We know who won the London mayoral election - but how did London really vote at a local level? See the votes at ward level

Simon Rogers

Google announced the winner of the Doodle 4 Google competition and today that winner’s logo is on Google home pages around the world. The Winner is Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisconsin for his Doodle named “Pirate Times.” The Doodle won him a $30,000 college scholarship, a...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

The next iteration of Mac OS X is coming. It doesn't have a launch date yet, but it likely will by the time Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference wraps up next month. 

While most of the updates focus on the slow convergence of iOS with the desktop, one unsung gem is sure to delight those of us who rely on the Internet rather than cable for television: AirPlay for Mac. 

Just as we already can with our iPads, iPhones and iPods, AirPlay for OS X will allow us to wirelessly mirror the screen of our Macs onto their televisions using Apple TV. 

The Cord Cutter's Dilemma: Limited Content

What makes this so exciting for the cord-cutting crowd - and probably somewhat cringeworthy for the network executive crowd - is that there's far more content available on the desktop Web than there is on iOS or any streaming set-top box.

Take Hulu.com, for example. The free version of Hulu's website has long blocked itself from being accessed by Google TV or Boxee. Annoyingly, even the paid Hulu Plus app isn't available on most of these devices. With AirPlay for Mac, TV fans will be able to stream Hulu's content from their televisions for free, at least as long as rumors about the site requiring a cable subscription don't pan out. Hulu is just the beginning. 

Although a decent number of video sites have converted to HTML5 since the standard began to emerge (and since Steve Jobs famously spoke his mind about Flash), there are still quite a few sites out there that use Flash to play video back, including those belonging to networks and cable channels. 

In many cases, popular shows that aren't available from a source such as Hulu are available on the content provider's website, but rarely in such a way that that content is accessible from an iPad or most streaming boxes. With AirPlay for Mac, that changes. 

Even though Boxee and Google TV have Web browsers, they still can't access everything that's on the Web. That's either because of the site owner's preferences or because of issues with the Flash player (an issue that's commonly cited by Boxee Box owners). 

Since these devices exist as easily detectable user agents, they can be blocked by scripts or through other means. But a MacBook is a MacBook, and Hulu will never block that. All AirPlay is is a more convenient way to pair it with one's TV. 

To that point, you may argue, why not just hook your computer up to your TV using VGA or HDMI? That's easy enough if you have a Mac Mini or laptop and the right cables, but AirPlay will make it easier to do and compatible with less portable machines. For instance, if you have an iMac desktop on the other side of your apartment, you can stream content from that without lugging it over or dealing with long cables. 

In theory, streaming from your Mac via the new Apple TV box should support 1080p video, but it's possible that things could get a little laggy on older hardware or on a less-than-stellar network. 

Other Uses, From Gaming to Business

The use cases go beyond video content, although that's certainly a huge one. Gamers who want to play desktop games on a bigger screen will be able to do so much more easily, especially if they use an external controller. And it's not just recent, high-impact video games that will find their way to bigger screens this way: Thanks to classic game emulators, it's also an easy way to play old-school Nintendo favorites on the TV.

AirPlay also turns out to be a pretty decent way to beam presentations onto a larger screen, provided it's hooked up to an Apple TV box, which is actually even easier to transport to a business meeting than a laptop is.

Using data published here at the Datablog, designers at thetrainline.com have produced a pastel shade visualisation of lunch prices at Michelin starred restaurants across the British Isles. Click the image below to view the full size version.
• Who made this graphic? Designers from thetrainline.com
• Where can I find it? here

Establishments are ranked in order of the cost of a set lunch, grouped according to the number of courses included and colour-coded by region. The most affordable venue is the Hand and Flowers in Marlow, where two courses will set you back £15.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the larger image you will find the Fat Duck - Heston Blumenthal's flagship - where the set lunch consists of a whopping 14 courses and comes at an appropriately pricey £180!

20 restaurants are not included in the graphic since they either do not serve lunch or offer only an a la carte lunch menu. These establishments are listed at the very bottom of the full size image.

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Are we or aren’t we? When it comes to social media bubbles and whether or not we’re in one, there is no shortage of people willing to argue on each side of the debate. 

It doesn’t matter if Facebook finishes Friday, its first day as a publicly-traded company, with a valuation of $105 billion or $75 billion: The debate is sure to get more intense in the coming weeks, months and possibly years. Earlier this month in the buildup to Facebook’s IPO, we took a look at the social media bubble (or lack thereof) in a five-part series that was based on dozens of interviews with experts on both sides of the divide.

We opened with a comparison between the dot-com bubble to the current period, when social media companies that have no revenue model are being sold for a billion dollars or more. Later on, we compared Facebook just ahead of its IPO to America Online in the period leading up to and following its IPO.

