We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. Today, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don’t necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

Installation

Sweetcron is a self-hosted service, so you will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL running on it. After downloading the code, the install is pretty typical for that of self-hosted application. It’s a bit more complicated than installing Wordpress or OpenTape, because you have to enter your data in numerous places and you have to edit your .htaccess when you want to install Sweetcron in a sub-directory.However, if you just follow the steps in the documentation, you should be able to install Sweetcron in less than 10 minutes.

After this, you just start adding your RSS feeds, and you are ready to go.

Final Result

The lifestream itself looks and works just like you would expect it, with a number of little surprises. One of the nicest features of Sweetcron is that it can format every new entry according to where it came from. A digg item, for example, gets a blue background, a Flickr items shows the photo on a green background with the caption underneath, and Twitter posts show in a blue box with your avatar in the top left corner (as long as you uploaded your avatar into the right spot in Sweetcron’s directory structure).

By default, Sweetcron updates your stream every 30 minutes, but you can also set the cron service on your server to update more frequently.

You can write your own posts in Sweetcron as well, but the editor doesn’t handle anything else but pure text and HTML code.

Bring Your Own Services

As of now, Sweetcron only creates your lifestream - if you want to add comments, Sweetcron recommends you install Disqus, and if you want to have a contact form on your site, it recommends you head over to wufoo to create one.

The two default themes are nice, especially the “Boxy but Good” one you can see in the screenshots here. Over time, others will surely start developing more themes and hacking the existing themes doesn’t seem too hard.

Verdict

Sweetcron does exactly what it promises to do. It is important to note, though, that this is not a Friendfeed-in-a-box type service. Your lifestream stands completely separate from every other Sweetcron service (though you could create a master feed for a group by patching all the RSS feeds together and running them through another Sweetcron installation).

For those who just want to have a lifestream on their blog, for example, Sweetcron is a great solution, especially if you don’t mind hacking Sweetcron to fit your own needs.

There are, of course, various other self-hosted applications that have a similar feature set (see Mark Krysnky’s list here), and many of them come as Wordpress plugins, making their installation very easy. Few, though, give you the flexibility of Sweetcron.

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In Tampa, Florida, one of the cities that comprises the megalopolis known as the Tampa Bay area, home to Busch Gardens, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and only minutes from beautiful beaches on the Gulf Coast of Florida (oh, and this author’s stomping grounds, too), a local politician is giving credit to Facebook for his recent win in the primaries for the local County Commission.

On Facebook, the crowd is still very young, with an average age of 22.96 as of this February. Typically, the youth vote, although coveted, could not be counted on thanks to low turnout of young voters at the polls. However, this small time local election may prove to be one of the first examples of the huge impact Gen Y can have on the political process.

Now that many members of Gen Y are of voting age, their sheer numbers can no longer be ignored by politicians. The biggest generation since the baby boomers, Gen Y has been poorly characterized by some as lazy, unfocused, and self-centered - a generation that would just as soon stay home with mom and dad than go out and climb the corporate ladder. While it may be true that Gen Y has the good financial sense to maximize their time in rent-free accommodations, they are certainly proving themselves the opposite of lazy when it comes to involvement, be it social involvement, community involvement, or political involvement. Considering this recent “Facebook-powered” win, it could be that this generation is all talk and all action, too.

According to Rearden Killion Communications, the St. Petersburg advertising firm that handled the campaign of Kevin Beckner in the District Six democratic primary for the Hillsborough County Commission, the Facebook effort comprised of content, video production, and media buying valued at around $7000. There was also a Facebook app which let supporters put a campaign button on their own pages and provided a link to Beckner’s page. The overall effort increased Beckner’s Facebook group membership by 50 percent.

In this local election of this County Commissioner, you have to wonder if this is a hint of things to come in the upcoming presidential election here in the U.S. The Obama campaign has defined themselves by the way they have embraced technology. From blogs to social networks to even SMS text messages announcing the VP, the campaign is “a revolutionary shift in our country’s political media ecology,” says Andrew Rasiej over on techPresident. Although it has yet to be seen whether or not the use of technology will propel Obama into the Oval Office, the results of this local election prove that there is merit to targeting the online crowd and asking for their vote.

(Image credit: Zappowbang)

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When Google acquired the microblogging service Jaiku in October of last year, many people had high hopes for Jaiku’s future. Would a Google-flavored Twitter soon show up everywhere from iGoogle to the upcoming Android handset, we wondered? Instead, news from the company slowed to a trickle and the doors stayed locked to newcomers - signs that many took to mean Google had essentially abandoned the service. But today, things are happening at Jaiku once again - most notably, unlimited invites are now available. Is Jaiku poised to make a comeback?

At the time of the acquisition by Google, Jaiku was a promising competitor to Twitter. This was before presidential debates were taking place via tweets or the Mars Phoenix Lander was announcing the discovery of ice on Mars. In fact, in many ways, Jaiku was thought to be the superior service, considering its features like threaded conversations, easy group creation, and RSS import. But once Google got its hands on the service, a whole lot of nothing seemed to happen.

