Watch YouTube Videos In Google Earth

Google wants you to watch YouTube videos everywhere. Now you can watch geo-tagged videos inside Google Earth. Any video tagged with a latitude and longitude will show up when this new layer of Google Earth is turned on. So you can watch videos about the places you are exploring inside Google Earth.

It’s a good way to show videos in the context of where they were shot, and also gets more plays for videos that might have otherwise been lost in the YouTube vortex. Of course, people have been embedding YouTube videos in 2-D Google Maps for a while now. But that seems to require more of a manual process. I’d like to see all geo-tagged videos automatically pop up in a video layer on Google Maps as well.

Projects like this point to a day when the entire world will be tagged by its citizens—with videos and text and photos and hyperlinks. Add mobile maps to the equation, and the line between what is virtual and real will begin to blur. Imagine flipping open your phone to see how other people have tagged the spot that you are standing in (although, this is more a Google-Maps scenario than a Google-Earth scenario, at least until you can run Google Earth on a phone). It would be a great way to create travel video guides.

Netscape Was Better As A Digg Clone: Viewers

Traffic on AOL’s Netscape portal has plummeted since the site dumped its social news voting model and reverted to a new portal, at least according to Alexa.

Unfortunately the comScore figures for Netscape aren’t yet available for September so we can’t confirm the traffic crash, but despite Alexa’s argued issues the crash in traffic as shown by Alexa is unlikely to be an Alexa only quirk.

Tony Hung, who first picked up on the traffic crash notes that “[the traffic crash] validates Jason Calacanis — and indeed all the hard work Netscape folks have done over the past year or so to cultivate a community in Digg’s shadow — that so many of the people at Netscape were genuine fans *of* social news.” He’s right.

If Alexa is to be believed, Netscape’s traffic is now at its lowest level ever and ranks at a miserly 2,200th, a far cry from the days where Netscape was in the top 10 destinations online or even in the Top 600 during its time as a Digg clone. Some one at AOL may have some explaining to do given that the decision destroyed the traffic (and value) of Netscape by over 50%.

The Clock is Ticking for Joost

There’s a time bomb out there with Joost’s name on it. Full-screen, broadcast-quality video streams—the main selling point of Joost’s peer-to-peer Internet TV client software—is quickly coming to the Web. Brightcove will soon be offering such streams to its video publishers using BitTorrent DNA. But the real threat to Joost will be coming from Adobe and its ubiquitous Flash player.

Sometime in the next few months, Adobe is expected to incorporate the H.264 codec in all Flash players with the general release of Flash Player 9. You can already download a beta version from Adobe Labs. The H.264 codec is part of MPEG-4 and is the codec that Apple uses to compress all of the video downloads on iTunes. Once H.264 is part of Flash, the quality of streaming video on the Web will roughly double at current bandwidth speeds. That means YouTube videos will look twice as good—and those will likely remain on the low end in quality.

Every video site on the Web (and quite a few that are still in stealth) is just waiting for Flash Player 9 to be distributed widely and become the new standard. That will allow them to launch their own full-screen Internet TV services with video streams that are just as good or better than Joost’s, and that will require nothing more than a regular browser to watch.

Joost’s greatest asset right now is not its peer-to-peer technology. It’s the momentum it’s gained so far by being an early mover. When Joost finally came out of its private beta on October 1, it had already signed up one million beta users and seeded its network with 15,000 shows. But the vast majority of that video is not exclusive to Joost. All the Internet TV services are lining up the same content. And better-quality video is not going to remain a differentiator for long.

As compression technologies get better, video sites will be able to dial up the quality of the video streams. Joost’s P2P approach is not a benefit to the consumer as much as it is a benefit to Joost (because it offloads the bandwidth costs of the most popular video streams to the users themselves). But streaming video on the Web is about to get a whole lot cheaper—and as Web video advertising takes off, a whole lot more lucrative. Some people argue that once the economics kick in, centralized Web streaming will offer a better, more consistent viewing experience than P2P streaming. That’s why H.264 is so important. It will change the economics of streaming.

Joost’s only remaining competitive barrier will be its network of viewers and their interactions among each other, along with the third-party apps built around it. If viewers feel that the experience of watching videos on Joost is more social or pleasurable than watching streams by themselves on the Web, maybe they’ll stick around. But social features are not exclusive to Joost, and neither are its platform ambitions. The slam-dunk days for Joost will soon be over.