While there is no shortage of bright people willing to argue that we are not in a social media bubble, we tended to land on the side of the argument that we were seeing the same kind of “irrational exuberance” that led to a run-up of dot-com stocks in the late 1990s and the early part of the last decade. Working under the assumption that we were indeed in a social media bubble, we speculated on which companies were likely to survive when the bubble bursts.

Finally, we talked to startup experts and found out whether a bubble was irrelevant to those who were thinking of starting a social media business. Suki Shah, cofounder and CEO at GetHired.com, told us, there may never be a better time to start a social network company.

"Small teams of smart, dedicated, entrepreneurial people are creating significant momentum and innovation in niche areas that really appeal to larger companies," he said. "Regardless of what will happen in the future, serious entrepreneurs need to use this time to set sail."

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Editor's note: In the Summer 2012 issue of SAY Magazine, Dan Frommer chronicles the history of tech blogging. For the rest of this week, Richard MacManus, who founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003, will be looking back on the early days.

When Sarah Lacy launched the oddly named PandoDaily earlier this year, the goal was to dislodge Silicon Valley kingmaker TechCrunch, New York media heavyweight AllThingsD, and Wall Street-friendly Business Insider as the daily source of business technology news. Those are three formidable competitors and PandoDaily was competing on the West Coast turf of TechCrunch, Lacy's ex-employer. But Lacy had a couple of aces up her sleeve, in the form of TechCrunch founder Michael "The Dark Knight" Arrington and his earnest Robin, M G Siegler. Unfortunately, the dynamic duo were forced out less than three months later by Lacy. Meanwhile, AllThingsD superheroes Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg have been on a tear this year, often scooping TechCrunch on important business news in the technology sector.

An excerpt from Dan Frommer's Rise of the Tech Bandits:

When I visited in mid-March, The Verge was working out of a smallish loft office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. With a few dozen editorial staffers in one room, The Verge is experiencing the phase of a startup where there are just too many bodies per square foot. It’s fun but a little crazy.
The Verge is not just another gadget blog. There is the look — an apparent nod to sci-fi novels. Topolsky, 34, and Patel, 31, cite influences such as early Wired, Computer Shopper and videogame magazines such as GamePro and Mondo 2000. There is the production quality, especially in video reviews, which far surpasses the competition. There is the infamous “CES truck” the publication rented in Las Vegas to serve as an office during the Consumer Electronics Show, which it flies the entire staff to.

Scoops are the name of the name in business reporting, although a good analytical article - such as Henry Blodget's recent profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg - helps to keep the brand solid. Kara Swisher has become the Queen of Scoops over the past year, usurping Arrington. Swisher does it through good old fashioned reporting graft. She talks to people in the technology sector, day in and day out. A fine example is her scoop yesterday about Pinterest. Along with co-writer Liz Gannes, another extremely talented blogger, Swisher was the first to report the news that image-based social network Pinterest is receiving a $100 million funding round from Japanese company Rakuten.

It's this kind of "one source said" style reporting that wins in the business media:

While the latest round of funding for Pinterest has been the most hotly sought of late in tech circles, one source said Silbermann was looking for a global strategic investor and had talked to several large Asian companies. Said one source on why he settled on Rakuten: “He just really liked them.”

Swisher followed that scoop up by interviewing Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani. Talking to people, it still works in the media game.

It's hard to compete in business reporting unless you get the scoops. PandoDaily's Sarah Lacy is as well-connected as Kara Swisher and she gets good stories too, like a recent post about how six "unlikely investors" got a piece of the recent Evernote $70 million funding round. AllThingsD may be winning the battle for business tech right now, but this is a war that never ends: each day there is a new scoop to be had, it's just a question of who uncovers it first.

SAY Media is ReadWriteWeb's parent company.

“Busy” used to be a fair description of the typical schedule. More and more, though, “busy” simply doesn’t cut it.

“Busy” has been replaced with “too busy”, “far too busy”, or “absolutely buried.”

It’s true that being productive often means being busy…but it’s only true up to a point.

As you likely know from personal experience, you can become so busy that you reach a tipping point…a point where your life tips over and falls apart because you can no longer withstand the weight of your commitments.

Once you’ve reached that point, it becomes fairly obvious that you’ve over-committed yourself.

The trick, though, is to recognize the signs of “too busy” before you reach that tipping point. A little self-assessment and some proactive schedule-thinning can prevent you from having that meltdown.

