Yahoo is not waiting around for 2008 to pack it in, and has released the top stories (and top searches) for the year that still has 30 days to go. I just spent 20 minutes on the site, and I love it. The presentation is simple, elegant and inviting. It is definitely better than most of the lists magazines are going to churn out. I wonder why Yahoo doesn’t do more of these technology-enabled media properties. Regardless, the top 10 searches of 2008 is an ironic reflection on our times - Britney Spears and WWE beat Barack Obama as the top search for 2008. (Yahoo offers a rational explanation for that as well.) The rest of the top 10 is also highly skewed towards entertainment artists. The site has also top 10 picks in different categories - News, Olympics, Politics, Economy and more.

The Internet is close to a meltdown, according to The Register. The culprit, according to author Richard Bennett, is the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, which introduced a new type of file transfer with its most recent alpha version. BitTorrent clients have long been using the TCP protocol to facilitate file transfers, but now uTorrent is moving to UDP, a protocol that is very popular for streaming media, VoIP and other real-time transfers. This will essentially lead to torrents eating up all of the bandwidth available for VoIP, according to Bennet, who calls uTorrent’s UDP transfers a “net-killing feature.”

Of course, the same argument was made when UDP-based VoIP connections and video streams became popular — and the Internet hasn’t ceased to exist. The truth is that uTorrent’s UDP implementation could actually be a step toward alleviating congestion problems. Bennet, however, decided to ignore this and instead serve up nothing more than a thinly veiled rant against net neutrality.

Bennet’s piece is based on a belief that UDP traffic is “aggressive” and uncontrollable, whereas TCP is the nice and proper protocol that can be easily managed. This notion ignores the basic fact that P2P developers, in order to make the protocol work at all, need to implement TCP-like functionalities on top of UDP, one of which includes congestion control. You simply can’t operate a P2P client that eats up all of its users’ bandwidth, much less build a successful business model on top of it.

BitTorrent Inc. has been working on establishing itself as a CDN solutions provider, offering media companies the ability to tap into its vast user base to deliver video and other huge files. Of course, this only works if end users are actually willing to provide some part of their upload bandwidth, and they are only willing to do so if file transfers don’t stop them from doing other things, like playing online games or making VoIP calls.

BitTorrent has traditionally entrusted its users with figuring out how to balance their network load, meaning that users had to manually limit their client’s maximum upload and download rate in case they encountered choppy Skype connections or similar problems.

uTorrent’s new implementation wants to automate this process by regulating its UDP traffic in relationship to ongoing TCP transfers. The company has tested its congestion control in recent months, and the first results seem encouraging, as a quote from a report (PDF) that the company recently shared with the IETF reveals:

“In one example, (BitTorrent) was used to download and seed game updates while an online multiplayer game was being played. With TCP used for transport the way it is usually used in BitTorrent, ping times shot up to 2000 milliseconds and beyond and stayed there while seeding. With the novel congestion control, ping times were in the 50-100 millisecond range, while the upload rate remained essentially unchanged.”

For now, we do have to take the company’s word for it that this actually works. uTorrent is not open source, and the client’s UDP file transfer protocol hasn’t been publicly specified, either. BitTorrent Inc. V-P Simon Morris has declared in a public response to the Register article that his company is working with the IETF to find “solutions that can be standardized and broadly adopted in due course.” In fact, BitTorrent engineer Stanislav Shalunov is co-chairing an IETF working group for this very purpose.

So why did Bennett chose to ignore all of this? Because a little scaremongering can go a long way to make the case for an ISP-based network management clampdown on P2P traffic. The only way to prevent the coming Internet meltdown, he contends, is to filter out uTorrent’s UDP transfers on the ISP level, and the only way to get this done is do away with net neutrality. Right — because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the financial sector, it’s that meltdowns are best prevented by doing away with regulation.

Pownce, a microblogging service started by Leah Culver and others back in May 2007, has been acquired by blogging software giant, SixApart and will be shutdown. Culver and other members of the Pownce team are going to work for San Francisco-based Six Apart, well known for products such as MoveableType and TypePad. What it means — negligible or no money changed hands.

