Answer Sharing
• Session 10: Final Session - Wikipedia Clinic

Read/WriteTalk

Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk - our new podcast show sat down with Jeff Clavier, Founder & Managing Partner SoftTechVC. They talked a little about the types of deals Jeff is most interested in and how he makes decisions. Jeff ended the interview talking about the most critical success factor in every deal - hint it isn’t the technology or the market.

That's a wrap for another week!

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Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Web News

Newsvine Acquired By MSNBC

The week started with some big M&A news in the Citizen Journalism space - Newsvine was acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture, for an undisclosed sum. Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson said that "Newsvine will continue operating independently, just as it has been since launching in March of 2006." He also indicated there would be little change in the features of the site -- which is great news, because in our review of Newsvine in July, we noted that Newsvine "is probably more advanced in its design than other CJ [Citizen Journalism] sites, often trying new things and design techniques." Indeed we can't wait to see how MSNBC integrates some of the Newsvine features, which Davidson said will occur: "Over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense."

Google Acquires Microblogging Service Jaiku

This week Finnish short messaging and microblogging service Jaiku was acquired by Google. That Google bought this competitor of Twitter, the service founded by Blogger founder Evan Williams, instead of Twitter is notable. Jaiku may be stronger on the mobile platform than Twitter and probably came at a much lower price. Google has been rolling up no end of very young mobile services; while the comparison with the Dodgeball acquisition, which ended up going nowhere, is inevitable - we think there's a lot more going on this time around. For one thing, Jaiku will now have access to scaling that Twitter could desperately use.

YouTube Videos Coming to AdSense

This week Google announced YouTube integration with AdSense. Selected YouTube videos will be available to AdSense publishers and will appear wrapped in banner ads. We think there's a whole lot of potential here. Though cynics have said that there's little hope for video outside YouTube, small video ad networks insist that there's a growing, thriving ecosystem of niche video sites just waiting for more and better content and ads.

In other YouTube news, YouTube Videos have also been added to Google Earth. Geotagged YouTube videos will now be viewable in a featured content layer of Google Earth.

MySpace App Platform Coming Soon

MySpace is set to launch its 3rd party developer platform in just a few weeks. R/WW's Marshall Kirkpatrick was somewhat skeptical of the news, writing that "things are really changing at the industry leading social network. By this time next year you'll be getting spam from MySpace applications and be running to shut off your account altogether. If you feel embarrassed perusing the Facebook apps directory ("yes mom, these are my peers, this is the new frontier - let's send some 'booze mail!'"), you'll feel nauseas when you see the MySpace apps directory."

In other big social network platform news, Read/WriteWeb heard from a couple of reliable sources that social network Bebo is about to announce a developer platform very soon too. Although this news didn't seem to interest the US-focused tech blogosphere, Bebo is one of the largest social networks in the world and is above MySpace and Facebook in some parts of the world (e.g. it is number 1 in the UK). So along with the MySpace news, this is another significant step forward in the social network space - where third party apps can hook into those popular ecosystems much easier.

Web Products

BitTorrent DNA: Hollywood Hitches a Ride with the Pirates

This week BitTorrent announced their content delivery network acceleration service, BitTorrent DNA. DNA will add their peer-to-peer file sharing technology to any CDN to speed up download and streaming services for videos and files. BitTorrent essentially works by harnessing unused network capacity on end-user computers. Anyone downloading or streaming a file also distributes the file to other users, which is broken into smaller chunks and reassembled upon delivery. BitTorrent has long used the distributed peer-to-peer approach for file sharing, and the same idea is employed by companies like Joost for streaming media.

Castfire Lands Next New Networks in Major Video Pact

In a cross-country deal that will make big waves in the video blogging market, San Francisco's CastFire, the up and coming video publishing tool/ad network, announced a large deal to distribute and provide services for New York's high profile Next New Networks. NNN was founded by former MTV exec Herb Scannell and animation mogul Fred Seibert (MTV's first creative director), has raised $8m in venture funding and publishes popular series JetSet and Talking Points Memo TV, among others. NNN has to date had a paltry video player and has not been able to monetize its content effectively - so it's no surprise that it's taken on another layer of services with another company. All the networks in NNN are reported to see a total of about 30 million unique visitors per month, but in the video world all metrics are in flux.

You can find many other product reviews and startup profiles in our Startups category.

Analysis

The Structured Web - A Primer

Alex Iskold wrote an important article this week outlining the nature of structured information on the Web. He wrote that the evolving aspects of the new web are Semantics, Attention (Implicit Behavior) and Personalization. Regardless of what we are decide to call this next web, the information in it is going to be more meaningful, more automatic, and more tailored to each of us. Increasingly, wrote Alex, information on the web is becoming more and more structured. This process is happening via several major movements:

• The rise of APIs
• The proliferation of vertical applications that run on top of existing data
• An increase in classic Semantic Technologies and Microformats
• The spread of RSS as an information delivery mechanism

Are Recommendation Engines a Threat to the Long Tail?

