The Web Services Report

Quickbooks, one of the leading accounting packages for small businesses, has just released web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone. The iPhone version, seen to the left, sports a very slick UI and allows easy, at-a-glance access to all of your financial information, entered into Quickbooks Online.

At first glance, the web app provides a simplistic view of things. Features included are looking at who owes you, who you owe, vendors, employees, and bank accounts. Despite the initially simplistic look, as you drill down, you uncover a whole new level of detail.

Even though this seems to be a killer app for referring to your financial information, I have to point out some points where they have missed the mark. First off, a standalone app, available through the App Store would have been nice for the iPhone, but it's not completely necessary. The largest oversight here is not being able to edit or add data. In my opinion, this would be one of the primary usage scenarios for this app. That said, this is version one of this app and we may see this sort of functionality being added at some point down the line.

If you are already a Quickbooks Online user, these new web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone are nice perks. I'm not sure that the introduction of these apps would be the deciding factor in jumping to Quickbooks Online, but it might help the decision.

You can try it out for yourself, before signing up by going to https://accounting.quickbooks.com/m and tapping "Demo."

Users visiting YouTube's homepage today will likely see a message asking them to link their YouTube account with their Google account. Automatically detecting that you have a Google account, YouTube says, "It looks like you have a Google account. Would you like to link your YouTube and Google accounts?" When you walk through the process, YouTube promises that you will be able to, "Import your Google contacts into YouTube for messaging or sharing videos," and that linking your account will make sure that you are, "...ready as we bring more Google services to YouTube."

It is interesting that Google has waited this long to prompt users to link their YouTube accounts, when Yahoo did it almost immediately after their acquisition of Flickr. Flickr users did not take to the idea very well, but maybe this delayed push will make the transition smoother for YouTube users.

As Google hints to in the transition message, linking YouTube and Google accounts is part of a larger push to integrate functionality of other Google services with YouTube. Looking at Google's master list of services, some likely candidates for integration include Blogger, Google News, and Google Talk. Fellow CNET blogger, Josh Lowensohn, seems to think that Google Finance might get cozy with YouTube. I'm not as convinced.

To me, the most exciting integration would be Google Talk. We are already starting to see a chat room scenario with Streams, but I would look for more chat capabilities to spread throughout YouTube, powered by Google Talk, as a result of account linking. Google News integration also has the potential to be extremely interesting. With videos on current events flowing back to Google News, from YouTube, Google has a killer platform in front of them to be a leader in citizen journalism.

YouTube already allows you to load contacts from a Google account to add as friends, so it's not immediately clear what Google plans to do with the account link, in terms of contacts. Hopefully contacts become a more central focus of YouTube, with a more robust messaging platform, since right now they are sort of hidden in the background.

While linking YouTube and Google accounts might seem innocent enough, under the disguise of making it easier to login, it is clear that Google has bigger plans for the new stream of data that this opens up. What Google services would you like to see integrated into YouTube?

Utilizing Apple's ad hoc distribution program, Stitcher let a beta version of their iPhone app loose on 100 testers today. While the app suffers from some stability issues, due to its unfinished nature, Stitcher provides a slick solution to those looking for customized audio programming.

Stitcher is trying to be to news and information what Pandora is to music. The service provides you with a variety of audio programming, broken down by topics, such as sports, technology, and world news. Sources for the app include CNN, CNET, ESPN, AP, WSJ, Reuters, and a variety of local sources. As you rate the various audio streams and podcasts, Stitcher learns what you might like and serves up content.

My favorite potential application of Stitcher is to create your own customized station for listening to on your daily commute. You could make a station that kicks off your morning with the sports scores from the night before, followed up by the top headlines from CNN, stories from your favorite local news station, and capped off by discussion of the hottest tech stories from CNET.

While there is a bigger market for music, I think that there is a sizable market for customized news and information. A lot of people listen to news and sports on the radio and Stitcher makes it easy to have a highly personalized stream to get you caught up on what matters to you.

Stitcher is a free, ad supported app. There is no word yet on when the app is going to be available to the general public, but the limited beta test ends at the end of this week.

Summer is, unfortunately, almost over and that means that students are starting to head back to school in the coming weeks. There are so many online tools that can help students today to stay more organized and productive that I thought I would outline a few here and hopefully ease the pain of the upcoming school year.

Remember The Milk

Remember The Milk is the best online to-do list out there right now. It plugs into a slew of other services, including their killer Gmail add-on, Netvibes, iGoogle, Jott, offline support with Google Gears, and a promised iPhone standalone app. Given its wide array of features, it should instantly help any student to prioritize their tasks and become more efficient.