Pownce seemed like a pretty cool idea, but it never got any major traction, losing out to the simpler and more popular Twitter. I used the service for a few months but then lost interest, and so did many of my friends. From Culver’s post, it seems that SixApart is going to incorporate Pownce’s microblogging technology into its blogging platforms. It makes a lot of sense for SixApart to buy a microblogging platform, since microblogging is one of the faster growing parts of the “social media ecosystem.”

Inventor and tech philosopher Dave Winer Twittered tonight that federation is the hot thing, pointing to a New York Times article about Facebook Connect. And just like that, he touched upon the third rail of our increasingly social web. The big question facing the social web depends on the direction it needs to take. A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has led to the idea of “federation.” On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place — in other words, aggregation. These two diametrically opposed views of how we are going to come to grips with our social web are going to face an intense debate until consumers vote with their clicks.

United Federation of the Social Web

Federation, as explained on Wikipedia, “describes the technologies, standards and use-cases which serve to enable the portability of identity information across otherwise autonomous security domains. The ultimate goal of identity federation is to enable users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, and without the need for completely redundant user administration.”

Facebook Connect, which was announced in May and is being rolled out this week, allows you to use your Facebook login to access Facebook’s partner web sites, then broadcast what you are doing on those sites to everyone on Facebook. It’s like Facebook Beacon — minus the marketing sleaziness. Partners include the Discovery Channel, the (irrelevant) genealogy network Geni, and (hot) video site Hulu.

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer told The New York Times. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.” Of course, as I pointed out earlier, this is desperately important for the company to figure out how to make money. As a competitive matrix, here are some of other projects Facebook Connect is teeing off against: Google-sponsored Friend Connect, Open ID and MySpace’s Data Availability initiative.

HyperAggregate

On the flip side of federation is aggregation. There’s a small army of startups, such as FriendFeed and Ping.fm, that want to act as a dashboard for your entire social-web infrastructure. The latest startup to join the ranks is Power.com, a Rio de Janiero, Brazil-based startup that has until now operated in stealth and has raised $8 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Esther Dyson. The company was started by Steve Vachani.

Vachani’s big idea is that you can come to the Power.com web site, log in and interact with all your social networks, as well as other web services. It is not the first startup of its kind. Several others — MyLifeBrand, Spokeo, Loopster and ProfileLinker — have walked down this road. What Power.com has done is use virality and focus on Orkut to get a big enough user base. Vachani describes his service as “Facebook Connect for everything — an ultimate mashup platform” that connects to data from any service and allows Power.com users to interact with that information.

It works like this: You register all your web services and social networks on Power.com. Once you log on, you are automatically logged on everywhere that matters and you can easily go from Power.com to any one of your social networks with a single click. Your start page on Power.com (a stripped-down cross between Facebook’s start page and Netvibes) will show you all of your friends, messages and content — from all their social networks, soon from instant messengers and email accounts — in one place. All your friends, messages, updates, birthdays and photos from diverse social networks will be aggregated nicely together.

A Power “communicator” will allow you to send information to all your friends across networks with the ease of sending an email. “This is just like Meebo,” Vachani insisted, where they log in to and constantly interact with the service. It doesn’t use any APIs, and all the magic happens using this technology developed by the company. Vachani called it “intelligent proxy.” I have asked for more details to understand how exactly it works.

Power.com claims that all your information is going to be arranged by people, not by discrete web destinations. Soon you will be able to use its dashboard to do everything on the web — or so it boldly hints in the press materials. The company claims it has 5 million registered users in Latin America and India and says it will hit 30 million by 2009. How it is claiming all these numbers and growth is a tad fuzzy.

Theoretically (and only theoretically) the idea of aggregating your web content and activites makes a lot of sense. Back in March 2007, in a column for Business 2.0, I wrote: “This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators…It’s impossible to keep up with dozens of social networks, millions of videos and thousands of blogs. Hyperaggregation is simply a way to do in the new-media world what old media has done for centuries: neatly package information.”

The demo of the service was quite impressive, but there was something about the service that makes me uneasy. Don’t get me wrong — I think they have built an interesting service, but many questions remain before it wins me over.

A Privacy Problem?

First of all, how is this going to turn into a big business? My guess is that our profiles would be used for some kind of marketing. In its terms of service, Power.com says:

You agree that Power may use your image for advertisement purposes. These advertisements will only be displayed to the same user whose image is being used.

