We get excited around here whenever a new application offers an Application Programming Interface (API) for 3rd parties to develop against. Oh, the possibilities! Sometimes, though, it just doesn't pan out and our dreams are dashed against the craggy rocks of reality. Mashups are hard and just because you've got some cool data and good hooks for developers to pull from doesn't mean anyone's going to build anything worth using on your API.

Such appears to have been the fate of news platform Daylife, a company funded by some of the biggest names in tech and new media. Daylife recently held a "developer challenge" giving cash prizes to the people who built the best mashups with their API. Unfortunately, the entries they got were awful.

Mashups Mashups Mashups

We learned about the Daylife contest today on Programmable Web, the leading blog and database about public APIs and mashups. PW must have felt obligated to be polite and just report on the contest, albeit weeks after the winners were announced.

We were really excited to learn about the contest - Daylife is a company with some good technology, offering news content with some structure to it. What could make more interesting fodder for mashups than structured news data? It turns out almost anything could, if you judge from what came out of it.

If you can't see the video above where we look at the mashup contest entrants, here's a Flash version.

To take a tour of all the applications discussed in the video, you can visit this link.

There Is Still Potential Here

The examples that came out of the contest are all relatively dismal, with the exception of the touchscreen news reading interface. Over on Programmable Web's page about mashups built on the Daylife API though, we found one very cool one. TreeHugger's GRNDX tracks media mentions of a number of words related to the environment. (No one cares about the environment this week, apparently, the Olympics are all anyone cares about.)

That's pretty awesome - even if Treehugger calls it more fun than scientific. Fair enough, but let's see more apps like this instead of the wacky stuff that dominated the Daylife contest.

News has emerged that the Chinese government has detained at least five bloggers from the United States for reporting on protests in favor of Tibetan independence. Included among the detained was the widely admired founder of the video blog series Alive in Baghdad, Brian Conley.

The detentions follow a wave of arrests of Chinese dissidents leading up to the Olympics. The US government pledged as the games began to engage the Chinese government concerning human rights - we wonder what those conversations look like now that China has detained journalists consistently critical of US policy as well.

Blogging is Powerful

New online media have opened the doors to people publishing on budgets that would never have supported journalistic efforts in the past. That new generation of publishers has a greater freedom to take risks because they aren't as beholden to the interests of sponsors. That's one way to describe the political impact on journalism of blogging - another way might be that these new media have opened up publishing to activists with less interest in objectivity than traditional journalists have aimed for.

Either way, the impact of blogging and video blogging on the world at large is widely recognized and it's no surprise that the authoritarian Chinese government is taking steps to protect itself. We condemn the detention of any journalists, whether they strive for objectivity or tell stories from a particular perspective.

According to extensive coverage on BoingBoing, the following US journalists and/or activists are all currently missing:
- James Powderly
- Brian Conley
- Jeffrey Rae
- Jeff Goldin
- Michael Liss
- Tom Grant

We're working on creating a widget displaying video, information and a button to call US Congressional representatives but for now we'll leave you with the following video published by Conley in China last week. Update: Ribbit.com doesn't want to give us an account promptly, so we'll just say - if you want to call the US Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee to register your concern about the 5 people above, they are at +1 202 225 5021 and they are waiting for you. We just called them a few minutes ago.

At Intel's Developer Forum, Yahoo today announced an initiative to bring the Internet to your TV set through what it has dubbed the 'Widget Channel.' While many a company has tried to bring the Internet to the living room (and mostly failed in the process), Yahoo is taking a slightly different approach by not trying to bring a full browser experience to the TV, but by creating a platform for widget developers.

The Widget Channel will allow developers to create widgets that will display on TV screens in JavaScript, XML, HTML and Flash. Yahoo will curate a directory of widgets and has currently signed up Blockbuster, CBS, CinemaNow, Disney-ABC, eBay, Joost, MTV, Samsung, Toshiba, and, interestingly, Twitter, which Yahoo demoed during the announcement at the IDF.

Comcast is also joining in the effort and will start testing the Widget Channel framework in the first half of 2009.

Challenges

By just focusing mostly on relatively simple widgets for now, Yahoo is at least partly sidestepping one of the major issues with bringing the Internet onto a TV set: navigation. As long as you only want to bring up some widgets on your screen, a simple remote control will do. However, as a typical usage scenario, Yahoo expects its users to want to browse to a friend's Flickr photos while watching a TV show - at that point, trying to find a set of photos on Flickr might just a bit more than your standard remote can handle.

Yahoo might be planting a Trojan horse in every living room here by creating a demand for Internet enabled TVs - but the real problems for interactive TV have never really been technical. Most users simply aren't interested in interacting with their TVs beyond flipping channels. The Widget Channel might just be simple enough for more folks to start using it and it might precipitate a cultural shift in how we look at our TVs, but so far, every other similar initiative has failed because of a lack of demand.

