Our top story this week was about bad news for the big guys: Google, Facebook, Digg’s top users. As you catch up on the news, be sure to watch the conversation about China, tech and democracy that took place between activist/artist Ai Weiwei, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things.

Note: We’ve refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.

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Story of the Week: Nexus One’s woes, spies love Facebook, top Diggers lose power

• Oops: Google Denied Trademark on Android Nexus One
• Big Changes Are Coming to Digg: More Power to Publishers, Less Power to Top Diggers
• How US Government Spies Use Facebook (Updated)
• Cartoon: Can’t Go to SXSW? We Feel Your Pain
• Nexus One Flopped, but Android Didn’t

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

Announcing the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit

Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services, augmented reality, native app vs. browser-based, commerce and marketing, mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com,

Register now for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit and get early bird rates – only $295.

Mobile Web

• Microsoft Updates Bing iPhone App and Removes It from All International iTunes Stores
• Blockbuster Brings New Releases to Android, Windows Mobile Phones
• Mobile App Marketplace: $17.5 Billion by 2012

More Mobile Web coverage

Internet of Things

• Internet of Things Explained (Video)
• 6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home
• 8 Ways to Better Understand the Internet of Things

More Internet of Things coverage

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

Real-Time Web

• OneRiot Brings Its Real-Time Ads to the Web
• Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• The Death of the Pageview
• Micropayments and Subscriptions: How Business Models for Startups are Shifting
• 6 ReadWriteStart Lists: Our Best Startup Advice

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

• Provider Fail: Vodafone Sells HTC Smartphone Loaded With Malware
• Google Apps Offers Migration for Microsoft Exchange

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• IBM Makes A Major Move Into The Cloud; Amazon Is In Its Sights
• Rulers of the Cloud: Will Amazon’s Computing Fabric Become a New Economy?
• The Oracle Effect: Sun’s Best and Brightest Move On to New Places

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Discuss

The Web has hit a point where tracking pageviews is useless for startups.

There was a time when all you needed to succeed on the Internet were lots and lots of eyeballs, and the best way of measuring those eyeballs was by tracking pageviews (measuring exactly which pages on a website are viewed by individual visitors). The dot-com crash showed us that the eyeball-based business model was a failure.

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Since then, startups have moved toward direct monetization strategies such as subscriptions and virtual goods – and these businesses using these strategies require very different metrics than an advertising-based business would. Make no mistake, pageviews were valuable metric once, but their time has passed.

Guest author Tim Trefren is one of the founders of Mixpanel, a real-time Web analytics service that helps companies understand how users interact with Web applications. He writes about analytics at the company blog.

For startups that sell something, metrics like average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are vastly more valuable than detailed pageview tracking. It doesn’t make any sense to focus on pageviews (an approximation for value) when you can measure the real thing directly.

There’s also a clear pattern in the direction the Web is heading – toward interaction and responsiveness, and away from separate pages. If you’re going for incredible user experience, on-page interactions are your bread and butter. Can you imagine what a drag it would be if the page reloaded every time you commented or ‘Liked’ something on Facebook? It would be awful.

This trend further devalues the pageview as a valid metric. If you have a highly interactive Web application that spans only a few pages, there’s not a whole lot of value in seeing how many times those pages were loaded. Much more valuable information can be found by tracking the parts of your application that your users are interacting with the most. The benefits here are twofold: You can directly measure the things that are important to you, and you gain unparalleled insight into how people actually use your application.

If Not Pageviews, Then What?

When you’re deciding how to incorporate analytics into your strategy, the most important thing is that you are gathering actionable data. By this I mean that you have to be able to use the information you gather to make a decision and take action. If you’re not going to use it to make a decision, it’s a waste of time to even look at it.

With this in mind, there are a few areas we should focus on: split testing, interaction tracking, conversion funnel analysis, and click tracking. These methods will give you the information you need to both improve your conversion rates and your understanding of user behavior.