Given my distaste for Facebook’s Beacon and other ad-supported efforts, this line makes me pretty queasy. Down in its TOS, Power.com notes that by saying yes to its service agreement, you are authorizing “Power.com to add the URL WEBSITE to my profile, linked to the site My.Power - Power profile of the user.” In other words, they can become your presence on the web, and the company can build a global social directory.

All these issues I would still be able to put aside, but I am not sure I want to aggregate and trust all my private information, including my personal communications (IM messages, emails and what not), to a tiny startup. What assurance is there when it comes to fidelity of my data? I am waiting for Vachani to outline how his company will be able to do that.

Instead, I very much like Loic Le Meur’s concept of “centralized me. “I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third-party service,” he wrote. I couldn’t agree more.

Image courtesy of Luic Le Meur

The Sunday Times of UK reports (more like speculates) that Microsoft is going to buy Yahoo’s search business for $20 billion in a very complex transaction. The Sunday Times claims that Jonathan Miller, formerly chief executive of AOL, and Ross Levinsohn, a former president of Fox Interactive Media, are going to run the new management team.

Under the terms of the proposed transaction, Microsoft would provide a $5 billion facility to the Miller and Levinsohn management team. The duo would raise an additional $5 billion from external investors. This cash would be used to buy convertible preference shares and warrants which would give it a holding in excess of 30% of Yahoo. The external investors would also have the right to appoint three of Yahoo’s 11 board directors. The talks with Yahoo involve Microsoft obtaining a 10-year operating agreement to manage the search business. It would also receive a two-year call option to buy the search business for $20 billion. That would leave Yahoo to run its own e-mail, messaging, and content services. It is expected that the operating agreement would boost Yahoo’s income by as much as $2 billion per annum. (my emphasis added)

If true, that would value the search business — not exactly a champion — more than Yahoo’s actual market value of approximately $16 billion. Microsoft might be desperate to win online, but as we have seen time and again, trying to buy share in search is a failing strategy. With little or no sources, I find this story as unreliable as a piece of swiss cheese left for too long in the pantry. Levinsohn who described the Times story as “total fiction” seems to agree. What are your thoughts?

Eric Schmidt is fond of saying it would take Google 300 years to achieve its goals. I always thought he must have been at least partly joking. The shelf life of Internet companies is short; it’s taken Yahoo and eBay little more than a decade to reach what appears to be their respective “best-if-used-by” dates.

And judging from the way investors have been treating Google’s stock, you’d think it was also on track to face an early downgrade from Internet giant to also-ran. After hitting an all-time high of $747.24 a share in November 2007, Google’s stock slid to as low as $247.30 a week ago — a 67-percent drop (the shares closed at $292.96 in a shortened trading day Friday). True, most stocks have suffered from widespread selling, but consider that rival Microsoft is down about 50 percent from its 2007 peak.

There is plenty of reason for concern in the short term. Google’s bread and butter is still online advertising, which is looking to be more vulnerable to a downturn than many initially thought. And it still hasn’t cultivated any rich revenue streams outside of search. Word of widespread contract worker cutbacks only add to that image of a giant on the ropes.

But there are signs that Google is growing slowly more integrated into many facets of our online experiences. Its market share in search expands slightly each month. Chrome is proving a bigger hit than the first reviews intimated. Google’s mail, chat, calendar, maps and feeds are becoming incrementally more useful. You may not be using all of them, but chances are you are using some of them more than you used to.

That’s because Google has been tweaking many of its far-flung offerings with new features and/or better performance. Not just Chrome, but video chat, and voice search on mobile devices. They don’t have to be perfect — and often fall short — they need to be just useful enough to steal our attention from a rival’s service.

Is Google making more money from these micro-innovations? Usually not. But they have a value that could last long after the next financial quarter. They foster loyalty, nibble up market share, and — most importantly — observe user interactions so that Google can be even more useful to you tomorrow.

The New York Times’ David Carr this week detected a larger pattern in all these micro-innovations. Confessing that he was at once seduced and creeped out by how useful Google’s programs were, he nonetheless concluded:

“Google’s Web platform, in all of its high-functioning glory, is its marketing.… If Google owns me, it’s probably because I am in favor of what works.”

