Coghead, like DabbleDB and Zoho Creator, allows you to quickly create a hosted database-backed web application without programming. But unlike DabbleDB and Zoho Creator, Coghead wants to create a platform not just for web applications but for web businesses, and they’re doing it on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Coghead is building their business on a model similar to that of AWS: providing agile and scalable services over the web using pay-as-you-go pricing. Through their affiliate program, Coghead makes it easy for more software-as-a-service (SaaS) web businesses to launch, just like Amazon wants to use their limited beta DevPay service to encourage SaaS businesses atop AWS.

In Coghead on AWS, you can see the arrival of the SaaS ecosystem, as web-based services combined and layered on top of each other make it easier and cheaper than ever for anyone with a good web business idea to turn it into a revenue stream.

Coghead unveils v2.0 on Amazon Web Services

Today Coghead unveils version 2.0 of its do-it-yourself web application platform. Their 50 new features and enhancements look less interesting than their migration to Amazon Web Services for their computing infrastructure. (CTO Greg Olsen, who sees a SaaS-based ecosystem as the inevitable future of computing, calls AWS the most significant product of his lifetime.)

To build an application with Coghead, you drag and drop widgets to make web forms via Coghead’s Flex-based user interface. You don’t have to do any programming because Coghead has done that for you, nor do you have to buy and manage your own hardware and hosting. Coghead handles that for you, too — by delegating such responsibilities to AWS and to services built on top of AWS.

Web businesses, not just web applications

In December, Coghead launched the Coghead Affiliate Program, which provides system integrators, value-added resellers, and web tycoon wannabes an easy way to build and sell web applications using a SaaS model. Coghead affiliates build applications using Coghead’s do-it-yourself interface, then set their own per-user, per-month prices for use of those applications. Coghead takes their part of the monthly user fees, while the application developer gets the rest as revenue.

Until now, there hasn’t been an easy, low-cost way for a tech-savvy person with a good niche web application idea to turn that into a business. You’d have to find programmers, arrange web hosting, and build a payment system into your application. Coghead does all that for you.

The next web expansion?

Coghead builds on the SaaS offerings of others, including AWS (which offers both hardware and software as a service), as well on other services built on top of AWS — such as offerings from RightScale. Coghead in turn creates an environment for yet more SaaS businesses to launch. Current affiliates include Hekamedia for education, allRounds for private equity, and MCF Technology Solutions for general business applications.

Coghead is just one of many companies growing in the SaaS ecosystem. I previously covered Workplace2Go, which offers hosted business applications and uses the Jamcracker service delivery network behind the scenes. Workplace2Go, like Coghead, reduces the friction of starting a business.

It’s too early to tell which players in the SaaS ecosystem will survive and thrive — but Coghead, as both a consumer and producer of service-based offerings, looks well-positioned for success in this cost-efficient new world.

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In his new book “The Big Switch,” blogger and journalist Nick Carr says, “In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards.” But the reason so many people play in the new economy is because the many can reap rewards, even if those rewards don’t come in a monetary form.

While Carr spends most of the book describing the move to utility computing and comparing that transition to the earlier switch to utility-based electrical power, he makes an important social argument as well: He suggests that the switch to utility computing — also sometimes known as grid-based or cloud computing — will shrink the workforce, lead to increasing income inequality, and destroy the middle class.

But Carr’s arguments left me unconvinced that the big switch is a bad thing. Instead of considering the job market as a whole, he focuses narrowly on the publishing and broadcasting industry. And he doesn’t offer backup to the assertion that income inequality is always and obviously bad. Increasing income inequality can mask gains in well-being from factors other than money, and the social, participatory web arriving as part of the switch to utility computing offers great riches to the masses.

A shrinking workforce, a dwindling middle class?

Carr largely bases his argument that utility computing will lead to a shrinking workforce on the example of the publishing and broadcasting industry:

Early last year, the US Department of Labor released a revealing set of statistics on the publishing and broadcasting business. Employment in the industry had fallen by 13% in the six years since 2001, with nearly 150,000 jobs lost. These were years when many media companies had been shifting from physical media to online. Yet the report revealed that there had been no growth in internet publishing and broadcasting jobs. In fact, online employment had actually dropped 29%.

On the other hand, we’re seeing vast growth in information technology jobs, due at least in part to the big switch to web-based computing. The Labor Department is forecasting employment in “network systems and data communications” to grow by 53.4 percent between 2006 and 2016, while employment in the category of “computer software engineers, applications” is projected to grow by 48.7 percent.

Carr asserts that computerization is “extending the replacement of workers by machines from the blue-collar to the white-collar world, but it shows no sign of creating broad new categories of employment.” But don’t “network systems and data communications” and “computer software engineers, applications” represent broad new categories of employment? Granted, a laid-off print media journalist is unlikely to be able to take on such a job, but that doesn’t mean the jobs don’t exist.

Carr argues that the middle class will shrink even as a small class of super-wealthy benefit from the uncompensated labor of the many (what he has previously called sharecropping the long tail):

The arrival of the universal computing grid portends a very different kind of economic realignment. Rather than concentrating wealth in the hands of a small number of companies, it may concentrate wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals, eroding the middle class and widening the divide between haves and have-nots.