Zipidee Wants To Be THE Marketplace For Digital Goods

In 1995 eBay sold a laser pointer online and kicked off the online marketplace for selling physical goods. As networks improved in the intervening years, the idea of what can be bought and sold online has grown to include digital goods, such as music, e-books, and videos as well. Zipidee wants to be a market for those digital goods, and is expected to launch some time in the next week.

It’s by no means a new concept, there are several sites out there that trade in digital bits: Payloadz, Tradebits, e-Junkie, Lulu, Edgeio, and more. eBay already sells digital goods, with delivery often handled through these third party sites. iTunes can also sell your content, but requires an approved label if you want to get paid.

However, Zipidee will offer considerably more control over pricing and distribution than these other sites. Merchants on Zipidee will be able to create their own virtual store where they can list their digital wares for sale on the site directly or across Zipidee’s website widgets. It’s an ideal setup for anyone selling an instructional video series or their own audiobook.

zipidee_player.pngAudio and video can be uploaded to the site to be rented or bought at whatever price the creator wishes and consumed via downloads or streams. Other services often only allow downloads.

You will be able to track the sale of their good in real time and adjust the price accordingly using their analytics dashboard. Creators will also have the option of protecting their product with Zipidee’s own DRM system. DRMed goods come with a license to play the media through their web or downloadable player on any computer with your Zipidee credentials.

Zipidee will make money through a $1 listing fee (waived to start) and roughly 80/20 split of the purchase price, like Lulu (Zipidee takes a smaller cut for higher priced goods).

To start, Zipidee will focus on digitizing the kind of media now sold at conferences and trade shows as DVDs or Books. For launch, they’re digitizing materials from a series of consultants and speakers such as DreamUniversity and MightyVentures who currently sell millions of dollars in physical merchandise directly to their customers.

Yet, there’s still a big question over whether and where people will buy “long-tail” digital content. Zipidee is fighting the trend toward free digital content (wikipedia, 5 min) and people are reluctant enough to even pay for big-media’s content (most songs on iPods do not come from iTunes). There is also a question as to whether the best way to sell this content is horizontally in a single marketplace, or vertically by topic. There are a great number of digital content verticals out there already that could serve as points of sale for independently produced content (DocStoc, Scribd, Amie Street, 5 Min, Snocap). We’ll have to see how it all pans out when Zipidee launches.

zipidee_screen.png

Stixy: Free-Form Collaboration and File Sharing Spaces

The internet ought to have made it dead simple to share files long ago. But for some reason, I still scratch my head every time I want to send a batch of photos or a collection of documents to a non-technical friend without resorting to email (which is not a dead simple solution in my book).

That’s why I get excited when I see companies like Stixy attempting to make file sharing not only as easy as it should be, but more pleasurable and intuitive along the way.

Stixy’s underlying concept is simple, and one that we have seen elsewhere in different forms: provide a desktop-like space in the browser where you can upload and share files. We recently gave out a batch of invitations to another new service, Wixi, that does this very thing.

Stixy provides a “free-form” area to drop your files, but it’s also very much like PikiWiki in the sense that it doesn’t settle for simple desktop icons. The files and other items placed in a Stixy workspace are more expressive. For example, photo files are displayed as small versions of themselves and sticky notes can be stuck anywhere. Therefore, Stixy is less like a traditional operating system desktop and more like a bulletin board.

The ability to access and interact with elements in a Stixy workplace (whether they be files or other widgets) is not yet very extensive. Currently, you can add only four element types to a workplace: sticky notes, photos, documents, and to-do notes. Both types of notes are pretty simple widgets and documents are displayed as simple icons. But there is a lot of potential for Stixy to expand the collection of widgets (and perhaps eventually create an open platform for widget development) as well as to improve the current widgets so they are more interactive. It would be great to be able to preview Word documents and PDFs in the bulletin board environment instead of downloading a local copy or opening them in another window. The same thing goes for video and audio files.