Just a few years back, your only options were to roll your own analytics or to pay tons of money to a giant company like Omniture. This left startups in a tough spot, one many startup founders still encounter today: it’s difficult to justify putting a lot of development time into analytics when it’s not your main product, and it’s hard for a small company to work with a large sales organization.

Luckily, the analytics landscape is changing. Many new companies are sprouting up to handle every aspect of your analytics, freeing you from the need to develop your own internal tools.

Split testing

Split testing involves creating different versions of your site and measuring how the changes affect user behavior. Your changes can be as small as a different call to action or as large as a complete redesign. With this data in hand, you can make changes to your website to massively improve your conversion rates.

What companies do it?

• Google Website Optimizer is a free multivariate testing solution. It makes it possible to change a number of different things and determine the optimal combination of changes.

Conversion funnel analysis

Funnel analysis is a way of measuring conversion rates across multiple steps of user acquisition. For example, you can measure the rate at which visitors from the front page go to the pricing page, and then how many continue on to actually create an account. This is an incredibly important concept to understand, and can be applied to many aspects of your application.

What companies do it?

• Mixpanel (my company) is a freemium service that provides funnel analysis and segmentation.
• Google Analytics has a feature called Funnel Visualization that provides basic pageview-based funnel tracking.
• KISSmetrics is a new company with a funnel analysis product in closed beta.

Click tracking

Click tracking is a great way to measure how effective your website is. Every click a visitor makes is recorded, so you know which links and buttons are receiving attention. There are a number of ways to report this data, but the most popular is to overlay an image of your website with a heatmap of all of the clicks. If your users aren’t performing as you expect, you can try changing the page and continuing the test.

What products do it?

• ClickTale is a freemium service that can generate click heatmaps and movies of single visitor sessions.
• CrazyEgg is a paid service that can generate a few different reports for your visitor click activity, including heatmaps.

Event tracking

Event tracking is a way of measuring exactly what users are doing on your site. Things like invites sent, videos played, and user signups all count as events. This functionality will grow more and more important as the Web grows more interactive.

What companies do it?

• Kontagent is a freemium service that is focused on Facebook applications. It can track Facebook-specific events like invites and notifications, among other things.
• Google Analytics recently added basic event tracking to complement its pageview based service.

Measure Relevancy, Not Your Ego

Ultimately, analytics are crucial to online success. If you want to improve your startup, you’ve got to be measuring it. It’s critical to measure the right things, though – the things that are actually important to your business, not things merely appeal to your ego. It can be mesmerizing to watch the unique visitor count go up day-over-day, but this is a dangerous diversion. The era of eyeballs equaling success is long past, so you should instead be measuring the things that are truly relevant to your business.

If you’re not measuring your visitors yet, I urge you to get your toes wet – track something small. The conversion rates for the buttons on your front page would be a great place to start.

Is the pageview really dead? What other companies and services are available to help companies move beyond a pageview-centric mindset? Let us know in the comments

Photo by Iva Villi.

Discuss

Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we’ve learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.

Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.

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We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here’s how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn’t see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven’t been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We’ll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri’s work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company’s technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Discuss

Google looks to be following up the addition of its Google Chart Tools with a neat addition to Google Labs – the Public Data Explorer.

The purpose of the new tool, Google says on the new lab’s page, is to make “large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate”.

Google, with its access to an immense assortment of information, is in the perfect position to help us with ways to display this information.

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Just as with the Chart Tools, Google’s Public Data Explorer will allow users to directly embed charts and other visual tools onto their websites. The charts will be dynamically created, so if the data updates, so will the chart.

Google first got into the public data game about a year ago and has been including this type of data in its search results.

Right now, there are 13 datasets available, ranging from something as specific as Education Statistics of California to World Development Indicators from the World Bank. Google has just added five new public data sources: the U.S. Center for Disease Control (think Google’s Flu Trends), the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Eurostat, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, and the California Department of Education.