To help you in that self-assessment, here are 7 signs that you’re way too busy:

1. You can’t remember the last time you took a day off. Occasional periods of rest are not unproductive, they are essential to productivity. Extended periods of non-stop activity result in fatigue, and fatigue results in lower-quality output. As Sydney J. Harris once said, “The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”
2. Those closest to you have stopped asking for your time. Why? They simply know that you have no time to give them. Your loved ones will be persistent for a long time, but once you reach the point where they’ve stopped asking, you’ve reached a dangerous level of busy.
3. Activities like eating are always done in tandem with other tasks. If you constantly find yourself using meal times, car rides, etc. as times to catch up on email, phone calls, or calendar readjustments, it’s time to lighten the load. It’s one thing to use your time efficiently. It’s a whole different ballgame, though, when you have so little time that you can’t even focus on feeding yourself.
4. You’re consistently more tired when you get up in the morning than you are when you go to bed. One of the surest signs of an overloaded schedule is morning fatigue. This is a good indication that you’ve not rested well during the night, which is a good sign that you’ve got way too much on your mind. If you’ve got some much to do that you can’t even shut your mind down when you’re laying in bed, you’re too busy.
5. The most exercise you get is sprinting from one commitment to the next. It’s no longer opinion that exercise promotes healthy lives…it’s proven fact. If you don’t care about that, that’s one thing. If you’d like to exercise, though, but you just don’t have time for it, you’re too busy. If the closest thing you get to exercise is running from your office to your car because you’re late for your ninth appointment of the day, it’s time to slow down.
6. You dread getting up in the morning. If your days are so crammed full that you literally dread even starting them, you’re too busy. A new day should hold at least a small level of refreshment and excitement. Scale back until you find that place again.
7. “Survival mode” is your only mode. If you can’t remember what it feels like to be ahead of schedule, or at least “caught up”, you’re too busy.

 

Brock Henry is a personal productivity writer. His belief is that productivity can be ignited by using a smart combination of strategy and simplicity. He can be found blogging at strategic simplicity. Connect with him on Facebook or Twitter.

In 2011, Android conquered the world. Google’s mobile operating system was activated on hundreds of thousands of handsets a day, the type of growth that was unprecedented in any era of computing. Android’s momentum from last year has carried into 2012, but it is not the rumbling freight train is was a year ago. There are chinks in the Android armor. Is it possible that the world’s leading smartphone platform is ripe for disruption?

Is Android Traction is Slowing in 2012?

There are a variety of factors that could lead to the disruption of Android. Yet, it is not as simple as a rival releasing a new operating system and seeding some devices to manufacturers and carriers. Just because Mozilla is working on a browser-based HTML5 operating system (Boot2Gecko) or the Linux community is trying to (finally) make some splashes with Tizen (formerly MeeGo), it does not mean either will just step up and push Android off its perch. There are too many moving parts and Android is too well established at this point to simply dethrone. 

But, there are signs of weakness. The top three U.S. cell carriers sold more iPhones in Q1 2012 than Androids. Nielsen and comScore still have Android the top spot among mobile operating systems in the U.S. and abroad. Android will need a boost in the next couple of years if it is to maintain its lead on the mobile ecosystem.

 

Android, at this moment, is still going strong. According to comScore, it gained 3.7% of the U.S. market share in the first quarter of 2012, from 47.3% to 51%. That was led by Samsung, which controls 26% of the U.S. smartphone market and gained 0.7% in the time frame. Apple has been growing quicker, as is seen by sales from the top three U.S. mobile carriers, gaining 1.6% of the market in Q1. Yet, the other top Android manufacturers lost share, with LG (-0.7%), Motorola (-0.5%) and HTC (-.2%) decreasing by 1.4% in the quarter.

Many technologists and pundits thought that Ice Cream Sandwich would be the boost that Android needs. Android 4.0 was designed to quell many of the problems that manufacturers, carriers and developers had with the operating system. The promise of ICS is still present – streamlined app design, easier to code for multiple screen sizes – but the newest version of the operating system has not put an end to fragmentation, still Android’s biggest challenge nor has it seen widespread adoption.

As of the beginning of May, Android 4.0 is being used by 4.9% of users accessing Google Play. Android 2.3x Gingerbread is still the predominant flavor of the OS at 64.4% and stubborn Froyo still occupies more than one out of every five devices (20.9%). ICS has not seen mass six months after its unveiling for a variety of reasons. Foremost, the carriers and manufacturers are not updating older phones from Gingerbread through over-the-air updates in a timely manner. Second, the manufacturers have been slow to put out a rush of ICS devices that take advantage of all the new capabilities of the operating system.

There are only a handful of desirable ICS devices on the market right now. The newly released HTC One series is probably the best, but that may not last long with a new Samsung flagship (the Galaxy S III) in the pipeline. AT&T did not have an ICS device on its shelves in any form until the Samsung Galaxy Note was released. Verizon was not much better, with the Android flagship Galaxy Nexus as the only decent ICS phone on the market (from any carrier) for a good portion of 2012. Simply put, for most of the year there have not been a lot of Android phones on the high end of the spectrum that have been all that exciting. It is hard to ICS to see mass adoption when it is hard to obtain. 