Despite the usefulness of the free-form workspace for files, it would also be great to see a more traditional file system view built into Stixy as an option for when I want to sort quickly through a bunch of files stored in the system. Currently, you wouldn’t want to add more than a couple dozen elements to Stixy because it would get too crowded. If Stixy were to develop more standard file views (as an alternative, mind you), it would be moving in the direction of a Web OS while remaining cognizant of the fact that preview functionality is paramount in an online storage environment (people don’t want to download a file each time they want to check it out).

It is important to keep in mind that Stixy is ultimately a collaboration tool (as any Web OS-like service probably should be). The company has decided to keep ownership of Stixy workspaces very simple, in fact so simple that usually there is no real ownership. If you share a “stixyboard” (it’s name for a workspace) with one or more other users, you give those users equal power over board management. Any participating user can edit any aspect of the board, and any user can delete the whole thing completely. Therefore, this is a tool for people who trust each other and not one suited for a broad social networking environment. Stixyboards can be kept entirely private, shared with other users, or opened up to the public at large (for either editing or just viewing).

Currently, Stixy has placed a 10mb cap on each file upload but no cap on total disk space usage (which will inevitably change as traffic increases). The company plans on making money from advertisements (not yet on the site) and premium memberships (also not yet available). The company is currently working on chat and messaging functionality to enhance collaboration. The ability to drag-n-drop files straight from the desktop (a la PikiWiki) is also in the works. And in the longer term, Stixy will probably feature a file versioning system along with an activity history log.

Stixy, which is based in Karlshamn, Sweden but also operates in Mill Valley, CA, launched just a couple weeks ago around the same time it exhibited in TechCrunch40’s DemoPit. I’ll be looking forward to seeing whether Stixy remains as a standalone product and/or becomes incorporated as a feature of other websites that facilitate file sharing.

Minti: Parenting Advice For The UGC Generation

Minti offers a collaborative parenting advice service that ignores the one-to-many we know best style service that is the norm in this space, and instead empowers individuals to share their stories and experience.

As Michael Arrington wrote his initial review of the site in March 2006, the overall concept of Minti isn’t entirely new. As a service it sits somewhere between an advice site such as BabyCentre (a site I visited regularly when I was on the road to parenthood) and a forum. The difference is in the implementation.

Weighing User Generated Interactions

Minti is powered by the Vibe Engine, a custom built CMS owned by Vibe Capital (the majority shareholders of Minti) that also powers sites such as Refurber.

Minti has over 20,000 active registered members (as opposed to inactive or casual visitors, they are doing 7 figures in traffic) who comment, vote, tag, and contribute advice. Consider something like Breastfeeding; Minti has many user generated advice articles on the subject but it’s how they are weighed that makes the service usable and perhaps something different.

minti1.pngThe Vibe Engine weighs votes on an article based on a number of factors. Anyone can vote, but an unregistered visitor’s vote is not weighed as heavily as a registered user. Users themselves fall into ten member categories based on the amount of activity the undertake on Minti itself. Each level has a higher weighing meaning that users who are more active have a stronger vote than those who aren’t. It should be noted that none of this is evident to the user; these are all primarily backend levels, although at certain levels users get extra privileges including the ability to mark a contribution for review/ deletion is it is not of a reasonable standard. Users at higher levels also get to vote on reviews/ deletions as well in a truly distributed management model where regular users have ownership in decision making.

Overall the model delivers user rated results that serve to filter lots of information in a more accessible fashion for all readers.

Rocketboom Moves to Blip.tv

The popular daily videoblog Rocketboom is joining online video network blip.tv, which will now host all of Rocketboom’s videos and sell ads for the show. Rocketboom joins a growing crowd of other top videoblogs that can be found on Blip.tv, including Wallstrip, TreeHugger TV, Alive in Baghdad, and Goodnight Burbank. As with most of those shows, the relationship between Rocketboom and blip.tv is not exclusive. For instance, Rocketboom will continue to sell ads on its own site. But the more top-quality shows that blip.tv can sell ads against, the stronger its position becomes in the embryonic world of Web-only video.

rocketboom_screen.pngWith its launch this morning on blip.tv, Rocketboom gains a new sponsor in Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program. And blip.tv is concurrently launching a new ad unit, an Flash-like overlay that can be seen on Quicktime downloads (the kind you get off iTunes). According to blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack, these ads will be viewable on iTunes even though Apple generally prefers the paid-download model to ads. Blip.tv has offered pre-roll and post-roll ads on video downloads for about a year, but this is the first time a mid-clip overlay is available. Overlays, which usually look like a banner that pop up during the video, are preferable because, Hudack tells TechCrunch “pre-rolls have the potential to turn off viewers and post-rolls don’t get watched.” Eventually, blip.tv will have the capability to track how many times each ad is viewed or clicked on as well. Up till now, such metrics have been more common for streaming videos than for downloads.