While there is research that suggests that higher economic inequality leads to more distrust, decreased social capital and higher levels of crime, not everyone agrees that more income inequality necessarily indicates a problem. Also, the presence of a few wildly rich people doesn’t inevitably mean the disappearance of the middle class.

It’s natural to feel annoyed when some people get really rich; we seem hard-wired to pay attention to our relative status. But I’d like to see some discussion of whether the income inequality Carr describes is bad, or merely bothersome and envy-making.

Wealth for all

Focusing too much on income can make us blind to decreasing inequality in other aspects of life. In an essay in its special holiday edition, The Economist reports that quality of life across different income strata may be becoming more similar, as even those with little money can afford what used to be reserved for the very rich:

You can see this levelling at work in markets for transport and appliances. You no longer need be a Vanderbilt to own a refrigerator or a car. Refrigerators are now all but universal in America, even though refrigerator inequality continues to grow. The Sub-Zero PRO 48, which the manufacturer calls “a monument to food preservation”, costs about $11,000, compared with a paltry $350 for the IKEA Energisk B18 W. The lived difference, however, is rather smaller than that between having fresh meat and milk and having none. Similarly, more than 70% of Americans under the official poverty line own at least one car. And the distance between driving a used Hyundai Elantra and a new Jaguar XJ is well nigh undetectable compared with the difference between motoring and hiking through the muck. The vast spread of prices often distracts from a narrowing range of experience.

This same effect is why some web optimists see the opportunities brought by the social, participatory web as mainly a good thing. It used to be that if you wanted to have your writing published, you’d need to have a job with a newspaper or magazine. Now anyone can publish their writing on blogs. It used to be if you wanted to have thousands of people watch your films, you’d have to get lucky in Hollywood. Now you can upload your video to YouTube. It used to be if you wanted to become a radio talkshow host, you had to convince a radio station to give you airtime. Now you can record your own podcast.

So even as some startup founders get wildly rich, the many benefit by gaining access to opportunities previously reserved for a privileged few. That other people are making tons of money shouldn’t distract from the very real nonmonetary benefits that people enjoy online.

In a recent interview, Wired called Carr “Captain Buzzkill.” But Carr’s book didn’t kill my techno-utopian buzz, and it made for an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. I came away with two ideas: first, the book “The Big Switch” is — as I expected from having read Carr’s blog — well-researched, well-written, and well-filled with ideas designed to annoy. Second, the big switch to a global web computer that Carr identifies is a good thing — at least insofar as it brings to the many the numerous experiences and opportunities previously only reserved for the few.

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When the U.S. presidential primaries wrap up, the winning candidates — after spending months kowtowing to the extremists in their parties — will make a mad dash to the center. A similar rush to the center is now taking place in software, and in 2008, we expect that trend to continue. But in the case of software, the center doesn’t lie between the extremes of conservatism and liberalism but rather between those of proprietary and open.

In the past, some software companies, like Microsoft, have taken a mainly proprietary approach while other outfits, such as the Free Software Foundation, have taken an entirely open approach. But the software primaries are over. The best approach now is somewhere in the middle: a combination of open and closed, or what, in The 7 Cs of the Future of Software, I called “clopen” — though I’m very open to other suggestions.

One manifestation of the momentum towards the middle is hybrid source, in which companies offer open-source and premium, proprietary versions of software. Under pressure from open-source alternatives, software companies need to find a new strategy, one that combines the concepts of free and open with revenue generation.

RedMonk analyst Steve O’Grady notes that hybrid source “is generally applied to projects or products that combine open and closed source software to produce an asset containing both.” O’Grady was prompted to tackle the question of hybrid source after MySQL, which had in the past provided all of their source code without charge, announced a commercial edition of their database design tool, Workbench.

But hybrid source is not the only result of moving to the center between the extremes of proprietary and open. Google exemplifies another strategy: offering free services based on proprietary algorithms based on open-source operating systems. And they’ve made this multi-layered concoction of open and closed work like magic.

Microsoft, like a political candidate who’s won a primary, is not immune to the need to move to the center. As David Strom reports in Baseline Magazine, recently the company “has become slightly more open with respect to its networking protocols. Late last year, they announced a way for third parties to license their core file-sharing protocols through an independent organization called the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation.”

Adobe is perhaps the most obvious example of the need for companies built on closed, proprietary software business models to move to the middle. Their open sourcing of the ECMAScript engine and the Flex SDK shows their considered steps towards a clopen future.

Finding the right balance between the two extremes will be the secret to the success for software companies in 2008 — just like the winning U.S. presidential candidate will be the one who finds the right balance point between the right and the left.

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Can you build a better search engine than Google? Lots of companies want to. But search already works pretty well — pretty well, that is, if you’re sitting at your computer. If you’re on the go with just a phone, it’s not quite so easy to get the information you need.

That’s because effective searching often involves orienteering — finding information step-by-step, and using local context at each step as a guide. Orienteering-style search on a mobile phone, however, is next to impossible. Startup ChaCha is looking to change that with textChaCha, a human-managed search available via text messaging from your mobile phone.

