After its in-house classified ads system failed to take a bite out of Craigslist, Facebook turned to an official outside provider--a rarity for the social network--to revamp the feature.

After its in-house classified ads system failed to take a bite out of Craigslist, Facebook turned to an official outside provider--a rarity for the social network--to revamp the feature.

After its in-house classified ads system failed to take a bite out of Craigslist, Facebook turned to an official outside provider--a rarity for the social network--to revamp the feature.

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/nombrayexamplesite.png" width="903" height="415" style="display:block;float:none;" / New web service Nombray is out to help folks establish their online identity by registering their name-based domain. Enter your name into the Nombray search engine and register the various available combinations of vanity URL available. (For example, a search for my name returns GinaTrapani.name, GinaTrapani.us, GTrapani.com, etc.) Then, register the URLs of your choice for $20 apiece, and use Nombray's simple web page designer and hosting service to link to the various social networks and profiles you've set up across the web. (See CEO Chris Lunt's Nombray-powered chrislunt.net site above for an example, where Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are linked from tabs in a top frame.) Almost three years ago we a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/feature/geek-to-live-have-a-say-in-what-google-says-about-you-152444.php"advised you to register your own domain to have a say in what Google says about you/a, and Nombray looks like an easy way to do just that./p div class="related"a href="http://www.nombray.com/"Nombray/a [via a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10111337-2.html?part=rss"Webware/a]/div br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=4c1112a8644de07f37242234aaaebf72p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=4c1112a8644de07f37242234aaaebf72p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=4c1112a8644de07f37242234aaaebf72" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=D4XE8l5c"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=6vGMDHGJ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=JRYSSuxT"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=JRYSSuxT" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=G9nqfAe7"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=G9nqfAe7" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/nLC45527pTk" height="1" width="1"/

Two years ago, when social networking was all the rage, a lot of dedicated community websites for specific (and often very small) groups of people were launched by entrepreneurs trying to cash in on the hype by carving out a certain niche. The strategy proved successful for some, but for others … not so much. And now that the economic crisis is weighing down on the entire industry, with advertisers cutting their overall budgets and the online spend decreasing rapidly, the wheat is getting separated from the chaff faster than expected.

One niche social network shutting down is Sneakerplay, an online community targeted at people who love their sneakers so much they need their own special place on the net to talk about them and share pictures of their favorite shoes with each other. That was the idea. But guess what? People don’t love their sneakers enough to bond with other people over them on an ongoing basis. At least not enough people to build an actual business around it.

To be perfectly fair, the founders never expected all that much from it either, at least not for long. In the blog post announcing the demise of the service, the founders are quite open about the fact that they lost their focus along the way.

Over time, we’ve realized that we weren’t committing the same amount of energy as we did in the beginning. Our focus has been diverted by other projects that we’re currently working on. We think it’s not fair to you guys to not support Sneakerplay the way it’s meant to be supported. Sneakerplay really needs a new home. We believe in the right hands, Sneakerplay can flourish. It needs someone who can nurture it, build new features, and give it the right attention it needs.

Sneakerplay started on a shoestring budget ($1500) and never attracted any outside financing, so it was always more of a hobby project, although the 3 friends who started the social network did get a nice return on the money they put in (and then some) thanks to sponsorship and support from brands like Adidas, Nike, EA Sports and Microsoft. You can ask yourself what this might mean for other niche social networks: if turning Sneakerplay into something that made more money than it cost wasn’t even sufficient to keep these guys motivated, how many other niche social networks will be closing their doors soon?

As you can read on their blog, the founders are still trying to turn the shutdown into a sale, but that’s rather unlikely since the social network never got any real traction. They are, however, pitching the idea of a sale to MTV and Complex (who operates a competing network dubbed KicksOnFire) so maybe they’ll still be able to flip it.

For now, we’re putting Sneakerplay into the deadpool.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Gina Bianchini / Ning Blog:
The End of the Red Light District  —  As individuals and as a service, we stand for the freedom to create your own social networks for anything.  We believe that people should be able to set their own social norms and Ning, as a broad-based service, is designed to respect many different perspectives …

Today, Microsoft is rolling out some of the sweeping changes to Windows Live it announced two weeks ago. Windows Live seems to be gradually replacing MSN as Microsoft’s central hub for everything you do on the Web.