ThePudding: Targeted Advertising Comes to Phone Calls

ThePudding provides free, PC-based phone calls to anywhere in the US or Canada. The big catch: computers in Fremont, CA will eavesdrop on and analyze every word of your conversation so they can serve up advertisements tailored to the topic at hand.

Users initiate a phone call simply by visiting ThePudding’s website (currently in private beta) and entering a phone number into the browser. After the call begins, advertisements tailored to the conversation will begin to appear on screen. The NYT has a good screenshot of what these advertisements will look like here.

Phone conversations are monitored only by computers, not actual human beings. The company also does not record any of the conversations or log any of the topics discussed. Therefore, advertisements are tailored to each particular phone call and not to trends in users’ calling behavior.

ThePudding has already experienced a fair amount of backlash, with some calling it a terrible idea because users will not be comfortable enough with allowing their phone conversations to be monitored. There is also the concern that niche users will not be swayed by this completely free offering, because they already pay very little for services like Skype. However, ThePudding may be a potential acquisition target for Skype itself, which may be interested in developing an ad-based revenue model.

Despite the criticism, ThePudding does not seem all that different to me from a privacy perspective than Gmail. If users are comfortable with letting computers analyze their email messages and display targeted advertisements alongside them, why won’t they be comfortable with allowing the same thing with their verbal communications? Perhaps there is an important psychological factor at play here that will always make people unwilling to let strangers monitor what they actually speak. But consumers are caring less and less about how much information they provide online about themselves to unverified companies, so it doesn’t seem implausible to me that with time many people will overcome their anxieties about this type of service.

While ThePudding is currently only available through the web browser on PCs, the company has plans to expand into mobile (and to display advertisements on the screens of handheld devices).

ThePudding is a service of Pudding Media, which was founded by two Israelis with experience in military intelligence and telecommunications. The company is based in San Jose, California.

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Sketchcasting - Another Weapon In The Bl

Eventvue Grabs Angel Round Over The Weekend

The firstTechStars startup has gotten funded over this weekend. Eventvue has closed a round estimated to be about a quarter million dollars from Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Wendy Lea, amongst others. See our earlier coverage of them here.

Eventvue brings social networking to the context of conferences, helping conference goers re-connect or follow up with business they couldn’t follow up with in the limited span of a conference. Networking at a conference is a fairly inefficient process, left up to chance encounters and stacks of business cards. Anything that can help optimize the limited conference time that thousand dollar ticket bought you is an easy sell.

Confabb is the most direct competitor in the space, but has focused on being a comprehensive directory of the who, what, and where of industry conferences rather than on the palm greasing that goes on at the events. More social competitors include Meetup.com and Eventwax. Eventvue is set for a public launch later this year.

PlanHQ Still Tiny, But Getting A-List Attention

PlanHQ, a Wellington, New Zealand startup that launched in April 2007, has just 180 paying customers and $6,000/month in revenue. But their product, which allows companies to create and track business plan and other goals and objectives, is getting rave reviews from some well known venture capitalists. That’s good news for the tiny startup.

The product is an easy to use business plan builder and project manager - set up goals and projections (financial, product or customer related) and then track those goals with the software. It’s not free - PlanHQ costs between $9 and $45 per month. Half their customers are choosing the high end plan.

It’s proving to be a useful tool for keeping the executive teams of startups focused on their primary goals (the ones the stockholders and board of directors care about) by providing constant feedback on the status of those goals.

The funny thing is, CEOs may not be the best people to market the product to. Sometimes more transparency into how they and their teams are doing is the last thing they want. But PlanHQ is hoping that venture capitalists will push it on companies. First Round Capital, a very well known early stage venture fund, is testing PlanHQ (they are not an investor). Other VCs are testing it as well, says company founder Tim Norton.