ChaCha’s mobile search is built upon their basic human-guided search, which has met with widespread skepticism due to underqualified human guides, pranksters using the service, and questions about whether anyone really needs a hand with searching. President and co-founder Brad Bostic admits that the initial set of guides ChaCha recruited didn’t always do a good job with guided web search. Now, he says, the company has put in place training procedures and understands better what sort of people might succeed as a search guide.

More importantly, however, ChaCha’s mobile search looks more promising because it addresses the fundamental difficulty of search-on-the-go: distilling an entire search experience into one good answer. And that’s something better done by a human who can engage in orienteering.

To use textChaCha, just text your question to short code 242242 (that spells “chacha” on most phones). Your question will be routed to a ChaCha guide who will provide an answer within minutes, as well as a link to more in-depth results that you can browse later.

Given that you don’t have to use specific keywords — you just ask your question using whatever text abbreviations and natural language you want — and you don’t have to use different services, textChaCha could eliminate the need to use a variety of other mobile information services.

ChaCha is one of a number of search startups looking for the right mix of human brainpower and computer algorithms to help people find what they’re looking for online. The startup that got the most buzz in 2007 was Jason Calacanis’ human-powered search engine Mahalo, even though it has appeared, to some, to be little more than a rehash of past attempts at creating web directories using people.

Like Mahalo, ChaCha offers human-curated search results in their “instant search.” If you enter search terms into the search box on their web site, your results may include “cool, hard-to-find sites” picked by ChaCha’s experts.

But the more interesting (or perhaps more easily ridiculed) part of ChaCha is guided search, upon which textChaCha is based. ChaCha has recruited thousands of guides who are provided with a toolset for helping ChaCha searchers find just the information they need. From your computer, you can search with a guide who chats with you about what you’re looking for and provides results; the guide then fine-tunes them based on your feedback.

ChaCha has won ample funding. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was the lead investor in the first $6 million round, and most recently, ChaCha took an $8 million equity investment and received a $2 million grant from the state of Indiana, where the company is headquartered.

Bostic wants to get the service offered as an add-on to cell-phone plans. This could be a way of reaching a target market that doesn’t want to learn, for example, Google SMS search keywords and yet wants the benefit of online information while on the go.

ChaCha, by providing orienteering-by-proxy that users need for mobile search, may have come up with a winning dance.

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A look back at some of the Web 2.0 stories we covered this year:

January. Yahoo bought MyBlogLog. Daylife, a webified newspaper with Jeff Jarvis as an adviser and Craig Newmark as an investor, launched. And browser preview startup Browster bid us good-bye.

February. Yahoo! launched its RSS mashup service Pipes. Facebook rolled out gifts, allowing members to give each other puppies and toilet paper, among other things, in digital form.

March. Clearspring raised $5.5 million for its widget platform. Internet OS Xcerion came out of stealth. Hewlett-Packard bought Tabblo, a photo organizing and printing site with social features.

April. Google released a competitor to social bookmarking discovery service provider StumbleUpon. Microsoft launched Silverlight beta, its answer to the Adobe Flash platform.

May. eBay paid $75 million to buy StumbleUpon. Facebook launched its developer platform. Google released Gears, its open source toolset for taking web apps offline. And MySpace bought photo-hosting site PhotoBucket.

June. Collaborative browsing service Me.dium took $15 million in funding in a second round. Twitter clone Pownce launched, but didn’t get much love from Twitter users.

July. Social network Hi5 received $20 million in its first institutional round of funding. Hyperlocal events site Going.com raised $5 million in fudning. Facebook bought Parakey, Firefox developer Blake Ross’ hybrid web/desktop platform.

August. Dave Sifry resigned from his position as CEO of blog search and ranking service Technorati as layoffs were announced. Contact management service Plaxo launched its social alerts service, Pulse. Disney bought kids’ social network Club Penguin for hundreds of millions of dollars.

September. Personalized news aggregation service Findory announced it would shut down in November. Personal and social finance tool Mint won the TechCrunch40’s $50,000 grand prize. Facebook opened up to public search, hinting at privacy controversies to come. Yahoo bought web-based email and collaboration service Zimbra for $350 million while Adobe purchased Virtual Ubiquity, maker of Buzzword, a web-based word processor.

October. eBay unveiled its foray into social networking, Neighborhoods. Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook at a valuation of $15 billion and got the rights to sell third-party ads on the Facebook network. Google answered Facebook’s application platform with its announcement of OpenSocial, a common set of APIs for building social networks online.

November. Facebook launched Beacon, its social advertising system, then weakened it after widespread criticism of how it compromised users’ privacy.

December. Blogging software company SixApart sold LiveJournal to a Russian group, SUP. Amazon relaunched Askville, a competitor to Yahoo! Answers. Google announced Knols, a Wikipedia competitor.

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Tags: Web 2.0

There’s more than one way to find a good airfare online, as the Kayak-SideStep merger shows. But what’s the best way? Is there one site that you can rely on to find the best fare for all your travel needs? Or do you need to visit them all to ensure you don’t miss anything?

I set out to compare fare-finding services and booking engines, including Kayak, SideStep, Mobissimo, Farecast, Priceline, Expedia and Hotwire. To do so, I chose three itineraries: a business trip to San Francisco, a trip from the U.S. to South America, and a one-way trip from India to the UK.