If you would like to see the slides that accompanied the IDF presentation, you can find them here (PDF). We will also provide a link to the video of the presentation once it becomes available.

Today, eBay announced a number of changes to its fee structure, which will emphasize fixed-price sales over eBay's traditional auctions. Fixed-price sales have been growing at a faster rate than auctions for eBay, so emphasizing this business model makes a lot of sense for eBay. To do so, the company has reduced the price to list an item for a fixed price by over 70% to 35 cents and sellers can now list multiple quantities of the same item for the same price.

The new price structure will take effect on September 16th and is clearly timed in order to increase business for the upcoming holiday season. eBay will also make similar changes to its sites in England and Germany. Of course, the last time eBay made changes to its pricing structure earlier this year, it drew the ire of its most valuable sellers, who quickly initiated a boycott. Now, eBay is moving to simplify the pricing structure that upset its customers so much earlier this year.

Final Value Fees

While the listing fees have been reduced substantially, the overall fees for a listing still includes what eBay calls a 'final value fee,' which is determined by the sales price of the item to be sold. These fees have been simplified, but also increased. Overall, however, this change in eBay's pricing structure could result in substantially lower cost for a lot of eBay's sellers.

Consumers Don't Want Auctions

As Laurie J. Flynn in the New York Times points out, these changes are also driven by a change in consumer behavior online. There is simply less interest in the auction model these days, which, even though it might be very exciting, just isn't as convenient as just heading over to Amazon and buying a product right away.

And Amazon is exactly the company that eBay should fear the most. For consumers buying anything on Amazon is easier (and often cheaper) than going to eBay - and it isn't loaded with the same potential for fraud. Amazon is also constantly making it easier for sellers to list their items in its database.

Blog search engine Technorati made a fresh round of promises this morning, assuring users that the service will be less awful soon once a new anti-spam program is put in place. The company says it sees nearly 10 million unique visitors each month but we cringe a bit every time we visit the site. It doesn't have to be that way.

Blogsearch in general is rife with spam and Technorati is at a real disadvantage compared to other blogsearch engines, but that's not the company's only problem. What would you like to see Technorati do in order to be relevant again? Below is our wish list.

Spam Control

The number one problem with Technorati is definitely spam blogs showing up in search results. Ask.com's blog search does a decent job of limiting spam by priortizing search results from feeds with a number of subscribers in the company's popular feed reader Bloglines. We could write a whole other post about what we wish Ask's blogsearch would do to improve too, though.

Google Blogsearch could take a similar step for spam control by referencing subscriptions in Google Reader. It may already have done so, but there's little evidence of active developement in Google Blogsearch.

When using Technorati, we've taken to running search feed through Yahoo Pipes and filtering out items with relatively low inbound links or from sources with a lot of spam on a given topic. That's not a lot of fun to have to do, but we sure appreciate those numbers being made available in the company's feeds.

Technorati has issued some new guidelines for being included in less spammy search results, but we'll see how well they work over the coming weeks and months. Some of the guidelines seem fairly arbitrary, like publishing a full instead of an excerpted feed and pinging Technorati directly instead of through a 3rd party. We assume that pings from Feedburner will still be welcome.

Uptime

Technorati returns a "we're sorry, there was an error - try again later" message far more than the other blog search engines do. The first several times we tried searching for inbound links to the new spam control announcement today we got that message.

Return sort by authority to blog directory and elsewhere

There was a time when Technorati's Blog Directory was a pretty good place to discover top blogs on any topic. It displayed blogs that had been tagged by authors as relevant to certain topics and let you sort the list by most inbound links in the last 6 months. Inexplicably, the sort by authority option was removed months ago and the blog directory is now under emphasized in favor of various bizarre options for browsing blogs topically. It's now relatively unusable.

If I'm interested in discovering the top blogs about cooking, for example, it sure would be nice if I could navigate directly to http://technorati.com/blogs/tag/cooking and find them in some intelligable order.

Pageview churn

Possibly the most annoying thing about Technorati these days is that search results aren't easy to navigate. From the front page of the site you're taken to full text search results but the headlines on the page don't link to the posts, they link to a Technorati page about the posts. The actual post links are small and grey below the headlines. That's absolutely contemptable.

From other pages, searches will bring you to other search results. The whole thing is ridiculous.

We'll leave complaints about poor, messy site design alone for now - the service has enough other problems. The company is moving its emphasis over to providing an ad network and letting its basic functionality fall by the wayside. Investors have been complaining for some time about Technorati's performance and we're all suffering as a result. Are there not enough ad networks in the world already? Technorati should make its own traffic grow by serving its users better and monetize that. The company tried a number of functional partnerships with other publishers, like the Washington Post for example, but apparently couldn't figure out how to make money from that. That's a shame.

