More than 800 digital-media enthusiasts in New York RSVP'd for a Tuesday night "meet-up" held by Boxee, the TV browser software company that's ambitiously (and controversially) aimed to make it possible to have a full Web content experience in your living room.
Right now, Boxee sources content from outlets such as Comedy Central, Netflix, CBS (which publishes CNET News), and Web video content hubs such as Blip.tv and Next New Networks.
In conjunction with the get-together, Boxee (still available only for Mac and Linux) made a few notable announcements: First of all, it's overhauled its application program interface (API)--which was only three weeks old to begin with--so that developers can build more complex applications for the platform.
There are a few new ones at launch: streaming-radio provider Pandora now has an application to bring its content to Boxee, as well as terrestrial-radio hub RadioTime. A third-party company called BoxeeHQ has also created an app to stream content from PBS.
Boxee's content-browsing software is now built on the XUL framework, which makes it a "remote cousin of Firefox," CEO Avner Ronen said. It will detect a video in a regular Web page and then attempt to pull it into a full-screen view. Guess what this means: Content from Hulu will be back, at least for now.
For those who stepped in late: Hulu, the joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., had been available as a channel on Boxee until access was blocked at the request of content partners. Boxee brought it back by pulling in Hulu's RSS feed, but then Hulu blocked that too.
Still in alpha test mode, Boxee has gained a loyal following among geeks who love its hackability, futurists who see it as the best hope for the why-won't-it-happen-already convergence between TV and the Web, and people fed up with subscription cable services. But on the flip side, it's still unclear as to how the start-up will dig through the complicated stratigraphy of media industry regulations, and it's also unclear as to how it will make money.
Ronen hinted that an "app store" format will be part of its strategy, letting developers charge for their applications and taking a cut of sales, in addition to advertising. Also down the pipeline: an improved search feature that will let members search all Boxee content at once rather than only within individual content providers one at a time.
Boxee also released its first iPhone app this month. It's not a video app, though--it's an app to remotely control the Boxee browser over a Wi-Fi connection. Ronen says the company's received "great feedback" on it.
There's a new OpenID extension for "social browser" Flock, and it was created with the help of password management service Vidoop and News Corp.-owned social network MySpace.
It's now available for download for all Flock users who have upgraded to Flock 2.0. For MySpace, which initially announced its support for OpenID back in July, this is also a push for Data Availability, a universal-login project that the social network announced in May but has since only rolled out with a few partners.
Yahoo, one of MySpace's launch partners for Data Availability, has also thrown its weight behind OpenID.
"As three companies dedicated to empowering users to easily share content and experiences, this was a very rewarding--and relatively fast--collaboration," Max Engel, MySpace's Data Availability product manager, said in a release. "Our goal was to eliminate some of the work involved in jumping between social experiences on the Web so that people can focus on their connections and the incredible content that's out there. This Flock extension will give millions of people an easier way to expand their experiences and expression without boundaries."
The OpenID Flock extension allows for easier credential management within the browser and makes it more apparent when a site will accept an OpenID login. A handful of OpenID extensions already exist for the open-source Flock, but this one's got the seal of approval from some big names.
There are deeper reasons for MySpace being so vocal about OpenID support, though. The standard has seen its toughest rival yet in the form of Facebook Connect, a data-portability project which enjoyed a high-profile New York Times writeup this week and will reportedly be ready for a full debut very soon. (It's already been implemented on a number of sites.)
Flock, unfortunately, isn't an enormous player in the browser space. It has tons of bells and whistles, but is still well behind the likes of Internet Explorer and Firefox in terms of downloads, and has newfound competition from Google's Chrome.
Regardless, MySpace has been paying a lot of lip service to open standards recently, and it's always good to see real developments.
(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)
It's not like Pets.com closing its doors or anything, but here's another small sign that we could be nearing the beginning of the end of Bubble 2.0: Mowser.com, a start-up that "translates" Web sites into mobile-friendly versions, is dying a quiet death.
Granted, it wasn't a particularly hyped dot-com. But I'm guessing that more than a few start-ups will be commiserating soon.
"We haven't been able to raise funding, and as a site, growth has been flat or falling for the past couple months because of various search-engine tweaks I've done," founder and former Yahoo mobile strategist Russell Beattie related in a blog post. "We'll keep the site running for the time being, but we're going to encourage others to not rely on the service as it could disappear in the future."
Trouble raising venture capital? Search-engine optimization strategy not working out? Sounds like what the irrational-exuberance crowd has been talking about.
The real problem is that Mowser fit right into a niche that is likely disappearing. Here's the thing: the last year has seen a trend toward narrowing the gap between the desktop Web and the mobile Web. A bizarre hardware company called Apple released this cute little device called the "iPhone" that a couple of people bought, and one of the cool features on it is that you can browse Web sites more or less just as they appear on a regular computer. There are still plenty of people out there with far less advanced mobile phones, but many of them still aren't browsing the mobile Web in the first place.
Beattie seemed to get the point. "I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I'm tired of wasting my time," he wrote. The presence of a separate "mobile Web," he said, is "limited at best, and dying at worst." He probably has the right idea. Other start-ups focusing on mobile Web sites might want to take note.
Beattie also acknowledged the inevitable: "Yes, this means I have to find a real job again."
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