Planet NZTech

Richard MacManus: Songza Announces Facebook App and API

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:11:48 +0000

The music search engine and Internet jukebox, Songza, lets you seek out any song on the web and stream it immediately. In January of this year, we announced the site's partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr, which allowed them to grown their online library to 28 million songs. Now, Songza grows again with a launch of a new Facebook app and the arrival of a Songza API.

The Songza Facebook app lets friends see what each other are listening to on the Songza web site. Whenever a song is added to your playlist, that information is posted to your mini-feed and your profile page. Your friends can then click the link to the song to be taken to the Songza site to listen to it for themselves. In order to use the Facebook app, you have to first sign up for an account at Songza.com

Songza in the Mini-Feed

Along with the Facebook app, Songza is now also offering RSS feeds for the site's top-played songs, the featured songs list, and each user's playlist of newly added tunes, which is found on the user profile page. With that last one, the user playlist feed, you now have the ability to add Songza to a lifestreaming service such as FriendFeed, for example.

The last part of the Songza announcement involves the launch of their API. By using the API, developers can build custom widgets and applications based on Songza data. The API can be used to access the featured songs list, a user's playlist, and the last ten songs a user has added to their playlist. At the moment, Songza isn't imposing any limitations on the number of times requests can be made to the API, but they do remind developers that their feeds only update every 15 minutes, so there isn't much point to polling more often than that.

Because Songza finds its music on the internet, it can be useful for locating more obscure artists or live performances. And since the service doesn't allow for downloads, only streaming, it's legit. They even pay artists based on how many times a song was streamed via licenses with the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC). However, the best thing about Songza is that you can listen to a song as many times as you want in its entirety, unlike Last.fm, whose on-demand service lets you play any particular song, too, but only in full three times before receiving a prompt to purchase it.

Richard MacManus: Spongecell Promote: The Event Management Platform

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:35:01 +0000

Last August we called Spongecell "the most intuitive of the online calendar apps," and picked it as one of our 10 Must Have Online Office Apps. Since then, though, a lot has changed. Spongecell is no longer just a personal calendar, but rather a full-scale event management platform aimed at businesses with complicated event calendars. Last week I caught up with Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman and Chief Strategy Office Marc Guldimann to learn a little bit more about what the company is up to.

With Google Calendar now dominating the online personal calendar space, Spongecell decided to take a different approach to the market. Spongecell reworked their product and launched "Spongecell Promote" in March 2007, a full event-marketing platform provides publishing, messaging, and reporting tools to event organizers. After seeing that they were getting more traffic via embedded calendars than via the personal calendar service that had been their main product, Spongecell decide to shift gears completely and make Promote their core offering.

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Above is a sample Spongecell calendar widget.

The service compares somewhat to Evite, but Kartzman stressed that Spongecell isn't focused on one-off events like birthday parties -- though the product could be used that way -- but rather hopes to help organizations or event managers who run a large number of gatherings to manage their entire calendar.

Spongecell's service has three main components:

Publishing: Each event gets a web page that allows people to RSVP, comment, get directions, etc. Event pages can be syndicated to MySpace, Facebook, Eventful, Upcoming and elsewhere via widgets.
Messaging: Spongecell lets users spread the word about their event via SMS and email. About 2 million emails are sent out each month via the service.
Reporting: Event managers can use Spongecell's reporting features to track their email and SMS blasts and guest lists.

Spongecell's calendar widget has about 12,000 installs and serves 2 million pageviews each month, Kartzman told me. About 25% of those come through the app's RESTful API, which allows developers to create custom calendar applications. Parenting site lilaguide.com, for example, uses the API to power its event section and has customized it so that parents can add events to the site's calendar.

Conclusion

Spongecell has already landed some pretty big clients for their platform, including CNN, but plans to expand into new markets over the coming year as part of an ambitious plan to become the event marketing management platform for any industry.

Spongecell may no longer be a must have office application -- if you're looking for a simple calendar, try Google -- but it is now a very well made and versatile platform for running an online event calendar on any web site. Deciding not to compete with Google was probably a smart move for the company, which now has a much better chance of cornering their intended market.

Richard MacManus: Knewsroom: A Look at the Latest Social News Site

Fri, 16 May 2008 13:15:01 +0000

The way we create, interact with, and share information on the web is continuously changing, and at a very rapid pace. The end goal, most would argue, is the create a medium that completely democratizes the entire process. This evolution has taken us through editorially driven community sites (Slashdot), socially driven bookmarking sites (del.icio.us), and socially driven news sites (Digg), but none of them have really managed to figure out how to make the newspaper of the future. Just launched Knewsroom, one of the first apps from Kluster (ReadWriteWeb's coverage), believes that it has gotten it right, but has it really?

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

"The Knews" gets published every morning, featuring the previous day's top stories in Politics, Business, Technology, Design, Sports, and Entertainment. -- Knewsroom description

You can participate in the Knewsroom in several ways.

1. Propose a topic: Any user can speak up and propose a topic for coverage. The propositions are based on future occurrences that you think will take place, stories that might break, or events you would like to see covered. Once a topic has been proposed, any user from the community can create content based the proposition and you have a chance at getting published and getting paid. This feature works a lot like Newsvine - where you can create a column on your subdomain and get a shot at being featured as a columnist on the front page - but the problem is Knewsroom only shares 20% of its revenue with the community, and that 20% is divided between writers, readers, and evangelists. Newsvine on the other hand, gives columnists 90% of all revenue generated from their columns.

