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Source:Mashable!

Rediff, one of the top online portals in India and one currently listed on the NASDAQ stock market, has evidently followed the past year progress of third-party developments within Facebook closely. Now it wants to stir a similar amount of interest in its own set of properties as well. Announced at Delhi’s Proto.in startup event, Rediff officially took the covers off its own developer program, called, plainly enough, The Rediff Platform.

The reason for the Facebook reference is simple. The company states that its properties are “being made…to support FBML,” Facebook’s markup language.

Indeed, Rediff is pushing an idea eminently synonymous with Facebook’s own. The phrase “apps economy” is writ large on the Rediff Developers page. But it’s also an effort that the company hopes will align with multiple pieces of the Rediff puzzle. To kick off the developer program, Rediff is first opening iShare, its music, video, and photo sharing service.

The company is promising grants to some students and entrepreneur developers through a basic submission program it is calling “Sociali.” The sum being touted by the company to fuel ideas thought promising ideas is 250,000 rupees, or US$5,800. A relatively small figure, it seems, especially if juxtaposed against Rediff’s expected revenue report for Q2 2008 (roughly $17 million). All may depend on the supply of developers Rediff finds enticing enough to fund in the weeks and months ahead.

The company states that developers ready to begin fabricating can now do so with data provided through its new website.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Google and Yahoo Looking to Acquire India-Based RediffiShare, The Indian YouTubeYahoo Takes Large Stake in India’s Tyroo MediaThe Daily Poll: Would You Build Apps for the MySpace Developer Platform?LinkedIn Outlines Strategy for Upcoming PlatformClearspring Opens Community Platform for DevelopersThe Daily Poll: Which Platform is the Best Opportunity for Developers?

Source:Mashable!

Want to read a wealth of magazines without spending a dime on subscriptions or one-time transactions? A website by the name of Mygazines is promising just that.

I for one can’t imagine the number of copyrights the site and/or its users have infringed upon. It must be many, no doubt. (depending on whether they’re considered independent items or part of publishers’ portfolios). But perhaps the concept of Mygazines itself, in some form or another, is something that will eventually become a sort of standard for the industry.

The way in which the website functions is quite user friendly. But even more important to note is that Mygazines’s idea of freely publishing any weekly/monthly/quarterly, irrespective of the source, will resonate with people. Simply put, the consumer space is driving in the direction of a mostly pulp-less new paradigm. And if you want to see where things are headed, Mygazines is perhaps the most overt example to date.

After all, subscriptions will either be acceptably inexpensive for the reader to consume, with, say, more than 9/10 lopped off the average annual mailer fee, or they will be entirely without cost to the reader other than time and the amount given for particular electronic device. Looking at what the daily news business is having to struggle with today (from subscriptions to ad-supported websites), it’s safe to say that the latter option will be the likely scenario to emerge - albeit with a select few holdouts dotting the landscape that manage to make do with reader contributions.

The delivery mechanism is the reason this movement toward free, of course. That and the fact that information today doesn’t play well with barriers. (Media in music and video form, as well as long-form books and perhaps some pre-eminent journals here and there, are an exception in my mind, because there’s really no easy way to maintain an appreciable experience and survive on a advert-content ratio of 50/50 or worse. Music and ads can be taken together sometimes. But all the time? That I strongly doubt. The same for some video productions. And things like The New Yorker and The Virginia Quarterly Review.) For the most part, the dead-paper publishing industry long imagined to be on an interminable course no longer seems to have the wherewithal to go much further. The tangible representations of the vast majority of newspapers and magazines are slated for fairly swift elimination. That’s the reality of it. Wireless, handheld technologies are only further goading the grim reaper at this point.

Now, it should be said that Mygazines isn’t the first digital magazine service to come about. There has been at least one name in operation that has delivered digital copies of subscriptions and single issues on-demand over the Web for years. Zinio is its name. I actually gave them a try some years back. The experience wasn’t excellent at the time, but it wasn’t terrible either. Anyway, Zinio’s basic premise is convenience, but with a cost. Like with its publisher partners, it operates on a paid-for platform.

Mygazines doesn’t. Sure, it will most likely have to contend with takedown notices and threats of legal action and possible destruction. (Unless it can do things like YouTube and pin any unsavory blame  on its users’ uploads.) But the way it works is free. People like free. Which means that, if anything, an actor like Zinio will look more like Mygazines than the reverse in relatively short order.

Mygazines isn’t perfect. That I can say with some certainly. Some things about it could use changing. Layout could be a bit better, perhaps. But the experience offered is, I think, what readers will want a lot more of. It would naturally be too much to expect publishers to jump aboard at this point. They’re more attuned to strike up opposition. Massive opposition, even. But where will the give-and-take eventually lead, do you think? In the vein of Mygazines, I suspect.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 5:32 pm and is filed under web, Opinion, publishing, digital media, free magazines, mygazines, paid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.