The new home page shows both your email and an activity stream of what your contacts are doing across the Web. It’s more FriendFeed than Facebook, with a little MyYahoo thrown in. You can also customize it to show the local weather, your calendar, and news headlines. A handful of recent your photos are displayed at the top, along with a search box and links to other Live services (Profile, People, Mail, Photos, Events, Spaces, Groups, SkyDrive, and even MSN).

The new services here are Groups, Photos, and Profile. The Profile page shows all of your activities on Wndows Live as well as other Web services like Twitter, Flickr, and Yelp. Groups lets you set up collaborative pages with others and includes a group calendar. Windows Live Photos also has a nifty slideshow feature that uses Silverlight to change the background color to match the dominant color in each photo.

With this redesign, Microsoft is also boosting the storage limit of its online file storage service, SkyDrive, from 5GB to 25GB. Primarily that is to make Windows Live Photos a more competitive photo sharing service. The photos take up storage in your SkyDrive account.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Although Google already enjoys a lead in search on mobile devices comparable to its dominance on the Web, the unique characteristics of mobile – small screens/keyboards, GPS, and cameras, just to name a few – leave open an opportunity for startups to come to the space with new ideas. One such company is Proximic, who is launching an iPhone app today that is just a sampling of some of the interesting things they have in-store for mobile search.

The company utilizes a technology it calls “Pattern Proxmity,” which lets users highlight whole paragraphs of text to perform a search for more information. The idea is somewhat like contextual advertising – looking at content and then serving up relevant ads – except it’s being applied to search, and rendering links to Web pages. From a usability standpoint, this makes a lot of sense on mobile, because typing and refining queries can be clunky and time consuming.

No Google Killer Yet

While that sounds pretty interesting, what Proximic is launching today isn’t exactly a finished product. The company’s first mobile app – which is for iPhone only – is simply a news reading application that lets you browse stories from more than 1.4 million feeds, and utilize the search technology to dig deeper within them. You can also subscribe to what Proximic calls “Agent Alerts” – essentially, notifications of pre-defined queries when new items are available.

Making Use of GPS and Camera

One reason the iPhone is where Proximic is starting is because of its built-in GPS features. Proximic sees these as being extremely valuable in expanding to areas like classifieds and real estate search – analyzing entire listings to return relevant related links. Additionally, Proximic wants users to be able to take pictures of a product, extract its name and description, and then perform the same type of search that you can currently do for news.

The Bigger Opportunity

As I see it, building a standalone app to challenge the existing huge players in search and mobile search is an extremely uphill battle. Where it seems Proximic could eventually become disruptive is in licensing its technology to other software developers, who can then incorporate it into the mobile browsing experience.

For example, rather than having to load a separate application to utilize Proximic’s technology, being able to simply highlight a block of text from inside your phone’s browser to perform a search using pattern proximity. Since Proximic can serve ads based both on location and context, getting the type of distribution that would come with such deals could create a serious cash cow.

Final Thoughts

For a variety of reasons – the devices themselves, slow mobile Internet, and bad interfaces – mobile search is still far from perfect. Proximic’s approach makes a lot of sense, assuming the secret sauce is actually good, and that the company can scale beyond a simple news reading app for iPhone. Those are big assumptions, but at the very least, Proximic is demonstrating an interesting approach to solving a big problem.

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Proximic Puts a Twist on Contextual Advertising
Proximic’s Contextual Content Widget
AdaptiveBlue Offers Auto SmartLinks for Blogs
WidgetBucks Giving You $25 to Register
National Geographic Widgets Launch Soon
Rabble’s Mobile Social Network Gets Funding
AIM Signs on Skyhook Wireless to Locate Nearby Buddies

