web2.0filter

Got the next big idea floating around in your head but want to see if someone else has already come up with it? Digging through the mountain of patents on file at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Web site can be a bit daunting. To help in that search is Patents.com, which has an index of more than 450 million patents in 15 different languages. All of this is combined with an online marketplace where these patents can be bought and sold.

Like Google's patent search offering, Patents.com offers some great exploration, which is where I found the most value. The front page shows off some of the most recently approved and submitted patents, but the star of the show is the search tool, which goes from basic to "expert" mode with just one click. The expert mode gives you a whole new bag of search tricks like word proximity, a cheat sheet of commonly used patent jargon, as well as a "fuzzy" search that will look for alternate or misspelled words in patent titles or the actual copy.

One of its key improvements over the standard U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Web site is the image viewer, which I found far easier to use. It's essentially a PDF viewer, but it's stuck right on the page instead of opening in a new window. Also, unlike the U.S. patent office site, it does not require reloading the page each time you want to see another image. Users of Google's patent search will feel right at home.

As for the actual sale of ideas, if you're a patent owner you can claim patents on the site and, once verified, you can sell them. Patents.com includes a list price set by the patent holder, and anyone who is interested can be contacted through Patents.com. This is definitely a useful service for people who know what they're doing. Like anything that involves legality and potentially large sums of money, it's probably best to do some research before buying a patent on a site like this. The search, however, is quite a fun way to explore human ingenuity, and hopefully will lead to some fun patent discoveries from bloggers looking to unearth a major company's next big thing.

Did you know sugar could be patented? Apparently it's true for the owner of this patent, which we found while browsing Patents.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Robert Vamosi and I discuss the new features and browsing capabilities of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 and how it stacks up with other browsers. The new release brings IE up to par with Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and even pushes Microsoft a little ahead of the competition in a few areas.

Related stories:

Evite gets more social interface (but still no API)

As promised in May, Google has brought the open-source Gears technology to Apple's Safari, augmenting some browser abilities such as using Gears-tailored Web sites while offline.

The company announced a beta version of Gears for Safari (DMG file download link) on the Gears users mailing list Monday.

"We would love for you to install it and test it and file bug reports so we can polish it and find all the corner cases," said Google's Jeremy Moskovich.

Gears extends a browser so, for example, some Google Docs can be edited or viewed while the user isn't connected to a network. It also can speed up use of the WordPress blogging software and some operations at MySpace, and Google is expanding its scope to geolocation services and other areas, too.

The software requires Safari 3.1.1 on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 or Leopard 10.5.3, he said.

Gears already works on Firefox and Internet Explorer; Opera is working on a version for both its desktop and mobile browsers.

(Via Google Operating System.)

I have to confess that one of the social networking tools I find most valuable is Goodreads. (It's a close second to Twitter, and way ahead of Facebook, Friendfeed, or Dopplr.) Unlike twitter, where I follow hundreds of people (possible because of twitter's minimalism) and am followed by thousands, on Goodreads, I follow and am followed by a small circle of friends and people whose taste in books I trust. As someone who loves books, it is the pinnacle of private social networking for me.

So it was with some interest that I read about Amazon's acquisition of Shelfari. Much of the resulting commentary has focused on the problems this poses for LibraryThing, in which Amazon also has an invesment (via their recent purchase of Abebooks.) I'm a bit surprised that the articles have seemingly ignored the fact that Goodreads appears to be the market leader, at least based on data from compete.com:

Of course, that could change quickly if Amazon throws their muscle behind Shelfari and integrates it into their overall service. And there's the rub: we're entering a period of Web 2.0 consolidation. After all, web 2.0 is all about network effects in applications that get better the more people use them. And that means that companies with dominant share tend to get more dominant over time; that dominance need not be organic to start with (though it helps.) Over time, I expect to see companies who've achieved dominant market share in one market segment to use it to dominate a related segment.

But here's the counter: open and interoperable applications, including open social networks. When are companies with "point applications" of social networks going to realize that their best option, in the face of inevitable competition from big companies looking to dominate their market, is to join forces via shared social networks?