For VCs, it provides a single interface for monitoring all of their investments and holding companies to their projections. PlanHQ is evolving to serve VCs more fully by launching a board member reporting feature on Wednesday. The company is also working on having the product integrate seamlessly with well known accounting software to import financial data.

The company has raised just $250,000 in capital from angel investors and has six employees. To the extent they can get VCs to make this mandatory for their portfolio companies, Norton may find himself running a profitable, if niche, business.

Australian Government Proves Why Blogging Is Best Left To Everyone Else

The Australian Government has released an official consultation (white) paper on whether it should launch a “consultation blog.”

According to the paper, the Special Minister of State the Hon. Gary Nairn states that the purpose of the paper is to discuss the provision of the consultation blog and “sets out to balance the opportunities provided by the new online environment against the challenges and very real threats emerging to the identity and privacy of individuals.” The blog itself “is
envisaged as a website that lists consultations and allows people to post responses, comments and feedback against each consultation.”

Now whilst it’s great to see a sovereign nation officially consider a blogging strategy, I want what ever it is the soon-to-be former Government is smoking; the irony of launching a consultation paper on a consultation blog seems lost on them. Certainly deciding to run a blog based on a lengthy consultation process by itself seems to me to prove that they shouldn’t be blogging at all; after all, if the purpose of having a consultation blog is to gain feedback from the public, wouldn’t they just be better off launching the blog and taking feedback from the public via the blog rather than launching a consultation paper that probably cost six figures to come up with by a committee of high paid public servants who love nothing more than creating papers like this as a means to avoid real exposure to the will of the public? A little cynical perhaps, but reading a paper that describes blogs like 2002 called again can do that to you.

The PDF in all its glory can be found here.

Disclosure: I’m a former Australian Government staffer.

TV Coverage For Dancejam, Realius and Gizmoz At TechCrunch40

Three TechCrunch40 demo pit startups got local bay area television coverage last week - Dancejam (note: I’m an investor), Realius and Gizmoz. It looks like the reporter did the easy thing - a swing by the demo pit to film the best looking startups. Congrats to all three.

Demand Media Takes $100 Million Series C

Domain holding company Demand Media has taken $100 million Series C funding in a round led by Goldman Sachs that included 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Spectrum Equity Investors. The new round takes Demand Media’s total funding to the rather extraordinary figure of $320 million and values Demand Media at $1 billion.

Demand Media is primary a domaining company that is focused on building a profitable domain portfolio which includes everything from generic names through to typos. Like a number in this business lately, Demand Media has started a value adding program for their domain portfolio, having launched social network Me.TV in May. Demand Media is headed by former MySpace CEO Richard Rosenblatt.

Whilst often being tarred with the domain hijacking brush, domaining has become a big business with serious money over the last couple of years. The sale of Business.com for $350million has seen renewed interest from tradition investors who are looking for similar flipping opportunities.

But Demand Media is also buying other online properties, including pure content plays. They have new competition from Ross Levinsohn and Jonathan Miller, who recently created their own fund, backed by General Atlantic, to acquire some of the same properties that Demand Media will be interested in.

Meebo Adds File Sharing To Webchat

Web chat startup Meebo, still basking in the glow of bringing instant messaging to the iPhone, is releasing a much requested new feature tonight: file sharing.

There are dozens of web based file sharing applications, such as YouSendIt and DropSend (we reviewed four P2P solutions here), but users often want to simply send a file to a friend while chatting with them. This is easy with desktop based chat, which usually allows for drag and drop file transfers. But there was no equivalent with web chat until now.

The back end of the service is hosted at Amazon S3. Meebo is eating the cost of the service, but limits file transfers to 10 MB each, with a 30 MB/month send limit per user. Look for a new “send file” button when chatting with someone on the Meebo website.

Meebo has raised a total of $12.5 million from Sequoia and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They say 6 million people use the service monthly and spent around 2 hours per day, several times per week, on the site.

The Holy Grail For Mobile Social Networks

We’ve been tracking emerging mobile-only social networks such as ZYB and Mocospace and Mig33. All have unique selling points (Mocospace is dead simple to use, ZYB has a rich set of potential users from their address book backup service, and Mig33 has a VOIP tool that has attracted over seven million users), but there’s one solid gold feature that none yet have: physical presence detection and information exchange with other users.