Now, we’re tentatively raising our hopes once again. As VentureBeat reports, Jaiku is back after several days spent offline in a move to Google’s datacenters as they continue their move to Google’s App Engine service, the Google answer to Amazon’s web services stack. In addition, there is now a brand-new TOS that existing users must accept upon login, which brings the original up to Google standards, presumably.

However, what’s most exciting is that users now have unlimited invites to share with their friends, a step we hope is just the first of many in Jaiku’s rebirth. Yet, as exciting as a Google Twitter-like service is, so much time has passed that Twitter has the market share and mindshare of those that want to participate in a micro-blogging community. Jaiku has a long battle ahead if they truly want to compete now.

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For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction. What can be done to make RSS more mainstream? Google plans to roll out a small but simple feature that could go a long way. We wouldn’t be surprised to see every blog publishing service follow suit.

“Follow this blog” is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they’ll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company’s RSS reader. It’s a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

What it Will Look Like

As this new feature is rolled out over the coming weeks, it appears that users will be brought to three key screens.

Blogger users will now see a mini version of Google Reader in their dashboards.

Apologies for the blurry pic, that’s what Google posted.

Google Reader users will get a new folder for “blogs I’m following,” and new users will apparently be shown Common Craft’s fabulous 1 minute introduction to Google Reader.

Why It Matters

RSS is life and work changing technology. It’s what makes an ecosystem of blogs possible by lowering the investment required by readers to follow and support a larger number of blogs than they would visit manually. It’s what keeps those podcasts coming after you might have forgotten to download episode after episode. It makes search an ongoing practice instead of a one-off shot in the dark. RSS is huge, but the name alone intimidates many people who ought to be diving into it.

Surveys over the years have offered a wide range of estimates of the extent of mainstream RSS adoption. We know, though, that many many people do not ever use the technology.

“Follow” is clear language that we expect to go over well. It aims at the long held goal of getting people to use RSS without asking them to embrace the acronym. Update: Several people have argued since we posted this that “follow” will be far more clear to young users of social media sites like Facebook than to older users. Do you think “follow” is still too unclear? We think it’s pretty good, but let us know in comments or the poll on the right.

We expect that Blogger.com blogs will see a big increase in subscribers following this change and we would not be at all surprised if other blogging platforms, Wordpress in particular, roll out “follow” language and links soon if the Google move is well received.

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While SMS has already become one of the most important forms of communication in many parts of the world, the U.S. is only catching up to this trend slowly. Part of the reason for this is the high cost of using SMS, not just for users, but also for developers who want to use SMS for their applications. In contrast to other SMS service providers, Zeep Mobile offers developers a free SMS API without volume restrictions, though in order to monetize the service, it will insert ads into the SMS messages.

Advertising

While having random ads inserted into their messages might not work for some developers, having access to a free SMS gateway is a very seductive proposition, especially for small developers who don’t have the resources to either establish relationships with the big mobile carriers, or who simply don’t have the money to pay a commercial provider for access to their SMS gateway.

We asked Zeep Mobile if it had any plans to share revenue from these SMS ads with developers or if it was going to give developers any influence over which ads it would display. However, as of now, Zeep Mobile is not planning anything in this direction, though it would seem reasonable to assume that they might start sharing revenue with developers at some point in the future.

API

Besides the standard web API, Zeep Mobile has also developed Python and Ruby libraries, which developers can use free of charge. As far as we can see, this API is pretty straightforward and well documented.

Still in Beta

It is important to note, though, that the service is still in beta right now and that developers are limited to sending out messages to no more than 10 recipients at a time. Also, while Zeep Mobile has plans to expand beyond the U.S. in the future, the service can only send messages within the U.S. for now and is also limited to a select number of carriers.

Overall, though, this seems like a service worth looking into for developers who wants to start adding some SMS functionality to their applications without having to pay some of Zeep Mobile’s competitors like SMS Everywhere, Clickatell, or Celltrust.

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There has been a lot of speculation recently about an impending update to iTunes. Version 8.0, among other things, is supposed to finally bring a recommendation engine to the digital media player application. While that’s interesting from a music discovery perspective, it is even more interesting to consider what this could mean in terms of an iTunes+iPhone based social networking experience.

iTunes (launched 2001) and the iTunes music store (launched 2003) have come a long way since they were first launched. The application has gone through various iterations, gaining significant features such as podcasts (2005), videos (2007), games, and applications (2008) along the way. In the process, selling billions of songs, millions of movies, and over 10 million applications in the first week of the app store’s launch. Needless to say Apple has built an experience that with all it’s parts combined is unparalleled in both its features and the breadth of its catalog of content.

The Software Side

While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other… because they can’t. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0.

He says, ‘… the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it’s gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.’ In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven’t bought/listened to. If you’re a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you’re probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn’t come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn’t introduced 2-3 years ago).