Come on Technorati - we're honestly cheering for you! There's a huge need out there and you could be filling it.

What would readers like to see Technorati do in order to become relevant again? Leave your thoughts in comments, the company is sure to read them and maybe something positive will happen.

Thanks to enterprising developer Zac White, we might just see a version of copy and paste working on the iPhone before Apple issues an official update. Zac, who has termed his solution OpenClip, has found a way to use a small amount of shared space on the iPhone to store data and then make it available to another app.

Apparently, this is within the limits of Apple's license agreements, but of course, final approval of new apps is completely in the hands of Apple.

It's important to note that OpenClip is only a framework to make copy and paste work that other developers will have to implement. It is not an application you can just install and make copy and paste work. Currently, a number of developers have pledged support, including the makers of Dial Zero, Twitterlator, and MagicPad.

The lack of copy and paste on the iPhone is definitely holding back a lot of functionality. While it would be easy to write a simple word-processor or blogging tool for the iPhone (and some have done so), they will only really become useful once you can copy a URL from Safari into the Wordpress or Typepad editor or a piece of text from Safari into a notepad application.

What Will Apple Do?

OpenClip is mostly a band-aid right now. Apple will release copy and paste sooner or later and given that Apple's own applications like Safari aren't very likely to support OpenClip very soon, the current solution will remain of limited use, but at least it will show the potential and give application developers an idea for what they will be able to do once this becomes a standard feature (and yes - it really should have been a standard feature of the first iPhone firmware...).

Here is a video of OpenClip in action:

As you may know, we are very fond of custom search engines here at ReadWriteWeb. We find them incredibly useful and we hope you do, too. In the past, we've shared many of our CSEs with you and we've showed you how to build CSEs of your own. So of course when we came across this new site called Hittery, we were really excited. A whole personal dashboard filled with CSEs you can customize? What could be better than that?

About Hittery

When you first visit hittery.com, you are presented with a page filled with all sort of search engines. Some of the engines are traditional search engines from YouTube, Google, flickr, Digg, and eBay. Others are just handy search engines like those for job searches, weather info, news, travel, traffic, TV guides, stocks, and even Facebook. Then there are a bunch of custom search engines that only show results from handpicked web sites that publish trustworthy content on a particular subject. The custom "Health" search engine, for example, searches 75 trusted medical web sites to deliver quality medical content. In total, Hittery has selected over 12,000 web sites for inclusion in these various engines.

Using the Site

On the Hittery homepage, you can arrange the various engines to your liking by moving them around via drag-and-drop, adding new ones from the drop-down boxes provided at the top of the page, or by removing the ones you don't need (just click the "X"). Since there is no sign-up area to create an account, it appears your preferences are saved via a cookie - so those of you notorious for cleaning your cache and cookies regularly, be aware.

When you perform a search using any one of the Hittery engines, your search results display next to a sidebar that provides invaluable tools which makes using the Hittery engines even better than a roll-your-own CSE, like those provided by Google Coop.

In the sidebar, you'll see the following options:

• An option to quickly customize the time frame for the search results (last 24 hours, last 7 days, last 30 days, or forever)
• Click to narrow your search to just one particular engine (e.g. Google, Google News, Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, etc.)
• See links to the latest news about the topic
• Add the engine to iGoogle, Netvibes, or your Google toolbar
• Suggest a link for inclusion
• Add the search engine to your own web site

Hittery does display ads above the search results, however that's a small price to pay for the usefulness and convenience of these search engines.

Conclusion

For anyone who has been interested in CSEs, but never wanted to take the time to build your own, Hittery is a great resource. You don't even have to use the Hittery.com homepage - just add the engines to iGoogle or Netvibes to give yourself easy access to your favorites.

No matter how you feel about FriendFeed, you can't argue with the fact that it has been one of most popular services among the early adopter set this year. For social media enthusiasts, the site fulfills a need to be always sharing, always active, always involved. In some cases, this led to a self-imposed information overload scenario - there was so much good stuff going on at FriendFeed that it was hard to turn away. But then, as people discovered the service's ability to hide items, they were able to better craft the FriendFeed (over)flow to their needs.

Yet the issue of noise still remains one of the service's biggest hurdles. Although built-in filtering and 3rd-party apps like Noiseriver try to address this problem, they still require a lot of tweaking, which equates to time. For some, this issue becomes a deal-breaker - too much noise, not enough signal. Others claim to love the noise and, by the number of likes and comments they leave, it's apparent that they do.