pWhile fears that a few popular sites might wind up dominating the web appear to be unfounded, a new study appears to suggest that social sites like Digg and YouTube may help initially popular stories dominate. /ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081202-the-long-tail-may-be-vanishing-on-the-social-networks.html"Read More.../a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/zoyeGLKoSIGxuaglvuaflSbQGfY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/zoyeGLKoSIGxuaglvuaflSbQGfY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=UDp9IEtT"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?i=UDp9IEtT" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=BPhqjeR5"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=vQYC8VsF"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=41" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arstechnica/BAaf/~4/2mVjrutbhbo" height="1" width="1"/

pWhile fears that a few popular sites might wind up dominating the web appear to be unfounded, a new study appears to suggest that social sites like Digg and YouTube may help initially popular stories dominate. /ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081202-the-long-tail-may-be-vanishing-on-the-social-networks.html"Read More.../a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/zoyeGLKoSIGxuaglvuaflSbQGfY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/zoyeGLKoSIGxuaglvuaflSbQGfY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=UDp9IEtT"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?i=UDp9IEtT" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=BPhqjeR5"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=vQYC8VsF"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=41" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arstechnica/BAaf/~4/2mVjrutbhbo" height="1" width="1"/

div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"A group of open-source software advocates set out a road map for the software industry through 2020 at the Open World Forum conference in Paris on Tuesday./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The authors of the report, a target="_blank" href="http://www.openworldobservatory.org/download/owf_roadmap_20020.pdf"quot;2020 FLOSS Roadmapquot; (PDF)/a, made a number of predictions about the role of FLOSS (free, libre, and open-source software) in 2020, and 80 recommendations for the industry. Their use of the French word quot;librequot; (free as in unfettered) clears up the ambiguity inherent in the English word quot;free,quot; which can also mean without cost./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld#39;s a href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/?source=fssr"Open Sources blog/a. ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"They painted a rosy vision of 2020 in which FLOSS will have entered the mainstream of the software industry and contributed to reducing the digital divide between rich and poor. Social networks will rely on ubiquitous, open cloud-computing services and will allow people to interact not just with friends, but also with governments and businesses, they said. CIOs wary of vendor lock-in will champion the use of FLOSS, and such software will be at the heart of green datacenters and other business models with low ecological impacts, they said./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Reaching this computing nirvana, however, will require action -- and not just by bearded geeks. Investors, legislators, educators, electors, and even consumers also have a role to play, according to the report#39;s authors./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Governments must favor open standards and open services, they said. This is not just a matter of ideology, but also of necessity if data is to be exchanged between different services and systems./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"This requires a stable and neutral legal context in which a clear definition of open standards and services can be made and imposed, they said. Clear legal frameworks could also help avoid the proliferation of software licenses, they said./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Investors, whether state or private, should fund research leading to the development of strategic FLOSS technologies, and governments and businesses should set up academic and professional training programs to educate a new generation of software developers about FLOSS./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"There are some risks ahead, said the authors, including experts from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Spain, and the U.S., although the majority of them are French./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Among those risks, the use of cloud-computing capacity on the scale required by some government systems will result in an over-reliance on a small group of powerful suppliers. That could signal a return to the era of monopolies in some markets, with the risk that entire countries could be held ransom by their service providers, the authors warned. In addition, organizations unable to pay the price for these elite services could be left running on unreliable, or unsecure, second-class systems./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Cloud computing and Web services pose other risks, too, said the authors, among them employees of networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent, cloud-computing user (and supplier) Google, and server and software vendor Sun Microsystems./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"By hiding away the software and presenting only the interface, they will limit our ability to see the source code for the applications we run. That could make some FLOSS licenses irrelevant, or their enforcement meaningless. It could also stifle innovation, if the individual programmers who code open-source applications today are reduced to mashing up future Web services through limited APIs, said the report#39;s authors./p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=660d8f4fc8b01b166c682556fe8087d2p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=660d8f4fc8b01b166c682556fe8087d2p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=660d8f4fc8b01b166c682556fe8087d2 