While this feature itself isn’t social and can be implemented entirely on the back end, the implementation required for that functionality is so close to a networked experience (monitoring of habits and correlation across users) that they might as well take a small next step and add a visible social layer with which those users can interact. In fact, if you look at the results from a 2006 iTunes survey, you will see the people want to be able to see what people with similar interests and tastes (i.e. friends) are purchasing and consuming, so they can experiment with and pick from the same selection. More specifically, consumers want:

1. The ability to view a friend’s wish list, with permission.
2. The ability to view what a friend is currently listening to, with permission.
3. The ability to view a friend’s playlist, with permission.
4. The ability to view a friend’s recent purchases, with permission.
5. The ability to view a friend’s favorite artists, with permission

What’s also interesting about this approach is that it reaches the exact opposite conclusions of EMR’s UK social networking study [PDF]. The study implies that social networks will be the content distribution channels of tomorrow, but the relationship may actually work better in the other direction. With the addition of networking and recommendation features to iTunes, the application could become the most efficient, most engaging, stickiest (always-on), and most profitable social network almost overnight.

But Apple’s social networking potential doesn’t end there. Remember Microsoft’s ‘welcome to the social’ campaign that centered around the launch of its Zune digital media player? If you don’t, you’re not alone. The goal behind the campaign, ‘to create a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers and will inspire discovery of new music and artists,’ was actually a formidable one. Unfortunately an inferior device, coupled with disasterous software integration made the campaign a $100 million failure.

Enter Apple.

The Hardware Side

With a formidable install base, great hardware and one of the most versatile mobile operating systems around, the iPhone is ready to herald in the future of mobile social networking. Furthermore, with 3G/EDGE/WiFi/GPS capabilities, the iPhone is a great tool for both networking as well as wirelessly sharing digital media like the Zune promised (but failed miserably at). Not only does the device work seamlessly with the iTunes software, but Apple’s DRM is more consistent and perhaps more forgiving that Microsoft’s (which was partly responsible for crippling the Zune’s ambitions).

The Cloud

With a firm grasp on the software side with iTunes and on the hardware side with the iPhone, Apple is in good shape. Their killer app, however, could end up being the cloud. Apple already operates MobileMe (previously .Mac) which faciliates the management of contacts, calendars (events), email, photos, and any other files or digital media. Admittedly the service has been an utter failure since launch, but Apple has acknowledge the failure and is on the path to fix its shortcomings.

The previously discussed iTunes social networking and collaborative filtering (recommendations) system, coupled with the iPhone’s versatile wireless communication and media sharing capabilities, topped off with media and information management (and sharing) in the cloud, the combo is no doubt ready to be our digital life (and relationship) manager. The only limitation of the network, however, (and it will be a deal breaker for many) is that unlike every other social network today, the experience will come at a steep cost. Knowing Apple though, I have no doubt it will be an experience worth the cost (especially considering what they had to deal with at the MobileMe launch).

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

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For most companies, having to deal with one piece of bad publicity in a day is already bad enough. Apple, however, has to deal with three pieces of bad publicity today. In England, the Advertising Standards Authority, moved to ban one of Apple’s ads for the iPhone because of misleading statements in it. Also, an embarrassing security hole in the iPhone firmware lets anybody bypass your security code, and Apple’s move to ban a violent comic book from the App Store has also set off a minor firestorm of protests.

iPhone Ad Banned

Apparently, two British TV viewers were unhappy about the fact that one Apple TV ad for the iPhone stated that the phone would give you access to the whole Internet. However, because the phone does not support Flash or Java, these folks argued that this is a misleading statement and the Advertising Standards Authority  agreed.

Security Hole

The gaping security hole in Apple’s firmware for both the iPhone and iPod touch is maybe the most embarrassing of these three stories for Apple, especially because the problem was already known and fixed back in the days of the first iPhone.

If you lock your phone with a security code, anybody can bypass that code by hitting the ‘Emergency Call’ button and then double tapping your home button (if it is still set to display your favorites, which is the default behavior). After that, you have full access to the contact list, email, web etc.

If you want to protect your self from this, just set the home button to do anything but display your favorites (Settings -> General -> Home Button.)

Comic Book Controversy

As if all of this weren’t enough, Apple itself created some more controversy after it moved to ban the violent comic book Murderdrome (which is based on the ComicReader app) from its App Store. As Apple’s SDK states, the apps are not to offend anybody and Apple itself is the sole arbiter of offensiveness, so the company was in its right to ban this book, which, after all, features a good number of beheadings and ripped out limbs, which might make some users feel a bit queasy about the comic.

Apple’s SDK states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

On the other hand, this is a comic book and, while a bit over the top, it doesn’t feature anything that other comic books haven’t shown before.

For developers, this once again shows the dangers of working within Apple’s closed off iPhone ecology, where Apple has the final say over what gets included and what doesn’t, with no place but the Internet to complain about it.

So What Does Apple Do?

In typical Apple fashion, the company has not made any statement about any of these issues yet - and is likely not to do so anytime soon. That, for better or worse, is the way Apple operates. At the same time, though, the disastrous launch of MobileMe forced Apple to issue repeated notices about the status of the service. Maybe (and just maybe) this current firestorm of problems might just force the company to open up a bit more, though we don’t expect Steve Jobs to start blogging about iPhone apps anytime soon.

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Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you’ve made that argument in conversation before (and we now many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you’d be wrong.

The official Google Blog made a post this morning following up on a New York Times story last week where the company claimed that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own when they find it using YouTube’s new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.