There are four choices for visualization styles – bar graph, line graph, map or bubble, and each has its advantage. After choosing a visual style, you can select what data points you would like to see and set variables such as time period.

Just as with the chart tools, we look forward to seeing how useful a tool like this can be for all those smaller organizations that don’t have the resources to hire a full-time web design team, but want to visually display data to help visualize trends. This could be a great tool for smaller journalistic organizations to compete with some of the big dogs.

Discuss

You’ve probably heard that ReadWriteWeb has just announced the 2010 Mobile Summit, which – judging by last fall’s real-time web summit – is going to be a bang-up event. (With Kaliya Hamlin facilitating, how can it be otherwise?)

This one’s in honor of the summit… and in honor of all of us for whom ubiquitous connectivity means you’re never really 100% present in physical space.

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Oh, sure, it has its drawbacks – the car accidents, the walking into parking meters, the wedding that got called off because you just had to Twitpic a photo of the moment to your tweeps, which was awkward as you were the bride.

But let’s admit it: We’re part of the hive mind, and we’re proud of it. Onward to Mountain View!

More Noise to Signal.

Discuss

Every one of our blog posts around here is like a delicate, magical snowflake that we nurture lovingly (if quickly) before we push it out the door into the harsh lonely world of the web. Many of them are well received (otherwise we couldn’t do this for a living) but sometimes we write something we’re really proud of and it just melts into the river of news without being read by as many people as we wished.

Thus we present to you, our staff’s hand-picked posts this week that we think you may have missed but would likely enjoy quite a bit:

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Frederic Lardinois has been covering the e-book market closely for months. This week he wrote up…
E-Books: After the Hype and Before the iPad

The e-book hype reached its apex just before the holiday season. Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at the e-book market, especially given that this business is heading for another disruption once Apple’s iPad launches.

Richard MacManus has been focusing on an emerging trend called The Internet of Things. Check out this interview he put up at the end of last month:
Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part 1

Last week I had the privilege of meeting Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It’s one of my favorite books about the Internet of Things and is still ahead of the curve, even though it was written in 2005 and published in 2006. Greenfield was in my city Wellington for the week, so I sat down with him at a local cafe to get his views on the current state of Internet of Things and where it’s headed.

Sarah Perez lives in Florida and she’s regularly got super smart content posted before the rest of us have even rolled out of bed in the morning. Her latest sleeper fave?
Beyond Twitter Search: Semantic Analysis of the Real-Time Web

Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company’s new partners in receiving the “firehose” of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter’s 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting – the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets – it provides an understanding of the world’s conversations.

What would a new newsman say is news if a new newsman could say news was news? We asked Mike Melanson, our newest addition to the news writing team. He said his favorite under-read post this week was…
Ads with Eyes: Keeping Digital Signage in Check

While geolocation based services have been in the forefront of our minds lately, with websites like PleaseRobMe making us second guess announcing our whereabouts, another industry has been quietly ramping up its data collection practices.

The Center for Democracy & Technology issued a report yesterday addressing the growing “digital signage” industry, suggesting a number of privacy practices it might adopt.

Alex Williams helps make Enterprise tech news interesting and he posted some very important coverage of enterprise innovation this week in….

Will StatusNet Be Another Open-Source Star in the Enterprise?

What a week for StatusNet, the open-source, microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, one of the first services to emerge as a focal player in the movement around the real-time Web.

Last week, the company launched StatusNet Enterprise Network, a microblogging service with a support program for the corporate market. Initial customers include Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd.

Kaliya Hamlin is a frequent guest contributor, events partner and friend of the family here at ReadWriteWeb. She wrote a great post this week titled…
Bending the Identity Spectrum: Verifiable Anonymity at RSA

Today at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, spoke – opening his talk with this question: “Do you want anonymity or accountability? YES!”

But how can you have both? I created a spectrum of identity to help understand the different forms that exist on the internet. On one end is Anonymous Identity. Basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site – no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week.