Just recently, we polled the Twitter audience about their love (or not) of FriendFeed by asking the following question: "If you could only answer YES or NO, how would you answer this question: "Do You Love FriendFeed?" The reason for posing the question this way to not allow for qualified responses like "well, the service has potential, but at the moment it...." or anything of that manner.

In the end, the responses were decidedly mixed, and surprisingly, a lot of NO's turned up. At final count on Twitter it was 16 NO's to 10 YES's. (Of course, on FriendFeed, the ratio was a bit different...and, as is typical on FriendFeed, a conversation ensued.) While most FriendFeed users agree that the service is great for sharing content and starting conversations, a good many will also admit that FriendFeed hasn't yet hit the sweet spot when it comes to combating info overload.

Growing or Fading?

So where does that leave FriendFeed now? On the one hand, you have people like Steve Rubel claiming that he now has over 5000 people following him on Friendfeed - 60% of what he has on Twitter. That certainly seems to show promise for the FriendFeed service. Even with all of Twitter's issues, the service is bordering on mainstream, having already been used for presidential debates, MTV awards shows, and for tweeting news from the Mars Rover. For FriendFeed to even come close to rivaling Twitter numbers, there must be something there.

However, on the other hand, you have the king of early adopters himself, Robert Scoble, sharing a post in Google Reader entitled "Why Have I Been Neglecting FriendFeed?" by Kyle Lacy. In the post, Lacy cites information overload, burnout, and increased work responsibilities among other things, as reasons for his neglect. But what's really interesting is the comment Scoble left when sharing the feed:

Wait! Stop the presses! Robert Scoble tired of FriendFeed?! If Scoble is the canary in the coal mine of social media, what does this mean for the rest of us? (Note: he appears to have gotten over this).

Still, we wonder - is a FriendFeed burnout on the horizon? Or is it only a matter of FriendFeed adding a feature or two to skyrocket it to uber-success?

Now that we've taken the poll of a small Twitter (and FriendFeed!) audience, we thought it would be good to take the pulse of a wider audience that includes our decided readers here on RWW. We hope that you'll not only answer the poll, but share your overall thoughts in the comments - be them here or on FriendFeed. We support both.

The break-up of behemoth, vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970's, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980's, and accelerated in the 1990's with globalization. Now, late in the 2000's, Social Media (aka Web 2.0) is adding another gear that will accelerate the fundamental restructuring of the enterprise.

This is a big story. That is why ReadWriteWeb is dedicating a new "channel" to Enterprise 2.0. I will be editing this channel and we are looking for part time writers to contribute. More on that later.

The Firm

Peter Drucker, the greatest management thinker of all time, pointed out that the "firm" is a relatively recent innovation, designed to do the things that individuals cannot easily do on their own. Ronald Coase later created a theoretical model (Coase's Theorem) to describe why firms exist, based on the difference between internal and external transaction costs. If the transaction cost was lower internally, then it made sense to organize that work internally. If the transaction cost was lower externally, then it made sense to organize that work externally.

Coase's Theorem underlies countless management books on subjects around reengineering, outsourcing, core competency, spinoffs, spinouts and so on.

Enterprise 2.0 - first innings of a new game

This is a fascinating story for me. For 20 years I worked in traditional IT enterprise vendors selling to large enterprises. It was a great game for a while, based on the fact that you could get license fees for copying a tape, effectively 100% margin. At scale, after paying for a base level of R&D and sales, it was fantastically profitable.

Around the turn of the century, it became clear that this game was in the final innings. Larry Ellison, one of the masters of that game, announced that it was game over. Innovation in enterprise software was over, the problems had all been solved, the only thing left to do was sell to Oracle and let them restructure you. Ellison may actually believe this, but mostly it is self-serving. He, and other big incumbents would like start-ups and their investors to believe that the enterprise market is worthless. Leave it to the big boys. That is clearly self-serving.

And wrong. As Salesforce, Basecamp, Google Apps, Zoho, LinkedIn and countless other start-ups that we cover here on ReadWriteWeb, prove every day. One game is over, a new one is in its first innings. This is the best time to be a start-up in enterprise software. We will profile the vendor landscape and the opportunities for new vendors in the next post. For now, I want to focus this from the point of view of the enterprise, the buyer.

Large enterprises and globalization

The fundamental restructuring of enterprises is mostly a developed world story. In developing countries such as India, Brazil and China, huge new companies are being created. They have totally different challenges and a different opportunity. They are still in the phase of organizing scarcity, which requires the deployment of large resources - scale is an advantage. America and Europe did this in the years after the Second World War, the Asian tigers (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) followed a few years later with a similar strategy. Now China is doing the same and, to a lesser extent India, Russia and Brazil.