Google Docs/Calendar/Gmail/Scholar

I decided to lump all of Google's services that are good for students together. I think that they provide a tremendous amount of value to users and can be put to great use in an academic setting. Google Docs provides a web interface for a suite of tools to make, view, edit, and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. As I've said before, the features of Google Docs might not be on par with its Office counterparts, but it really shines when it comes to sharing and collaboration. This makes it perfect for working on group projects or spreading notes around.

Google Calendar can help keep a student's hectic schedule in line. Managing time is one of the hardest parts of being a student and Google Calendar can help . Did I mention that Remember The Milk integrates with it also?

Gmail includes a lot of great features to keep your incoming stream of email organized and prioritized. Gmail's labels help to keep your email organized and bring attention to those requiring your attention. It's helpful, even if you don't receive a large volume of email.

Google Scholar provides an excellent resource for students, looking for sources for research papers. While most schools already provide resources for students in this department, Google Scholar's excellent search provides a good point of discovery.

Evernote

Evernote is a great new web service to handle all of your notes, photos, and clippings from around the web. It has clients for Mac, PC, and various mobile phones, including the iPhone. Robert Scoble did a nice interview and demo with the company's CEO if you want to get a thorough overview. While it might be hard, at first, to integrate Evernote into your workflow, your productivity and organization will see the benefits.

Easybib

This one is a little bit of an old school pick, but it's an indispensable resource for every student. Easybib lets you pick from a variety of types of sources, then you just fill in all of the information that you can, and Easybib will automatically generate a MLA or APA formatted works cited page.

Facebook

Apart from being the premiere social network for students, Facebook also offers some applications, such as Courses 2.0 and Study Groups that have academic value. These applications leverage Facebook's social networking features in order to connect students for the purpose of studying or collaborating on coursework. Facebook is also a necessity for any college student, if for no other purpose than meeting new people and staying in the loop on parties around campus.

Socialbib

Socialbib is a really interesting service, where students offer up old textbooks that they no longer have a need for and trade them for ones that they do need. This could potentially cut down on otherwise absurdly expensive textbooks for students.

Those are my recommendations for making school life a little easier. Services like these are easing the load put on students and making everything slightly more enjoyable. For the students out there, what web apps do you find yourself using?

Have you ever been forced away from watching your favorite sports team because of some prior obligation, only to find yourself sneaking away to the nearest TV to check on the score? Well, then ScoreMobile's new iPhone app is for you. Essentially, ScoreMobile has taken its already killer iPhone web app and translated it over to a nice downloadable package. Right now, ScoreMobile offers real-time scores and stats for MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, NCAAF, NCAAB, and even CFL for our Canadian readers.

Even though I have dropped a lot of jaws by showing off the instantaneous video highlights that MLB.com's iPhone app provides, it is certainly lacking in the statistics department. ScoreMobile picks up the slack. The application gives live standings, lineups, and a variety of other statistics. Even though it doesn't have video highlights like MLB's app, the statistics provided here are much more robust.

The lack of sports applications that are available for the iPhone is really amazing to me. There is certainly a large market of sports fans out there, waiting to be tapped into. Despite the apparent void of good sports applications, ScoreMobile's app for iPhone is clearly the best available right now. It serves up rich and timely statistics and has a slick UI. The best part is that it's free, so it's worth your click to download it at the very least. You can give it a try here.

One of the most requested features for the iPhone is the ability to tether the phone to feed 3G or EDGE network data to your computer. That feature was briefly a reality Thursday, thanks to Nullriver's NetShare application. MacRumors reports that, priced at $9.99, the application seems to have, somehow, slipped below Apple's radar, but was pulled down after about 20 minutes of availability in the App Store.

The application basically turns your iPhone into a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, giving all of your Wi-Fi-enabled devices internet, wherever you have a cell signal. There are similar solutions available for iPhone users who have jailbroken their handsets, but they are significantly more complicated than Nullriver's offering, and since they require a hacked phone, don't hold mainstream appeal.

Wireless carriers have almost always been opposed to tethering smartphones with unlimited data plans. Many telcos even state in your contract that if you tether your phone, you may be responsible for additional fees associated with the data that you use. Of course, for an additional cost, you can tether some phones, such as a Blackberry, but Apple's iPhone doesn't offer legitimate tethering at any cost.