Finally, my personal pick from my own archive. I’ve been having a great time writing up narrative tales of leading technology innovators. This is one you may not be familiar with but I think it’s really a moving and important story.
What Does it Mean to Make 5 Million Maps? Platial’s Legacy

It’s not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world.

Community mapping service Platial announced this week that it is turning off its servers and asking users to move their content onto the servers of other providers. Just short of 5 years old, Platial raised some venture capital, bought other small companies and made a name for itself, but in the end wasn’t able to build a business. Co-founder Di-Ann Eisnor defiantly says that Platial changed the world anyway. Cartography used to be an elite practice of drawing borders around resources and power. Platial helped transform it into an accessible practice for millions of people to share how they have experienced the world around them.

Those are our picks for this week! Come back daily for the best tech blog coverage we can provide.

Snowflake photo CC by Flickr user YellowCloud

Discuss

In just a couple more days, a healthy section of the RWW team – and a good number of our friends and fans – will be convening in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive. A couple of us have been asked to speak on panels; we wanted to share that information with you and ask you to share your panels and talks with us (and the rest of our readers, too).

Leave a comment telling us – and the rest of the world – about your SXSW Interactive panel. Let us know who’s going to be talking and what you’re talking about, plus where and when to show up. We’re sure you’ll find a few kindred spirits who’d love to attend and ask questions – and maybe offer some pre-show feedback for tweaking your notes!

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Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick will be moderating a panel with Scott Raymond of Gowalla, Brett Slatkin of Google, Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft and Jack Moffitt of Collecta – talk about an all-star cast! – on real-time technology. Marshall’s especially suited to this task since he’s the man behind RWW’s mammoth state-of-the-industry report, The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Here are the gory details:

Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized?

“The emergence of the real-time web enables an unprecedented level of user engagement and dynamic content online. However, the rapidly growing audience puts new, complex demands on the architecture of the web as we know it. This panel will discuss what is needed to make the real-time web achievable.”

When: Saturday, March 13, 11:00 am
Where: Hilton H

And I, Jolie O’Dell, will be moderating a panel of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and startup incubator-types on whether or not startups need traditional, Sand Hill Road VC in the first place. Sure to be contentious, this panel is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while, and I hope you’ll make it out! I’ll be talking with Mike Trotzke of SproutBox, Mitch Lasky of Benchmark Capital and Dave McClure of the Founders’ Fund.

Who Needs Venture Capital?

“Only a fraction of business financing comes from Sand Hill Road. Yet entrepreneurs still obsess over traditional big meeting/big money Silicon Valley venture capital. This heated panel debates what types of companies actually benefit from VC and reviews concrete examples of alternatives to traditional venture capital.”

When: Monday, March 15, 12:30 pm
Where: Hilton D

Also, for those of you who read along last year during my cross-country travels through the tech scenes in Nashville, Omaha, Chicago, New York and beyond, there’s the RoadTwip core conversation with our brothers-in-tech Dave Delaney and Kurt Daradics (also a co-founder of CitySourced).

RoadTwip

“Last Spring, three kids set out in one car for two weeks. Their mission was to discover the emerging future for a new America, one town at a time. While they captured and produced plenty of content along their roadtwip.’ The most valuable thing was the relationships they established. This panel is about getting out of dodge, it’s about going offline – where true friendships are solidified. In the flesh.”

When: Friday, March 12, 5:00 pm
Where: Austin Convention Center 8A

Those are our panels! What do you think so far? And please do share the details about your – or your friends’ – panels in the comments.

Discuss

Today ReadWriteWeb is announcing our second event, the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010. It will take place May 7, 2010, in Mountain View, California.

The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit will be an exploration of the latest Mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Registration is now open, at an early bird rate of just $295.00. Click here to get your ticket at this special price.

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As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the ‘unconference’ format. We discovered in October that the unconference is a perfect compliment to our brand, because it encourages a high quality two-way dialog. Not only that, but the knowledge and ideas that came out of our Real-Time Web Summit were practical and useful – we got a lot of great feedback about that.

