Webware

Opera, announced Thursday that it has inked a deal with Skyhook Wireless that will bring geolocation to its browser. According to the company, those who download the geolocation-equipped Opera browser will be able to share their location with any site that supports it and get information about related products and services in their area.

Skyhook played an integral role in making the geolocation possible. The company's Wi-Fi Position System makes it possible for any computer or mobile phone with a wireless adapter to be located.

In conjunction with the release of a new Opera build that supports geolocation, the company also released an API that will allow Web developers to add the Skyhook location platform to their site, so they can interact with Opera browser users. Download the browser here.

AOL might have enjoyed its best days in the late 1990s, but the company is still the most beloved ISP, according to a new study from Forrester Research. Forrester polled nearly 4,600 consumers about their experience dealing with ISPs. AOL topped the list for usefulness and simplicity. Overall, the company's "Customer Experience Index" rating was 71 percent, putting it atop the list of ISPs across the U.S.

Visible Measures, a company that provides video tracking and measurement services, announced Tuesday that it has raised $10 million in a Series C funding round that was led by Northgate Capital. According to the company, it plans to use the funding to expand its operation.

Mortgage search site, Home-Account, announced Thursday that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from Charles River Ventures and other investors. The company will use the funding to invest in its growth for its recently launched site.

Amber Ettinger, better known as "Obama Girl," has teamed up with Stickam for coverage of the presidential inauguration. Live coverage will be streamed live Monday at 8 p.m. EST from InauguralFest, and viewers will be able to see what she is doing all day at the inauguration starting at 10 a.m. EST Tuesday.

Integrated Media Measurement, an online research firm, found (PDF) that women between the ages of 15 and 48 tend to watch a television show and surf the Web an average of 17.5 minutes per day, while men do the same for just 15.7 minutes each day. Women between 30 and 39 average 23.3 minutes of simultaneous Web and TV usage each day. More importantly for marketers, women tend to multitask more as they get older, while men multitask less often. According to Amanda Welsh, head of research for IMMI, "women are more inclined to multitask than men" while using the Web.

Professional social network LinkedIn announced Monday that it has partnered with IBM to bring social-network functionality to Lotus Notes, an enterprise client that provides e-mail and instant-messaging services to users. The social-network plug-in will provide Lotus Notes users with contact and networking information about those they're contacting (as long as they are using LinkedIn) and browse LinkedIn's news feeds. The companies plan to unveil the new plug-in at Lotusphere later this year and hope to release it to Lotus Notes users by June.

Juniper Research released a report Monday saying event-based sales should increase the value and monetization of mobile dating and chat room sites. The report said that although subscription revenue will still contribute the most revenue to online dating sites over the next five years, charging customers to contact one another or providing virtual gifts will become increasingly important in their business models going forward. Juniper also found that free services that charge for contact are becoming more popular and could become the standard sometime during the next 10 years.

Navitell, a Belgium-based start-up that develops software that adds location-specific multimedia content to mobile phones, announced Monday that it has raised approximately $2.6 million in a round of funding that was led by FPIM. According to the company's executives, they plan to use the funding to expand their set of personalization services.

One of my buddies who is a finance nerd spends weeks at a time working on giant, awe inducing Excel spreadsheets. He seems like the perfect type to enjoy SensibleUnits, a silly service that takes standards measurements and converts them to real-world items like Alaskan moose-antlers, football fields, and London buses. The hope is that you can take any number of units (large or small) and make it a little more interesting. Any writer or storyteller would be wise to bookmark this.

For the more visually inclined, check out Nikon's Universcale site which maps out objects in the world and beyond both large and small on a very flashy interface. We wrote about it back in March of last year.

Some of the measurements are better than others. For instance, we can see laying batteries or CDs side-by-side, but not the fetus thing.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Hitwise released research this week reporting that Twitter had a nice relative growth spurt this year. The key word is relative. The site grew from a market share of a whopping 0.0005 percent (U.S. Internet visits to Twitter.com) to 0.0016 percent in April. That places the Twitter.com site at number 439 on the list of social networks. I'll bet if you try to name the 438 social nets above Twitter you'll run out of gas well before you hit 50.