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/150-red-star.jpg" /In 2008 we saw the Semantic Web gain traction, giving us plenty of choice when selecting the 10 best Semantic Web products of 2008./p pThis is the first in a series of posts we'll publish over December, listing our choices for strongthe top web products of the year/strong. Then at the end of December, we'll post a strongTop 100 list/strong - which we'll be promoting over 2009 and opening up at some point for public voting. Without further ado, let's jump into the top 10 Semantic Web products of 2008./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12774amp;cb=12774' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12774amp;n=12774' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pEarlier this month we posted a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_semantic_apps_to_watch_one_year_later.php"an update to 10 Semantic Web applications/a that we have been tracking for a year now. Some of those make this list, as well as some from our follow-up post a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_more_semantic_apps_to_watch.php"10 More Semantic Apps to Watch/a. We also have a couple of other products in this list, which for one reason or another didn't get mentioned in our watch-lists. /p pYou may disagree with our selections, so do tell us in the comments what you think./p pemNote: the products listed below are in no particular order/em/p h21. Yahoo! SearchMonkey/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/yahoo-purple-logo.jpg" width="140" height="103" border="0" align="left" /In May this year a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_searchmonkey_launches.php"Yahoo! launched an open developer platform for search/a called a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/"SearchMonkey/a. Yahoo hasn't had the happiest of years, but its willingness to innovate in search is to be commended. As we reported a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_apps_platform.php"at the Web 2.0 Expo/a in April, SearchMonkey is a component of a major overhaul at Yahoo! across all of its properties to "rewire" for the social graph and data portability. SearchMonkey allows developers to build applications on top of Yahoo! search, including allowing site owners to share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup (microformats, RDF), standardized XML feeds, APIs (OpenSearch or other web services), and page extraction./p pWe think this is the best use of Semantic Web by an Internet bigco this year. So for that reason SearchMonkey makes our top 10 list. emRelated: a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semtech_making_the_web_searchable_searchmonkey.php"The Story of SearchMonkey/a/em./p h22. Powerset (acquired by Microsoft in '08)/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/pset-livesearch.png" align="right" /a href="http://www.powerset.com/"Powerset/a (see a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/exclusive_launch_of_powerlabs.php"our initial coverage here/a and a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/powerset_and_hakia_quest_for_semantic_web.php"here/a) is a natural language search engine. It's fair to say that Powerset has had a great 2008, having been a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_acquires_powerset.php"acquired by Microsoft in July this year/a./p pAt the time of the acquisition, Powerset said that it needed a bigger partner to expand its product beyond its current state of only searching Wikipedia - something we had speculated about when the a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rumor_microsoft_powerset.php"rumors of the acquisition first appeared/a. In its own statement, Microsoft stressed how useful Powerset's technology will be for improving Microsoft's own search products and to quot;take Search to the next level.quot; In a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/does_microsoft_powerset_beat_google.php"our analysis of the deal/a, we noted that it was a quot;bold play requiring exact executionquot; by Microsoft./p h23. Open Calais (Thomson Reuters)/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/calais_logo_mar08.gif" align="left" /At the end of 2007, ClearForest had been recently a href="http://www.clearforest.com/whatsnew/PRs.asp?year=2007amp;id=109"acquired by Reuters/a and at that point it had a Web Service and a Firefox extension. What a change a year brings! ClearForest went on to release a href="http://www.opencalais.com/"Calais/a, a toolkit of products that enable users to incorporate semantic functionality within their blog, content management system, website or application./p pSince a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/reuters_calais.php"launching the Open Calais API/a early this year, over 6,000 developers have registered with it and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. a href="http://www.opencalais.com/node/8823"Version 3.0 was released/a earlier this month and version 4 is expected by January 09./p h24. Dapper MashupAds/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/dapperlogo.jpg" align="right" /In November a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dapper_mashupads_a_new_lease_o.php"we wrote about/a the recent improvement in a href="http://www.dapper.net/mashupads/"Dapper MashupAds/a, a product we first spotted a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dapper_ads.php"over a year ago/a. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that's related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. That could be movies, books, travel destinations - anything. We remarked that the UI for this has grown much more sophisticated in the past year. /p pThe company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically. We think this has plenty of promise, so it makes our year-end list./p h25. Hakia/h2 pimg border="0" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/hakia_logo_mar07.jpg" align="left" width="150" height="73"a href="http://www.hakia.com/"Hakia/a is a search engine focusing on natural language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Over the past year Hakia has been busy extending its reach - a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hakia_licenses_semantic_search.php"licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology/a to other companies in March and a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hakia_announces_semantic_api.php"announcing a Semantic API/a in June. It was also one of the first companies to a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_opens_its_search_engine.php"utilize Yahoo! BOSS/a, by integrating their semantic parsing with the Yahoo! search index./p pWe think Hakia has made good progress getting its technology into the hands of third parties and making use of Yahoo's broader index, so for that reason it's among our top 10 for the year./p !