The winner? Mobissimo.

Itinerary 1: Business Trip from Denver to San Francisco

When I travel on business, the dates are usually inflexible, because I’m likely attending a conference or other scheduled meeting. I choose nonstop because business travel is hassle enough without lengthening the amount of time it takes to get there and back. But even though my primary concern is convenience, I’ll still have to justify my choice to whomever is footing my business bill. So cost matters.

I started with Kayak, which offered me a fare of $231 with one stop. But I wanted to go nonstop, and for that, it provided a fare of $333. I then used its “compare fares” feature to check on Expedia, Priceline and Hotwire. Nonstop fares on those sites were about the same as Kayak: right around $330.

Hotwire offered a “limited rate” fare of $219, but I wasn’t able to find out the carrier, the times, or whether or not I’d have to make stops — hardly ideal for the business traveler.

SideStep looked like it might have a winner for me, telling me that United had a nonstop flight available for $242. Clicking through, however, revealed that United’s nonstop fare was actually $333.

But then I checked with Mobissimo and Farecast, both of which found a nonstop flight with Frontier for $210! Wow! About a third less — Om would be pleased with my frugality.

The next time I make business travel plans, I’ll be sure to check those sites first — and maybe even go directly to the Frontier site myself. As useful as fare finders are, they’re even more useful if you combine them with some personal knowledge of which airlines most economically serve your favorite routes.

Winners: Mobissimo and Farecast.

Itinerary 2: Trip Home to Paraguay

My Paraguayan au pair is traveling home in February to visit her family before staying in the U.S. for an additional year. As a bonus for her hard work, we’ve offered to pay for her ticket, but obviously we’d like to keep the price low.

The dates for this trip are flexible, but the departure and arrival airports are not. I chose Feb. 15th-29th as the travel days, but with the hope that I could specify “flexible dates” and be offered cheaper days to travel.

Since Mobissimo and Farecast were so helpful with my business trip, I started with them. Mobissimo turned in a pretty good choice, of $1,155.69, and Farecast offered a fare of $1,303. Neither, however, gave me the option of classifying my dates as “flexible.”

Kayak and Priceline each found a fare of $1,140 with Brazil’s largest airline, TAM, while Expedia offered a TAM fare of $1,334. Hotwire doesn’t cover that itinerary.

I wanted to use flexible dates to see if I could find an even cheaper flight, but Expedia’s flexible dates checkbox only works with popular U.S. routes and anyway, it didn’t find the best fare for me in the first place. Kayak doesn’t offer a flexible dates capability. Kayak offers a flexible dates feature, but you need to sign up for a free account to access it.

Priceline made it easy to select alternate departure and return dates, though, so I ran the itinerary through again, shifting up by one day then shifting back by one day. I got the same result: $1,140 flying either United or US Air along with TAM to South America.

Winners: Priceline and Kayak. Close runner-up: Mobissimo.

Itinerary 3: One way from Bangalore to London.

For my third itinerary, I had to use my imagination. So I imagined someone beginning a new life in a different country, moving from India to the UK. Since Mobissimo did well for me with both my first two itineraries, I started with them, using a travel date of March 1st, 2008. It gave me a price of $457 through ebookers.com.

Priceline requires U.S. departure airports, so that was out. Hotwire doesn’t handle one-way tickets and only covers travel in the U.S. and Canada.

Kayak, SideStep, Farecast and Expedia all turned up fares around $460, with Farecast offering up the lowest option, at $455. But then I noticed that I could easily compare fares on Orbitz, Travelation and Cheap Tickets from the SideStep window.

It looked like I’d made a smart move. Using it, I discovered that Orbitz and Cheap Tickets each had available fares of $392, and Travelation had a $385 ticket for a flight on Gulf Air with just one stop! But when I looked closer I noticed that once you added on taxes, the price came up to $462 — almost exactly what I’d found before. It was a good reminder to always compare fares with taxes and additional charges added on.

Winners: Everyone except Priceline and Hotwire.

Overall winner: Mobissimo. It came within a few dollars of the low fare on every itinerary. If I were actually shopping for trips, though, I’d probably run the itinerary through all the sites, to make sure I didn’t miss any great fares.

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Tags: Farecast, Hotwire, Kayak, Mobissimo, Priceline, SideStep

Geeks everywhere got excited recently when they heard that SimpleDB might be based on Erlang. Why? Is Erlang the next big thing? Probably not — it’s a 20-year-old language that some programmers find weird.

But the model Erlang offers for parallel programming — distributing computing instructions across multiple processors such as are found in multicore computers or clouds of servers linked together — does represent something radically new to many programmers, even though it’s two decades old.

Parallel programming too difficult and buggy?

Programming for multiple processing units — also known as concurrent programming or parallel programming — is not easy, especially with programming languages designed mainly for situations in which instructions are executed one at a time, in a predictable order.

Languages like C++ and Java work mainly by using sequential processing. They have the capability to run multiple pathways of execution at the same time — allowing computer instructions to run in parallel — but in order to do so, they usually use something called “shared memory.”