Two Wharton academics released an interesting paper recently that asks whether online recommendation services are a threat to the aggregate diversity of items discovered by their users. The study is titled "Blockbuster Culture's Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity". All indications point towards a rise in importance by recommendation engines, so this argument deserves examination. From eBay's acquisition of StumbleUpon to the CBS acquisition of Last.fm to this weekend's MSNBC acquisition of Newsvine - recommendation engines are big money. Marshall Kirkpatrick explored this topic for Read/WriteWeb...

In a related post, check out Josh Catone's review of Criticker - Movie Recommendations Based on Taste.

You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.

Conferences

BIF-3

This week R/WW's Josh Catone was at the BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, Rhode Island. The BIF-3 event reminded Josh of the TED conference, in that it brings together great minds from across a multitude of disciplines to tell stories and have a converation about innovation. Josh's coverage from the event:

• BIF-3: Ellen Levy - Ask the Right Questions
• BIF-3: Euan Semple - Bringing Social Networking to the BBC
• BIF-3: Dan Heath - Think Inside the Box
• BIF-3: Jason Fried - Software Should Be Opinionated

R/WW Network Blogs

last100

Check out a wrap of the week's Digital Lifestyle news on last100. There was lots of music industry news this week. The band Nine Inch Nails announced they were following Radiohead’s lead, by dumping their record label; and Madonna said she plans to do the same. On the digital front, online music service Rhapsody is now available on TiVo; and Universal is reportedly pushing ahead with Total Music, the latest assault on Apple’s iTunes.

In Internet TV-related news, Sony???s PS3 game console is to become and IPTV set-top box for Korea Telecom; Vuze, which now boasts 10 million software downloads, has opened up it p2p video distribution platform; and Joost plans to add “live” television to its service early next year.

Alt Search Engines

AltSearchEngines this week had a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Search debate - Part one and Part two. It featured Wolf Garbe of FAROO and Jeremie Miller of Wikia/Atlas. One of the questions was: what aspect is the architecture distributed and what are the benefits of this? Wolf said that "FAROO is using a fully distributed architecture: distributed index, distributed crawler, distributed ranking, and distributed search." Jeremie replied that "each entity within Atlas, whether it be the Factory, Collector, or Broker, can be entirely distinct and independent, and will likely be different companies or groups altogether."

Read/WriteTalk

This week Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk - our new podcast show - was at the Graphing Social Patterns conference. He sat down with Seth Goldstein, the CEO of Social Media. The podcast discusses Goldstein's work on the Attention Trust non-profit and vision for SocialMedia, his new advertising network for Facebook Applications.

Poll

We ran a late week poll on what you'd be prepared to pay for the download version of Radiohead's new album In Rainbows (or insert your favorite music artist). The results at press time:

US$30 or over 3%
US$20-29 2%
US$15-19 6%
US$10-14 27%
US$5-9 40%
US$3-4 11%
US$1-2 3%
less than US$1 1%
Free 8%

So US$5-9 was the happy medium, with US$10-14 the second most popular choice.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Sponsor:

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Web News

Adobe Acquires Virtual Ubiquity - Enters Web Office Fray

Josh Catone was at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago this week, where several Web-related announcements were made. The biggest was Adobe's acquisition of Waltham, Mass.-based Virtual Ubiquity for an undisclosed sum - and in doing so officially entering the Web Office fray. Virtual Ubiquity are the creators of Buzzword, an online, collaborative word processing application powered by Adobe's Flex framework. Buzzword is built on Adobe's Flex framework and runs in the browser using the Flash player. The interface is slick and seems reminiscent of recent Adobe imaging applications, such as Lightroom.

See also:

• Adobe Unleashes Media Player to the Public
• Adobe Announces Document Sharing Service
• Adobe Demos "Thermo" RIA Design Tool to Delighted Crowd

Lone Remaining Burmese Blogger Uses Lightweight Messaging Service to Broadcast to the World

The story of the monk-led protests in Myanmar, or Burma, and subsequent police crack-down was a widely reported one this week. Bloggers were particularly important as the events unfolded, posting news accounts and photos to the internet from a country that very few outside reporters have access to. At least one blogger remains active in the country, posting to a lightweight messaging service with an embeddable widget for output - click on our story to see the widget in action.

Microsoft Launches Office Live Workspaces

This week Microsoft announced a new online office service called Office Live Workspace, plus re-named its Office Live service to Office Live Small Business. Both moves are attempts to complement Microsoft Office, its dominant desktop office suite - rather than replace functionality present in MS Office. Office Live Workspace will allow users to store, access and share 1,000+ documents in an online workspace. It will also synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook. The service is free and is being marketed as an "online companion to Microsoft Office".

R/WW editor Richard MacManus asked: Is this what Microsoft's answer to the Web Office is - tacked on features to its all-powerful desktop suite? Apparently so.

In other Microsoft news: Microsoft Aims to Store Health Records Online -- Will Anyone Bite?

