Webware

Updated 2:30 p.m., with comment from Microsoft.

It had become a ritual for Microsoft's consumer unit. Every year it came out with a new version of Microsoft Money and sent new boxes to retail stores.

That tradition is now dead.

Microsoft, via a newsgroup posting from one of its enthusiasts, announced it will no longer update Money each year and, more importantly, it will stop selling the product at retail stores.

It's the latest indication that Microsoft is seeing a shift in the way people, particularly consumers and small businesses, buy their software.

"More and more retail consumers are going online to shop the endless rows of digital shelves," Microsoft said, according to the newsgroup posting, which was noted earlier Friday by ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley. "In response to our retail partners' needs, consumer behavior and business efficiencies, Microsoft is focusing distribution efforts for Microsoft Money Plus software online via download and discontinuing traditional box sales of the software at retail."

Money is not the first consumer title to see its fortunes change in recent years. Another perennial shelf space occupant, Microsoft Digital Image Suite, was discontinued altogether last year.

However, Microsoft added in the posting that it is not abandoning packaged software companywide.

"Microsoft does not see shrink wrapped software going away anytime soon and we are always talking to customers about different ways to price and package our software offerings," it said in the posting. "The company is evolving its strategy and product solutions to meet customer demand and optimize business efficiencies."

Indeed, the company has seen very strong sales of the latest version of Office and its OneCare security software is also sold heavily at retail stores. The company just introduced Equipt, which is a subscription service combining the two, but sold as a packaged product at retail.

The company has been eyeing this shift for some time and looking at options like subscriptions, online services, and even advertising-funded software on the PC. After years of weighing the issue, the company went ahead with Microsoft Works SE, an ad-supported free version of its consumer productivity package.

Intuit, another big name in consumer software, has already seen a huge shift to both online sales as well as selling its personal and small business finance programs as online services, rather than packaged software.

The company already gets more money from its TurboTax online service than it does for the packaged product, with more than 10 million people doing their taxes online. The company also has 128,000 small business customers using its online services, according to spokeswoman Heather McLellan.

It has also debuted niche products that are online-only such as a medical account expense manager product.

Update: I spoke this afternoon with Chris Jolley, a product manager in Microsoft's financial products group. He added some details on the trends that prompted Microsoft's move.

In the past 12 months, half of the sales for Money Plus, the latest version of Microsoft Money, have come via digital download. That's roughly three times the rate of a year earlier, he said.

Although the company laid the ground work for less-than-annual updates when it renamed the product a year ago, Jolley said that the decisions to go digital and to skip this year's update were made more recently.

Say you just captured an amazing video of your cat doing something funny. It's time to upload it to YouTube right? Why stop there? HeySpread, a service from the folks at Particles was just updated Thursday morning to take the video you just captured and push it out to nearly 20 different video hosts at once.

Better yet, it keeps track of the views once they're there. You can view each video with daily-stats analytics, view breakdowns, and comparison charts to see how the same video is doing on different services. It'll also let you compare it with other videos (even if they're not yours).

In case you're already entrenched in YouTube, a built-in tool called YouClone will let you copy all your videos off YouTube and post them to other services without having to track down the original. All you need is your YouTube password and it will do the rest.

The service is not free, and uses a credit system that charges one to three 5 cent credits per video uploaded, transferred, watermarked, and tracked. If you're a videographer looking to get a video out there it's not a bad deal when you think about how much your time is worth.

If you're a cheapskate like me, there's also a free video stat-tracking service called TubeMogul that will do the tracking without the small fee. As for uploading to the rest of the services, though, you're on your own.

Hey!Spread - Video Distributing Web Service from Bruno Celeste on Vimeo.

Google has enlisted Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane to create an original animated series that it will distribute on the Web via its AdSense advertising system, according to The New York Times.

Google plans to use AdSense to syndicate the program--called Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy--to thousands of Web sites that are popular with MacFarlane's target audience, according to the newspaper. Advertising will be incorporated via "preroll" ads, banner ads, or "brought to you by" ads, according to the report.

MacFarlane is also reportedly working with advertisers to create original advertising to run with the Cavalcade content, although neither Google nor MacFarlane would reveal any of the advertisers, saying only that the deals were among AdSense's largest ever.

MacFarlane, who will receive a percentage of the ad revenue, told the newspaper that the two-minute episodes would be "animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier."