Argument: Content ID is Next to Impossible

Many have argued that YouTube wasn’t capable of finding all the pirated content uploaded to its site - that it’s been an arms race pitting human monitors and shoddy ID technology against a sea of users uploading content. Video maverick Mark Cuban has argued that YouTube’s claim it can’t identify content was refuted by the fact that it manages to keep porn off the site and thus that the company couldn’t plead ignorance about copyright either.

Right: We don’t know if there’s some direct financial overlap between Katy Perry’s publishers and the ringtone site advertising on this video of hers, but at 600K views we’re pretty sure the video’s rights holders have seen it and chosen to let it remain on the site. Is that “what good girls do?”

Now it appears that YouTube’s newest content ID technology is doing quite a good job of finding copyrighted content. That alone is a game changer.

Argument: Media Companies Don’t Want Low Quality Versions of Their Content on 3rd Party Sites

It’s also been argued that many media companies are unwilling to have their content appear online in any form other than high quality files on their own webistes. That way they can maximize ad revenue and protect their brands. YouTube’s claim that 90% of content owners who find their work on YouTube are running ads on the site instead of demanding it be removed indicates a sea change in big copyright holder attitudes.

Scarcity is no longer a tenable strategy in a world of digital content and file quality is clearly not as important to consumers as many content producers believed it would be. Imagine what the web would be like if music producers took a similar strategy with mp3 files on other sites. Those same parties are undoubtedly among the participants in YouTube’s new program, using the ID technology to find songs being used along with user created video. Unfortunately, the music industry may be too greedy to support this same kind of model throughout a whole ecosystem of websites. Witness the plight of Pandora, a wildly popular service that’s trying to play by the rules.

Argument: YouTube Wouldn’t Be What it Is Without Pirated Content

One of the most commonly made critiques of YouTube is that it was only able to ramp up fast because it caught copyright holders by surprise; that it was born of illigitimate uploads of pirated TV shows and movie clips.

The latest turn of events leads us to wonder whether this question was turned around the wrong way. Couldn’t we just as well assert that YouTube was lucky to survive before a time when copyright holders understood that they had options with content that they owned rights to on the site? Had copyright holders come down hard and fast in the earliest days, as they did in later months surrounding the Google acquisition, then YouTube wouldn’t still be pushing the envelope and opening new doors for distribution and monetization today.

There’s a world of possibilities beyond even what’s being done today by the most open minded copyright owners. The Times article mentions Electronic Arts, for example, who encourages users to upload Spore related content and then uses YouTube’s ID technology to find it and highlight the best stuff. Any number of other campaigns have tried to get people to use a common tag in their metadata or upload through a dedicated portal powered by the YouTube API. YouTube is a chaotic place, though - companies may get the greatest connection with their fans by letting those fans upload how they like and using YouTube’s ID tech to find them afterword.

This is Big

This isn’t just about copyright and advertising, this is about a new paradigm that big copyright holders may be catching up with. From video to user data, it’s not about scarcity and silos anymore. It’s about keeping your users and fans through better service and compelling value-ads. Let’s hope this YouTube experience is more than just a flash in the pan and that the industry is genuinely moving in this direction.

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For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Taking Notes

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. If you are in a lecture, for example, you can also take a picture of the blackboard with your phone, upload it to the Evernote server, and thanks to Evernote’s clever OCR algorithms, even pictures of handwritten notes become instantly searchable.

You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. Best of all, you can use a web app, a Windows or Mac desktop app, or a Windows Mobile and iPhone app, all of which seamlessly synch with each other, so that your notes are always up to date.

2) Google Notebook

The Google Notebook is one of Google’s lesser know products, but, thanks to a very well designed Firefox extension, it’s a great tool for when you do most of your work in a browser already. If you do some of your research in Google Books and Google Scholar, you can also easily clip excerpts from books and articles into your Google Notebook.

One additional nice feature is that you can invite collaborators to work on a notebook with you. If you are doing a research project in a group, for example, you can easily share your research with your whole group.

Online Office Suites

3) Google and 4) Zoho

Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are probably the single most often used tool among college students, and while none of the online offerings can yet beat Microsoft Office (which, for students, now only costs around $60 for the Ultimate Edition), the online office suites from Google and Zoho do have some distinct advantages. Office obviously has a lot more features, but not only are both Google Apps and Zoho free, they also allow easier sharing of documents and working on projects collaboratively.

And while the online tools to create presentations are still a bit crude compared to Powerpoint or Keynote, they are both worthy contenders, especially if you don’t feel the need to add lots of fancy transitions to your presentations.

If we had to choose between Google’s and Zoho’s offering, our vote would probably go to Google, as the Google apps have a slightly more organized and professional feel to them, which, in the end, is going to make it easier to focus on the content of your documents.

Bibliography

5) Zotero

The standard tool for doing extensive bibliographies in academia is Endnote. While that is a great tool if you are writing a dissertation, Zotero is a great choice for less extensive research projects - and it’s free. Zotero is a Firefox extension, so it is not technically a web app, but in its next version, the developers are promising the ability to synch your bibliographies to a web version of the tool, so that your books and notes will become available everywhere.