We will write more about the emerging giants from the developing world and how they are impacted by social media in future posts. This post is focused on the challenges faced by large enterprises in the developed world. They don't need to organize scarcity, they need to organize for innovation. Nobody really knows how to organize for innovation, certainly not within traditional organizational structures. But we do know that scale is not an advantage and is often a disadvantage when the prize is innovation.

The perfect storm hitting large enterprises

Large enterprise face a "perfect storm". These are huge challenges. Start-ups that help them navigate these challenges in real and fundamental ways will do very well:

1. The demographic time bomb of retiring baby boomers. They have mastered the rules of the traditional enterprise and, with only a few years to retirement, they will tend to resist fundamental change. When they leave, they take with them accumulated decades of experience, knowledge that is not easily codified for handing down to the next generation.
2. The difficulty of bringing in Generation Y. This generation has grown up in the fluid world of social media. GenY are not enticed by rigid command and control structures controlled by a generation that does not want to hand over power. This is a big problem for enterprises. Ask a random sample of GenY how many view Fortune 500 companies as their ideal employer. If large enterprises don't get the best and the brightest in this generation, they will be in deep trouble from the start-ups and global challengers who do.
3. Enterprises are all about secrecy, structure and control. Social Media is exactly the opposite. Secrecy, structure and control have served real needs for a long time, they work. When the irresistible force of social media hits the immovable force of a traditional enterprise, it makes a loud noise. The strategies are not obvious. "We will make social media technology bend to our rules" will lose a lot of the real value. "Blow up all the rule books, let self-organizing networks evolve" may work out brilliantly, or it may blow up catastrophically; the risks are unlikely to be easily contemplated by existing management and investors.
4. Figuring out what is core and what is non-core is hard. Implementing that is even harder, when careers and power rest with the current definitions that assume that most activities are core and should be done in-house.

Historic opportunity

This is a massive shift. A bit of historical perspective helps. In 1955, 1/3 of the US GDP was controlled by Fortune 500 companies. By 2000 that share had tripled to 2/3. Within that cold statistic lies thousands of human stories of family farms, Mom & Pop stores and other small businesses trampled by WallMart, Agribusiness and other large companies. The drivers mentioned above may reverse that trend. It is not written in stone that large companies should control 2/3 of the economy.

That is huge opportunity for a lot of start-ups. There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. It also a huge challenge for the incumbents. Big companies need to re-define themselves in fundamental ways to find new ways to be big in a meaningful way.

Adoption of social media will be the central theme in that story.

The next post will focus on the Enterprise 2.0 market landscape and the opportunity window for start-ups. At a time when advertising is challenged and the VC window is a less open, this is a vital area of opportunity for start-ups.

Tell us what you think? Tell us where you sit - within the large enterprise trying to figure out how to manage this huge wave of change? Within a start-up or VC looking at the opportunities?

You can subscribe now to our special RSS feed for the Enterprise channel.

We just came across Pixelpipe.com, a new service that allows you to easily post your digital pictures, videos, and audio files to a growing number of different services with only a few clicks, similar to what Ping.fm lets you do with text based messages. Pixelpipe supports forwarding to 33 different photo and video sharing sites, as well as most of the larger blogging and micro-blogging services. To upload photos, Pixelpipe has developed clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as for Nokia N Series phones.

Pixelpipe is being developed by an international team with offices in San Francisco and New Delhi, as well as with contract developers throughout the world. CEO and founder Brett Butterfield was the founding Imaging Architect for Ofoto (which later became Kodak Gallery), so he has a solid background in the media storage business. Pixelpipe's architect Jacob Jay heads the New Delhi office and is the creator of PictureSync, a service that has quite a few similarities with Pixelpipe.

Supported Services

To start using Pixelpipe, you simply pick which services you want your files distributed to, enter your login credentials, and upload your files to Pixelpipe. If you have ever used Ping.fm, this process will seem quite familiar to you.

Among the services Pixelpipe supports are Facebook, Flickr, imeem, Picasa, Photobucket, Vimeo, SmugMug, Shutterfly, Box.net, Zoomr, YouTube and Kyte. Pixelpipe also supports a number of blogging and micro-blogging platforms, including Pownce, Blogger, Livejournal, tumblr, Vox, and Wordpress, as well as any other platform that supports publishing through the MetaWeblog or Atom protocols. Thanks to the TwitPic integration, posting to Twitter is also covered.

Pixelpipe also allows you to forward media files via mail, which means that you can use it for a large number of services that are not supported directly, but that support uploads via email. Thanks to this, you can also send your files to services like FriendFeed or Posterous (which, by the way, now also supports parallel posting to a number of different blogging and photo sharing sites and has just announced support for video files as well).

Uploading

To upload files, Pixelpipe has developed a number of different stand-alone applications and plugins. PixelPipe also supports basic uploading by email through a custom email address (very handy if you want to send a picture from your phone, for example). For Mac users, PixelPipe has developed an iPhoto plugin and if you are a real hardcore user, you can even have it forward your files to an FTP account.