As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, who in my opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We’re using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum.

Mobile was one of our top 5 trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth, so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of Mobile! Because as in our last event, The Real-Time Web Summit, it will be you – the attendees – who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business. Here’s a sample of some of the topics we’ll explore in both of these tracks:

• Geo-location services – what can you do using location as a platform?
• Commerce & Marketing – as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
• Content, Publishing & Recommendations – the technologies and best practices.
• Mobile Social Networking – how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
• Internet of Things – the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
• Augmented Reality – the technology and business applications of AR.
• Native App vs. Browser Based – Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

If you’re a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in helping sponsor this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information on the sponsor options.

The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can’t wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here, if you’re so inclined.

We hope to see you on May 7!

Discuss

Socialcast is launching a brand new activity stream, an Outlook plugin, an on-premise offering and a private cloud environment. The offerings represents a new effort by enterprise vendors to reach deeper into the enterprise and integrate more fully with email systems.

It also represents the reality that many large companies want a service that is not entirely in the cloud.

Socialcast originally developed a real-time service that provided a sophisticated service for building teams, collaborating and analysis.

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Socialcast calls the new real-time activity stream “Enterprise Activity Stream Engine,” or EASE. With it, they’ve created a new logo, a new image for the company, that looks a bit more modern and perhaps a little more formal, too. EASE is designed to serve as a layer within the enterprise that allows anyone to post real-time updates, create communities and see updates to the updates that people make to applications within the enterprise. This means that the real-time updates can filter deep into sales, marketing, operations and other parts of the corporation.

A New Social Layer

A social layer is settling over enterprise applications that cuts across CRM environments, ERP systems and the software that touches warehouse workers and other people in the field whose job it is to deliver the products into the marketplace.

It’s this transformation that companies like Socialcast see as the greatest opportunity to reach into the heart of the enterprise.

In the new enterprise, the real-time web will be the glue that binds different services. But it will not be entirely SaaS based. We hear this from the larger companies in the market. Socialcast is targeting companies with more than 100,000 employees, which means they will compete with a service like IBM’s Lotus software. IBM is focused on offering SaaS and on premise offerings. IBM has a large installed-based so it make sense they would focus attention on its on-premise applications.

Companies like IBM also know that they need to offer a SaaS environment. This is what makes the Socialcast news noteworthy. It puts its product into a category that makes what they offer more palatable to the largest companies in the market.

Further, Socialcast is offering a private cloud environment that can be deployed behind the firewall as a rapid-install virtual appliance, leveraging VMware, Hyper-V, or other server virtualization platforms.

The Outlook plug-in is also demonstrative of an approach that will help Socialcast compete. Employees will be able to view the real-time stream in the same window as their email.

E-mail is getting some attention, huh? Microsoft is offering more collaboration with Outlook and GMail is now home to Buzz, which will soon be an enterprise offering in Google Apps.

We are entering the next phase of enterprise collaboration. The drive is to serve the entire enterprise. To do that, expect more companies to offer hybrid approaches to appease the concerns about moving entirely to the cloud.

Discuss

The big news of the week was Google’s efforts to remove censorship from its search results in China – read on for our coverage and analysis of this news. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things.

Note: We’ve refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.

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Story of the Week: Google vs. China

• Chinese Hacker Behind Google Attack Found
• Despite Tough Talk, Google Still Censoring in China
• Italy Attacks Web Democracy with Google Convictions

More China coverage and analysis

Historic Conversation in NYC: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey & Richard MacManus

On March 15, at the prestigious Paley Center in New York City, a conversation will take place between Chinese digital activist and artist Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey, and yours truly, Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder and editor in chief. The moderator will be Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

The topic of the event is the emergence of digital activism for fostering positive social change. The onsite event is invitation only, but it will be live streamed exclusively on ReadWriteWeb on Monday, March 15, at 6:30 PM EST (-5 GMT), from the Paley Center for Media, New York City.