For now, Zotero lives in the status bar of Firefox, and it pops up a little icon in your URL bar every time it recognizes a compatible website. Zotero already supports the databases of a huge amount of libraries worldwide, as well as a lot of standard academic databases such as JSTOR, LexisNexis, InfoTrac, PubMed, or ScienceDirect. Besides curating your citations, you can also add notes, tag items, or add attachments (like pdf files of articles). Once you are done, Zotero will create a bibliography for you in most standard formats, including APA, MLA, or Chicago style.

6) EasyBib

If you just need to create a short bibliography, Zotero might be more than you need. EasyBib will just help you to quickly create a bibliography entry in MLA format - a favorite among literature teachers. It can also handle the APA format, but you will have to subscribe to the pro version of EasyBib.

If you really hate figuring out where to put a comma and where to put a semicolon in your APA style bibliography entries, those $7.99 a year for the pro version might just turn out to be a bargain.

Also, if you only need a quick bibliography entry for a book, check out OttoBib, where you just have to enter the ISBN number and it will give you a fully formatted citation.

Staying Organized

7) Google Calendar

There are lots of great online calendars out there, including 30 Boxes and Yahoo’s calendar app, but our favorite is the Google Calendar, simply because it is dead easy to use, integrates nicely with GMail, allows for importing and exporting your calendar, and lets you publish a site with your free/busy information with the click of a button, so that your friends know not to bother you while you are cramming for that test.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk might just be the tool that will keep you on track. And to make things even easier, Remember the Milk also integrates nicely with Google Calendar, so you can manage everything in one place.

Picking the Right Class

9) Rate My Professors

As much as teachers don’t like sites like these, Professor Performance and Rate my Professors can be useful tools when you decide which class you want to take. While almost every university makes you rate your professor at the end of the semester, schools never make this data public, so whenever you get a choice between professors, you really have no idea who the better teacher is. We like Rate My Professors a bit more than Professor Performance, simply because its search is a lot easier and the site is a bit more up-to-date. The site now also features a Facebook application.

Keeping in Touch

10) Meebo

As much as your teachers would like to think so, college isn’t just about classes, papers, and long ours in the library. If you want to stay in touch with your friends no matter what computer you are on, Meebo is a great universal IM client that lives on the web. It supports, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk, as well as Meebo’s own IM architecture.

What are we missing?

Are there other tools you use in school that we missed here? Let us know in the comments.

Flickr image by laffz4k.

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RSS is the backbone for most things Web 2.0 but these days, it’s not always fast enough. Politeness limits ping times to every 15 minutes at best in most cases, string a couple of applications together and information will sometimes not arrive where you’re waiting for it for up to an hour.

A number of people are trying to speed up the feeds but today sees the first public mention of a new effort lead by the guys at popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed. FriendFeed is working on an open source add-on to RSS and Atom that will make it easier to discover when a feed has been updated. This could be a big deal.

What it Is

The FriendFeed crew is working on something called a Simple Update Protocol. It was first reported on by venture publication The Deal and subsequently by Venture Beat, leading us to believe the PR push is an effort to for the company to raise some more money.

In response to our questions, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit told us the following:

• RWW: How will it work?

  Buchheit: SUP is just a very simple extension to RSS and Atom that makes it easier to discover when a feed has been updated.

• RWW: Where is this relative to XMPP?

  Buchheit: It’s unrelated to XMPP.

• RWW: Gnip? (See our coverage of Gnip, a startup that appears to be aiming to do what SUP will do and more.)

  Buchheit: We’re talking with several companies about supporting SUP, but aren’t ready to announce anything.

• RWW: Open source?

  Buchheit: Yes, absolutely Open Source.

Not a whole lot of information is available about SUP, but we hope the above helps. We’re real excited to see what FriendFeed has under its hat. The company has done more interesting things with popular use of RSS than anyone else has in awhile.

The Simple Update Protocol is due to be released next month. We look forward to checking it out. Soggy feeds put a damper on our day far too often.

Interested in FriendFeed? Take a tour of the RWW writers’ activities on the site here. See also our months-old podcast interview with the founders of FriendFeed, still one of the best sources of in depth information available about this important service.

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For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Taking Notes

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. If you are in a lecture, for example, you can also take a picture of the blackboard with your phone, upload it to the Evernote server, and thanks to Evernote’s clever OCR algorithms, even pictures of handwritten notes become instantly searchable.

You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. Best of all, you can use a web app, a Windows or Mac desktop app, or a Windows Mobile and iPhone app, all of which seamlessly synch with each other, so that your notes are always up to date.

2) Google Notebook

The Google Notebook is one of Google’s lesser know products, but, thanks to a very well designed Firefox extension, it’s a great tool for when you do most of your work in a browser already. If you do some of your research in Google Books and Google Scholar, you can also easily clip excerpts from books and articles into your Google Notebook.

One additional nice feature is that you can invite collaborators to work on a notebook with you. If you are doing a research project in a group, for example, you can easily share your research with your whole group.

Online Office Suites

3) Google and 4) Zoho

Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are probably the single most often used tool among college students, and while none of the online offerings can yet beat Microsoft Office (which, for students, now only costs around $60 for the Ultimate Edition), the online office suites from Google and Zoho do have some distinct advantages. Office obviously has a lot more features, but not only are both Google Apps and Zoho free, they also allow easier sharing of documents and working on projects collaboratively.