We tested the 'Pixelpipe Uploadr' on our Windows machine and were generally impressed with the ease of use of the application, which is a port of the Flickr Uploader. One nice feature of the desktop uploader is that it supports tagging.

Pixelpipe also provides a universal Java uploader and the company plans to release both a Firefox plugin as well as an iPhone application in the near future.

Storage

Currently, Pixelpipe is also storing the full resolution images its users upload on Amazon's S3, but it only surfaces the thumbnails of these images at this point. Pixelpipe also utilizes Amazon's EC2, but Brett was quick to point out that the team has built Pixelpipe without hooking into any of Amazon's unique services in order to be able to port it over to other platforms if needed.

As Brett also told us, Pixelpipe will soon announce limits for the length of time and amount of storage the service will offer, but he also stressed that Pixelpipe is basically a set-and-forget service. You simply set up your pipes and forget.

API

Developers who want to built on top of Pixelpipe can easily do so. The service supports the Atom 0.3 and 1.0 standard, as well as the Flickr API, SMTP, and they will also support a MediaSock standard very soon. Pixelpipe is also developing its own API, which should also be available in the near future. Thanks to using these APIs, developers should be able to quickly add Pixelpipe support to their applications if they are so inclined.

Verdict

In our tests, Pixelpipe worked exactly as advertised. There was almost no noticeable delay between sending files to Pixelpipe and seeing the uploaded files on Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa , or Flickr. Thanks to its wide range of supported services, Pixelpipe looks like a winner to us.

Hey!Spread provides a similar (but paid) service for video files and Ping.fm does the same thing for short text messages. In the near future, Pixelpipe will also announce a more direct integration with Twitter and they are constantly adding new services.

Invites

Pixelpipe graciously offered 1000 invites for RWW readers, so head over here and sign up.

Continuing our coverage of the mainstream web, in this post we look at some of the most popular websites for kids. We've gathered information from a recent report (pdf) from Nielsen Online, via Marketingvox, which studied the online habits of Britons under the age of 23. We also polled friends of RWW via Twitter.

The Nielsen report concluded that entertainment sites have the greatest affinity with under 12s, games sites for 12-17 year-olds, and student and video sites for 18-22 year-olds. We're all familiar by now with the latter 'young adult' demographic, who are big users of social networks and video sites like YouTube. But let's look more closely at what the under 12 and 12-17 year old demographics are using on the Web.

< 12 yrs Like Entertainment; TV Networks Dominate

The above table is ranked according to percentage of <12 yrs in the audience, so the sites listed aren't necessarily the largest ones. Also as it's a British study, somewhat predictably the BBC has the 2 sites with the largest audience. Despite those caveats, one trend is crystal clear here: most of the most popular sites for under 12's come from television. These brands dominate the list of top websites for this age group: Nick, Cartoon Network, the BBC's CBBC and CBeebies and Disney International. So the Internet, for under 12s, is very much about entertainment and unsurprisingly TV networks use the Net to extend their brands.

It's interesting also to note that there is potentially big money for startups targeting kids, in terms of acquisitions by the big tv networks. Just last year Disney paid US$700M to acquire virtual world Club Penguin, one of the sites listed above. And needless to say, kids love it. RWW reader Richard Lusk says that "my daughter (12 yrs old) LIVES on Club Penguin." Many other friends of RWW listed Club Penguin too (see list below).

The site at the top of the list, with 32% of UK Unique Audience Under 12, is Swedish fashion community site Stardoll. At this site, users can dress up and play with dolls virtually. Membership is free and the company states that most of their users are girls between the ages of 7 and 17. Stardoll says that it has around 16M 20M users [Update: Stardoll contacted us to say that they passed 20M members last week]. It's had about $10M in funding so far from the likes of Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital Partners, so it is another example of how big the Internet market for kids is.

Recommendations from Friends of RWW

Many of RWW's readers are parents (including yours truly), so we asked on Twitter what other sites kids under 12 use. In my household, MyLittlePony and interactive pet games have been popular. Here is what others say, and we encourage you to add more in the comments to this post...

Mari Silbey noted that on HighlightsKids.com she can "do hidden pictures with my 2-almost-3-year-old. It's great."

Mikko Alasaarela said that his three under 12's "use game sites like miniclip, orisinal, kongregate, fantage." He also pointed out that "one of the most popular social networks for that age group is Habbo."

Shana Albert concurred with Mikko, saying that her son loves Habbo.

Nathan Hull said that "My nieces (4 and 7 yrs old) love pbskids.org"

Josh Morgan said that "yoursphere is a new one for kids. It's deal is that all participants are vetted."