Android still does robust sales at lower price points in the market both in the U.S. and abroad. Going forward, that will continue to be a strength for the operating system as manufacturers release cheaper devices available to a wide variety of people. The lower end of the Android spectrum will battle for supremacy in emerging markets as Asian manufacturers like ZTE, Huawei and Samsung and others pump out more and more low end devices. 

Is there anything that can disrupt the Android train? We will take a look in Part 2 of our mini-series on Dissecting Android.

Views are a massive part of Drupal and you can't experience the power of Drupal without the Views module.

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I had a relapse a couple of weeks back. After full bore sobriety from all things productivity porn, I couldn’t help myself any longer. When I see an update to a “GTD” app or see something new online that looks like it can be a “GTD” app, I get the itch to try it out. What pulls us to do this?

I’ve tried everything from simple paper, pencil and a paper filing system to the robust yet complicated systems like OmniFocus and even Microsoft Project. I’ve found that the more complicated the tool tends to be, the more I end up tweaking it and entering into the “cool thing to do on a Saturday afternoon” type of mentality that Dave Allen speaks of. Everything looks great about my system when I’m tweaking, but when I’m in the “heat of battle” on Monday morning, how will it stand up?

I’ve found a couple of things about these productivity tools over the past 5 or 6 years that I want to let you in on.

Productivity tools suck when they use you

The problem with super complicated productivity tools is that they tend to only work when you work them. If you let them lay stagnant for any period of time and have set up reminders, due dates, and notifications, there will come the day when all of the little “boops and beeps” will repel rather than attract you.

Have you opened up a digital productivity tool and been overwhelmed by the tasks that you have assigned to yourself? Couldn’t believe how many tasks had due dates that didn’t really matter if they were due? If so, then you have been used by your productivity tool.

It’s a dirty feeling. I know.

The worst thing is that if you don’t do something drastic, even as drastic as erasing all tasks and projects from the tool, your time enjoying the use of the productivity tool will soon come to an end. You will probably end up resenting it.

If you spend more time organizing than doing

The reason that your tools end up using you is that you probably tend to spend more time organizing your work than actually doing your work. I know that is the case with myself.

I love OmniFocus. It’s probably one of the best productivity apps around, but you can really get down in the weeds with it. And when you do, you will find yourself making decisions about how to organize tasks in a more “intuitive manner” and trying to figure out which GTD contexts better suit you as a human.

All of these tools tell us they are made for getting stuff done, but don’t let their robustness fool you. If you are a “tinkerer” or someone that likes to organize things into their proper “buckets”, complex tools will be your own productivity’s kryptonite.

Completely simple tools aren’t the answer

If you think that paper and pencil is the answer, think again. While the benefits of paper are many (and we sure have talked about that a lot here at Lifehack) it lacks in important things like sorting, rearranging, filtering and alerting.

Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, try to find a tool that doesn’t get in your way and use you while still having support for your large amounts of tasks, priorities, and deadlines.

How to get unstuck

The easiest and most straight-forward way to get unstuck from the wrath of complicated productivity tools is to start fresh. That’s right. Start over.

If you have any decent productivity tool you will be able to easily export or save your current data and start with a clean slate. This is the only way that I have found to take control of a complicated system that has gone stagnant and to get myself unstuck and doing the right things again.

When you are setting up your system, make sure to not get too particular about naming conventions, tagging, etc. Also, try really hard not to set “fake due dates” for your projects. After that, instead of thinking of the 20 ways your productivity tool could be better, starting working and checking items off your lists.

Remember, your productivity tools are only as good as you keep them. If they are a dumping ground and not current, your productivity will suffer.

In lieu of the fact that I was unable to go attend Confab this week, I wanted to represent the Content Strategy movement by sharing a notion I've been thinking about for quite some time. I believe there are three key ingredients to making an amazing website: 

1. Beautiful Design
2. Meaningful Content
3. Rock Solid Development

While this concept may seem self evident, I find most web projects do a great job at focusing on design and development, but fail to allocate sufficient resources, time, and consideration to the "Meaningful Content" chunk of the triangle. 

Fortunately, the evolving field of Content Strategy has produced a concepts, tools, and methodologies which have begun to shift people's opinions on the importance of this sector.

In an effort to support this momentum, I've compiled a list of resources to share with future collaborators, web practitioners, and site administrators. 

After all, the more we all know about Content Strategy, the better the web will become.

