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Read/WriteWeb


RWW on Strange Love Live, 10pm PST TonightYesterday

strangelovelive.jpgEvery now and again some of us at ReadWriteWeb pop up in video or podcast recordings. Our VP Content Dev Marshall Kirkpatrick moreso than me, as he is based in the US. And Marshall is appearing on an interesting live video show tonight, called Strange Love Live. It will be broadcast live on Ustream at 10pm PST tonight (Friday). Hosted by Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal, Strange Love Live focuses on the latest happenings in online tech - calling on techies around the Portland, Oregon area to provide insight into their areas of expertise. Interesting without being dull, recent topics have ranged from OpenID to WordPress to iPhone apps. We're looking forward to seeing Marshall live tonight! Tune in at 10pm PST.

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Update: We've got the Ustream show embedded below, while it streams live:

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Recent RWW Appearances on The Interwebs

Yours truly (RWW editor Richard MacManus) was interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit in


Sayvee Makes Awesome Promo Videos For Pre-Launch Artist Website ToolYesterday

Sayveelogo.jpgCanadian startup Sayvee will "soon" launch a new service that allows artists to quickly and easily create their own websites to sell their art, build community, support positive political causes and more. That doesn't sound like a show stopper (unless you're an artist in need of a website) but the videos the company made to promote their service are awesome!

We wish everyone put this much care into promo videos - then our jobs watching promo videos would be even more fun. And the serious business of promoting important web startups would overcome one of its most challenging obstacles - getting people to listen to and understand your explanation of some crazy new idea. So check out the Sayvee video we like best below, stop by their site for more and sign up there for notification when the new service is available.

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5 Reasons to get a site through Sayvee.com from Nico Boesten on Vimeo.

These guys are going to



Is SaaS Cheaper Than Licensed Software?Yesterday

rww_enterprise.jpgMost people quickly answer this question in the affirmative. I certainly do. However, there are people out there who aren't sure. They look at the monthly cost of a SaaS application and compare it to the equivalent licensed product over an extended period of time. Given enough time, you will eventually hit a point when the SaaS product appears to be more expensive. Let's look at it from the perspective of the total cost of ownership (TCO).

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The true cost of a licensed product is much higher than just the software. Here are other things to factor in:

  • Hardware costs: You have to either buy machines or add your software to existing servers and manage them. If it is a mission-critical application, you will probably need dedicated machines and back-ups.
  • Additional software costs: You will most likely need an OS, application server software, a database, monitoring software, etc. Many of these products are open source now, but there are still associated costs.
  • Implementation costs: In my experience, the implementation costs associated with a behind-the-firewall solution are always higher than those o

Poll: Internet Now Considered More Reliable Than TV, Radio NewsYesterday

CNNhologram.jpgDon't trust what you read on the internet? That's no longer the dominant sentiment in the US, according to a new poll by Zogby International. A survey of more than 3000 people performed in the two days after the US Presidential Election found that 37.6% of respondents considered the Internet the most reliable source of news, 20.3% consider national TV news most reliable and 16% said that radio is the most reliable source.

The survey found that most people find all the news biased in some way and there were a number of other interesting findings. It's quite striking, though, that we're at a point in history where the internet is trusted more than TV and the Radio!

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More Numbers

Other results of interest include:

  • 72.6% believe the news they read and see is biased
  • 88.7% Republican and 57.5% Democrat respondents describe the news media as biased.
  • Lest we conclude that the Republican/Democrat split represents sour grapes more than anything else - 39.3% of those surveyed trust FOX News most for the issues they consider most important, followed by CNN with 16% and MSNBC with 15%.


Open Beta of Google Friend Connect Coming Soon?Yesterday

friend_connect_logo_nov08.pngJust about half a year ago, Google announced a limited beta of Friend Connect, which allows site owners to display OpenSocial based gadgets on their sites and site visitors to sign in to these social gadgets with their OpenID, AIM, Yahoo, or Google accounts.

Amit Agarwal has been keeping a close eye on Friend Connect since it was announced and he assumes that the service could go live pretty soon. Just last week, Google published a new YouTube video geared towards users and now the support site for Friend Connect is available as well.

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Some of the gadgets Google currently supplies are a comment wall and a ratings gadget. Friend Connect will also work with third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community. To enable these gadgets, all a site owner has to do is to copy and paste some code snippets into their site's HTML.

Google Profiles Meets MyBlogLog

Lately, Google has started to put a lot more emphasis on its own user profiles, and Friend Connect makes good use of them. Once you join a Friend Connect enabled site, other users will be able to see information from your profile, though you can set your privacy settings to disallow others from seeing your profile pages as well. In many ways, this is quite similar to MyBlogLog.

It's Social, But is it Open?

friend_connect.jpgWhen Friend Connect was first announced, we were concerned about the direction Google was taking with this implementation of the OpenSocial standards. Also, as we noted in our earlier posts, the Friend Connect apps are displayed in an iframe, which is basically a separate web page inside another web page. Because of this, these apps are black boxes that live on your site, but don't allow the site owners to really leverage the data from these apps on their own sites.

It is interesting to note that the latest Google video about Friend Connect still prominently features Facebook as a supported service, even though Facebook has decided to eschew OpenSocial in favor of its own platform. The help pages for Friend Connect don't feature a list of supported services yet.

Benefits

There are, however, also some clear benefits to using Friend Connect. Through this service, a site owner might be able to create more user loyalty and enthusiastic readers can evangelize your site by publishing their activity on it to their own social network. Visitors will also be able to invite their friends on social networks to join your site.

In an early press release about Friend Connect, Google stated that this initiative was about helping the 'long tail' of sites to become more social. While we might worry about  some of the details of Google's implementation, this by itself is a worthy cause, and it will be interesting to see how site owners will implement Friend Connect once it becomes publically available.