--nextpage-- h26. TripIt/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/tripit_logo_nov07.jpg" align="right" /a href="http://www.tripit.com/"Tripit/a is an app that manages your travel planning. With TripIt, you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest./p pOver the past year TripIt has continued to iterate on its feature set - introducing LinkedIn integration, better mobile functionality, more social networking features, and other goodies. In short, it's user experience continues to rock!/p h27. BooRah/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/boorah_logo_sep08.png" alt="boorah_logo_sep08.png" align="left" /a href="http://boorah.com"BooRah/a is a restaurant review site that we first a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/boorah_semantic_restaurant_reviews.php"reviewed/a earlier this year and has come on in leaps and bounds over 2008. BooRah uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs. Because of this, BooRah can recognize praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly. BooRah also gathers reviews from Citysearch, Tripadvisor and other large review sites./p pBooRah also a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/boorah_launches_api.php"announced last month/a the availability of an a href="http://boorah.com/api.html"API/a that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah's data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons./p h28. AdaptiveBlue/h2 pemstrongDisclosure:/strong AdaptiveBlue's founder Alex Iskold is a feature writer at RWW./em/p pimg border="0" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/adaptiveblue_may07.png" align="right" width="238" height="56" /a href="http://www.adaptiveblue.com/"AdaptiveBlue/a are makers of the Firefox plugin, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blueorganizer_semantic_web.php"BlueOrganizer/a. As we wrote in January this year, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/adaptive_blue_indigo.php"the basic idea behind BlueOrganizer/a is that it gives you added information about webpages you visit and offers useful links based on the subject matter./p pOver the past year the company has been working on a new product, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php"called Glue/a. Launched last month, Glue is a more social networking oriented version of BlueOrganizer - it connects you to your friends based around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. We think the company has diversified smartly in 2008, by integrating social networking and mobile functionality into its products./p h29. Zemanta/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/zlogo.gif"a href="http://www.zemanta.com"Zemanta/a is a blogging tool which a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zementa_brings_a_semantic_layer_to_blogs.php"harnesses semantic technology/a to add relevant content to your posts. While it didn't make either of our 'Semantic Apps to Watch' lists in November, a number of commenters pointed it out as something they use. In September we covered a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zemanta_releases_major_upgrade.php"a major upgrade to Zemanta's service/a, allowing users to specify the sources they want to see in the suggestions list that Zemanta provides. Users can now incorporate their own social networks, RSS feeds, and photos into their blog posts. As we noted, this makes Zemanta a lot more appealing to established bloggers who are in less need of suggestions and more in need of automation./p pZemanta's API is also being used by startups, including semantic bookmarking service Faviki - which we mentioned in a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_more_semantic_apps_to_watch.php?p=2"our second Watch-list/a. So all up, we think Zemanta has done enough this year to be included in our top 10 list./p h210. UpTake/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/uptake-logo.jpg" width="150" height="44" border="0" align="right" /Semantic search startup a href="http://www.uptake.com/"UpTake/a (formerly Kango) aims to make the process of booking travel online easier. In a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_travel_search_uptake.php"our review in May/a, we explained that UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities - over 400,000 of them - from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations. /p pAnd now please let us know in the comments what you think of our selections. Do you think we've picked the best 10 Semantic Web products of the year?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_semantic_web_products_2008.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/CMocRhN6GOs6CQNxJfi0HCHZneQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/CMocRhN6GOs6CQNxJfi0HCHZneQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=17VzMLFa"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=NarFW15R"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=OUd0WMBh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=OUd0WMBh" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=Zxp0mQMt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=Zxp0mQMt" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=Xl99Wg7k"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=Xl99Wg7k" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=bdbZJL2f"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=AiovxOmK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/QRuIJbJSgdY" height="1" width="1"/