Mobile Web

• The Truth about Mobile Application Stores
• Mobile Cloud Computing: $9.5 Billion by 2014
• Our Hottest New iPhone App Discoveries: February Edition

More Mobile Web coverage

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

Internet of Things

• Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part 1
• Why The iPad May Save The Internet Fridge
• Are Modern Web Apps Killjoys?

More Internet of Things coverage

Real-Time Web

• Google Takes First Shot at Facebook Search Results
• How the Real-Time Web Will Impact Social Change
• Buzrr Wants to Be Tweetmeme for Google Buzz

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Washington DC
• What’s In A Name? For Startups, It’s Crucial
• Startup Visa Introduced: Is it a No-Brainer?

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

• Are The Fortune 100 Now Beginning To Embrace Social Media Tools?
• Is Jive Software Taking Steps Toward An IPO?

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, IS dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• Weekly Poll: Why Is Apple Building a Massive, $1 Billion Data Center
• A First Look at Apple’s Massive Data Center
• Microsoft to Government CIOs: Choice is Here

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Discuss

The big news of the week was Google’s efforts to remove censorship from its search results in China – read on for our coverage and analysis of this news. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things.

Note: We’ve refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.

Sponsor

Story of the Week: Google vs. China

• Chinese Hacker Behind Google Attack Found
• Despite Tough Talk, Google Still Censoring in China
• Italy Attacks Web Democracy with Google Convictions

More China coverage and analysis

Historic Conversation in NYC: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey & Richard MacManus

On March 15, at the prestigious Paley Center in New York City, a conversation will take place between Chinese digital activist and artist Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey, and yours truly, Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder and editor in chief. The moderator will be Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

The topic of the event is the emergence of digital activism for fostering positive social change. The onsite event is invitation only, but it will be live streamed exclusively on ReadWriteWeb on Monday, March 15, at 6:30 PM EST (-5 GMT), from the Paley Center for Media, New York City.

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• The Truth about Mobile Application Stores
• Mobile Cloud Computing: $9.5 Billion by 2014
• Our Hottest New iPhone App Discoveries: February Edition

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Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

Internet of Things

• Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part 1
• Why The iPad May Save The Internet Fridge
• Are Modern Web Apps Killjoys?

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Real-Time Web

• Google Takes First Shot at Facebook Search Results
• How the Real-Time Web Will Impact Social Change
• Buzrr Wants to Be Tweetmeme for Google Buzz

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Washington DC
• What’s In A Name? For Startups, It’s Crucial
• Startup Visa Introduced: Is it a No-Brainer?

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

• Are The Fortune 100 Now Beginning To Embrace Social Media Tools?
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ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, IS dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• Weekly Poll: Why Is Apple Building a Massive, $1 Billion Data Center
• A First Look at Apple’s Massive Data Center
• Microsoft to Government CIOs: Choice is Here

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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As of today, Facebook Fan Page status updates will begin appearing in Google search results, according to a tweet by Google. The announcement means that we will begin seeing results from the nearly 3 million fan pages, but not from the more than 400 million users.

Google currently controls around 90% of the search engine market, according to StatCounter, with Yahoo and Bing it’s closest competitors. Will Bing’s exclusive access to Facebook user updates change this at all?

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Google first announced the expansion of its real-time Web search last December, noting that it would include data from Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Indenti.ca and Twitter. And, of course, Buzz is now included in that list. Since then, Bing and Yahoo have made deals to step up their real-time Web search as well.

Yahoo recently brokered a deal with Twitter and Bing expanded its partnership with Facebook to become the default on-site search engine for the social network. Also included in the Bing deal was the ability to fully index public user updates, but this functionality is not yet available.