Some of my friends prefer LibraryThing. Others may prefer Shelfari. But I only network with those on Goodreads because that's the service I ended up using first. What a shame that I can't see what my friends on LibraryThing and Shelfari might be reading! I'd love to see a firm commitment to cross-application connectivity, with the social network as infrastructure rather than application.

This applies to other specialized social networks as well. Sorry, even though I'm an investor in Tripit, I'm not going to try to rebuild the social network I've already got on dopplr, just because Tripit thinks they'd better add this hot functionality to what was already a unique and interesting product.

I've argued for years that one of the critical architectural decisions we can make about Web 2.0 applications is whether they are built on the "one ring to rule them all" model that we saw with Microsoft Windows and Office, a game where network effects drive a winner-takes-all marketplace, or the Unix/Internet model of "small pieces loosely joined," in which cooperating applications come together to build value greater than any of the pieces do alone.

We're entering the critical phase of that decision. Application developers need to embrace the "small pieces loosely joined" model, or they will be picked off one by one by dominant companies who've already reached scale, and who are practicing the "one ring" model. As Benjamin Franklin said during the American Revolution, "Gentlemen, we must all hang together, or we shall assuredly all hang separately." Now is a good time for LibraryThing and Goodreads to start talking about interoperability.

Google has added Google Suggest to their homepage. When Google suggest first-launched Buster McLeod (AKA Erik Benson) checked the suggested term for each letter to create the Google Alphabet, 2004 edition. When Google News Suggest launched in 2006 I did the same. Now in honor of Google Suggest graduating from labs here is the annotated Google Alphabet, 2008 edition:

A = amazon
B = bebo
C = craigslist (in 2004 this was cnn)
D = dictionary
E = ebay
F = facebook (in 2004 this was firefox's turf)
G = gmail
H = hotmail
I = ikea
J = john lewis (the first result is for John Lewis, a UK retailer that I had never heard of till now)
K = kelly blue book
L = limewire
M = myspace
N = nbc olympics
O = olympics
P = photobucket (over Paypal and beating out 2004's Paris HIlton)
Q = quotes (the first result is for The Quotations Page; I hadn't realized how popular quotes were)
R = runescape
S = sears (I am impressed that Sears is able to beat second-place Skype; 2004 winner Spybot is gone)
T = target
U = utube (you know your site is popular when a misspelling is a top searched term; Google's spell corrector doesn't even try to stop this misspelling)
V = verizon wireless
W = wikipedia (www.youtube.com was ninth on this list)
X = xbox (the only Microsoft product to make the list this year; hotmail was a part of the alphabet in 2004 and gmail was not oops, hotmail is clearly still on the list)
Y = youtube (not a surprise with all the foreshadowing, but this does mean that Yahoo! is no longer on the list)
Z = zip codes

How does Google's algorithms choose the alphabet, err top term? According to the FAQ it's primarily popularity. There must be some other unnamed factors because some of the Google Trends matchups don't support that.

Here's Yahoo! vs. YouTube. Based on the chart it's not surprising that YouTube has come out on top.

Its no surprise that Spybot is gone, but I would have guessed that Skype would come out above Sears.

The Olympics beat out second-place Orkut right now, but I wonder how long it will retain the top spot before coming back again in 2010.

People are more likely to look for free stuff than the news, not surprising that Craigslist is ahead of CNN:

It's been a long, close battle, but Photobucket has definitely beaten out Paypal and Paris Hilton. Paris will probably be apart of the alphabet every so often when she gets a spike in notoriety.

Flickr is best known for its photo-sharing, but increasingly its most innovative work is coming from its geo-developers (Radar post). Yesterday they announced the addition of a street-level map of Black Rock City so that we can view geotagged Burning Man photos. Flickr got the mapping data via Open Street Map's collaboration with Burning Man.

