The single biggest slice in Flurry’s statistics is “gaming”, at 32%. Does anyone really think that mobile games would be better off written to run in web browser tabs? Lamenting today the falling share of time people spend in web browsers at the expense of mobile apps is no different from those who a decade ago lamented the falling share of time spent reading paper newspapers and magazines at the expense of websites.]]>
the inescapable fact is that when deploying on the web, from the user’s perspective, you’re probably starting with a disadvantage.]]>
A committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an international governance group for the Internet, recommended this week that. amazon not be approved for use as a so-called global top-level domain — the letters that follow the dot in Internet addresses. Still has to go to the Icann board, but it would be surprising if it reversed this decision.]]>
In this, Gmail is a good example. Google just needs me logged into their system so they can amass data on my browsing habits. That’s the business. They don’t make their money by giving me — or even letting me pay for — a superb e-mail program that offers unlimited storage. That’s just how the business was sold. But perhaps that’s the business I need.
Together, the Gmail experience, the death of Google Reader, and the closure of Picnik all have me questioning whether I want to keep investing time and energy in “free” Google products or whether I need to start looking for paid services that are explicitly making money off the thing I am paying them to do. Google Reader's closure is a milestone in Google's relationship with its users.]]>
It won't be Microsoft, you can bet on that. They have been notoriously inimical towards Open Standards, Open Source, and pretty much “Open Anything” for most of their history. And I haven’t seen any recent evidence to suggest any fundamental change of heart on their end. ]]>
Web apps, in turn, comply with Berners-Lee's "principle of least power," a rule of simplicity, security and interoperability he defined as "If you're going to transmit something, you should use the least powerful language that you can."
He is not, however, an absolutist. During a post-talk Q&A, he defended proposals to add support for "digital rights management" usage restrictions to HTML5 as necessary to get more content on the open Web: "If we don't put the hooks for the use of DRM in… people will just go back to using Flash."
Berners-Lee's biggest fear is not a mobile experience dominated by iOS or Play Store apps, but one in which the basic protocols of the Web are eaten away by ISP interference and state surveillance.]]>
Don't worry, all of that hard work won't be wasted. The World Wide Web will remain accessible for 30 days, which will give you plenty of time to update your readers and customers. Each of you will also receive a 30-day free trial for AOL. Look for your CD in the mail soon.
Even better, we've created an import tool to make it easy to migrate everything you've put on the web to American Online! The address will change, of course, but now it will be available to every AOL member. You may find that you don't need to bother, though. America Online already has groups and pages about almost every topic you can imagine. Take a look around first and you might save yourself a lot of time. There are only so many different ways to say that Citizen Kane was a good movie! ]]>
Barabási's findings, published yesterday in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, involved a simulated model of the web that he created to better understand its structure. He discovered that of the roughly 1 trillion web documents in existence — the aforementioned 14 billion-plus pages, along with every image, video or other file hosted on every single one of them — the vast majority are poorly connected, linked to perhaps just a few other pages or documents.
Distributed across the entire web, though, are a minority of pages—search engines, indexes and aggregators—that are very highly connected and can be used to move from area of the web to another. These nodes serve as the "Kevin Bacons" of the web, allowing users to navigate from most areas to most others in less than 19 clicks.]]>
As a potential advertiser, I would not be impressed. As a journalist, I wonder whether the same sloppiness exhibited on this promotional page extends to the company's research.
And then there's this FTC news release from March 14, 2011:
The FTC reached a settlement with online advertising company Chitika, Inc. that ends the company’s allegedly deceptive practice of tracking consumers’ online activities even after they have chosen to opt out of online tracking on Chitika’s website.Chitika certainly isn't what you'd call cooperative about where its data comes from. But none of the data-pimping sources is. Nor do companies themselves provide all the numbers you want. Essentially, you have to triangulate on the most reliable and repeatable data.]]>
Yes, doing that was an inconvenience, but it bothered me more that this bad information was out there to begin with, and subsequent music-related searches uncovered many similar examples. Doesn't only apply to music, of course.]]>
So here's a few glimpses of a web that's mostly faded away. Late to linking to this, but it's good to think about as the new year dawns.]]>
The latest numbers come from a report issued by the state-linked China Internet Network Information Centre (CINIC) and cited by On Device Research.]]>
But it's never felt quite right to me. For one, I spent most of the 90s as a teenager in rural Washington and my web was highly, highly social. The social networks you can name aren't the ones that actually send people to sites.]]>
MInutes in North America and Europe spent in the browser on “traditional computers” is growing at a rate of 1.6% a year. (from IDC forecasts June 2012.)
1.6%.
For a technology that’s changed the world as much as the web has, and has gotten to 2 billion people in under 20 years, that’s an incredible statement. Growth has stopped. People will spend about as much time on the “desktop web” next year as they did this year — and actually maybe less per person, since population is growing. And as we know from history, flat is a precursor to down. And then way down. Guess where the growth is happening.]]>
Despite the original similarity in mobile business models, the graphs below show two nearly polar opposite results. Apple’s success with both the iPhone and iPad have led its devices to command a staggering 63% of all mobile traffic – up nearly 35% from slightly under year ago. The iPad is surely distorting the figures. According to Chitika, RIM's mobile web share was just over 1%. In October 2011 it peaked (for the past year) at 5%. ]]>
The service — doitquick.net — will auto-register up to 15 domains simultaneously, choosing randomly named domains unless the customer specifies otherwise. Krebs doesn't specify whether it's done cheap, but kudos anyway for getting the AC/DC reference in there.]]>
Clearly, the folks who do this for a living are shameless and awful. But this morning I learned they’re striving for even greater levels of shamelessness and actually achieving it. Today's helping of karma with a side order of belly laughs.]]>
When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. One wrinkle: the web is increasingly being used via mobile. He thinks that's different from the non-mobile-screen web. Does that change the question? (Thanks @nomster for the link.)]]>
Here are some slides that explain the main concepts from a pervious talk. Fabulous idea. Android Intents is a great concept.]]>
While Google adopted the cultural norms of open source software by making its mobile operating system free and commoditizing content, Apple changed the game by keeping a closed system, focusing on brands and enabling paid apps.
Apple differentiated web content for a price. By doing so, McNamee believes, it created a fundamentally different model than succeeded on the wired web.
“Most of all what Apple did was they charged $400 to $1,000 for the hardware that was necessary to get a differentiated user experience on data that 100% of their customers could get for free off a desktop device,” he said. “Every Apple customer has consciously voted with $400 to $1,000 against the world wide web.” McNamee argues that people will start using apps rather than the mobile web as such on mobile, because they can get to niche users more easily.]]>