When ad spending recovers, Google is going to have more ways to spread it around in front of us, and take up even more of our attention spans. But it’s not content with that, prodding its tentacles into other areas such as energy conservation. Schmidt recently spoke about the company’s early efforts to help make energy usage more efficient. Again, it’s not clear how Google would or could monetize it, but its influence in an area of changing demands is notable.

Does that make Google under $300 a bargain? In the long term, quite possibly. Remember when Google went public at $85 a share and people said its P/E of 58 was too high? Google’s 2008 P/E is now 18. And while Google’s profits are growing much more slowly, they are likely to be growing for years.

Google executives have long acted blasé about its stock price and investor obsessions like profit margins. Still, when a stock loses 67 percent of its value in a little more than a year, it has got to be worrisome for workers holding options. And so there may be a couple of stomach-churning years ahead for Google.

After that? The subtle moves Google has been making with an eye on long-term growth could lead to bigger payoffs for years to come. Maybe not 300 years, but certainly into the next decade or so at least.

It’s far from certain — it’s even a fairly remote possibility — but the possibility of an economic depression is being discussed more and more these days. As is to be expected, the discussion tends to be centered around how much of what we’re used to having could be destroyed. As worthwhile as it is to brace for the damage an economic depression could wreak, this is Thanksgiving weekend — a time to reflect on what we do have, and what opportunities we see ahead. Not “opportunities” as in exploiting those in need during hard times, but as in adapting to and serving changing needs. A recent story in the Boston Globe that looked at the social changes a depression could bring got me thinking about how web companies might respond. The core strategy of the web’s biggest successes to date — make it faster, cheaper, more useful — doesn’t have to evolve much to respond to the dramatic shifts we’d see.

In the Globe’s article, staff writer Drake Bennett sees a 2009 depression unfolding differently from the 1930s: not bread lines, but long lines at emergency rooms; not migration from dust bowls to California, but an exodus from exurbs to cities. Durability would trump fashion, frugality and escapism would rule, and people might grow more isolated.

Again, this is all a mighty big “if,” and just speculation. But let’s imagine for a moment that a depression does descend upon us — how would the web adapt?

Let’s start with escapism. As Bennett noted, “The Depression was, famously, a boom time for movies.” As the current recession deepens, online video is already providing a contemporary equal in Hulu and other sources of free content.

The proliferation of online video, however, leads us to the issue of isolation. Here another recent web obsession, social networking, could come into play. Networks that pull people out of their houses — Meetup.com, say, or those that recruit people to do volunteer work — could become new stars.

The economic malaise is increasingly leaving thousands of skilled people with time on their hands. But the open-source ethic and user-generation spirit that has defined the web could be harnessed for group creation of new technologies as well as a new generation of entrepreneurs. Even a depression wouldn’t diminish the web’s power to help us promote our talents, so it could still churn forth labor-of-love innovations.

Free content, of course, will become more sought after than it was in the boom times. And while it will be difficult to generate revenue with a free (see: ad-supported) model, such an approach could become a way for cash-rich companies to build market share: Google is the most obvious beneficiary, but a free model could also offer leverage for Microsoft and even a life raft for Yahoo. Bartering could become more popular, which makes eBay’s current traffic decline hard to understand. Perhaps it will open a door for a rival upstart.

A quote this week from Lawrence Summers (yes, in declining to regulate derivatives in the 90s, he helped sow the seeds of this mess; and yes, he was also tapped to help clean it up) summed this up well: “All financial crises end — and when they end, they end in ways that create spectacular opportunity.”

Whether this financial crisis ends with the economy recovering quickly or stalling for years, web companies will end up with more than their share of opportunity. Either way, now is as good a time as any to begin wondering what those opportunities will be.

Chart courtesy of MarketWatch.

Carl Icahn, a hedge fund investor and corporate rabble-rouser, has bought 7 million shares of Yahoo for $67 million. That works out to about $9.92 a share. With that, his stake in Yahoo is now 75.6 million shares, or nearly 5.5 percent of the company, according to the AP. So how should we read into his move? After all, Icahn previously bought 70 million shares for about $25 a share and has lost $900 million on that investment. In other words, his track record thus far hasn’t exactly been awe-inspiring. His investments in Motorola, another company he lobbied to restructure, have taken a heavy pounding as well. Kara Swisher thinks that this recent Yahoo stock purchase is a sign that Yahoo is about to make a CEO choice “sooner than later and much more Icahn-friendly.” What do you guys think: Is Yahoo a bargain?