Flickr uses Yahoo! Maps for most of their mapping (and fine maps they are). The underlying data for them is primarily provided by NAVTEQ. NAVTEQ's process can take months to update their customers' mapping data servers. For a city like Burning Man that only exists for a week every year that process won't work. However, an open data project like Open Street Map can map that type of city. To the right you can see what Yahoo's map currently looks like.

This isn't the first time Flickr has used OSM's data. They also used it to supplement their maps in time for the Beijing Olympics. I wonder if Yahoo! Maps will consider using OSM data so that their sister site doesn't continue to outshine them (view Beijing on Yahoo Maps vs. Flickr's Map to see what I mean). OSM's data is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

In other geo-Flickr news they have added KML and GeoRSS to their API. This means that you can subscribe to Flickr API calls in your feed reader or Google Earth. (Thanks for the tip on this Niall)

If you want to get more insight into Flickr's geo-thinking watch their talk from the Where 2.0 2008 conference after the jump.

Mozilla on Tuesday released a public prototype of Ubiquity, a curious command-based interface to locating information on the Web and creating compilations of information from various sources. See: Mozilla offers do-it-yourself mashups for all.

At the moment, it's most capable as a command-line browser. You press the hot key, ctrl-space, and you can just start typing lookup commands, like "imdb Blade Runner." Or, if text is already selected in the browser, your command will act on them. Mouse over a restaurant page in Yahoo Mail, press the hotkey, and type "yelp" for a review, for example.

Ubiquity can find and insert map images into e-mails.

But the most interesting application is Ubiquity's capability to extract items from Web pages and insert them in whatever you're creating, like an e-mail message or a blog post. At the moment I believe the only site you can extract data from is Google Maps, but clearly Mozilla's direction is to build a platform that takes bits of data from Web resources and pastes it together on the user's behalf.

Microsoft, too, is putting resources into a new feature that parcels out Web pages. In the upcoming Internet Explorer 8, the browser supports a feature Microsoft calls, "Web Slices," which is the platform's capability to take a portion of a Web page--like a stock chart on a financial page--and display it as a pop-up widget that's called from the bookmark bar in the browser.

Slices on Internet Explorer are part RSS feed, part widget.

Slices are built using a combination of protocols, including Microformats, RSS, and new HTML tags that IE uses to demark Slices.

Together, Ubiquity and Web Slices lead me to believe we're entering an era of fracturing Web content. Already we have seen content separated from presentation with RSS, and we've given developers access to online data for their mashups via Web APIs. But the growth of Microformat-coded Web pages will make it possible for users to more easily create their own mashups--personal profile pages that have just the pieces of Web content they want, or e-mail messages made up of live maps, automatically updating weather forecasts, up-to-the-minute travel information, and so on.

It means that developers will have to learn how to code pages for modularity. Conceptually that's not that big a deal, although if coding for Ubiquity and coding for Slices is different, it's going to be a technical mess. What I am waiting to see is how managers wrestle with the branding and revenue implications of letting their sites be mashed up and refactored into tiny pieces all over the Web, by anyone. I predict that the sites that give away the most data will reap the biggest benefits, but that will be a difficult leap of faith for many publishers.

See also: ActiveWords.

Technorati Media, parent company of blog search site Technorati, has acquired Blogcritics.org. The newly purchased site is a user-fueled "online magazine" for bloggers that was already a member of the newish Technorati Media ad network.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Technorati has said that it plans to keep Blogcritics an intact, separate property.

With the acquisition, Technorati says it hopes to help Blogcritics contributors make some money, as well as scale the property to give it more reach. "As part of Technorati Media, we'll be able to grow the community and further improve our platform to attract new audiences," Blogcritics founder Eric Olsen said in a release. "Technorati's mission to help bloggers and people who read blogs is the ideal complement for us."

Acquiring content properties, however, likely won't change the fact that Technorati has been losing ground to Mountain View, Calif.-powered Google Blog Search and (to an extent) the search feature that Twitter built into its technology when it bought Summize. Technorati founder David Sifry has long since left the company, and he's now at the helm of a new start-up called Offbeat Guides.