Those of us who were not quick enough to grab the app while it was available on the App Store seem to be out of luck for now. Links to the application now pop up with an error message that reads, "The item you've requested is not currently available in the US store." It's not exactly clear what happened with NetShare, how it slipped through the cracks, or why it was pulled. The app may have accidentally gotten through in the avalanche of new applications that are being added to the store, however it seems unlikely that someone at Apple would have signed off on this app, not knowing what it did. It would appear that either Apple, AT&T, or both had cleared the application, then quickly reconsidered. Apple has not yet responded to a request for a comment on the issue.

The concept of the "wisdom of crowds" is a fundamental building block of a lot of the Web 2.0 services that we see today. While not all of them are built on this core concept, major sites like Digg, Wikipedia, and Mahalo rely heavily on crowds being wise. There have been several instances of this system breaking down in the past, one notable occurrence being the infamous Digg HD-DVD revolt. On occasions like this, a mob mentality tends to take over a very vocal and active segment of a community, greatly skewing the product of their collective "wisdom." We are seeing the latest meltdown of crowd wisdom over at IMDB, the popular movie information database as we speak.

Since the release of The Dark Knight, the film has made an incredible surge to the No. 1 position on IMDB's Top 250 list, a spot that has only been held by The Godfather for the last decade or so. While most serious movie watchers would argue that claiming that The Dark Knight is the best movie of all time is ridiculous, we might be able to chalk the massive surge up to the unparalleled amount of hype that surrounded this movie, particularly in Internet communities.

Since The Dark Knight's initial rise, an even more interesting trend has revealed itself. /Film is reporting that, in an attempt to keep the movie on top, fans of The Dark Knight have been voting down The Godfather. The movie has gotten hammered so badly by Batman fans that it has fallen to the No. 3 spot. So, not only has The Godfather dropped out of the No. 1 spot for the first time in a decade, but now it has dropped from the second spot as well. This sort of drastic shift hardly seems the work of a wise crowd.

We are seeing a similar effect here to what happened with the Digg HD-DVD debacle. This mob mentality, brought on by a significant event (in this case, the release of The Dark Knight), causes a total breakdown in a system that is otherwise fairly accurate, useful, and trustworthy. The original theory of the wisdom of crowds discusses this sort of failure. A quotation from Wikipedia on the topic reads, "...in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed because the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently."

Cases like what is happening on IMDB's Top 250 right now are not the fault of the users of the site. They are just acting how humans have always acted. Mob mentality is in our nature. We are always being influenced heavily by these outside sources. Sites like IMDB and Digg need to be set up to deal with and process the effects of an eventual mob action.

I am still a firm believer in the wisdom of crowds. I think that it is a tremendously powerful concept that can be applied to a variety of areas. However, if it is not implemented correctly, you will occasionally get breakdowns like we see here. In the cases of Digg and IMDB, these breakdowns happen infrequently enough that it is not a major concern and does not usually disrupt the use of the site. That said, we have seen, with some consistency, that the system can be broken or manipulated by the actions of a passionate group of individuals, acting as a mob. If these incidents are not largely prevented in the future and become commonplace, we risk a lot of people losing faith in this otherwise very useful system.

Nothing could have caused more uproar in the blogosphere about Twitter than followers suddenly disappearing. We have all complained about and tolerated Twitter's downtime issues, but seemingly losing your hard-earned followers is something that users might not stand for.

In an update on the issue on Twitter's status blog, the company said that they are working on restoring the correct follower/following counts. They go on to say that, "Even after this recovery is complete, your counts may appear lower than previously...The counts we display on your profile page are not always up-to-date...when we remove spammers from the system (which we've been doing a lot lately), the follower counts are not updated in real-time." Even though it's great that Twitter is trying to sort through its problems with spammers, decreasing someone's number of followers is going to cause some backlash if it is not communicated properly. The removal of followers, due to spam, may have even gone unnoticed if it wasn't for this larger issue highlighting it.

Sarah Perez, at ReadWriteWeb, speculates that the problems arose due to a malfunction of the "Twitter anti-spam bot." As you can see in the image above, I lost 13 percent of my Twitter followers in one fell swoop. Other users have reported a drop in followers still as high as 28 percent, although it appears that the problems are being fixed even as we speak.

Even if Twitter is able to fix this problem, it is clear that confidence in the company is shaken. The ever-enthusiastic Louis Gray chimed in, saying, "Every time I think they've captured the market on a single route to failure, they find another way." There is no doubt that Twitter's service is a crowd favorite and everyone is dying to see them succeed and break into the mainstream, but they just keep shooting themselves in the foot with incidents like this. Individually, these sort of problems are tolerable, but when they are all lumped together, like they have been with Twitter, people are not going to stand for it. If Twitter fails, it's not going to be because of other sites like FriendFeed. It's going to be because of themselves.