With shared memory, different paths of execution (called “threads”) access different bits of data at different times. Your program needs to control access to that data and ensure that no matter what order in which the instructions arrive, the data is in the state you what it to be.

Edward Lee, a professor in UC Berkeley’s EE/CS department, calls threads harmful, citing the indeterminate results you get with multiple threads reading and writing shared data in parallel. Indeed, programs using shared memory can be subject to unpredictable bugs.

Erlang dispenses with shared memory

Erlang was created by Ericsson in 1987 to use in the development of fault-tolerant telecom applications running across many processors. It approaches the problem of program parallelization differently than do C++ or Java or other so-called sequential languages: It uses very lightweight processes that don’t share memory but rather pass messages asynchronously.

Asynchronous message passing, as opposed to shared memory usage, removes the possibility of deadlock and race conditions, two bugs that sometimes occur in shared memory parallel programs. But making an effective and efficient concurrent program still requires plenty of work on the part of a developer and Erlang’s approach doesn’t work for every situation.

Erlang too old and too weird?

As Sun Distinguished Engineer and Director of Web Technologies Tim Bray has said of Erlang, “It’s too weird, and in my brief experiments, the implementation shows its age; we have in fact learned some things about software since way back then.” Another engineer I talked to who’s used Erlang chose the same adjective, telling me, “The problem with Erlang is it’s just too weird. Too many programmers hate weird.”

This fall, Bray launched his Wide Finder project, a programming exercise intended to see how Erlang could parallelize the processing of a large text file. I asked him if his opinion had changed since getting to know Erlang better by way of that project. He said it largely remains the same, but expressed a wish for Erlang’s concurrency model — lightweight threads that use message passing instead of shared memory — to be incorporated into his favorite modern languages, such as Java and Ruby.

Erlang may not be entirely suited to general purpose parallel programming projects, even for SimpleDB maker Amazon. Although Amazon wouldn’t comment on the technologies they use in SimpleDB, a source close to the company told me that while Erlang was indeed used in the SDS project (which became SimpleDB), the engineers implemented their own inter-process communication instead of using Erlang’s built-in distributed communications capability.

But even if Erlang isn’t the next big language, it could serve as a concurrent programming game-changer (as could other languages that offer similar concurrent programming support). By suggesting an alternative to shared memory concurrent programming, it can teach programmers one new way that concurrent programming can be done — even if it’s two decades old.

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Travel review site Kango, which brings together traveler opinions from across the web, then analyzes them using natural language analysis and travel-specific term matching to help you find the perfect hotels and activities for your next vacation, said it entered “almost beta” today.

Kango’s “almost beta” state covers romantic and family-friendly lodging and activities in Hawaii and California. For example, you can search for a family-friendly resort in Wailea, Maui and specify your budget criteria. Kango ranks results in order of family-friendliness and displays ratings from web sites like Yahoo! Travel, Travelocity and TripAdvisor.

Earlier this year, Kango received a Series A round of funding of $4 million from Shasta Ventures. The company was founded by Yen Lee, former general manager of Yahoo! Travel.

Kango could eliminate some of the multi-web site research that many vacationers undertake. For it to be generally useful, it will of course have to cover more geography and support terms beyond “before kids” (romantic) and “after” (family-friendly).

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Kids’ plush toy social network Webkinz.com has started running advertising, a move that, if recent articles in New York Times and Silicon Alley Insider are to be believed, has greatly upset parents. In fact, whatever controversy exists seems to have been manufactured by a nonprofit group with an idealistic agenda.

In October, some Webkinz bloggers noticed that the site was running an advertisement for “Bee Movie.” Conversation ensued, much of it over how to score a bee costume by clicking on the ad.

Blogger WebkinzMom asked Ganz, the company behind Webkinz, about their advertising plans and policy, and Ganz responded by saying the advertisements would only be for family-friendly products and that they would never offer hyperlinks directing children off the Webkinz site.

In the comments to that post, Webkinz parents largely expressed satisfaction with Ganz’s response and, by extension, its decision to start running ads. One said, “There is a limit to how much of this I am willing to buy, so if limited and tasteful advertising helps them meet their bottom line without me having to buy ungodly amounts of this stuff, it is fine with me.” And another, “[Y]es the ads told you where to go. But never ever did they try and take the littler ones out to another website. I thought that was pretty cool.”

So who is creating the controversy if not parents of Webkinz toy owners? The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, whose mission seems like a well-meaning but impractical idea. The CCFC itself points out that Webkinz is, from the ground up, a commercially-oriented site, a fact that Webkinz purchasers surely understand.

This seems like a huge mismatch: a nonprofit activist organization that wants all commercials removed from childrens’ lives joined with a set of parents who choose commercially-based online playtime. Parents willing to buy their kids the Webkinz plush pets that allow them entry into the Webkinz.com site are likely practical enough to accept some limited amount of advertising along the lines of what Ganz is doing.

The real story here is parents and companies relating directly to each other and figuring out what’s agreeable to both sides. Via blogging, Webkinz parents discussed the issue among themselves. Then WebkinzMom checked with Ganz to find out their policy on advertising. It’s notable that Ganz didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from the New York Times, but did respond to WebkinzMom in October.