Increasingly, every time there is an unfortunate tragedy — be it a raging fire or a terrorist attack – we geta torrent of stories heralding the legitimacy of Twitter as a news source. Their core arguments are always the same — that social media tools allow for information to be dispatched far faster than the lumbering old media. 

Indeed, Twitter’s simplicity gives virtually anyone the power to send dispatches from the front line. Traditionally, eyewitness reports would first go through an editorial grinder; now they hit the web as soon as the people that type them up hit the proverbial send key. The question, however, then becomes: How does one make sense of the torrent of information that comes with this immediate media? I first wrote about the “immediate media” phenomenon last year:

This immediate media is information simply adapting to the new methods of distribution. At the turn of the last century, [the] telegraph was used to spread the news. Telephone technologies gave newspapers a new sense of urgency and made distant events a weekly, and for some, a daily affair. Radio broadcasts made news more real time, making it part of our daily life. TV brought news into the living room, [and] made it more personal. Cable and the birth of CNN made news a 24/7 phenomenon.

The Internet in its early version upped the tempo, and with the rise of high-speed, always-on connections, information is now an unending stream. If you follow that thread, then [you] can easily see that with each transformation, technology compressed the news cycle a little, and made distribution a bit more efficient. The more we connect, the more we want to know but in less time.

That idea of the future has arrived much faster than we thought, but as we struggle to make sense of all the readily available information, it’s important also to understand how the role of media outlets has changed. Such a need became especially clear to me over the past few days as I watched the ugliness unfold in Mumbai.

 Since Wednesday afternoon I have been glued to my computer screen — actually three of them — watching the CNN-IBN News and NDTV News feeds, MSNBC and Fox News, Wikipedia, and most importantly, Twitter, for updates on the situation in India. (Check out FLickr for getting visuals that show life after the attacks and how the armed forces are taking action on sea.) 

Despite the tremendous volume of information — and its immediacy — coming from Mumbai via Twitter, getting context about the situation has been a struggle. While a few people have been tweeting firsthand accounts, much of the information has been re-tweets or just rambling, reaction-based tweets. Maybe I was overcome with emotion, but the sheer volume of tweets and lack of clarity only fed my frustration with Twitter. (I’m sure it’s the same kind of frustration people feel with blogs at times as well.)

Over the last 12 months, video on the Internet has essentially turned global news into a local broadcast. Yet even with all the news coming at me from the local Indian channels by way of streaming on the web, no one was offering context, analysis or a comprehensive overview of what was unfolding around them. CNN, MSNBC and others didn’t exactly have a grasp of the situation either, and I was left guessing what was actually happening. It wasn’t until The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times offered up their reports that the whole time line and sequence of events started to make sense. It was only then that the sheer ugliness and audacity, the horror and the madness, hit home. 

And that’s when I realized that the future of media is being split into two streams: one that consists of raw news that comes like a torrent from sources such as Twitter, mobile messages and photos, the other, from old media. The eyewitness dispatches (and photos) via social media are an adjunct to the more established media — which needs to focus on providing analysis, context, and crucially, intelligence — in real time. And yet it is old media — and their next-generation counterparts, the blogs and other Internet outlets — that will have to adapt to this. Of course, the biggest adaption will need to come from the public, those of us who aren’t there ourselves.

 That’s my personal struggle, but you could insert many all-consuming tasks — such as starting up a company, or training for the Olympics — for blogging and still get to the heart of my question. Most people believe good blogging is about two things: personality and passion. But where does that leave me, a professional news writer who’s passionate about technology — but not to the point where I want to think about it 24 hours a day?

Technology isn’t my single-minded passion, mostly because I have this other passion in life — my two-year-old daughter — but anyone else with a life outside of their blog seems doomed to failure under that formula. I suppose I could be a mommy blogger with a heavy focus on technology, but in truth, it really is the hardcore sciences and learning about technology that I love. So my passions are pretty much destined to never meet — unless I want to implant an RFID or GPS chip in my kid. Maybe when she starts driving. On Monday, Om sent over a nice read about what makes a good blog post from 43 Folders that summarizes the personality and passion requirements quite nicely. But I was drawn more to a New York Times article on slow blogging written on Friday. While the idea of posting a few times a month seems self-indulgent for a professional reporter, there’s a lot of value in taking the time to think a post through. Passion and personality are no substitute for innovative thinking and well-researched points of view.