Update
We just received an update on the situation from Biz Stone, over at Twitter. He writes, "Some users lost followers as a result of an error during a database upgrade. We replaced followers last night and will be replacing followers today. This is not related to the spam initiative we blogged about the other day." At least Twitter is hard at work trying to remedy the situation.

Digg commenter Hiji writes, "This is the beginning of the end. In a few years all the major blogs and social-media sites will be owned by large corporations, putting us right back where we started."

The topic of discussion is, of course, TechCrunch's rumor that Digg will soon be acquired by Google for somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million. Digg's users are debating what Google acquiring Digg might mean for their community in this thread on the site. The question is, would being controlled by a big company like Google ruin--or enhance--the community that Digg has worked so hard to build?

Some background on Web 2.0 acquisitions
A few of the major Web 2.0 sites that have been acquired by big companies include YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace. Each of these sites has been greatly affected by being acquired by a larger company.

Once it was acquired by Google, YouTube was forced to take down much of the copyrighted material that had helped it rise to popularity. I would argue that YouTube has benefited from the financial backing and support that Google was able to provide, so the acquisition may have been a necessity at the time.

Flickr has seen little to no improvements in the way of new features, aside from Flickr Video, since being acquired by Yahoo. Despite the lack of innovative new features at Flickr, its photo community is stronger than ever, thanks in no small part, to Yahoo's ownership.

Although MySpace is still a force to be reckoned with on the Internet, especially in the music scene, it has watched its seemingly insurmountable lead in the social-networking space slip through its fingers and into Facebook's. Whether this is due to being bought by News Corp. is purely speculation, but the influence of the big media company may not have helped.

Why does Google want Digg?
In the case of Digg, Google would clearly be buying the site to acquire Digg's community. Digg has one of the strongest communities in the social-media space. Google certainly has the engineering power to build a site similar to Digg, or Yahoo Buzz, if it wanted to. But what it is really after is the people. If we can agree that Google wants the community, it would only make logical sense that the company would do whatever it could to keep that community happy and to get it to stay, post-acquisition.

How Google would change Digg
The other side of the coin that must be considered is the volume of people who would be streaming into Digg if it is acquired by Google. The added promotion of the Internet giant would send lots of newcomers to the site, who could break the delicate dynamic that Digg has right now. Digg suddenly being flooded by gardening tips, for example, might drive away a lot of the core users. Digg would, almost certainly, survive under mainstream attention, even thrive. But it could become a very different place from what we see today. The category structure of Digg submissions was built out for this very reason. If and when the mainstream public turns its attention to Digg, the audience that it has today might be able to find refuge in its own sections of the site--if it decides to stick around.

This acquisition would be a tremendous opportunity for Kevin Rose and company to cash in on some really hard work. They have done a great job building this company and carefully crafting the Digg community into what it is today. Being taken under the wing of a company like Google may be their big shot at really breaking into the mainstream.

Like I already said, the move would absolutely change the dynamic of the site. Some would like it and stay, some would hate it and leave, and many more would discover Digg for the first time. So, what do you think? Would Google destroy Digg or take it to the next level?

Along with over five hundred other applications, Facebook's iPhone app made its debut today. The application gives you easy access to your friend's updates and profiles, along with Facebook Chat and your inbox. Facebook's app also lets you take and upload photos directly to Facebook.

Viewing Facebook photos is really great in this app. They have implemented the same "flick" style of navigation that the iPhone uses and photos flip over to reveal comments. Overall, the UI is pretty intuitive and uses a lot of the same conventions that Apple does. Taking photos and uploading them to Facebook could not be simpler. Just tap the camera icon, take the picture, and tap to upload.

The installed application is a great improvement over the previously released web based version, which does not offer as high a level of functionality or as fluid of an interface. While I was initially skeptical as to the benefits to a standalone Facebook application, as opposed to just using the web based one, features like photo uploading and chat justify its existence.

Facebook has built an extremely slick iPhone application. My first impressions are extremely positive and Facebook has definitely earned a spot on my first page of icons. Its navigation is very fluid and the feature set is complete and easy to use. It was important for Facebook to have an application at launch for the iPhone App Store, with competition coming from a variety of other social networks, MySpace included, so it's good to see them bring such a solid offering to the table.