You've got to start somewhere, though, so I don't quite understand why anyone is either surprised or worried that Twitter is mostly unknown outside of Silicon Valley. It's a compelling social service and it has every chance to enter the mainstream.

The beginning of Twitter's growth, or the end?

(Credit: Hitwise)

But this post is not really about Twitter. It's about my favorite topic of late, APIs. The Hitwise analysts recognize that their numbers don't take into account non-site access to Twitter. Indeed, according to clever ReadWriteWeb research, 44 percent of all Twitter posts come from sources other than the Web site. They're from services like Twhirl which rely on the Twitter API, and the IM interface, which when used doesn't count towards Web utilization. As I've said (see "How I got burned by Twitter's API, why it matters, and how to fix it"), Twitter has got to get its hack-job of an API converted into a serious platform if the service is to grow into a mainstream app.

Twitter is, I believe, unique among social platforms in its reliance on APIs and non-Web access to its service. But as more Web 2.0 services open up and as developers start to build better interfaces for them (like Viewzi is doing for search engines and AlertThingy does for Friendfeed), the story of Twitter's multiple access methods will become more typical. And the need for measurement companies to track real service usage will become critical.

I'm already dissatisfied with Internet measurement companies like Comscore and Nielsen/NetRatings, which use incomplete sampling techniques to measure users and page views. Neither do they do a good job of taking into consideration users' interactivity on Ajax-heavy or Flash-based sites, nor do they measure user contribution on individual social sites or blogs (although Avenue A | Razorfish has interesting Web-wide data on social participation).

Ultimately, surveys for measuring traffic are all flawed, or at best incomplete. And I do not buy the common argument that the flaws are the same for each measured site, so you can use the data for comparative purposes at least.

One of the really great things about the online medium, that makes it fundamentally different from broadcast and print, is that you don't have to perform surveys or polls or browser intercepts to get an idea of who's doing what, when, or where. You can measure usage at the source. Some company is going to step up to the plate and figure a way to collect this data from site publishers, audit it, and package it in a way that really works. I would place my bets on Google (using Google Analytics as the Trojan horse to gather the data) to be the service that becomes the actual measurement broker for Web 2.0. I really don't see the current media survey companies becoming more relevant as the Web, and how users interact with it, gets more complex.

There's been a lot of buzz this week about Facebook's traffic leveling off or declining, and naturally, it's been accompanied by schadenfreude over the fact that the hottest start-up in Silicon Valley may soon be losing its laurels.

Blog chatter, unsurprisingly, is at a fever pitch.

Earlier this week, the U.K. arm of audience measurement firm Nielsen reported that traffic from several social-networking sites, including Facebook, had dipped from December 2007 to January 2008. Now, numbers from ComScore (reported Friday on TechCrunch), suggest that Facebook's U.S. traffic may be in trouble as well. Graphs show unique visitors reaching a plateau, and with a small dip between December (34.7 million unique visitors) and January 2008 (33.9).

Facebook has not yet issued an official statement on the ComScore statistics.

It's inevitable that the explosive expansion that Facebook experienced in 2007 can't possibly go on forever. And since no hot new destination has popped up to potentially suck away Facebook traffic, the obvious conclusion is to blame it on social-networking fatigue. Facebook, one could say, is a trend and users have simply grown tired of it.

The argument makes sense. For many there was an initial novelty to keeping in touch with faraway friends and classmates, wasting time at the office with games and other developer-created applications, and voyeuristically sifting through online photo albums all on a single destination site. Me, I've grown tired of the Scrabulous gaming application on Facebook--it's way more fun to play word games in person.

But an apparent leveling in traffic doesn't equal mass account deletion. "Coolness factor" always fades; now it's up to Facebook to prove it can stay relevant and useful in its post-expansion era. Remember when instant-messaging client adoption was soaring and people were IMing each other just for the heck of it? We're all still IMing, but it's no longer a novelty, it's a utility. ("Utility," by the way, appears to be one of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's favorite words.)

And there are a few very important points to keep in mind when it comes to dealing with statistics. First, the ComScore numbers only point to U.S. traffic. It's clear that Facebook is aware that some of its best opportunities for growth lie overseas, as the company has launched a translation project to offer its site in foreign languages and hence appeal to a bigger base abroad. None of that international growth (in both English- and non-English-speaking regions) is reflected in the numbers.