So as I sit down with my family for a much-needed vacation during the rest of the week and let up-to-the-minute blogging slide, I am also taking some time to think about a few topics that really interest me, such as privacy, home networking, broadband pricing and regulation, and where the chip industry might be in the next five years. Feel free to send your thoughts on those topics or tell me how you guys manage to juggle multiple passions — or if you think passion is the key to great blogging, even. Almost a year into this gig, I still haven’t figured it out.

Microsoft’s battle to conquer the web has a certain Moby-Dick-like quality. Me-too products, muddled branding strategy and constantly playing catchup with competitors has reduced the king of software to a punch line. The more they try, the further they get. In the third quarter of 2008, Microsoft’s online revenues were $770 million, up 15 percent from Q3 2007. But the losses jumped 80 percent year-over-year to $480 million. Adam Lashinsky succinctly sums it up:

Microsoft is so busy playing defense against Google. Yet Microsoft hasn’t done a great job with that either. Even as it has spent money on data centers and marketing gimmicks like giving cash back to users of its search engine — the online equivalent of banks handing out toasters for opening accounts — Microsoft continues to lose share to Google.

Microsoft’s portion of U.S. search queries was 8.5% in September, according to comScore, down from 10.4% in January 2007. During the same period, Google’s share rose from 53% to 63%. And Facebook, MySpace, Google’s YouTube, and other, newer sites have reduced MSN to also-ran status in terms of web popularity.

That at least five high-ranking Microsoft executives have a piece of the online portfolio illustrates another part of the company’s predicament. Microsoft doesn’t speak with one voice when it talks about the Internet. (via Fortune)

Perhaps that explains why it was willing to make a deal with that bureaucratic quagmire called Yahoo. Regardless, do you have any advice for Microsoft as it tries to win on the web?

Photo courtesy of Microsoft Corp.

Online retailers are not immune to the current credit crunch and are feeling the heat in a big way. The New York Times says that online spending dropped 4 percent for the first 23 days of November 2008, compared with the same period last year. According to comScore, online spending was about $8.19 billion vs. $8.51 billion in 2007. They are forecasting a flat holiday season at $29.2 billion.

Their estimates are more conservative than the $30.3 billion in online spending this holiday season projected by eMarketer, which estimated a total of $136.8 billion in holiday spending. In comparison, comScore is projecting $131.3 billion in total. Despite this lower number, I think comScore is being too optimistic.If you take the estimates at face value, they mean that we will see additional spending of $21.01 billion during the remainder of 2008 holiday season. In 2007, for the same remainder of the season, consumers spent $20.69 billion, a gain of 1.54 percent. If you believe comScore’s survey, which says that 46 percent of people are buying less expensive gifts, and 47 percent are buying fewer gifts — it is hard to see how they are going to get to the $21.01 billion number.

Hitwise, another research firm, today reported that “for the retail category overall traffic is flat when the market share of visits for last week is compared to the week before Thanksgiving in 2007.” They are seeing an increase in traffic interest to web sites preceding Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and at the same time “daily market share of visits to the Retail 500 (adjusted to reflect the number of days leading up to Thanksgiving) has also remained relatively flat.”

The upside of this bad news is that if you are actually looking to buy anything, it is a pretty good season for bargain hunting. The longer you wait, the more you may be able to save. For the past few days I have been getting all sorts of offers from online retailers…I smell the desperation. Now, wait for prices to fall low enough.

Santa Claus Photo by Alex Buhrmann via Flickr.

If there’s one thing people love to speculate about, it’s what a future business model might look like for Twitter, the belle of the Web 2.0 ball. Founder and CEO Ev Williams has said the company will come out with more details in the new year, which has only increased the frenzy of speculation. That frenzy got another boost on Monday, when Twitter announced that it had acquired Values of n, a company founded by well-known programmer Rael Dornfest, the former chief technology officer at O’Reilly Media and one of the developers responsible for creating the RSS standard.

