| Weekly Wrap-up: Google's Social Network, Twitter's Birth, Why Group Messaging? and More... This week's top story was Marshall Kirkpatrick's revelation that Google has plans to launch a a new social network. Does it exist? Does it not exist? Google tried to shoot the down the story (which is what companies with sekret projects usually do) but Marshall's analysis and reportage paint a fairly comprehensive picture of what that service might be. Scoop! Denial! Repeat! Oh tech blogging, I wish I knew how to quit you. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key trends that are shaping the Web - mobile, location, app stores - plus highlights from our six channels. Read on for more.
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Crowdsourcing the Preservation of U.S. War Papers The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has joined forces with crowdsourcing document outfit Scripto , open source document transcription tool, to transcribe and share a piece of U.S. history thought to be lost. The project "Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800" seeks to transcribe and digitize copies of papers from a formative part of American history, previously thought to be lost to fire. Projects like these rarely suffer from a surfeit of funding, so using Scripto to coordinate a crowdsourced transcription has made the project possible.
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Using Twitter to Preserve Minority Languages Of the approximately 6,000 languages alive in the world today, 60 percent or more are said to be dying out. The majority of the world's languages are, in fact, "minority" languages, used in the shadow of a more politically powerful tongue. On St. Patrick's Day, Prof. Kevin Scannell of St. Louis University launched a project called Indigenous Tweets. Using a web-crawling statistical software he wrote called An Crúbadán, Scannell identifies which minority languages are being tweeted, by whom and how.
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The State and Future of the Social Media Management System Space This post originally appeared on guest author Jeremiah Owyang's blog. Social Media Management Systems, like CMS systems for websites, help companies manage, maintain, and measure thousands of social media accounts. Although the nascent SMMS space is only one year old, 58% of corporations have adopted at least one of these 28 vendors. Altimeter is conducting a formal research report on the SMMS topic (see research agenda for 2011), However, I wanted to give a year-end state, after coining this category 12 months ago and listing out vendors. SMMS systems are the next growth market for the social business category. While saturation is at 58% of corporate buyers, the average deal size is a meager $22,000 but will expect to grow to six figure annual deals in coming quarters to meet market demand. This growing space has low barriers to entry, which result in a flood of clones, but expect only a handful to remain after a shakeout to serve enterprise-class buyers.
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Don't Use Bit.ly's New Mobile Site: Do This Instead URL shortener Bit.ly launched a new mobile site today and it's a pretty good combination of quick, easy and powerful. If you're browsing the web on your phone and you want to share a link with someone - why not jump over to Bit.ly mobile and shorten it first? That way you can easily get all kinds of analytics on who clicked through it, where they were and more. It's frustrating, though, that the company didn't just improve its Bit.ly sidebar experience on mobile devices. If you're willing to grab and use the javascript from the Bit.ly sidebar button (we've embedded it below for your convenience) - you'll be a lot happier in the long run. How many clicks does it take to shorten and put on your clipboard a link with the new Bit.ly mobile site? 13. With the sidebar javascript? 4! That sounds like an obvious choice to me.
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Trends at SXSW 2011: RWW Founder Richard MacManus Interviewed by WebBeat.TV At the end of SXSW Interactive, I was interviewed by WebBeat.TV's Pelpina Trip. We discussed what was, in my view, the main trend of the event: group messaging. The ReadWriteWeb team tested a couple of these products, Beluga and GroupMe. We ended up using Beluga for the duration of SXSW, to keep in touch with team members in real time (see also Mike Melanson's analysis of these apps). I also discussed with Pelpina the story that ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick broke at SXSW about a new social networking product from Google. It was arguably the biggest tech story published during the event and continues to generate discussion to this day. Full video below!
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SXSW: BroadFeed, a New Twitter Newspaper for iPad At this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, we got a sneak peek at a new Twitterized "newspaper" application for iPad called BroadFeed, just prior to its iTunes launch. Designed by marketing agency Organic, Inc., the app has publisher appeal because it won't "steal clicks" (i.e., page views) from content providers when displaying articles your friends linked to in their tweets. On the consumer side, BroadFeed offers several features to entice new users in this increasingly crowded "social magazine" space. It automatically works with your Twitter account and your custom Twitter lists to organize the topics based on popularity, allowing you to read the most important items first. This gives the app a level of intelligence that some of its competitors don't have just yet.
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Magic Email Sidebar Xobni Now Available for Gmail (100 Invites) Once you've added x-ray vision to your email inbox, you'll never go back to life without it. The latest service to offer just that is Xobni, a high-profile startup that brought its Outlook plug-in out of Beta status a year ago next week. Today Xobni comes to Gmail and it looks really nice. The first 100 ReadWriteWeb readers who visit this link and enter the code XOBNI-RWW will be provided access to it. The company says iPhone and Android versions will open for testing within 90 days. Xobni competes with Rapportive (my favorite to date) and Gist, which was recently acquired by Blackberry company RIM. Another service called eTacts (site now down) was recently acquired by Salesforce. Xobni was funded by Blackberry Partners a year ago, but remains independent. Check out the screenshot below to get a feel for how it looks, what it offers and how it's different.
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SXSW: LightBox, Gorgeous New Photo App Goes Android-First LightBox is a beautifully designed new Android application, debuting at this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The app, which describes itself as a "social camera roll," is notable not only for its attractive design, still somewhat of a rarity in the Android world, but also for its business model: LightBox is building for "Android First." What that means is that LightBox's founders, Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel, are building Android applications that will eventually be ported to iOS, and not the other way around. The LightBox photo app, a combination camera and photo gallery, is only the first of many the company plans to build. These apps, for the most part, will be designed to replace default Android features with professionally designed counterparts.
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NFC News Round-up: RIM Fights Carriers; iPhone 5 Speculation Continues Research in Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry smartphones, is in a battle with mobile operators over its plans to use NFC in its forthcoming devices. NFC, short for "near field communication," is a technology that will enable mobile payments and mobile wallet-type applications, allowing customers to wave or tap their phones at point-of-sale to pay for purchases. According to a report from The Wall St. Journal today, the disagreement between RIM and the carriers has to do with where the credentials for these mobile payments will be stored - on a SIM card inserted into the phone, or, as RIM would have it, in a secure area within the BlackBerry device itself. Meanwhile, in other NFC-related news, it appears that the iPhone 5 may have NFC capabilities after all, despite earlier reports saying plans for this had been scrapped.
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