The "Weekly WassUp" is a brief weekly overview of what has been showing up in "the feeds" in the last week.
In this issue:
- Feb. 2: Internet Explorer market share slips
- Feb. 4: Locate your friends with Google Latitude
- Feb. 4: Facebook turns 5
- Feb. 5: Microsoft launches Live Maps Belgium
- Battle for the e-book
Feb. 2: Internet Explorer market share slips
According to web metrics company Net Applications, Internet Explorer lost a total of 7.25% browser market share between March 2008 and January 2009, ending up at 67.55%. In the same period, Firefox gained 3.7% (17.83% to 21.53%), Safari gained 2.44% (5.82% to 8.29%) and Google's Chrome (launched last September) came in at 1.12%, overtaking Opera. Taking into account that Internet Explorer already dropped 9% in the 2 years before, this is a disturbing trend for the Microsoft browser. Maybe Internet Explorer 8, which is now in official release candidate version, can turn the tide?
Feb. 4: Locate your friends with Google Latitude
The social web is going mobile: after Loopt, Whrrl and Brightkite, Google launches its Google Latitude service. Latitude is basically an overlay on Google Maps, showing you where your friends are and what their status is. You can invite friends to make their location known to you and once they accepted, their location is shown on your Google map. Off-course privacy is a concern with these types of applications. But Latitude allows you to define who can see what and even lets you fake your address.
Although Google Latitude is a true mobile initiative, they also created an iGoogle gadget for the service. And if you're connected wireless to the Internet, it even can detect your (approximate) location.
Feb. 4: Facebook turns 5
On February 4 2004, Mark Zuckerberg started 'theFacebook.com', a social platform for university students. Now, 5 years later, Zuckerberg is number 321 on the Forbes list of wealthiest people with a stunning $1.5 billion and Facebook counts 150 million users from all over the world. But still monetization is an issue for Facebook (as is it for other social networks like Twitter). Latest rumours on how Facebook could be made profitable is the creation of a 'sentiment engine' taking all data from all Facebook profiles and turning it into a gigantic marketing research database. Want to know what people think about a specific product in a certain area? Digg into the sentiment engine and retrieve real-time results. Apart from being fed by day-by-day status updates, shared notes, links etc., Facebook users could also be polled using so-called 'engagement ads', allowing users to comment on ads, sharing virtual gifts or becoming a fan.
On another Facebook note, Facebook last week updated its API (application programming interface) to allow (a.o.) status updates :
"Specifically, your applications can now directly access all of a user’s status, links, and notes via new methods and FQL calls. Your application will have access to any status, notes, or links from the active user or their friends that are currently visible to the active user. In addition, we’re opening new APIs for you to post links, create notes, or upload videos for the current user, and we’ve made setting a user’s status easier."
This could turn out to be huge, because Facebook now made it virtually possible to build a new Twitter using the Facebook statuses (although Twitter probably doesn't need to fear yet).
Feb. 5: Microsoft launches Live Maps Belgium
Microsoft launched its Live Maps for Belgium. It can be viewed in either dutch or french (although french is the default) and has a nice integration with the Belgian yellow pages ('Gouden Gids') to allow quick mapping of companies. Especially nice is the birds-eye view showing a low-altitude image from 4 different angles.
Still, it doesn't feel quite right yet: the localisation of addresses is not all that precise, the interface always falls back to the french version, the overlay of street names in birds-view sometimes is odd, there's no way of embedding the maps in your website, ...
Battle for the e-book
With the launch of Google Book Search for Mobile, Google last week stirred up the world of the e-book readers. Putting together digitized versions of over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) and a mobile application for the iPhone and Google Android phones, Google created a new way of digital reading: using your mobile.
Wait and see how this will affect the recently launched second generation of Amazon's e-book reader 'Kindle' (of which the first version generated more sales in its first year than the iPod did in its first year)...
