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DEL.ICIO.USA sizzling online summer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s summertime and the living is supposed to be easy. However, for those following the online industry, this past week was filled with so many developments, it was hard to keep up.
Time Warner obviously received a lot of attention as its AOL wing dropped its subscriber-service model and cnn.com launched user-submitted video at CNN Exchange.
However, there was other significant news from several well-known players:
— Apple will team up with Ford, General Motors and Nissan to integrate iPods with car stereos. Drivers will be able to charge the digital music player and store it in a glove compartment as they listen to the music. The car’s stereo controls will be used to select music from the iPod. More than 70 percent of U.S. 2007-model cars will offer the integration.
— The Washington Post and other Web publishers are adopting technology from Inform Technologies LLC that could lead visitors to articles on competing news sites. If you’re reading a story on, say, Iraq, there will be links available to related content elsewhere, regardless of whether it’s a competitor or not. Why send users to your competition? The idea: it’s better to offer your own choices for related content than readers going to the search engines to find what they want.
— Google squashed rumors that they would be selling music, which had circulated for more than a year.
— Google began alerting users whenever they click on a search result that may take them to a dangerous Web site. Dangerous sites are those reported to The Stop Badware Coalition, a nonprofit organization led by Harvard University and the University of Oxford and backed by Google, Lenovo Group and Sun Microsystems. A study by McAfee reported that U.S. users go to malicious Web sites about 285 million times per month by clicking on search results from the five top search engines.
— In another collaboriation, Google, Yahoo and MSN vowed to work together to fight advertising click fraud, coming up with the guidelines and tracking the problem.
— MSNBC completed a beta test on an ad-supported mobile news service with headlines and videos from NBC’s news programs for cellphones. The service is expected to launch in November.
— Meanwhile, less successful was an upgrade from MSN Spaces to the new Windows Live Spaces blogging and social-networking service. The company acknowledged early problems — initial slowness to load and issues with Firefox, e-mail and the stats page.
— And, finally, Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor launched Eons, a social network for the over-50 crowd. Some creepy, but cool things: The site features an online obituary database that sends out death alerts when people die. And there’s a death calculator that works out your lifespan based on answers to questions.
This week promises to be no less busy. For starters, Apple chief Steve Jobs speaks at the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.
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