Google, which launched AdSense in 2003, expanded its AdSense program last year so that Web site publishers could display and make money off embedded video clips from YouTube content partners that have targeted banner or text ads. Google has experimented with distributing video and video ads on its AdSense publisher network before, but with mixed results. The company has tested distributing in-stream video ads and in-stream video clips with bundled ads.

SoundCloud is a service for musicians to distribute their music to one another, and eventually the public. It's not a marketplace like iTunes or Amazon though; instead it's a sharing network for musicians looking to hock their demos and get feedback on early tracks. You might be saying to yourself "doesn't MySpace do all that?" Well sort of, but the big difference is that SoundCloud is its own social network and offers more control over where tracks go as well as what bits of metadata come along for the ride.

The entire experience revolves around a fairly simplistic player (example embedded below). There's no volume control, but you can start, stop, and jump around the track freely. It will also analyze the entire track for its waveform, and anyone listening to it can leave a timed comment that will pop up at that point in the song. If you've ever used Viddler the functionality is identical. The folks behind SoundCloud are hoping it will lead to groups possibly leaving feedback about certain parts of a song (kind of an audio version of ConceptShare).

As I mentioned before, one of the standout features is metadata and the user control over it. You can fill out an incredible amount of it for each track, including the catalog number, the release date, and what key it's in. There's also a tempo control in beats per minute (BPM) that you can set manually or simply tap a button as the song plays to determine it on-the-fly. It's just plain fun.

The site is currently in private beta and is continually adding features. If you're a fledgling artist looking for a good platform to start sharing early cuts with your bandmates it certainly beats e-mail attachments hands down. We've got 100 invites for Webware readers, so if you'd like to check it out go here to claim yours.

Disclosure: The track below is from my brother's band Speechwriters LLC. It was used because I was given explicit permission to share it with the SoundCloud community in order to test the site for this review.

The New York Times is reporting that HBO is launching its own online distribution service for a portion of its content both past and present. Starting this week, lucky residents of Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisconsin will be the first to get dibs on the new software application that can be set up to download and stack episodes old and new that can be watched on their PCs. Cable provider Time Warner (the same folks working on the lovely bandwidth metering down in Texas) is sending out the application on an CD to current HBO subscribers "soon."

Already there are a few caveats to using the fancy new software. For one, the application is limited to Windows machines, and unlike standard network television channels, Internet users can't access the programming without being an HBO subscriber--a system that's likely to be checked with activation servers. The downloaded content is also given a self-expiration date of one month, regardless of whether or not it's been watched. In many ways it's similar to the BBC's efforts with the iPlayer project, both in helping people catch up on old episodes, and attempting to curb piracy with easy access.

The Times notes competitor Showtime's foray into digital distribution that started with iTunes back in 2006. Showtime currently has just over a dozen shows on iTunes and Amazon's Unbox service at $2 a pop, although unlike HBO's standalone downloading media player, both services are on a purchase model that allow users to repeatedly watch episodes on their computers, TVs, and in the case of iTunes--iPods and iPhones.

HBO Subscribers are getting a slightly better end of the deal than their Showtime counterparts as long as they're willing to watch the shows on their PCs and forgo bringing the programming with them on portable devices. I'm still interested to see how much legacy programming HBO intends to offer in its first few months, as two of the key reasons for piracy are people simply not wanting to buy DVDs or missing the episode within its initial TV window. Isn't this what they created on-demand programming for in the first place?

One thing that struck me during Steve Jobs' keynote yesterday was this odd moment when Jobs was trying to rationalize many of the reasons MacBook Air owners would be happy not having an optical drive in their laptop. He was going down a list of things we need optical media for and replacing them one by one with various Apple creations. Apple's perceived solution for not having a drive would be to buy all your media through iTunes and play it on your iPod, delegate the task of reading discs to another computer in your house, or simplify things with a new and proprietary $99 external drive. Sounds simple, right?

It's commonly been referred to as the "Steve Jobs reality distortion field" and there hasn't really been a clearer example of it since Apple launched the "simpler" version of its one-button mouse that actually had five. In this case, it's the importance of optical media and the role it still plays in our lives. While I applaud Jobs and Apple trying to get rid of what's admittedly become a weak and cumbersome format, I'm a little disappointed that Apple hasn't decided to offer a real solution to the problem they're creating for novice computer users and road warriors who want to avoid optical media altogether--at least not yet.