While it may be true that having access to only Facebook Fan Page updates puts Google at a disadvantage in terms of the sheer volume of content indexed, do we really want to have every piece of content shared by those 400 million users in our search results? A recent post here on ReadWriteWeb garnered a large stream of traffic from Facebook’s more technologically inept portion of its user base and the resulting comments were less then intellectual.

As Brandee Barker, a spokeswoman for Facebook, told us the other day, “Facebook Pages are designed to provide authentic voices for public figures, celebrities, and organizations.” While some are arguing these new results will just be a stream of advertisements and self-promotion, they will focus on official voices from organizations and the content they want to share.

We’re not sure about you, but maybe we don’t want to hear every little thing every person on the planet has to say about everything. Although the Internet is a great and democratizing force, perhaps having some filters remain in place isn’t the end of the world. It can be hard enough just keeping up with the stream of updates as it is. Adding the daily chatter of 400 million may just go one step too far – although we’d still like the option.

Maybe, in the end, this will give Bing a bigger share of the search engine market, and that isn’t a bad thing. Just like a multi-party political system offers more choices, maybe a more balanced search engine market would be better for us too. When we want the official word from official organizations, we can go to Google. When we want to put our finger on the pulse of the 400 million users, we can go to Bing.

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Earlier this month Amy Sample Ward interviewed ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick about our report on the real-time Web and how real time impacts the world of nonprofit organizations. Sample Ward helps nonprofits, community groups and those in the social change sector use new technologies, and is the co-author of Social by Social, a handbook in using social technologies for social impact.

Her conversation with Kirkpatrick started with the basics of what real time is, and then moved to the big question: How can nonprofits or social impact groups take advantage of the real-time Web?

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First, what does the “real-time Web” really mean?
“It means different things to different people, but the most literal meaning is probably this: real-time systems push information from a publisher to a subscriber (be they a human reader or a machine consuming information) as soon as it’s available, without the subscriber having to ask if there’s anything new.

“Think of how Facebook notifies you that you have new messages without having to refresh the page, or the way your Instant Messaging client shows you new messages as soon as they are sent. The underlying technologies used in those kinds of circumstances are now being integrated into all kinds of other websites because real-time delivery of information changes the user experience radically and offers all kinds of benefits. It’s smoother for users, users and systems get to take action immediately on new information and it’s much more efficient, meaning that your technology can do more with less computing expense.”

When did RWW start focusing on the real-time Web?
“Probably middle of 2008. Like people generally do, we thought about the impact that Twitter and Facebook were making on the web. When we looked deeper though, we quickly found out that there is far, far more going on in the real-time web than those two services.”

For the report, you interviewed 50 Web experts – what were some of the surprising things you heard?
“I was surprised to learn how broad this field is. We talked to people working with public records extraction in real time, with designers building lightweight, real-time presentation sharing tools, Google engineers have some incredible ideas about ways they hope that their PubSubHubbub real-time protocol will be used – stuff like real-world sensor networks and contact info syncing. When I started those interviews, I knew there were broad possibilities but I had no idea how broad.”

How has the real-time Web already impacted nonprofit organizations or those focused on social impact work?
“One of the organizations I did an interview with was the American Red Cross. As they say, “at the Red Cross, the real-time web saves lives.” Real-time information delivery has changed the way that organization works in radical ways. It’s amazing. Disaster response work that used to take days now takes minutes, using a combination of Sharepoint, mobile devices and airplane surveillance. The Red Cross also pays very close attention to the rest of the real-time web, though. I was fascinated to find out that the team at HQ is full of fans of the Breaking News Online iPhone app.”

What impacts are right around the corner?
Organizations that choose to do so are already able to run circles around the web using these real-time technologies. I expect that some will do so and many will not. It will be like the difference between organizations that developed an effective web or email presence early vs. those that did not.

“If organizations want to be relevant and effective, they will need to incorporate some elements of real-time information delivery into their work flow. Be that pushing real-time updates out to their websites and supporters, consuming updates on breaking news in their sector in real time, or collaborating remotely in real time. Using only the parts of the web that you must refresh for updates, when you remember to do so, be they email or web pages, will soon feel like putting your ear up to a tin can with a string connecting it to some other tin can far away.