This is the Holy Grail of mobile social networking, and one of the main reasons for taking the networks off the desktop/laptop environment in the first place. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

Knowing when your friends are around, and having the ability to meet new people who share your interests (even if it’s just that you are both single), will drive massive usage of networks. But, as with many new services, a chicken and egg problem looms. Until everyone is using this, there is no real reason for anyone to use it. Meetro, an instant messaging service that finds friends based on location, has struggled to gain users over the last couple of years for this reason.

Technical barriers aren’t an issue - cell phone tower triangulation and bluetooth solve a lot of the problems of locating users and transmitting information between phones. What’s harder is just plain getting a critical mass of users.

The Failures

There is a trail of failed attempts at getting this right. Nokia released Nokia Sensor nearly three years ago. It broadcasts information about yourself to others via bluetooth. Never heard of it? Neither has anyone else, although it is still available for download. Google’s Dodgeball is another example that’s fallen flat - it tells friends (and friends of friends) who are within 10 blocks of you where you are and what you are doing.

The New Experiments

A bunch of new startups are giving this a shot, too. In a post yesterday TechCrunch UK mentions Germany’s Aka-Aki, Paris-based Mobiluck and MeetMoi (the lone U.S. startup). Another startup is Copenhagen-based Imity. It’s not surprising that most of the innovation is occurring in Europe. The current approach is to get java-based software on the phone - very few U.S. carriers and handsets allow user-based installs of java apps.

Aka-Aki

Aka-Aki, based in Germany, is just a couple of weeks old. Create a profile and download the java app to your phone. You can also create and join groups that say things about your life, job, etc. When you are near other people who are members, data about you is transmitted to them via bluetooth, and vice versa. Users have control over data flow with privacy settings. And the groups supply another layer of privacy. You may transmit that you are single only to other singles, for example. Or share your sexual orientation only with others with the same orientation.

After a silent launch, word is getting out. Thousands of people in Berlin are using the software, and there is a chance for them to get critical mass there with proper marketing. The company has raised a small seed round from FoundersLink and is currently looking for a larger round.

Imity

Copenhagen based Imity, which launched in April, has also been flying under the radar. Like Aka-Aki it detects other members via bluetooth and send basic profile information to your phone. It also keeps track of people on its website, so you can check that out periodically from your normal computer. It’s bridges mobile and traditional social networks, which may help it gain critical mass. Co-founder Nikolaj Nyholm is also behind Polar Rose, a facial recognition and image tagging service.

Imity went open source in February 2007.

MeetMoi

MeetMoi, the only U.S. based service, is most like Dodgeball - it uses text messaging to help connect people. It’s dating focused - text your location to the service and it notifies other users in your area that you are there. If they are interested, they can contact you. The company has raised $1.5 million from Acadia Woods Partners and is based in New York.

MobiLuck

MobiLuck, based in Paris, is another bluetooth solution similar to Aka-Aki and Imity. Download the software to your phone and it vibrates when other users are nearby. You can then chat with them, send photos, etc.

Update: Per a comment below, we’re adding Britekite to the list. We actually covered them briefly last month as part of the TechStars event.

Yahoo Lands Bebo Advertising Deal

Good news for Yahoo, which until now didn’t have an advertising deal with any of the big social networks. They just announced that they will handle advertising for the UK and Ireland sites of Bebo, one of the large social networks (articles here and here).

The deal will see Yahoo selling the majority of display and video advertising to an audience of 11.6 million members. Yahoo was previously rumored to be in talks to acquire Bebo for $1 billion in May.

This at least gets them in the game. Last year Google snatched up Myspace advertising with a nearly $1 billion deal. Facebook went with Microsoft, and then Friendster announced a multi year deal with Google earlier this year.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Google guaranteed revenues to Fox, MySpace’s parent company, pursuant to their deal. And Microsoft was largely rumored to have done the same to win Facebook’s business.

More coverage at TechCrunch UK

Facebook Apps Are Pointless If They Don’t Work

Surj Patel is discussing an important issue about Facebook applications over at The Future of Software.