Hash tags to follow

• #contentstrategy (my personal favorite)
• #confab2012

People to follow

• @halvorson
• @karenmcgrane
• @arockley
• @RellyAB
• @confab2012

Books to read

• Content Strategy for the Web
• The Elements of Content Strategy
• Content Rules

Resources to check out

• http://blog.braintraffic.com/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/content-strategy-storytelling/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/06/03/content-strategy-optimizing-y...
• http://www.slideshare.net/KMcGrane/adapting-ourselves-to-adaptive-conten...
• http://boagworld.com/tumblog/the-truth-about-content-strategy/
• http://boagworld.com/site-content/10-ways-to-put-your-content-in-front-o...

 

Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society.

The democratization of literacy in the late 19th century created one of the great inflection points in human history. Knowledge was no longer confined to an elite class, and influence began to spread throughout all levels of society. Any educated person could command the power of words.

What if any educated person had equal sway over the power of machines? What if we were to expand our notion of literacy to encompass not only human languages but also machine languages? Could widespread facility in reading and writing code come to be as critical to society as the ability to manipulate spoken and written language?

The usual definition of computer literacy stops at the UI: If a user knows how to make the machine work, he or she is computer-literate. But, of course, the deeper literacy of the programmer is far more powerful. Fortunately, computer languages and human languages are basically very similar. Like human languages, computer languages vary in form and character (Python to Java to Ruby) and can be implemented in infinite ways. My Python may not look like your Python, but it can do the same thing; likewise, a single idea can be expressed using a variety of combinations of English words. And both kinds of language are infinitely flexible. Just as a person literate in English can compose everything from a sonnet to a statute, a person literate in programming languages can automate repetitive tasks, saving time for things only a human can do; distribute access to systems of communication and control to large groups of people; and train machines to do things they've never done before. Computer programming already does marvelous things like deliver this article to your mind, operate life-sustaining medical devices and enable IBM's Watson to win at Jeopardy. The current potential for innovation would be many times greater if every schoolchild had a firm grasp of programming concepts and how to apply them.

Among programmers, a movement is forming around this idea. Shereef Bishay, founder of San Francisco-based Developer Bootcamp, believes that coding is destined to become a new form of widespread literacy within the next 20 to 30 years. Everybody should learn to code, he says, because machine/human and machine/machine interaction is becoming as ubiquitous as human/human interaction. Those who don't know how to code soon will be in the same position as those who couldn't read or write 200 years ago.

300 years ago, Bishay said, "you would have to hire to write a letter for you, and hire them to read the letter for you. It is just insane." Today most people hire a skilled programmer to write computer programs for them.

The code literacy movement began to gather steam in late 2011, when Codecademy started teaching basic programming skills for free. The debate came to a head this week as two blog posts took the top spots on the tech website Hacker News. The first, dubbed “Please Don’t Learn to Code,” came from noted developer and StackOverflow.com creator Jeff Atwood on his blog Coding Horror. The second, a rebuttal entitled "Please Learn to Code," came from Sacha Greif, a Parisian designer whose clients include HipMunk and MileWise. 

“I do think (or at least, hope) that computer programming will become the next version of literacy,” Greif wrote in an email to ReadWriteWeb. “When I watch my 4 year old niece interact with an iPhone, I see her intuitively using interaction patterns that older people often have trouble with, even when they're computer-literate. And kids can easily memorize huge quantities of facts about complex abstract systems like Pokemon games. So clearly they have the potential to learn how to code.”

Not everyone in the programming community agrees. Atwood argues that verbal literacy is a different kind of skill, and more fundamental. “Literacy is the new literacy,” he told ReadWriteWeb. “As much as I love code, if my fellow programmers could communicate with other human beings one-tenth as well as they communicate with their interpreters and compilers, they'd have vastly more successful careers.”

Atwood stresses learning, and mastering, the basic skills of communication. Learn to read. Learn to write. Learn to hold a conversation. Learn some basic math. These skills, he says, are more essential than being able to program a computer.

Of course, the path to universal code literacy is not without roadblocks. The skills necessary depend on how computing evolves over the next several decades. How will quantum computing affect our relationship with computers? However, the human capacity to learn is not at issue. If it becomes necessary for me to code to interact with my machine, I will likely learn to code. It is no different than if I was dropped off in Cambodia without a place to stay or food to eat - I'd learn the local language posthaste. 

At present, the ability to program computers is vocational, like carpentry or learning to cook. There's little impetus to make it universal. But imagine if it were.

Should computer programming become the new literacy? Or should it remain a vocation? Let us know in the comments. 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock

 

Spotify is raking in the money. The six-year-old streaming music startup has only been live in the U.S. for about a year, but it has apparently won the confidence of investors, who are said to be ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars into the company. So what will Spotify do with all that money? 

They won't say, but it's safe to assume that content licensing, app development and hiring are high on the list. Here are a few of our unsolicited recommendations. 

1. Expand the Music Catalog

Spotify already has a massive selection of music, but to stay competitive with the likes of Rdio and the cloud music lockers, it's going to need to continue to grow that library. This is one of the more expensive things a company like this has to deal with, so it's probably one of the first places that money is going to end up. 