Lidija Davis told us that her 9-year old boy loves gamespot.com and that he "visits all the time to get cheats for DS, Xbox". Lidija also said that he likes Club Penguin and Runescape and online games in general. Lidija noted too that YouTube is popular with under 12's - although, wary of the dangers, she said that "luckily my little people ask me to check first".

Jonathan Fields told us that his 7 year old daughter likes "club penguin, webkinz, stardoll, myscene, playhouse disney, pbsKids, and, of course, her blog".

Kevin Marks suggested runescape. He also listed toontown, webkinz, neopets, club penguin, and YouTube.

Andy Coffey tweeted that "my 6y/o loves lego.com".

Don Reisinger reminded us that Disney carries a lot of spyware!

Mike Brown said that Club Penguin is "hugely popular with our 6 and 10 yr old and lots of their friends".

Ben Tremblay suggested "http://pbskids.org/ and http://pbsparents.org/ There's also http://www.pbskidsplay.org/ but it's frabbed".

Dara Rochlin said that her "6 yo is a webkinz nut, can get on the laptop by herself and play, pbs kids, disney, build a bearville, starfall." As for her 11 year-old, he "likes addicting games, naruto arena, line rider, runescape, pivot, webkinz (to help his sister). Naruto Arena's a fav. He also likes miniclip, and castlewars (on kongregate)."

Online Gaming Big With 12-17 Year Olds

In this age group we start to see social networks make an appearance. In the UK, Bebo is very popular and so it's no surprise to see it ranked #1 in terms of users in the above table. In the US it would probably be MySpace, although we have no data for that.

But the biggest trend in this demographic is that online games sites - for example RuneScape, FreeOnlineGames, AddictingGames and MiniClip - are most popular with 12-17 year-olds.

The Mobile Web is also popular, with mobile phone social networking site Frengo (our earlier coverage) having the highest percentage (26%) of 12-17 year-olds amongst its audience in the UK.

The Nielsen report noted that "as children hit their teenage years, general entertainment sites tend to make way for games-focused sites".

Conclusion

For under 12's, entertainment rules. But there seems to be social networking aspects to that too, judging by the popularity of Club Penguin and StarDoll. After the age of 12, online gaming becomes more popular, and general social networks like Bebo and Facebook enter the scene. The Mobile Web is popular in the 12-17 age group too.

For more analysis about how kids use the Internet, check out Sarah Perez's great post Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web.

Please add more website suggestions for kids in the comments, and let us know what you think of these Web trends for the younger generation.

Image: pixelrobber

Security company Marshal reports that their latest survey found 29% of respondents willing to admit that they have purchased something from a spam e-mail.

While that number seems pretty questionable, PCMag's Appscout points to a related survey from Forrester in 2004 that found 20% of people say they have bought from spammers. In other words, if you believe these studies - it's getting worse, not better.

Context

Marshal (no relation) says that global spam volumes are around 150 billion messages each day and have doubled for the year ending June 2008. We wrote in December about another study, also from a vendor in the anti-spam market, that concluded that 90 to 95% of all email is now spam.

"A common misconception is that 'regular' people don't buy from spam. But, you have to consider the types of products people are buying," Marshal's Bradley Anstis wrote in the company's release today. "It's pirated software, knock-off watches, counterfeit designer goods, cheap drugs and prescription medicines, pornography and other adult material. The Internet provides convenience and a degree of anonymity to people who want to buy illegal or restricted goods. It is a black market and spam has become a conventional means of advertising to a willing audience of millions of people who are purchasing from spam."

The announcement of the study concludes with these funny lines, from Anstis again: "The other way to look at this situation is from a spammer's perspective. There are approximately 250 million people out there who are interested in these kinds of products and have made purchases from spam in the past. That's equivalent to double the population of Japan mixed in with every other Internet user. As a spammer - how do you reach that market without knowing specifically who these people are and with the bare minimum of expense? Easy, send lots of emails to everyone."

Has The Market Spoken?

If you buy Marshal's numbers, and they have a vested interest in painting a large threat, perhaps the market has spoken. It sounds like people want spam, after all. What other e-commerce channel would 30% of respondents admit having bought something from? Doesn't sound like something that needs to be illegal.

Of course these numbers should be taken with a giant grain of salt. The study was of just over 600 respondents who visited the Marshal website. The question they were asked appears to have been framed in a pretty presumptuous way. "What purchases have you made from spam?"

This author has never bought anything from spam. I swear.

The percentage of people who have clicked on a topical looking ad on a spam blog that showed up in search is probably even higher. The satisfaction with that spam is probably much higher than satisfaction with email spam.

Those of us who want to use online communication channels for serious purposes, and I don't mean serious like S&M fantasies, may be forever forced to wade through a sea of people who are less discerning and the spammers who email us all in order to find them.