In separate blog posts, both Dornfest and Williams said that Values of n would be shutting down the two services it offers — a smart sticky-note application called Stikkit and a personal assistant application called I Want Sandy. However, both also hinted fairly broadly that aspects of these services might find their way into Twitter. “[T]he technology behind the scenes will live on and potentially re-emerge as part of Twitter’s systems, services, user experience, or open source libraries,” wrote Williams, while Dornfest said Twitter “has no immediate plans to incorporate Sandy or Stikkit’s feature sets into its core product [but] those who know our apps well may notice familiar-feeling bits and bobs appearing in your Twitter experience.”

Stikkit and I Want Sandy are similar, in that they are both personal productivity-related apps. The former makes it easy to collect bits of personal data about friends and co-workers — phone numbers, birthdays, reminders, and so on — as though you were writing them all down on a sticky note, which is then integrated with other applications and services such as email, etc. I Want Sandy, meanwhile, is a kind of virtual assistant; you send “her” emails with specific instructions or keywords, such as birthdays to remember or appointments you need to keep, and she emails you or text-messages you at a time of your choosing to help you remember.

The fit between both of these services and Twitter seems fairly obvious. In the same way that Twitter “bots” can be set up to send specific messages at certain times or when users type certain keywords (try sending a message that contains the word “pony” in order to see the Wheee! Pony bot in action), it’s easy to see how a user might set up something like I Want Sandy and Stikkit combined — so that he or she could direct message the bot with details about a meeting or appointment, and then receive a message later with all of the relevant info. I Want Sandy, in fact, is already connected to Twitter so that you can send your virtual assistant direct messages.

Who knows — for the ultra-connected and time-starved business traveler, that might someday evolve into something worth paying for.

Nielsen, whose efforts to measure television audiences are ambiguous at best, says that we are watching more old television, prompting some childish headlines. According to the study, in the latest quarter:

• Americans viewers watched more than 142 hours a month of old TV – 5 hours more than last year.
• Americans are watching online video for 2 hours and 31 minutes per month.
• The number of homes with DVRs has grown to 27 percent and the time spent watching time-shifted video was about 6 hours and 32 minutes a month.

These numbers are an anomaly — 2008 was an election year, with the citizenry more actively involved in the process than any other election in recent memory. Millions were turning to television — broadcast, cable and the Internet — to keep up with political developments. And just like the viewing numbers, television revenues have been propped up by political ad spend. Next year, oldteevee companies are in for rocky times.

As a counterpoint to the Nielsen study, Liz over on NewTeeVee has collated together stats from some recent studies that show online video is exploding. Among them:

• Online video viewing is up 35.4 percent year-over-year
• 12 percent of U.S. teens and 11 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds watch online TV at least once a week
• 88 percent of U.S. Internet users are forecast to watch video online by 2012

The growth of the Internet is both true and greatly exaggerated depending on which web you look at, according to a rundown of data offered last night by Prof. Andrew M. Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota School of Mathematics. Growth of the wireless web is far outpacing the rise in use of the wired web, and providers charge more for wireless traffic. Odlyzko compiles an annual report on the growth of Internet traffic that generally looks at growth not as an incoming exaflood of information designed to take out networks or sell more routers, but to actually forecast the growth of networks.

In his rundown of recent, available data, the wired web has been growing by about 65 percent worldwide from the third quarter of this year over last year judging by stats from PAIX, an Internet exchange. Otherwise, growth appears to be slowing in North America and Europe, although Odlyzko is looking at only a few data points for this update. However, he concludes that wireless web growth is up 400 percent based on a report issued last week by Opera, which makes the Opera Mini mobile browser. As wireless growth explodes, look for carriers, in a bid to both control access and boost revenue, to implement tight controls on what users can and cannot do on their data plans. And even though wired web growth is slowing, don’t expect carriers to suddenly abandon their efforts to squeeze more out of subscribers with tales of video clogging the network.

This has been the year TV networks finally embraced the web. As 2008 wraps up, nearly every broadcaster posts its shows online within half a day of first airing them on TV. And the audience for such programming is growing, especially among desirable younger demographics. Twelve percent of teens and 11 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds watch online TV at least once a week, respectively, as compared to 4 percent of 35- to 64-year-olds, according to Knowledge Networks. But the major networks’ strategies aren’t cut from the same cloth. It’s instructive to consider each network’s overall strategy holistically, and we recently got a chance to do that with Fox. Continue reading at NewTeeVee