And while the online tools to create presentations are still a bit crude compared to Powerpoint or Keynote, they are both worthy contenders, especially if you don’t feel the need to add lots of fancy transitions to your presentations.

If we had to choose between Google’s and Zoho’s offering, our vote would probably go to Google, as the Google apps have a slightly more organized and professional feel to them, which, in the end, is going to make it easier to focus on the content of your documents.

Bibliography

5) Zotero

The standard tool for doing extensive bibliographies in academia is Endnote. While that is a great tool if you are writing a dissertation, Zotero is a great choice for less extensive research projects - and it’s free. Zotero is a Firefox extension, so it is not technically a web app, but in its next version, the developers are promising the ability to synch your bibliographies to a web version of the tool, so that your books and notes will become available everywhere.

For now, Zotero lives in the status bar of Firefox, and it pops up a little icon in your URL bar every time it recognizes a compatible website. Zotero already supports the databases of a huge amount of libraries worldwide, as well as a lot of standard academic databases such as JSTOR, LexisNexis, InfoTrac, PubMed, or ScienceDirect. Besides curating your citations, you can also add notes, tag items, or add attachments (like pdf files of articles). Once you are done, Zotero will create a bibliography for you in most standard formats, including APA, MLA, or Chicago style.

6) EasyBib

If you just need to create a short bibliography, Zotero might be more than you need. EasyBib will just help you to quickly create a bibliography entry in MLA format - a favorite among literature teachers. It can also handle the APA format, but you will have to subscribe to the pro version of EasyBib.

If you really hate figuring out where to put a comma and where to put a semicolon in your APA style bibliography entries, those $7.99 a year for the pro version might just turn out to be a bargain.

Also, if you only need a quick bibliography entry for a book, check out OttoBib, where you just have to enter the ISBN number and it will give you a fully formatted citation.

Staying Organized

7) Google Calendar

There are lots of great online calendars out there, including 30 Boxes and Yahoo’s calendar app, but our favorite is the Google Calendar, simply because it is dead easy to use, integrates nicely with GMail, allows for importing and exporting your calendar, and lets you publish a site with your free/busy information with the click of a button, so that your friends know not to bother you while you are cramming for that test.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk might just be the tool that will keep you on track. And to make things even easier, Remember the Milk also integrates nicely with Google Calendar, so you can manage everything in one place.

Picking the Right Class

9) Rate My Professors

As much as teachers don’t like sites like these, Professor Performance and Rate my Professors can be useful tools when you decide which class you want to take. While almost every university makes you rate your professor at the end of the semester, schools never make this data public, so whenever you get a choice between professors, you really have no idea who the better teacher is. We like Rate My Professors a bit more than Professor Performance, simply because its search is a lot easier and the site is a bit more up-to-date. The site now also features a Facebook application.

Keeping in Touch

10) Meebo

As much as your teachers would like to think so, college isn’t just about classes, papers, and long ours in the library. If you want to stay in touch with your friends no matter what computer you are on, Meebo is a great universal IM client that lives on the web. It supports, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk, as well as Meebo’s own IM architecture.

What are we missing?

Are there other tools you use in school that we missed here? Let us know in the comments.

Flickr image by laffz4k.

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Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you’ve made that argument in conversation before (and we now many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you’d be wrong.

The official Google Blog made a post this morning following up on a New York Times story last week where the company claimed that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own when they find it using YouTube’s new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.

Argument: Content ID is Next to Impossible

Many have argued that YouTube wasn’t capable of finding all the pirated content uploaded to its site - that it’s been an arms race pitting human monitors and shoddy ID technology against a sea of users uploading content. Video maverick Mark Cuban has argued that YouTube’s claim it can’t identify content was refuted by the fact that it manages to keep porn off the site and thus that the company couldn’t plead ignorance about copyright either.

Right: We don’t know if there’s some direct financial overlap between Katy Perry’s publishers and the ringtone site advertising on this video of hers, but at 600K views we’re pretty sure the video’s rights holders have seen it and chosen to let it remain on the site. Is that “what good girls do?”

Now it appears that YouTube’s newest content ID technology is doing quite a good job of finding copyrighted content. That alone is a game changer.

Argument: Media Companies Don’t Want Low Quality Versions of Their Content on 3rd Party Sites

It’s also been argued that many media companies are unwilling to have their content appear online in any form other than high quality files on their own webistes. That way they can maximize ad revenue and protect their brands. YouTube’s claim that 90% of content owners who find their work on YouTube are running ads on the site instead of demanding it be removed indicates a sea change in big copyright holder attitudes.

Scarcity is no longer a tenable strategy in a world of digital content and file quality is clearly not as important to consumers as many content producers believed it would be. Imagine what the web would be like if music producers took a similar strategy with mp3 files on other sites. Those same parties are undoubtedly among the participants in YouTube’s new program, using the ID technology to find songs being used along with user created video. Unfortunately, the music industry may be too greedy to support this same kind of model throughout a whole ecosystem of websites. Witness the plight of Pandora, a wildly popular service that’s trying to play by the rules.