2. Submit or create relevant content: Story submission has two sides to it. First, as mentioned above, you can write original content based on a story someone from the community has proposed, and second, you can submit a link to an external source to be syndicated as a response to the story proposal. If the community deems your content "Knewsworthy," you will get published on the site's front page, and if the content is your original work you have the chance to earn an additional $150 on top of your cut from the 20% shared with the community. What you have to do to earn this additional money is not clear (but I imagine it is based on the popularity of the content).

3. Decide what content is deserving: Once a story idea has been proposed and someone else has either created content in response to it or submitted an external link related to it, the Knewsroom community gets to decide whether the story is worth publishing or not. If enough people agree that it is worth covering, it will be published as a column in the next day's Knewspaper.

What I find really interesting about Knewsroom is that the more you participate and the more the community appreciates and respects your participation, the more power you have to shape the Knews. This is a good way to incentivize regular participation and is the exact opposite of the way Digg treats its most passionate users. As you get more involved, you accumulate watts, a form of currency on Knewsroom, that you can 'invest' in proposed topics or created stories to show how much importance you attribute to them and how important you think it is to cover them in the next day's paper. You accumulate these watts - in the same way you accumulate actual cash on the site - by suggesting topics, writing stories, voting, and referring other members to join the site.

Just like on Wall Street, your return on investment is determined by the risk you take. You can invest in Topics -- which are kind of like mutual funds (lower risk/lower return), or you can bet on Stories -- which you can think of as individual stocks (higher risk/higher return). Of course, you can diversify and do both. Like everything else at Knewsroom,^TM it's entirely up to you.

At the end of each day (at deadline time), Knewsroom uses its "sophisticated matrix algorithm" to determine what the most important topics are in each category and what the most important stories are within each topic. If your topics or stories are picked, you get a return on the watts you invest as well as real cash credited to your Knewsroom MasterCard.

Problems with Knewsroom

As I was signing up for the service, I immediately saw several issues with it. For example, unlike traditional social news sites Knewsroom's Knewspaper doesn't update as people participate on the site and invest watts into stories, rather there is one Knewspaper per day and once it's published there is no changing it. This feels like a step backwards, toward daily print news cycles where if a news story breaks in the evening you don't know about it until the next day. It's as if they've taken something static (a print paper) and put it on a dynamic platform (web publishing) but refused to take advantage of the dynamicness.

For example Knewsroom's coverage in the technology section yesterday had no mention of Yahoo!, Facebook versus Google, CBS's acquisition of CNET, or any other stories that broke later in the day and were all over Techmeme and Digg almost immediately. In fact, I saw some of these stories in the queue for tomorrow's paper, by which time they will already be old news.

Furthermore, the revenue sharing, while a good idea, is not enticing enough to attract people already contributing to Newsvine's social news and content publishing hybrid that pays out a much larger percentage for your efforts. And while I like the idea of 'investing' in stories rather than a simple positive or negative vote (because it allows for degrees of approval and also limits how you distribute your watts among stories), the implementation of the feature on the site feels a little contrived. For example, rather than simply submitting a story, you have to first select a category, then pick a topic (or create a topic), then invest in it and hope enough other people do too (not to mention waiting for someone else to find a link to write original commentary on a topic you proposed), before it gets published. And you have until 5:00 AM CST for the entire process to complete, meaning a story that breaks an hour later would have to go through a 23-hour gestation period before it gets published (if at all).

If at first glance you find yourself simply comparing the service to a combination of the existing social news services with a newspaper-style presentation of the content, you're not far from reality. Knewsroom uses the existing services as models to build on and even though they are moving in the right direction, they have made some grave missteps that keep them from the prize. In the end, it's the site's slogan that sets it up for failure...

The best news isn't up to the minute -- it's up to you.

The problem is, a lot of incredibly important news is up to the minute and if I can't get it on Knewsroom, I will go somewhere else where I can.

Derek Wenmoth: SuperCool School

Fri, 16 May 2008 10:48:25 +0000

Final day in Austin today - last evening I had a chance to go out with Joel Greenberg, Director of Strategic Development at The Open University to listen to some music and chat about developments in the eLearning space at the Open University. A key interest of Joel's is how we can harness the opportunities afforded through the whole social networking paradigm for the sake of education. At the OU they are actively working on creating online educational environments that resemble things like facebook, myspace and bebo etc.

It was with interest then that I read this morning on Jane's blog about SuperCool School, a Facebook app that makes online learning social by democratizing the learning process and empowering everyone to demand, create and participate in live and interactive online classes. I haven't had a good chance to look around it yet, so can't really comment on what it is like - however, what appeals to me is that this is indeed evidence of what I think we'll begin to see more of as people look to de-construct our current paradigm of classroom-based education and look for ways of democratising the experience, creating opportunities for more personalised learning to occur, where learners themselves are able to take responsibility for determining their own learning goals and tragectories, and where they may also be recognised for their expertise as 'expert learners', taking a role of guiding others in their learning.

Brenda Wallace: DSC_8528.JPG

Fri, 16 May 2008 09:20:28 +0000