Yahoo! Launches Search Enhancements

The news search engine features that we wrote about at Yahoo! in early August are now live on their site. The enhancements include Yahoo!'s Search Assist, which is an improved version of their search suggestion feature, and a number of new Yahoo! Shortcuts. Shortcuts are self contained information widgets that appear at the top of results for certain searches and draw content from other Yahoo! properties.

Techmeme Launches Leaderboard - Read/WriteWeb Ranked #6

Provoking a storm of blogger coverage, Techmeme launched a new Leaderboard this week. It's a list of the top 100 sources for the popular tech news aggregator - calculated over the past 30 days. The Leaderboard updates daily and each site is ranked with a "presence" indicator, defined as "the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period". Read/WriteWeb is currently ranked 6th, ahead of such news luminaries as the BBC and Wall St Journal.

Web Products

A Flood of Mashups Coming? OAuth 1.0 Released

While not a product, this announcement may have wide-reaching ramifications for web apps. This week the distributed group of developers working on the Open Authentication spec OAuth released what they hope will be the final draft of their 1.0 version. The OAuth spec will create a standardized way for applications to request permission for access to user info from other applications and for info-holding services to communicate clear rules and options for accessing parts of the data they hold.

The spec got a burst of publicity earlier this week when the widely used feed reader Bloglines announced that they intend to support it in addition to OpenID and the Attention Data standard APML.

Webmail.us Acquired by Rackspace - Subscription Model Does Work

Webmail.us, a business web email service, was this week acquired by leading web hosting company Rackspace for an undisclosed sum. We last covered Webmail.us in August last year as part of an overview of the web email market. At that point Webmail.us provided email hosting services to more than 23,000 small-medium businesses. Currently, over a year later, Webmail.us provides services to more than 72,000 businesses and 600,000 users. Also recently Webmail.us made the Inc 500 list as the #217 fastest growing private company in America.

Probably the best thing about Webmail.us is that it's a great example of a web 2.0 startup which earns good revenues via a subscription based business model.

Netvibes Launches Corporate Startpages - Will Companies Go For It?

Netvibes, the French startpage near the top of the startpage market, launched a new service this week called Netvibes Premium Universes. The service allows companies to offer Netvibes functionality (reading feeds, posting widgets) on their own website with their own branding and domain. It's essentially a Netvibes page in an iframe on your website.

You can find many other startup profiles in our Startups category.

Analysis

Storms in the Web 2.0 Petri Dish

Bernard Lunn wrote: "The Web 2.0 world is looking increasingly like a giant petri dish. There are so many experiments, so much innovation and, as yet, relatively little real revenue. Within this petri dish are a few ideas that will turn into billions of dollars, at which point we will all say “why didn't I think of that”? There are also lots of “what on earth were we all thinking” ideas out there. Numerically of course, there will be much more of the latter - but in $ terms the few big winners will mean it'll all make some kind of sense in the end."

Check out Bernard's advice to entrepreneurs, to weather these coming storms. They are wise words worth heeding. Also check out Bernard's other post this week: Creative Entrepreneurs: The Next Masters of the Universe.

The New Rules Of Technology VC

On a similar theme to Bernard's post, Alex Iskold took a close look at the current state of the VC industry and how it effects entrepreneurs. Alex wrote: "If the way in which a company is built has to change, the way in which it is funded needs to change as well. What are the new rules for tech venture capital? Where and how should the money be allocated? In this post we take a deeper look."

You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.

R/WW Network Blogs

last100

The major digital lifestyle news this week on last100 was Microsoft's announcement of second generation Zunes, the company's line of digital audio players. New flash-based models were introduced, along with a beefed up 80GB hard drive-based version. The company also announced that its online music store, Marketplace, will offer 1 million DRM-free songs for purchase, and that the company is launching a music-based social networking site called "Zune Social". In a follow up post titled Zune 2: five things Microsoft got right, last100 editor Steve O'Hear wote: "while the new Zune lineup is at best evolutionary rather than revolutionary, especially when compared to the User Interface innovations found in Apple???s iPhone and iPod Touch, Microsoft has made some significant improvements ??? and, dare I say it, done a few things from which even Apple might learn a thing or two."

Also check out a great guest post by Guinevere Orvis on how social media is helping to boost TV ratings.

Alt Search Engines

AltSearchEngines this week released the latest version of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list. One trend that ASE editor Charles Knight is beginning to see is that some of the alts are getting larger. Charles noted: "We have always said that there are 4-5 major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) and 100 Top ASE. But we may have to revisit that. Some ASE (maybe - blinkx, GigaBlast, Exalead, picsearch, Answers.com, Eurekster, Quintura - this is a new concept) seem to be growing larger than a typical ASE, but are not “major” yet either."

Read/WriteTalk

This week Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk - our new podcast show - spoke with Dan Saffer, Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path. In the podcast, Dan discussed the process of designing for new types of Web-enabled devices - such as Nintendo's Wii, Apple’s iPhone and the new touch iPod..

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.