We at TechCrunch expect a rapid expansion of the market for mobile social networks. And with the iPhone’s success as one of the main catalysts of the development, services like Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, Loopt (which even offers a TechCrunch-branded version), aka-aki, and others keep cropping up.

One of the most recent social mobile networks catching our attention, MobaMingle, comes from Japan. MobaMingle is the internationalized version of Mobage-town, one of Japan’s biggest mobile social networks. The premise behind MobaMingle is to blend elements of virtual worlds, social networking, gaming and mobile blogging into one integrated concept.

Any new mobile social network faces the critical challenge of differentiating itself from the dozens of competitors. But the mobile-only MobaMingle, which launched as a beta version in September, has some factors going for it. In the first place, it has the advantage of being backed up by a large-cap parent company in Japan (DeNA), which has already managed to build a highly successful mobile social networking site in that country.

Having invested $3 million to get the US subsidiary started, DeNA seems to bet high on the advancement of the mobile web outside Japan. The company says it’s fully dedicated to the cell phone and not interested in bringing MobaMingle to the fixed Internet (the Japanese version, however, can be accessed through PCs since July, albeit in a rather halfhearted way).

DeNA Global, the San Mateo-based subsidiary behind the service, even tries to bring the Japanese phenomenon of writing and reading novels on cell phones to the west (“MobaStory”). In this field, the site is mainly competing with Quillpill, which exclusively focuses on cellular storytelling.

One culture- and age-specific factor, which might become a problem as far as reaching out to a broad, world-wide target audience is concerned, are the anime-style avatars through which users are represented. MobaMingle’s Japanized style can surely attract a certain segment of mobile web users but will also fence out a massive number of people who will just hate the design of the site. In order to minimize this danger, MobaMingle offers a number of avatar designs and virtual items geared towards the broader diversity of the global population (different hair styles, various face shapes, more clothing options, etc.). Just like in the case of MySpace’s mobile version, MobaMingle seems to attract some adults, too: DeNA Global claims around 10% of users access their site via Blackberrys.

If what works in Japan is any indicator, being reduced to pursuing a niche strategy isn’t necessarily a disadvantage for social networks. In Nippon, Mobage-town logged in over 15 billion page views in September alone, generated by 11.6 million registered members (DeNA Global won’t disclose statistics for the US market). In contrast to Facebook’s mobile version, for example, MobaMingle’s business model isn’t solely based on ads or affiliate models. In the Japanese original, users need to acquire MobaGold (a virtual currency) by clicking ads to buy virtual items. In the US, users currently accumulate MobaGold for activity on the site, i.e. for making friends or introducing new members.

But soon the free service will be additionally monetized through adopting the Japanese MobaGold system. In addition, virtual items costing several dollars a pop will be sold, a concept that (provided users embrace it) leads to high profit margins and amplified user involvement. Revenues and profits suffered a dip recently, but in Japan the service still boasted sales of $47.2 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2008. $21.2 million were generated through avatar-related transactions.

In order to replicate this success outside Nippon, however, MobaMingle must improve the quality and quantity of the games currently available on the site. Not leveraging the huge library of free Flash Lite games, which is the essential element of the Japanese version, is a clear drawback (DeNA Global cites the lack of support of Flash Lite in US handsets as the main reason). In its current form, MobaMingle is almost the same as Facebook without applications and a relatively easy target for copycats.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Bon, après la semaine de fou que je viens de passer, ça fait du bien de revenir à la programmation régulière et de vous parler d’autre chose que de mon petit moi (quoi que j’aime ça aussi, mais il y a des limites). Donc ce matin, dans le bulletin d’eMarketer, l’article Learning to Work with Social Networks, attire mon attention. Dans celui-ci on remarque que les gens de marketing cherchent encore LE modèle d’affaires à appliquer dans les médias sociaux. Le king des médias sociaux reste le blogue et son ROI (dans le sens de retour sur investissement) n’est plus à démontrer, mais les autres médias sociaux tels que Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube et autre, restent encore énigmatiques en terme de qu’est-ce qu’on peut y faire, combien ça rapporte et les autres questions fondamentales qu’un gestionnaire se pose par rapport à ça. Je ne parle pas ici de mettre du cash pour apparaître comme bannière publicitaire dans ces sites (qui comme le démontre le pote Yannick dans un récent billet à propos du PQ, peut-être aussi inutile) mais plutôt comme outil de stimulation de contenu généré utilisateur. Ce questionnement fondamental est confirmé par eMarketer et les réponses se font encore attendre :