2. Increase Royalty Payments For Independent Artists

It's still very much a growing company, but Spotify should consider increasing the royalty checks it sends to indie artists. That may not help the bottom line in the short term, but to remain viable, the service is going to need to retain those artists. Some of them are already uneasy about the meager payouts they've seen to date, and even an incremental boost in revenue would be a good way to restore their confidence. 

3. Redesigned Apps For Every Platform

This may well be something that's already underway, but a good way to mark the one-year anniversary of Spotify's U.S. launch would be with a fleet of shiny, newly-redesigned apps across all platforms. The UI of their desktop app, for instance, is functional and looks fine, but it's not the most jaw-droppingly beautiful interface we've ever seen. The same is true of the iPhone app. 

The standard set by the company's brand new iPad app is a pretty good one. There's no reason the desktop experience shouldn't be every bit as nice, and then some. The model could be shrunk down to fit on smartphones, and some lessons can be drawn from the design of Rdio's iPhone app. 

It might be a longshot, but a Web app would be nice too. Unlike Rdio and MOG, Spotify doesn't exist as in-browser experience. Since Spotify uses P2P architecture, there are legitimate technical issues on the backend that might prevent Spotify from doing this, or at least make it very challenging. 

4. More Native Social Features

Spotify's integration with Facebook is nice, and it has certainly helped the company grow its user base. The social experience of using Spotify shouldn't stop there, though. Twitter and Facebook could both be baked even more thoroughly into the service, and users should be able to interact with one another from within the app itself through basic features like comments, likes and private messages. 

5. Grow the Third Party App Platform

One of the best things Spotify has done in the last year is launch its own app store for third party developers. Right now, the selection is still fairly limited, but the potential there is huge. Apps like Last.fm, Pitchfork, Matador Records, Rolling Stone and We Are Hunted are great for discovering new music. Mood Agent, TuneWiki and Soundrop are all innovative apps that layer in a new element to listening to music. 

The innovation could go even further on this platform and the apps would be even more useful in a mobile context. To date, they only exist on the desktop. 

 

 

If the Facebook IPO and Pinterest's $1.5 billion valuation mean anything, it's that social media have become business as usual. Everybody's full of social media advice and best practices these days. For today's Big Question, we asked the savvy RWW readers to share their tips.

If you could give someone one piece of advice about social media, what would it be?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and now we're presenting them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

[View the story "If you could give someone 1 piece of advice about social media, what would it be?" on Storify]

Finally !...

Sometimes less is more. At least, that's how this social video app works. The key to this is in its limited ability to choose. Think about going to the grocery store: When there are 12 types of ketchup to choose from, everything can quickly become overwhelming and bizarre. Now reimagine that scene with only four types of ketchup. Much better, right? It's what ReadWriteWeb recommends.

Social video app Viddy has reportedly just passed the 15 million user mark, so it must be doing something right. Zuckerberg and Snoop are both onboard. (I know that because I am busy following both of them.)

On Viddy, much like Twitter, users decide to follow others, and others follow them. It takes time to gather a steady base of followers and people you want to follow, but much like any social media platform, if you invest time in it you will end up having a positive experience. Whereas on Twitter you tweet text, on Viddy you share video clips that can be up to 15 seconds long.

The next step is to attach a filter - Snoop Dogg, for example, prefers the vintage one. There are only four types of filters to choose from: none, vintage, black and white or the color-popping crystal. Select your audience - followers only or everyone - and then post the Viddy to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr too, if you'd like. 

Viddy is short with users - real short. It requires users to record and submit videos that are 15 seconds or less. In fact, even a 10 second video on this site would do the trick. There are no tunes or themes; much like Instagram, it is only about the filter "magic." In this sense, it seems most likely to be acquired by Facebook in the same way that Instagram was.

Viddy's filter options are a bit of a snoozer, but the "vintage" one does the trick in the same way that every Instagram filter that came before it does. For a more classic look, go with "black & white" or the uber-saturated "crystal" filter. There are more filters available for a price. But with only 15 seconds to shoot, it might be better to go nude.

Not only has Viddy created a new form of video - the 15-second-long "viddy" is certainly not the same as a YouTube clip or Vimeo video - it limits your options. That is not something that competitors Socialcam or Klip can do.

When it comes to content, Socialcam is a mixed bag. Its videos don't have a time limit, it encourages the use of various filters and it offers mostly cheesy music overlays that may not always make sense with the selected imagery. This social video app does offer a lot more premade options for creativity, but it also relies too heavily on filters and audio.

Klip is another competitor. It does not offer filters or a time limit on videos. What Klip does offer in terms of privacy, however, is something that neither Viddy nor Socialcam has down pat. On Klip, users can create their own Circles in much the same function as Google+ Circles but with a more Path-like functionality.