Now, where can I get a Webkinz reindeer?

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Posted by Anne Zelenka on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  15 Comments

Before all the 2008 predictions come out, it’s fun to take a look at predictions from last year to see how widely on or off the mark we were. I didn’t write a predictions post last year, but I did comment on Om’s request for 2007 predictions, saying:

My prediction or maybe just my hope: people will stop talking about hybrid web/desktop apps because internet access will become nearly ubiquitous.

Did my prediction come true? Not exactly. Internet access still isn’t ubiquitous (though we’re seeing baby steps towards getting it onto airplanes, and people love their EVDO). More to the point of my prediction, there’s definitely been talk and action about the offline web application story. But still, offline web applications and tools for creating them don’t seem to have much momentum.

Adobe released an alpha of Apollo for building hybrid web/desktop applications, then renamed it AIR. Google came out with Gears to enable offline access for web apps, and used it to give Google Reader an offline mode. Microsoft introduced a Gears competitor. (Note that Adobe AIR follows a different model from Google Gears; AIR applications require an installation and are closer to the desktop paradigm than Gears applications, which run in a browser).

The offline web app story in 2007 wasn’t just about developer tools, either. Zimbra enabled offline access to its email and other collaboration capabilities; Zoho made its word processor work in offline mode.

Despite these developments, hybrid web/desktop apps aren’t exactly buzzy. A Google Trends graph for Adobe Apollo/AIR (the name changed in the middle of the year) and Google Gears shows no trend towards increased interest, suggesting that the hybrid web/desktop application space, at least for now, isn’t gaining momentum.

I suspect many people are happy with the mix of desktop and web applications they currently use. Desktop applications suit content-intensive work such as writing long documents (MS Word), manipulating large image files (PhotoShop), and writing software code (Eclipse). Web applications suit multiperson collaboration and communications. And if you want desktop application richness for communications like email or instant messaging, there are plenty to choose from.

What about you? Are you pining for offline access in your favorite web applications? Or are you satisfied with the mix of on and offline capabilities you have with your current toolbox of web and desktop applications?

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Posted by Anne Zelenka on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  24 Comments

Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. He’s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.

This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features — such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin — that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.

Why blogs and not Facebook or MySpace

In contrast to social networking, blogging offers a person-centric way for individuals to come online. A social network like Facebook gives you your own place online, but it’s not really your own place. As Copyblogger Brian Clark recently said in a blog post, “For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating ‘user-generated’ content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.”

Clark was responding to an ongoing conversation launched by blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who proposed that blogging is far more important to him than social networking. Bloggers including Stowe Boyd and Darren Rowse seconded the idea. This growing disenchantment with social networking and return to blogging suggests that in the future we could see a migration, at least among tech bloggers, towards more distributed social networking — along the lines of what Messina envisions.

WordPress, why and how

WordPress is ideal for experimenting with a distributed social network. It has a plug-in architecture that makes it easy to extend. And people who use it are already comfortable to some extent with coming publicly online as individuals. Though there are, of course, WordPress installations that don’t represent just one person, in many cases they do.

Messina, along with Steve Ivy and Will Norris, is exploring how WordPress can serve as a social networking profile. To that end, a blog needs a way to identify itself to other blogs and share its contact lists, ideally in a privacy-protected manner. The OpenID identity standard can serve as a distributed identifier for both a person’s blog and the blogs of people to which that person is related. Messina and his partners plan to develop a WordPress plugin that exposes the contact list. An OpenID plugin for WordPress already exists; it was developed by Will Norris.

Not everyone wants unified social networking

WordPress-as-social-network, like the unified social graph meme, will most likely appeal to those who want to create one strong identity online. But not everyone does. Blogger danah boyd has written about how some people use social network identities in an ephemeral manner. Those who prefer a more multilayered and multifaceted depiction of themselves online might prefer to create multiple social networking profiles on different sites, representing themselves in different ways as the situation demands.

But those who already use WordPress probably want to build a strong and persistent online presence and identity. Plus they’re the geeky sort, with whom with the idea of a unified, distributed social network might resonate. And at least some of them are refocusing on blogging. The next hot social network might just be built out of blogs.

Full disclosure: Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com is funded by True Ventures, which is also an investor in GigaOM.

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VoIP startup Jaxtr said today that it has attracted 5 million registered members, up from 500,000 users 140 day ago, making the company “the fastest-growing Internet communications service in history — ahead of Skype, Hotmail and ICQ,” according to its press release.

But where is the money?

You might think that scaling to meet the needs of these millions of users represents Jaxtr’s biggest challenge. Indeed, Jaxtr expresses concern in its announcement over its ability to meet user demand. To that end, it recently hired Taneli Otala, former CTO of MySQL, as VP of engineering.

But Jaxtr has bigger problems than scaling and tuning their systems for millions of users. To make Jaxtr a real business, they need to convert sign-ups into satisfied users, and from there, transform those users into customers who pay.

Even then, there are no guarantees Jaxtr will succeed. If the promise is cheap calling, it’s just the same old VoIP thing.