Argument: YouTube Wouldn’t Be What it Is Without Pirated Content

One of the most commonly made critiques of YouTube is that it was only able to ramp up fast because it caught copyright holders by surprise; that it was born of illigitimate uploads of pirated TV shows and movie clips.

The latest turn of events leads us to wonder whether this question was turned around the wrong way. Couldn’t we just as well assert that YouTube was lucky to survive before a time when copyright holders understood that they had options with content that they owned rights to on the site? Had copyright holders come down hard and fast in the earliest days, as they did in later months surrounding the Google acquisition, then YouTube wouldn’t still be pushing the envelope and opening new doors for distribution and monetization today.

There’s a world of possibilities beyond even what’s being done today by the most open minded copyright owners. The Times article mentions Electronic Arts, for example, who encourages users to upload Spore related content and then uses YouTube’s ID technology to find it and highlight the best stuff. Any number of other campaigns have tried to get people to use a common tag in their metadata or upload through a dedicated portal powered by the YouTube API. YouTube is a chaotic place, though - companies may get the greatest connection with their fans by letting those fans upload how they like and using YouTube’s ID tech to find them afterword.

This is Big

This isn’t just about copyright and advertising, this is about a new paradigm that big copyright holders may be catching up with. From video to user data, it’s not about scarcity and silos anymore. It’s about keeping your users and fans through better service and compelling value-ads. Let’s hope this YouTube experience is more than just a flash in the pan and that the industry is genuinely moving in this direction.

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For most companies, having to deal with one piece of bad publicity in a day is already bad enough. Apple, however, has to deal with three pieces of bad publicity today. In England, the Advertising Standards Authority, moved to ban one of Apple’s ads for the iPhone because of misleading statements in it. Also, an embarrassing security hole in the iPhone firmware lets anybody bypass your security code, and Apple’s move to ban a violent comic book from the App Store has also set off a minor firestorm of protests.

iPhone Ad Banned

Apparently, two British TV viewers were unhappy about the fact that one Apple TV ad for the iPhone stated that the phone would give you access to the whole Internet. However, because the phone does not support Flash or Java, these folks argued that this is a misleading statement and the Advertising Standards Authority  agreed.

Security Hole

The gaping security hole in Apple’s firmware for both the iPhone and iPod touch is maybe the most embarrassing of these three stories for Apple, especially because the problem was already known and fixed back in the days of the first iPhone.

If you lock your phone with a security code, anybody can bypass that code by hitting the ‘Emergency Call’ button and then double tapping your home button (if it is still set to display your favorites, which is the default behavior). After that, you have full access to the contact list, email, web etc.

If you want to protect your self from this, just set the home button to do anything but display your favorites (Settings -> General -> Home Button.)

Comic Book Controversy

As if all of this weren’t enough, Apple itself created some more controversy after it moved to ban the violent comic book Murderdrome (which is based on the ComicReader app) from its App Store. As Apple’s SDK states, the apps are not to offend anybody and Apple itself is the sole arbiter of offensiveness, so the company was in its right to ban this book, which, after all, features a good number of beheadings and ripped out limbs, which might make some users feel a bit queasy about the comic.

Apple’s SDK states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

On the other hand, this is a comic book and, while a bit over the top, it doesn’t feature anything that other comic books haven’t shown before.

For developers, this once again shows the dangers of working within Apple’s closed off iPhone ecology, where Apple has the final say over what gets included and what doesn’t, with no place but the Internet to complain about it.

So What Does Apple Do?

In typical Apple fashion, the company has not made any statement about any of these issues yet - and is likely not to do so anytime soon. That, for better or worse, is the way Apple operates. At the same time, though, the disastrous launch of MobileMe forced Apple to issue repeated notices about the status of the service. Maybe (and just maybe) this current firestorm of problems might just force the company to open up a bit more, though we don’t expect Steve Jobs to start blogging about iPhone apps anytime soon.

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RSS is the backbone for most things Web 2.0 but these days, it’s not always fast enough. Politeness limits ping times to every 15 minutes at best in most cases, string a couple of applications together and information will sometimes not arrive where you’re waiting for it for up to an hour.

A number of people are trying to speed up the feeds but today sees the first public mention of a new effort lead by the guys at popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed. FriendFeed is working on an open source add-on to RSS and Atom that will make it easier to discover when a feed has been updated. This could be a big deal.

What it Is

The FriendFeed crew is working on something called a Simple Update Protocol. It was first reported on by venture publication The Deal and subsequently by Venture Beat, leading us to believe the PR push is an effort to for the company to raise some more money.

In response to our questions, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit told us the following:

• RWW: How will it work?

  Buchheit: SUP is just a very simple extension to RSS and Atom that makes it easier to discover when a feed has been updated.

• RWW: Where is this relative to XMPP?

  Buchheit: It’s unrelated to XMPP.

• RWW: Gnip? (See our coverage of Gnip, a startup that appears to be aiming to do what SUP will do and more.)

  Buchheit: We’re talking with several companies about supporting SUP, but aren’t ready to announce anything.

• RWW: Open source?

  Buchheit: Yes, absolutely Open Source.

Not a whole lot of information is available about SUP, but we hope the above helps. We’re real excited to see what FriendFeed has under its hat. The company has done more interesting things with popular use of RSS than anyone else has in awhile.