While many marketers want to use social networks as part of their strategies, they still have no clear list of best practices for the medium. Getting friends to spread a marketing message to each other is a great goal, but how is that best done?
(…)
But the lack of established social network ad and marketing strategies is, in part, why use of the medium is still relatively low.

Mais comme je le dis aussi à mes clients, il faut continuer d’expérimenter, d’être présent et d’observer ce qui s’y fait et ces médias peuvent à tout le moins servir de faire-valoir (notamment en termes d’hyperliens externes entrants) de votre site Web principal. C’est d’ailleurs ce qui semble être l’avis de gestionnaires de ventes au détail américains...

Social networks have a lifecycle: They start with a small core of early adopters, swell as mainstream users getBy the numbers, there are no signs of Facebook fatigue. The social networks ranks swelled from 100 million in August to 120 million in October. If it sustains that improbable pace, it will encompass the entire worlds population by 2012. pa href=http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/1hMqB_yWRK4v-_EtOiAkyS8iPmM/aimg src=http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/1hMqB_yWRK4v-_EtOiAkyS8iPmM/i border=0 ismap=true //a/pimg src=http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/digg/container/technology/popular/~4/n7Yq3Xl-Ghc height=1 width=1 /br[a href=http://valleywag.com/5100378/why-facebook-wants-to-spam-your-news-feed title=linklink/a] [a href=http://feeds.digg.com/~r/digg/container/technology/popular/~3/n7Yq3Xl-Ghc/Why_Facebook_wants_to_spam_your_News_Feed title=moremore/a]

div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"MySpace, a target="_blank" href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/inform.do?command=searchamp;searchTerms=Flock+Inc."Flock,/a and Vidoop Tuesday unveiled a jointly developed a prototype tool that will let users store their OpenID credentials in the a target="_blank" href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasicamp;articleId=9061779"Flock social Web browser/a . a target="_blank" href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/inform.do?command=searchamp;searchTerms=The+Mozilla+Corporation"Mozilla/a -based Flock allows users to monitor what is happening on their favorite social networks as they surf the Web./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"a target="_blank" href="https://extensions.flock.com/"OpenID for Flock/a is now available to all users of Flock 2.0 as an alpha extension to the browser. The tool automatically notifies users when they surf to a Web site that supports the a target="_blank" href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasicamp;articleId=9061518"OpenID framework/a . The framework, supported by a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.computerworld.com/google_moves_to_openid"Microsoft#160;and Yahoo/a , allows people to use a single username and password to enter sites that support it./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at a href="http://www.infoworld.com/news/?source=fssr"InfoWorld News/a, or subscribe to the a href="http://www.infoworld.com/newsletter/subscribe.html?source=fssr"Today#39;s Headlines newsletter/a. ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The new tool also allows for configuration, management and usage tracking of all the OpenIDs a user has collected, the companies said. Users can choose which of their OpenIDs they want to use to log in for each site; the prototype also allows them to view the log-in history for each OpenID they have created./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Max Engel, product lead for the MySpace data availability platform, said that the tool should help expand the use of OpenID, which will help make the Web easier to use. quot;I strongly believe we are helping to advance the user experience around OpenID,quot; he said. quot;We can start soliciting feedback from the broader OpenID community.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The joint MySpace, Flock, and Vidoop implementation is a reference design released as open source under the General Public License so that changes from developers will be shared with the entire open-source community, the companies said./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"a target="_blank" href="http://www.computerworld.com/index.jsp"emComputerworld/em/a emis an InfoWorld affiliate./em/p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=5c21e236b92ef66116871a553f8fb181amp;p=1img style=border:0; src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=5c21e236b92ef66116871a553f8fb181amp;p=1 border=0 //a