“I don’t mean to say that everything will be real time and you must always live in that flow, but I do believe it’s fast becoming an essential form of engagement. Not just because everyone is doing it, either, but because it’s really very useful.”

How can nonprofits or social impact groups take advantage of the real-time Web?
“There are as many ways to take advantage of the real time web as there are to use the web in general. Here’s one of my favorite stories though. Some time back I was doing a workshop for nonprofit communications people and one of the attendees worked for a women’s advocacy organization. As a proof of concept, we took the RSS feed of the New York Times and filtered it for keywords related to her organization’s areas of interests, I think we used Yahoo Pipes to filter, it might have been FeedRinse.com, but that’s not hard to do in many different ways.

“Then we took the filtered RSS feed and we ran it through an RSS to SMS/IM alert service. I use Notify.me a lot but even faster than that now is an iPhone app called Notifications. Or have your team’s geeks check out Superfeedr.com. So the idea was, this person could then watch the NYT feed automatically, get an SMS or IM alert whenever a relevant story was published and then she could call up her local newspaper or other press.

“‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about this story breaking on a national level,’ she could say, and of course they probably hadn’t because they don’t have robots watching for these things automatically, ‘but if you’d like to cover this topic on a local level, our Executive Director is an excellent source for information.’ That journalist will love you for it. Do that enough times and your organization, no matter how small, will have a chance to grow its public profile substantially.

“That’s just one idea. There are countless other ways that real-time information delivery can be leveraged by nonprofits. From live video to live updates to live collaboration, more and more experiences online are going on in real time.”

Our report, “The Real-Time Web and its Future”, includes case studies, profiles, sector overviews and more. Find out more, and download a sneak peak, here.

Discuss

The big news of the week came out of the annual Mobile World Congress, from companies such as Adobe, Facebook, Google and Skype – read on for our extensive coverage and analysis. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Augmented Reality.

You may’ve noticed that we’ve refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.

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Story of the Week: Mobile World Congress 2010

• Adobe Prepares for a World without Apple’s Blessing
• Facebook Goes Extra-Light: Announces Stripped-Down Mobile Site
• The New Windows Phone
• Skype Comes to Blackberry & Android With Verizon Partnership
• Mobile Phones to Serve as Doctors in Developing Countries

Other Mobile Stories

• The 5 Most Interesting Things About Google’s ReMail Acquisition
• PleaseRobMe and the Dangers of Location-Based Social Networks
• Social Networking Now More Popular on Mobile than Desktop
• 2010 Winter Olympics iPhone Apps

More Mobile coverage

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

Real-Time Web

• How I Loved, And Lost, an Aardvark
• OneRiot Launches New API for Real-Time Search and Introduces Twitter-Style Ads
• Google Now Includes MySpace Status Updates in Real-Time Search Results

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

Augmented Reality

• Yahoo! and Total Immersion Bring Augmented Reality to the Olympics
• AR App Development: Metaio Releases Unifeye Mobile SDK
• Wikitude Brings Augmented “Worlds” to the iPhone

More Augmented Reality coverage. Also ReadWriteWeb is currently working on our next premium research report on the topic of AR marketing. Watch this space for that.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• Never Mind the Valley: Here’s New York City
• Build Business Cases, Not Business Plans
• We’re Still Not Facebook: Lessons from Late Adopters

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

• CEO Eric Schmidt at World Mobile Congress: Google’s Future is in the Enterprise
• Information Blocked: The Racial & Gender Makeup of Google & 4 Other Tech Giants

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, IS dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• Will One Company Become the Dominant Player in Cloud Computing?
• Dilemma: Cloud Computing Is Disrupting Microsoft Office 2010 and its Profit Margins
• Facebook and Twitter: SalesForce.com Offers Social, Real Time Enterprise Tools

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Discuss