How Jaxtr works

Jaxtr offers free international calls via a web-based widget. To use it, you sign up for an account then publish your Jaxtr widget on your blog, web site, or social networking profile page. You can also email callers a link to your Jaxtr page, which shows the widget. Callers click on the widget, enter their phone numbers, then Jaxtr rings the caller phone and your phone to connect you with one another.

If the caller is located in one of 50 supported countries, they will be given a local phone number they can use to call you next time — without paying long-distance charges. Otherwise, they will be provided with a U.S. number.

Each Jaxtr user gets 100 “jax” a month. Jax represent a Jaxtr-specific currency that is exchanged for minutes at different rates in different countries. Currently, once you run out of jax you have to wait until the next month to get more. In the future, you’ll be able to buy jax — and that, along with web and mobile advertising, is where Jaxtr plans to get its revenue.

The big challenge for Jaxtr: Turning try it into buy it

It’s no surprise that Jaxtr is seeing so many sign-ups: the promise of free international calls, mobile-to-mobile, is compelling. And compared to Skype, Jaxtr doesn’t require any special client software. A caller simply uses the widget once, then subsequently dials the number the widget gave them for future calls. But turning registered members into ongoing users — and paying customers — won’t be quite as easy.

First, the Jaxtr service is somewhat complicated, as a quick glance at the frequently-asked questions list proves. Plus, though it does provide for mobile-to-mobile calls, the first time a caller uses it, he or she must use that web widget.

Second and more importantly, there are doubts as to whether the Jaxtr money-making math adds up. The company must be spending some serious cash on those local numbers it gives out, as well as on connecting phone calls. Will they be able to come up with a pricing scheme for jax that makes the business economically feasible?

Five million users is impressive, but how hard can it be to find 5 million people that want mobile-to-mobile international calls for free?

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Tags: Jangl, Jaxtr, skype, VoIP

Professional networking service LinkedIn wants to emulate Facebook’s success by drawing users and applications through the use of a similar portal strategy. But LinkedIn’s best chance at success lies in doing just the opposite: reaching out to other web sites and applications.

LinkedIn announces personalized home page, Business Week partnership

Today, LinkedIn launches a new personal home page that provides a basic personalized news capability, along with modules showing where OpenSocial applications will go. They are also announcing a relationship with Business Week, their first partner for an external API.

LinkedIn’s new home page includes company news, network updates and customizable modules. The company news feed shows news articles about the company for whom you work, filtered by what’s most popular among your colleagues. The network updates show what your professional contacts are up to. And the customizable modules show how users will add OpenSocial applications to their home page.

LinkedIn, you’re no Facebook

The new home page looks like an attempt to create a professional version of Facebook’s one-stop-shop social networking site. But LinkedIn is no Facebook, despite rosy possibilities for next year. Facebook has found success in bringing people and applications to its site because it offers a rich social experience.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, has always been about recording and browsing professional networks, not building those networks. Building the relationships that LinkedIn displays happens elsewhere. Even with features like Answers and Introductions, which provide some person-to-person interaction, LinkedIn is currently more data store than social platform.

That data store has real value, but because it’s locked up on one site it’s far less valuable than it could be. If LinkedIn made itself the default way to keep track of and activate professional relationships, their service would be hard to beat.

LinkedIn ReachingOut

The new partner relationship with BusinessWeek shows how LinkedIn might reach out to succeed. When you’re viewing a Business Week article with the new LinkedIn feature, you can hover over a company name and find out how you’re connected to the company via your professional contacts.

This flips news personalization on its head. Usually, personalized news means a service recommends articles to you. In this version, articles you’re already reading are personalized by virtue of their association with your professional network.

Imagine if you could access your LinkedIn professional network from anywhere: your email (LinkedIn integration is already available in Outlook), Facebook, your instant messaging client, Twitter, your contact manager, and so forth. And I don’t mean just downloading a CSV file and then importing it by hand.

The limited news personalization capability that LinkedIn is offering on the new home page suggests another way LinkedIn could reach out. It could make professional profile, network and company data available for integration into RSS news readers. People could find out how they’re related to other people or companies they read about on blogs. Professional profile and network information could even be used by smart newsreaders to come up with feed and article recommendations based on the people, companies, industries and job titles in a user’s LinkedIn account.

The riskiness of not risking enough

LinkedIn isn’t moving forward aggressively enough to unlock the value of their data and services; they need to bring them to the places where professional networking happens. “We’re taking a measured path because our audience is a professional audience,” Senior Product Director Adam Nash told me. But successful professionals know that the biggest risk you can take is to be too cautious.

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When you get book recommendations from Amazon or music suggestions from Last.fm, they’re based not just on your own shopping and surfing history, but on the preferences of people who like the same things you do. It’s called collaborative filtering, and it’s not always an ideal way to find new things to read, watch, or listen to.

Suggestions based on collaborative filtering can be helpful, but they can also leave you wondering where your ability to think for yourself went. One antidote can be found in the personalization approach taken by matchmine – it profiles your likes and dislikes on numerous levels, then matches that multidimensional taste profile with the characteristics of specific movies, blogs and other content.

[poll]

How it works

The system revolves around the MatchKey, a feature in which users describe what they enjoy. The MatchKey is then stored on your hard drive, where it can be accessed by content personalization applications that help refine matchmine’s understanding of you.