"You can define your private circle," says Klip CEO Alain Rossmann. "It is a simple but powerful concept, and allows you to have a subset of followers who might be your family, classmates and these growing user types for people who want to communicate but do not want everyone else to see what they are saying."

Do users care enough to actually take the time to create personalized and ever-changing circles? Probably not. In that sense, Viddy comes out as the quickest, most easy-to-use social video app. Will it get snatched up by Facebook in the near term?

HP's Itanium debacle provides plenty of lessons for anyone who is willing to pay attention. For the past decade, HP has been making a valiant, if extremely misguided, attempt to support the high-end Itanium chip architecture and the HP-UX Unix implementation that runs on it. Oracle's open letter and drop of documents as part of the companies' legal battle shows just how much HP has been keeping from customers in order to prop up the good ship Itanic in the face of disinterest even from Intel, which actually makes the Itanium chip! Things are getting ugly.

HP has been trying to make the case that Oracle is acting against customer interests in dropping support for Itanium. Publicly, HP has been accusing Oracle of breaching contract in order to boost sales of SPARC servers.

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Customers?

No doubt, Oracle is strongly motivated to lure customers away from HP-UX and Itanium to its Sun hardware and Linux or Solaris. But reading through the documents made public by Oracle shows that HP hasn't been straight with its customers, and its own motivations are less than charitable. Along the way, HP has felt free to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about the Sun/Oracle deal to try to move customers the other way.

Last year, when HP filed suit against Oracle, Oracle claimed that HP had been lying to customers. According to Oracle's statement, "HP issued numerous public statements in an attempt to mislead and deceive their customers and shareholders into believing that these plans to end-of-life Itanium do not exist. But they do. Intel's plans to end-of-life Itanium will be revealed in court now that HP has filed this utterly malicious and meritless lawsuit against Oracle."

In fact, the documents brought forward by Oracle show HP execs in a panic over Intel's "bombshell" in 2007 (PDF) that it wanted to cancel Poulsen (an Itanium processor scheduled for release in 2012).

In 2009, the documents show, HP was considering buying Sun (PDF) to take over the Solaris "franchise" and deal with the fact that "HP-UX is on a death march due to inevitable Itanium trajectory." More documents from 2009 discuss the "impending end of life" of Itanium, while HP hoped to keep the "Itanium situation" as "one of our most closely guarded secrets." (PDF)

To keep Itanium afloat, HP worked out a deal with Intel to pay for the development of Itanium (PDF) and fork over money to ensure that Intel wouldn't lose money producing Itanium chips. There's nothing inherently wrong in HP paying Intel to make the Itanium, by the way. Trying to drag other vendors along for the ride, and being dishonest with customers about what was going on, is another story.

An email in March 2011 from Martin Fink, senior VP and GM of HP business critical systems (BCS) (PDF), complained that HP could not say that Intel "at no time communicated to Oracle a change in commitment to the future of the Itanium processor family." In April 2011, an email from Dong Wei to HP's Kirk Bresniker said Intel "specifically told them [Huawei] that the Itanium line is at end of life with 2 more generations to go."

Oracle may be happy to lure customers away from HP-UX and Itanium to Solaris and SPARC (or Linux and x86), but it seems it had plenty of good reasons to abandon the Itanic sooner rather than later.

Lessons Learned

Aside from the corporate drama, what does all this add up to? The short of it is that companies need to be very careful when they're committing to expensive platforms like HP-UX and Itanium.

All of HP's bluster about sticking with Itanium for the customers is belied by the fact that the company has gone to great lengths to obscure from customers the dim future for Itanium and how much HP has had to prop up the ailing platform.

Despite obvious signs to the contrary, HP has spent years pushing Itanium and trying to convince customers that the platform has got a long and healthy life ahead of it. Remember that Itanium was supposed to be the next generation for Intel, and there wasn't supposed to be a 64-bit line for x86 systems. Intel was forced to jump into the 64-bit race with x86 after AMD led the way and demonstrated that, yes, customers wanted to stay on x86.

Red Hat announced it would drop Itanium support in 2009. Microsoft announced the same in 2010. Intel evidently wanted to abandon Itanium back in 2007. Companies that made new or additional investments in Itanium and HP-UX after that should be rethinking their IT practices - and how much they trust what their vendors tell them.

It also, once again, demonstrates why companies should seek commodity and open source systems. Companies that have adopted HP-UX on Itanium have paid a premium for those systems, and now find themselves at a dead end. They'll get support from Oracle on current products, but will have to deal with expensive migrations (one way or another) when Oracle's support commitment ends or when they need features in later releases. Meanwhile, customers that chose Xeon-based x86 systems and commodity operating systems are ticking along just fine.