The Simple Update Protocol is due to be released next month. We look forward to checking it out. Soggy feeds put a damper on our day far too often.

Interested in FriendFeed? Take a tour of the RWW writers’ activities on the site here. See also our months-old podcast interview with the founders of FriendFeed, still one of the best sources of in depth information available about this important service.

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Since our initial review of Yahoo! Buzz earlier this year, not much has changed about the service. At the same time, however, the perception, acceptance, and impact of the service has changed drastically. The service has shown that it can send enormous amounts of traffic (very talkative traffic), and has displaced Digg as the most active ’social news’ community. In the process, they added widgets and rss, and most recently (and most importantly) have opened up participation to everyone.

Since they opened the submission process to everyone, the buzz surrounding the site has really been at a high. Desperate publishers and marketers who were previously locked out of the supposed ‘traffic mecca’ have joined the service in droves and have already started the practice of vote-begging in the hopes that enough votes will get them promoted to Yahoo’s main page. Here’s what you need to know about the current state of Buzz.

Note the important distinction between the Yahoo! main page and the Yahoo! Buzz main page, and the distinction between content made popular (i.e. promoted to the Yahoo Buzz main page) and Y! featured content (which is content cherry picked from Buzz to be featured on the Yahoo! main page).

ReadWriteWeb’s one (and so far only) appearance on the yahoo.com frontpage - Wikipedia story bottom right

1. Yahoo! Buzz is not a social experience. The process of being featured on Yahoo! Buzz is socially driven (based on votes, shares, and search patterns), but if you consider the site’s place in the overall structure of Yahoo’s strategy, the experience isn’t social. Yahoo! Buzz is the picking ground for the content that ultimately gets featured on the Yahoo! main page, which means it is social in the exact same way Slashdot Firehose is social. Your votes may get a story to the main page of Yahoo! Buzz but after that it’s up to an editor’s judgment whether a story gets featured on the Yahoo! main page or not. So the final result, or the process of getting featured on Yahoo’s main page is not entirely social. Furthermore, there Yahoo! has turned off the comments so there are no conversations, and because there is no networking aspect to the site, there are also no relationships.
2. Your votes don’t mean much. Number of votes is one of the metrics used to determine content popularity. Even then, I’ve learned that the impact of votes is arbitrary. I know people whose content was featured on the Yahoo! main page with 0 votes, and people whose content didn’t even get to the Yahoo! Buzz main page after 75 votes. The other metrics are the number of times content is shared via email and on other social sites, as well as search volume.
3. Exposure is very limited, inequitably distributed. The Yahoo! Buzz main page presently is less significant than even the upcoming/most page on Digg. Although being on the page may increase your odds of catching an editor’s eye, you don’t get any exposure unless you are featured on the Yahoo! main page. Furthermore, such an insignificant number of stories cross from Yahoo! Buzz to the Yahoo! main page that for the average person, participation in the quest for exposure is an act in futility.

To summarize, Yahoo! Buzz is social insofar as a community of users gets to submit content, and vote/share it. Anything more than that, Yahoo! Buzz doesn’t do.

That said, the site also doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is. It doesn’t consider itself to be a competitor to other social news and networking sites, in fact it allows you to and even recommends you to share Buzzed stories on other social sites and then counts ’shares’ as another metric to measure content popularity. As the popularity of Yahoo! Buzz grows and more people start frequenting the Yahoo! Buzz main page to read and at some future point discuss stories, that will all change. Until then, that page is just a stepping stone to the Yahoo! main page, which is the end goal.

Who should participate on Yahoo! Buzz?

From a content producer’s/publisher’s perspective, Yahoo! Buzz should without question be used by anyone publishing multiple posts a day on a site, or anyone that owns a network of blogs publishing content for different niches (heck you can automate the submission process). Networks like Hearst Digital Media and Conde Nast Publishing come to mind, but the strategy should also work for networks like Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media. From a community member’s perspective, Yahoo! Buzz’s features are so limited that they would probably appeal to someone with a passive interest in social news, or someone just entering the space and wanting to get his or her feet wet. If you are interested in making friends, participating in heated discussions, etc., look elsewhere.

What kind of content works on Yahoo! Buzz?

It’s a wry twist in the story. The people most interested in exploring Yahoo! Buzz and participating on the site are the digerati. But the kind of audience Yahoo! Buzz is designed to cultivate is quite the opposite. Before you give up in frustration, understand that the audience the site is supposed to appeal to is the same audience for the Yahoo! portal for news and entertainment. That’s why you won’t see a lot of insider Silicon Valley news featured and instead you’ll see content from mainstream news outlets (a lot of syndicated content from Yahoo! News) about mainstream news events or entertainment.

What’s the future of Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz is an interesting service because it has become an awkward balance between social news and mainstream news, where some of the basic social news and networking elements are intentionally missing. At the same time, it is also interesting because although the site made some buzz for supposedly dethroning Digg, the prevailing social news champion, the site doesn’t compete with it and is not cannibalizing the social news audience. If anything, people who use Yahoo! Buzz may very well over time switch to sites with more robust social news and networking capabilities.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

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