You create your MatchKey using an online application called KeyForge, which starts by recording your “demographic archetype” made up of zip code, year of birth, and gender. Then it walks you through the four types of currently supported content: movies, video, music and blogs; you either rate specific examples (in the case of movies, video and music) or tell it what categories you like (in the case of blogs).

You then save your MatchKey onto your computer, where it can be read by locally-installed Adobe AIR applications and used to make recommendations. Right now, matchmine offers two beta applications: MyMovieMatch, to help you find movies, and MyGumballMachine, which makes recommendations from all four categories.

Why it might be better

What I like about matchmine is that it lines up my multidimensional taste profile (my MatchKey) with the multidimensional profile of a piece of content. For example, I like “The Princess Bride” because it combines comedy with romance and a bit of fantasy; matchmine can find other movies that have similarly specific profiles.

matchmine reminds me a bit of Pandora, which doesn’t use collaborative filtering but rather searches for music based on the characteristics of music you say you like. Pandora, however, doesn’t construct a personal profile of you to match to the music; it starts with music you specify. [Do you like Pandora or Last.fm? Take our poll at Web Worker Daily.]

matchmine can also match you to other people, by computing the similarity of your respective MatchKeys. That would be another path to find content you might like.

matchmine works across content types and services, effectively bypassing the compartmentalization of personalized recommendations. But it does so in a way that doesn’t compromise privacy, because you retain control of your MatchKey. Plus, when used to make recommendations, it’s not associated with any identifying data.

Future plans

In January, matchmine will roll out integration with partners Fuzz (for music) and Filmcrave (for movies). Peer-to-peer online trading platform Peerflix has been named as a partner as well. CEO Mike Troiano says the next wave of partners will include both small discovery players and larger content providers.

Early next year, matchmine will offer the capability to store MatchKeys on a server, making the download optional. Then people can come across it as a feature on some web-based content service, discover how it works, and then use it on another one, all without having to understand what it offers in absence of a specific use. It’s hard to understand in the abstract, as Troiano admits.

If matchmine can get MatchKeys incorporated into various content platforms and show users the benefits of truly unique personalization without the need to compromise their privacy, this could be a winner.

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Tags: Last.fm, Matchmine, Pandora

Google’s Marissa Mayer, VP of search products & user experience, proposed Google Trends as a way of polling the populace, suggesting in a webcast yesterday that Trends could help predict who will win an election.

Mayer showed how Google Trends accurately predicted George W. Bush’s dominance over John Kerry in 2004 and Nicolas Sarkozy’s win in May of this year over Segolene Royal in the French presidential election. Current Google trend lines show Clinton beating Obama and Edwards, though I wonder how anti-Hillary sentiment plays into this, given it seems stronger than any anti-Barack or anti-fancy haircuts feeling.

On the webcast, Mayer also said that Google will eventually provide an API for Trends and allow download of the data, but didn’t commit to a time frame for either of those.

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Tags: Google Trends

There’s this idea wandering around the web that less is better: less work, generally, and less writing and blogging and especially less press release rehashing. But more and faster conversation about technology means more chances for interesting ideas and useful analysis to emerge. There’s certainly a place for deep thought, but the web mind can work at many speeds — fast, slow and in between.

Marketing consultant and blogger Brian Oberkirch suggests that tech blogging happens too fast, without enough thought, and that a decrease in ad spending could have a helpful effect:

A minor correction in the ad market might be the best thing to happen to blogging. Maybe writers would turn away from becoming page mills and boring the crap out of us, and instead, will turn back to value, passion, thinking things through, making connections previously unseen.

Forrester blogger Josh Bernoff recently voiced a similar criticism:

When it comes to blogging, faster is often perceived to be better. GigaOm and TechCrunch are all over the trends, covering the same announcements, often within minutes of each other.

I’m not convinced, however, that better ideas emerge by holding back on them, deeply thinking them, and polishing them until they’re just right. With the global Internet mind, offering more tentative and provisional ideas and doing it faster may be a better strategy than sitting in an isolation chamber, devoid of feedback.

Writing coach Angela Booth tells writers they should write more, not less:

Many years ago, I wanted to be a “good” writer. So I wrote less. I became obsessive about revision — polishing the life out of my writing. It finally dawned on me that “good” doesn’t mean slow. In fact the faster I wrote (which was my natural inclination anyway), the more quality I could winnow from the chaff.

There’s a parallel that can be drawn with tech blogging — not just that individual bloggers become better writers as they write more, but that the ideas we come up with as a community get better as they are batted about the blogosphere.

If all tech blogs did was rewrite press releases, they would add little to the evolving understanding of technology. What they do instead is consistently introduce timely information and quick analysis into an ongoing conversation. While it’s not a perfect approach, it can contribute to an incremental growth in understanding — especially when that new information is mixed and mashed up by other writers working at different paces and with knowledge of other spheres.

Richard Ogle in his book “Smart World” proposes that the world of ideas thinks for itself. Blogs can radically accelerate that process by encouraging a much broader range of people to participate, speeding up the flows of information and allowing connections to be made across a range of topics. On the web, less is definitely not more.

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