Read/WriteWeb

US Web stats company Compete has some interesting analysis on how Social Networking sites compare to portals. From a sample size of around 2 million US people, Compete concludes that social networking sites are quickly approaching the traffic level of the big portals like Google and Yahoo. Their key findings:

1. In June, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site

2. Since January 2004, the number of people visiting or taking part in one of the top online social networks has grown by over 109%

3. Social networking sites are now close to eclipsing traffic to the giants - Google and Yahoo

They liken the growth of SNS to email in the 90's. A couple of charts from Compete:

Given my recent coverage of international markets, it'd be interesting to see how the likes of Bebo fits into this picture - as Bebo recently overtook MySpace as the top SNS in the UK. Compete's stats are US-only, but in any case it's clear that all trends point to SNS sites overtaking the Internet portals - sooner rather than later.

Written by Steve O'Hear and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the second in a two-part series.

In part one of this series, e-learning 2.0 - how Web technologies are shaping education, I described the way in which teachers and students are embracing web technologies such as blogging and podcasting. Although not designed specifically for use in education, these tools are helping to make e-learning far more personal, social, and flexible. Elgg, in contrast, is social networking software designed especially for education - built from the ground up to support learning.

In this article I review Elgg and interview the founders, Ben Werdmuller and Dave Tosh.

What is Elgg?

Described by its founders as a 'learning landscape', Elgg provides each user with their own weblog, file repository (with podcasting capabilities), an online profile and an RSS reader. Additionally, all of a user's content can be tagged with keywords - so they can connect with other users with similar interests and create their own personal learning network. However, where Elgg differs from a regular weblog or a commercial social network (such as MySpace) is the degree of control each user is given over who can access their content. Each profile item, blog post, or uploaded file can be assigned its own access restrictions - from fully public, to only readable by a particular group or individual. [Ed: this is similar to the "smart" social networks described by Ken Yarmosh in another R/WW post]

From a developer perspective, Elgg is built on LAMP and is open source - released under the GPL. The software has its own plug-in architecture, and supports a number of open standards including RSS (which is used throughout Elgg), LDAP for authentication (soon to support OpenID), FOAF, and XML-RPC for integration with most third-party blogging clients. The OpenID support is being developed as part of a project called Open Academic - which will allow a single login across installations of Elgg, Moodle, Drupal and MediaWiki.

Interview with Elgg founders

I caught up with Elgg's founders, Technical Director Ben Werdmuller and Project Manager Dave Tosh, to find out more about the project and what they have planned for the future - including their company Curverider, which provides Elgg-related services.

Continue reading "Elgg - social network software for education" »

Today I interviewed Geoffrey Arone, the co-founder of social Web browser Flock.com. Flock recently released its official beta, which they call version 0.7. They're currently positioning their product as a mainstream browser which enables people to share and create online. Flock is specifically targeting people who use social networking media tools like MySpace and YouTube.

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The interview [20 mins, 9.7MB] kicks off a new series on my ZDNet blog, called Browsers 2.0. In that series I'll be exploring 2006-era browsers and seeing what is available in the browser market - and what's coming soon with the likes of IE7 and Firefox 2.0.

What interests me most about Flock these days is its goal to become one of the big browsers. Geoffrey said they're planning to go-live (out of beta) in October this year and he is confident that Flock can become a big player in what is a very tough market. He said:

"If we continue to respond to what our users are telling us and get out there and partner with the right folks, absolutely we will be [mainstream]. I want us to become increasingly part of the dialog of: what option do I have to participate online."

Also Geoffrey is sometimes reluctant to call Flock a browser, because "it's a passive term". He said "the way our user testing is showing people interacting with Flock, it's anything but passive."

I mentioned that a lot of Web apps these days are becoming cross-platform and cross-device, so does he think the browser will morph into something different - in other words, where is the browser in general headed? Geoffrey replied:

"I view the browser as a vehicle for creating your online identity. So people are increasingly going towards mobile and to some extent the living room. Right now it's certainly not in our short-term plans. But I do see the browser as being the primary interface to your life online."

Check out the whole audio interview, because we delve into some of those broader browser issues a lot more. Geoffrey said that my questions were the best he’s had in any interview about Flock (which is a nice compliment!).

Next in my series on top Web apps in international markets is Russia. To remind you of the previous countries profiled: Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea and United Kingdom. Other country profiles coming soon include Spain, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand (if I can rustle up enough web apps from the NZ2.0 mailing list!), Latvia, China (I still need more contacts for this) and Ireland (also needs more data). Do contact me if you can give me information about web 2.0 in your country.

My thanks to Alexander Dodonov and Anton Antich for all the information about Russian web apps.

Russia's Web 2.0 Market

Alexander says that Web 2.0 became popular in Russia only recently and there hasn't been much development so far - many projects are in alpha and their business model is not clear (hmmm, doesn't sound that different to the Valley!). Russian users use foreign web 2.0 services a lot, such as gmail.com, netvibes, del.icio.us. And livejournal.com is the most popular blog service for Russians - there are thousands of Russian communites on LJ.

Anton too says that web2.0 is at its infancy in Russia and that a lot of web apps are inspired by their western counterparts. He said there are 2 key things for a project to be successful in Russia: 

1) It has to be fully localized.

2) It has to work with local payment systems, which are very different than in the US or UK - "that's something many of the english language startups don't get and that's why they are not going to be successful here, unless they change". Anton thinks this leaves a lot of proven and empty niches in Russia.

Continue reading "Top Web 2.0 Apps in Russia" »

Last night I published the first part of my interview with two senior Sun Microsystems engineers, Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview was to celebrate the 15th birthday of the Web this week.

Several commenters on the Slashdot thread about my post said they'd prefer to get the whole context, rather than just my write-up of it. So here now is the full interview as a podcast [37 minutes, 17MB]. The audio quality is not great at the start (due to a bad telephone connection), but it gets better after a couple of minutes. Note that this is instead of me doing a separate write-up of Part 2.

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Subjects discussed

Some of the subjects discussed in the full interview podcast are:

• The past and future of the Web - and where Sun fits into the picture.
• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and why Tim and Radia don't think it will be a major driver on the Web.
• Web-connected devices (music players, TV, games machines, etc) and the future of the browser.
• Web Office - do Tim and Radia think a browser-based office suite will ever be competitive with MS Office? Sun has StarOffice, which is a desktop alternative to MS Office. Will it go web-based?
• How does Sun fit into the Web 2.0 era we're currently in - e.g. social software, apps that leverage collective intelligence.
• How will RSS and ATOM be used going forward; and thoughts on Google's data format GData.
• Security on the Web
• Where will the Web be at in another 15 years?!

Key Quotes from Part 2

Some key quotes not featured in Part 1:

• Tim on media on the Web: "I do not expect the Internet to be a suitable medium for broadcast video, at any kind of acceptable level of quality that we've come to expect on our TV screen, any time soon. The architecture isn't built to do that and the bandwidth isn't there."
• Tim on Web Office: "Anything that can migrate onto the Web absolutely will."
• Radia on security on the Web and stopping the bad guys: "People ought to be trying to make it easy and cheap, rather than trying to make money out of security."

Hope you enjoy the podcast. I plan to interview more Web industry luminaries over the next few months.