What I'm getting at is that Apple's in the perfect position to start offering digital software downloads to the masses, and tie it into a software system that millions of people are comfortable with giving their credit card information to on a daily basis. I'm speaking of course, about iTunes.

Apple's got all the pieces in place to start offering people computer software the same way Valve's been doing with video games with its hugely successful Steam service for the last six years. I love Steam for many reasons, but primarily for its built-in updating tools and easy-to-navigate digital storefront that make it easy to buy software with one click and not have to worry about it again. If I could get the same performance from an app that's admittedly become a little bloated but already has a decent updating system, I'd be happy as a pig in mud.

Two things stick out in my mind as being good signs such a service is in the works via iTunes:

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It may be too soon to say Flip.com has completely flopped, but Conde Nast has indeed flipped its strategy.

The teenage girl-centric site, which the company's CondeNet Web unit launched last February, has been morphed from a standalone social network to a set of distributed Web applications designed for existing social networks' developer platforms. It'll first go live on the Facebook Platform, according to Conde Nast.

In essence, the magazine-publishing giant realized that capitalizing on the popularity of existing social networks was probably a better strategy than trying to create its own.

The original Flip was centered around shared "flipbooks" that members could create using photos, videos, and other content--and as many predicted, it didn't gain a whole lot of momentum. Currently, it has only 300,000 registered users, and TechCrunch noted that traffic measured by ComScore has been plummeting.

The Flip home page will remain, but the majority of its features will be tweaked into applications suited for Facebook and its brethren. But this niche might not be any more open: companies like Slide and RockYou have already made it big as widget creators--not to mention the overwhelming glut of other applications that can make it extremely difficult to rise above the noise. Flip's new strategy will have to offer something really new.

Yesterday we were all aflutter over Disqus (review) and Intense Debate (review)--two companies offering similar products for replacing an existing blog comment system, and one is centered around universal profiles and comment tracking. Today we're taking a look at SezWho, a comment enhancement service that's been around since June (we briefly wrote about them last month), and has since been integrated into more than 300 sites.

Instead of replacing your current system, SezWho layers on a reputation and rating system to your comments. Registered users can vote on the usefulness of other people's comments, and that rating goes into an aggregate ranking that's a part of a user's profile. Like the solutions from yesterday, rankings are universal on any site that's integrated SezWho, meaning you're taking a track record of all your posts with you to other sites, where other users can explore what you've been commenting on, and how other users perceive you. The goal is to help sites sort out the good and the bad (employing self-policing from the users), and simultaneously letting people share and explore links amongst themselves.

This morning the company is announcing several new features. Two--one for site owners, and one for SezWho users at large--are all about user visibility. The first, called Red Carpet, is for site owners, and is similar to the top-users widget I mentioned with Intense Debate. Red Carpet lets site owners promote some of their most active discussion participants with a visual ranking widget that can be put anywhere. In a perfect world, users will see this somewhere and either explore some of the content these users have been reading, or feel the need to participate to get a place on the list.

The other widget is a SezWho profile badge, which users can post on any blogs or personal pages. Mousing over the badge causes it to pop up with a user's SezWho profile, including links to their latest comments, and other user ratings. Between the two, I see Red Carpet getting more traction, as blog owners seem more likely to promote the use of such a system to give their blog, and some of their older posts additional exposure in other parts of the SezWho network.

What might end up being the most useful addition is a new set of metrics rolled out last week to both SezWho users and blog owners. Users get to see a more open set of stats about how many people are rating their profile and comments, while blog owners get access to a new internal tracking tool that shows where any incoming SezWho traffic originates. The data charts aren't as extensive as something like Google Analytics, but it's a nice addition for site owners to keep an eye on user involvement.

On a side note, our (CNET's) TalkBack commenting system has a similar feature for rating a user comment's usefulness, and users can hop between our various sites with one account. The biggest difference is the option to jump to other sites with that same ID.

I must say, I really like the idea of SezWho. Comment rating is a very useful way to sort through the good and the bad--assuming your audience is keen and plentiful enough to make it worthwhile. Where SezWho inherently falls short is how deeply it can be integrated. While it's nice that you don't have to replace your current system, you're missing out on a single user profile for both the site and commenting system--something which is possible with larger Web-based blogging platforms like Wordpress.com and Blogger.