Facebook applications deal with the same, if not greater, scalability issues as regular websites. As usage of any online service grows, developers must provide enough storage and computational power to keep up with the demand. Otherwise, pages take forever to load, error messages begin popping up, and frustrated users vow to never use your product again.

Scalability problems have plagued Facebook’s developer platform from the start. I can’t tell you how many times I have tried to test a Facebook app only to wait impatiently and finally succumb to screens like the one below:

There seem to be two primary reasons why Facebook apps have a particularly bad time with scalability. First, Facebook’s news feed serves as a powerful distribution network that can cause applications to spread virally between friends at a rapid pace. The hockey stick can come very quickly and very unexpectedly for Facebook developers. As a consequence, many of them are caught off-guard and left dealing with victims of their own success.

While I don’t have any statistics on how many Facebook developers are amateur rather than professional, it also seems as though many casual programmers produce Facebook apps that they never seriously intend to scale successfully. The Facebook development environment is such that a skilled programmer can build an attractive application within a very short time. Such casual programming sets these applications up for failure when they receive serious attention by users. Unfortunately, many users (including myself) are left with a bad impression of Facebook apps in general when casually-built apps fail them.

So what is to be done? Patel mentions Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services as good processing and storage solutions for developers who need extra resources on demand and perhaps cannot afford to pay for excessively-sized hosted or in-house scaling solutions. He also names WeoCeo and RightScale as other “meta services” that make it easier for developers to hook up their applications to resource providers.

And yet, it seems unnecessarily inefficient to me that developers have to work with both Facebook and a 3rd-party meta service to deploy successful applications. I’d like to see Facebook itself step in and fill this need for developers so they don’t have to scrounge around for extra computational and storage capacity (after all, there is a waiting list for Amazon’s services now).

If Facebook were able to ensure the success of applications on its platform by providing all the requisite resources for a marginal fee, we would have a win-win situation on our hands. Developers could sleep more easily and so would the execs over at Facebook, because the company wouldn’t have to worry about slow 3rd-party applications tarnishing the brand and overall social networking experience. The service might also provide a healthy revenue stream for the company.

Such a move would take the idea of a platform to another level and demonstrate to potential developers that they really do care about the success of applications within its garden.

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Revver: $1 Million In User Payouts In First 12 Months

Social video site Revver has paid $1 million to video producers and their affiliates over the past year, the company says (pdf). Today also marks the service’s one-year anniversary. Revver generates revenue from pre and post roll advertisements that play in video content in their embeddable player.

Revver splits revenue 50/50 with video creators after paying 20% off the top for video distributors (sites that embed the video become distributors). This implies total revenue of $2-2.5 million in the last year depending on if there are distributors to be paid. Of course, if they have sweatheart deals with some content providers, that revenue total could be lower, even significantly lower.

Revver was one of the first and currently is one of the few hosted video sites helping monetize social video for independent publishers. Metacafe currently has a producer rewards program where they pay $100 per 20,000 views. Dailymotion and Youtube are expected to pay their users through advertising revenue as well.

Google To Present At TechCrunch40

We just got permission to post this - On top of everything else we’ve got planned, Google will present something at TechCrunch40 next week. Like the AOL and Yahoo product launches, it will not be eligible for the $50,000 top prize awarded to the best new startup product. But they will present it in front of the main crowd, and audience comments and questions will be part of the show.

Odeo (Formerly SonicMountain) Acquires FireAnt

If you know who FireAnt is, you either love podcasts or you’re a long time reader of this blog. The company built up a cult following in 2005 and 2006 as the podcast directory and player, and competed head on with Evan Williams’ Odeo for mindshare and users.

FireAnt’s assets were acquired by Odeo for $400,000, they companies will announce today. Not the old Odeo, but Sonic Mountain, which renamed itself Odeo after acquiring it earlier this year. For less than $2 million, Sonic Mountain has now put two of the more well know podcasting brands together under one roof.

The acquired assets include FireAnt’s technology, particularly their desktop media player for Windows and Mac, as well as FireAnt’s database of feeds and metadata. Founder Josh Kinberg joins Odeo to lead product development and integration of the Odeo and FireAnt technology.

Everything will be branded Odeo from here on out, so take a good look at that screenshot. If you are a FireAnt user, it will be changing significantly soon.