There is an infinite variety of things you can do with RSS feeds and a substantial number of those things can be done with Feed.Informer, which was formerly known as Feed Digest and just relaunched today. This super useful service was acquired in a small, unreported deal earlier this year and today comes out of a dormant period when new account creation was limited.

What can you do with Feed.Informer? You can splice feeds together, filter them for keywords and most importantly - display them dynamically on a web page with just a little bit of code. There are other services that do all of these things, but Feed.Informer is so quick and easy to use that a free account is worth checking out and a premium account may be worth paying for.

We Love Feed.Informer

Feed.Informer is a service I've used regularly for years and happily pay for every chance I get. It is the fastest, easiest and most user-centric way to publish items in a feed dynamically on a page. We've used it here on RWW in a number of posts, the best to see how it works is Ten Sites to For Finding Wonderful Things.

Why Use This Tool Instead of Others?

Much of Feed.Informer's functionality can be performed better by Yahoo! Pipes but many people find Pipes intimidating and it gives users no control over the styling of RSS output on a page. It doesn't offer PHP code like Feed.Informer does, so there's no SEO benefit to using the Pipes "badge" for feed display.

SImplePie is a powerful way to parse and display RSS feeds and is probably what you want to use in a production environment, but it requires hosting on your own server and is beyond the technical capabilities of many new publishers.

Feed.Informer is simple, fast and powerful. Unfortunately, that's why a fair number of spam bloggers probably use it. Automated website content by feed? Only recently have reputable publishers discovered good use cases for such technology. Our favorite? Displaying the feed for a user's tag in Del.icio.us on a web page.

There's a lot of things you can do with this handy little tool. It often throws up errors in the admin section of the site and it's not as pretty as it could be - it's not perfect, but day in and day out if comes through for us in powerful ways. Check it out and let us know what you think of the new Feed.Informer.

When Twitter announced they were killing SMS for anyone located outside the U.S., Canada, or India for financial reasons, many Twitter SMS users were upset as they had come to rely on that aspect of the service to send and receive tweets. However, in only a matter of days, numerous services sprung up to fill the void, including sites like TweetSMS, TwitSMS, and ZygoTweet. Today, you can add one more to that list: 3jam.

3jam is an SMS startup whose main offering is a group text messaging service, SuperText, that is currently available to over 180 countries. Because they already have experience delivering texts on this scale, they believe they will be the most reliable Twitter SMS service when compared with their competitors. In addition, due to the large amount of messages 3jam sends using its SuperText service, they have been able to negotiate cheaper rates than any of their competitors.

Starting today, 3jam's new Twitter SMS service will be offered to all users outside the U.S., Canada, and India. However, at the time of launch, they only plan to support the delivery of direct messages. It seems they want to test the waters first - only if there is enough interest will they then look at expanding to include @replies or normal Twitter status updates.

The service will not be free, of course, as none of these new pay-per-tweet services are - you will need to pay for each text you get (replying is free) and you will only receive messages when you have a positive credit balance in your account. The prices will be the same amount per message as a SuperText message to your own country. Standard SMS receiving rates apply (typically free outside of the U.S.).

Is there enough worldwide demand for Twitter via SMS for these pay-for-Twitter services to make it? If you live outside the U.S., Canada, or India, do you have plans to use any of these new SMS services? Let us know in the comments.

Apple once again had to accept defeat and has announced that it will extend all subscriptions to its bug-ridden MobileMe service for yet another 60 days. This move comes after the company already gave every subscriber an extra 30 days after the botched launch of the product in July. MobileMe is quickly becoming Apple's most public failure in recent years - when the service first opened, it was basically rendered non-functional for the first couple of days, after that, a good number of users stopped receiving email, calendars disappeared or didn't sync, and the service often simply didn't work.

Even users who are still in the free trial will see their accounts extended. Apple has also posted an FAQ that should answer the most common questions.

MobileMe was supposed to be Apple's answer to Web 2.0 mail clients like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, but instead, it has turned out to be a relatively clunky and slow paid alternative to a lot of free services. While the MobileMe email client has some neat features like QuickReply, it often doesn't stack up against its free competitors.

Besides handling mail, MobileMe also manages contacts and calendars, as well as online storage and photo-management (both of which are pretty much useless for Windows users, by the way). MobileMe users have complained about problems with pretty much every single aspect of the service, so giving everybody a total of three free months of subscription (which is pretty much three times the lifetime of the service so far) is a small consolation for the agony a lot of paying users have had with MobileMe. Thanks to the constant service interruptions, MobileMe even became the target for phishers.

Given that nobody is paying for MobileMe right now anyway, maybe Apple should just have had an open, three-month beta period.