Google has introduced several new reporting improvements for AdSense publishers, and it has released new research that shows publishers make more money with “smart pricing” — even though their revenue-per-click is discounted as compared with search ads — than they would...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

On LinkedIn's blog today is a post about the top 10 most sought-after engineering startups in Silicon Valley. And no, Facebook and Google didn't make the cut because this was a list of companies with fewer than 500 employees. (Pinterest was number 6.) To compile the list, the company looked at nearly a quarter million engineer profiles on its service and tracked where they were searching for jobs.

Four of the top 10 spots go to companies that are heavily involved in Big Data: Cloudera, Palantir Technologies, Hortonworks and Splunk. Two others, Arista Networks and Nicira, are doing new things with networking and virtualization infrastructure. And then there are Box.net, Pinterest and Square, the mobile payment processor. Most of the companies are clustered in the Santa Clara area, with a few located in San Francisco.

LinkedIn did its analysis by tracking people "visiting profiles of employees looking for common connections, checking out LinkedIn Company Pages, and following companies using the LinkedIn Company Follow button." There aren't many surprises here; these are some of the hottest, best-known new companies in the Valley. If you're trying to hire engineers for your own startup, these companies are your competition. And of course, LinkedIn is looking to hire data scientists of its own. 

On the eve of Facebook’s initial public offering, and two weeks after writing a five-part series that tried to answer the question of whether we’re in a social media bubble, the most striking thing to me is how divided people are on whether these astronomical values and this unlikely craze can be sustained.

Hundreds of tweets, comments, emails and more than the occasional accusations of being both a “Facebook naysayer” and “Facebook apologist” all at once leave me no closer to answering that question. But they do leave me with one important conclusion, no matter where you stand on the notion that we may or may not be in a social media bubble: We need Facebook’s IPO to work. We need what may be one of the biggest companies and biggest phenomena of our lifetimes to really be everything that those who don’t believe in the social media bubble say it is.

As someone who remembers the dot-com bubble (I was writing for Dow Jones at the time and got a front-row seat to the “irrational exuberance” Alan Greenspan warned us about) and believes we are overvaluing companies like Facebook, that’s hard for me to admit. But getting my pride dinged up would be worth not living through the catastrophe of what happens if Facebook’s IPO doesn’t live up to expectations.

Money Drives Dreams, Dreams Drive Innovation

This is what I wrote on the day Facebook filed its IPO, and this is what I still believe:

“Last year was marked by a string of disappointing IPOs in the social media sector - disappointments, in large part because those interests didn't align as well as company executives had hoped... A successful Facebook IPO means some restored faith in the social media space. That means more capital and more incentive for the next Zuckerberg to come along and create something earthshaking instead of finishing a degree at Harvard.”

If Facebook raises $16 billion, as it hopes to tomorrow, it doesn’t just unleash a new string of Mark Zuckerbergs; it also unleashes a new string of Kevin Systroms who have great ideas, but no clear-cut way to monetize them. Zuckerberg may have been motivated by fear when he paid $1 billion for Instagram, but he bought it. And $16 billion can buy an awful lot of good ideas and fuel even more dreams.

But if it fails, naysayers like me get to say “We told you so,” and not much else. A chilling effect on the IPO market means less money flows from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Fool us once, shame on the dot-commers who duped us more than a decade ago. Fool us twice, shame on everyone.

This Is a Story About Users

I’m going to leave predictions about where Facebook’s stock price will close on Friday to the sites that cater to investors. ReadWriteWeb is a site for people who use tech, and if we get too caught up in revenue projections, P/E ratios and and consensus analyst estimates, we miss what is important.

What is important is that if Zuckerberg remains true to his promise to not be driven by quarterly reports and share price, this ends up being a good thing for users. Yes, we will continue to complain about Facebook’s all-invasive service terms, and we will continue to hate on the world’s biggest social network. But most of us will continue to use it, if only because the people we need to keep in touch with need to use it.

By its sheer size, Facebook can generate enough revenue to keep moving forward as it has for the past eight years. As one analyst told me yesterday, if each of Facebook's 500 million daily active users saw just one ad in their news feed each day, and Facebook collected two cents for that ad, the company would generate $3.5 billion in annual revenues.

Facebook can certainly do a lot more, and it hasn’t even tapped mobile revenue streams yet. Its growth may not live up to the pace that Wall Street investors want, but Zuckerberg has insisted he’s not going to be a slave to showing revenue growth each quarter. If he keeps that promise (and if the corporate structure he has selected gives him the power to keep it), users will, at the very least, not have to worry about shareholders or a board of directors messing up Facebook.

We may very well continue to bristle with every tweak and change Facebook makes to its design, and we may grow angry about privacy policy changes that serve to further erode privacy. 

But at least we’ll know who to blame.