Then there's the fact that some say you just can't rely on Web metrics. Many a new-media property, among them Major League Baseball's MLB.com, has complained that it's been tough to roll in ad dollars because traffic measurement firms like ComScore and Nielsen Online don't report numbers accurately. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which represents more than 300 digital publishers including CNET Networks (publisher of News.com), has asked those two firms to undergo an audit (currently in process) to explore discrepancies between their metrics and IAB members' internal server logs.

Either way, this shouldn't induce doomsday prophecies. Facebook's traffic may indeed be leveling off, something that should naturally happen after any site's phase of frenetic growth. Now it's up to the site to prove that it can stay relevant and useful to the base that it's already built up.

Video advertising online is certainly becoming more common, but it's still difficult to get a good handle on exactly the kind of impact those types of ads are having.

Three companies came to Demo to push their individual strategy on how to improve the placement of video ads and the information gathered about them.

Liquidus: This 6-year-old Web marketing company has come up with a quick way for digital cable providers to produce and push video classified ads to the Web and TV screens via video on demand. Liquidus' video publishing platform aggregates video ads from a variety of sources and allows cable or broadcasters pick ads for specific local markets. The platform turns each ad into a Flash video, which can be altered depending on the market it's intended for. The appeal Liquidus is emphasizing here is volume: the company says they made more than 1 million video ads last year.

TubeMogul: TubeMogul has devised a way to put a single video on multiple platforms at once, and a comprehensive dashboard set up to to track who views the video ad and more. Once uploaded, a video ad can be distributed to a variety of platforms simultaneously--YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, etc. The results for that one ad across all platforms are aggregated into a single display, so no need to track each platform's performance individually. Trends for who is viewing each video, for how long, and how often, as well as comments audience demographics, and comparison statistics to competitors are available for free.

Visible Measures: This company promises to give more detailed information about measured behavior of a Web video ad's audience. Specifically it gathers and displays data regarding what happens after a video is played. The coolest function is an animated graph that shows an advertiser or publisher, as a video is playing, what viewers are doing--rewinding, clicking back, or leaving the video. The company gets its detailed data by integrating directly with the Flash video player. In addition, Visible Measures tracks when a video has been linked to or picked up by other sites.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Frustrating service at restaurants and dry cleaning horror stories are all too common. When you have a bad customer service experience, it's likely you want to take action, but aside from the Better Business Bureau, where else can you turn? MeasuredUp is a new social networking site that exists solely to let people post their experiences (good and bad) with local businesses. Similar sites already exist. Yelp and Yahoo Local are two good examples of community-based sites that offer a place to swoon or gripe, but neither aim to inspire massive changes from businesses. Between the poor efficacy for online petitions in general and a lack of localization features specifically, MeasuredUp won't fulfill its potential without some maps and a large user base.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Coordinating family affairs can be tough. When you stack up school, sports, work, and transportation, there's a lot of schedules to take care of. Famundo is a collaborative service that lets families manage the basics such as a calendar, an address book, and a message board. In addition, there are some things you typically see in business collaboration tools, such as basic file sharing and list management (for shopping or to-do lists). Famundo is free to try for two months, then it's $10 per month (or $99 per year). The price isn't so hot, but organizations can get Famundo subscriptions for free. As a small perk, Famundo donates 10 percent of family subscription fees to a Famundo organization of your choosing. An interesting fund-raising concept, but $99 is a bit steep these days for 1GB of storage, shared e-mail, and calendars. We'll stick with a giant calendar on the fridge.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Borrowing money is the pits. The usual options are pawning off your possessions, selling yourself to the bank at dismal interest rates, or approaching family members for a loan. And those are just the legal options. FYGO is a community-driven site that lets users borrow from a group of people and negotiate the interest rate. You still pay interest, but with FYGO, you directly pay those who lend you the money rather than pay an institution. What's nice about going through FYGO instead of a bank is its low fee structure, $1 to $3 for loans. Compared with the percentage that a bank might charge, it's an attractive prospect. If you've got money to spare, check out Prosper (which we covered in March), a nearly identical service that lets you preauthorize loans that match your requirements, so you can earn interest without having to manage your account.