People often speak of old and new media as a dichotomy, with stodgy network television channels and traditional newspapers on the one hand, and hip, technologically sophisticated youth on the other. But recently, old media –- in particular, large television outlets -– have been catching on. A recent post on Mashable noted that CNN is using Twitter to interact with viewers. I commented that Fox News Channel is also using Twitter and Facebook. Many traditional newspapers, national and local, are also using Twitter and other social software to various degrees.

Because I use my Comcast Cable DVR to watch shows on delay about 75% of the time, I found myself this morning viewing a national news show and realizing that I couldn’t interact with the hosts via Twitter, because I was an hour too late. Show hosts asking viewers to “Twitter your comments” is clearly the modern version of “calling in with your questions for our guest.” The key question I asked myself was, as more television media master their new media brands, will we find ourselves more likely to tune into their shows in real time?

The financial consequence of not using DVRs, or downloading the shows from a third-party website, or other new options, is that more people watching the real-time version means more viewer share, which in turn means more advertising revenue. People are more likely to engage the show in real time and therefore more likely to see traditional commercials. I don’t know if the gurus at television networks or advertising firms they work with are thinking about it this way yet, but it seems like a truism to me.

So what might be a strategy going forward? As an avid watcher of television, particularly political news, complex dramas, and reality shows, I could imagine many scenarios in which incentives are created to watch shows in real time – viewers pose questions for the guest, guide alternative dramatic scenes, or decide what challenge the players have to perform. How cool would it be to watch Donald Trump, Sr. using Twitter on a BlackBerry in the middle of the live Apprentice finale? And the advertising underbelly is that you are statistically more likely to purchase paper towels, basketball sneakers, or a dream vacation cruise.

With the increasingly “long tail” of niche television channels, magazines, and similar outlets only becoming more prevalent, it might behoove the “blockbuster” organizations like NBC to become the leaders in “old new media” to win some of that viewer share back. This summer, the startup social network and search site Searchles inked a deal with the venerable Washington Post to create social networks among people with common reading interests. Why not similarly network all the people who voted for Clay Aiken, are fans of Gossip Girl, or hate The View?

Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy in Washington, DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Federal Government.

(Image via Flickr/ dailyinvention)

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Source:Mashable!

One of many companies launching at DEMO this week is Say Where from DialDirections. Say Where hopes to make its mark by offering voice input locations and directions generated by speaking an address or city into an iPhone 3G. By doing this Say Where brings basic pre-programmed GPS destination functionality to the iPhone 3G.

If you have used any basic GPS system, you know that pre-programmed destinations are par for the course. There is a selection included in any GPS worth its salt of nearby gas stations, movie theaters, restaurants and other points of interest. The drawback to these is that they don’t change dynamically as businesses succeed or fail. They could be outdated at any moment without real time data feedback.

If you have an iPhone, you already have all of the real time Web-based destination information you could want. Coupled with the ability to get directions and mark your place with drop pin and bookmark, iPhone users already have more flexibility than this program appears to offer at first blush. If I had to choose between getting more reliable and up to date information from the iPhone Web interface, or possibly outdated pre-programmed information from Say Where, I’m going to have to choose the Internet until Say Where includes real data.

One of Say Where’s pitch points is voice capability. It’s nice to speak into the iPhone and get results, especially if you have trouble with the touch screen keyboarding. in the end, what good is convenience or cool software if it gives you potentially useless data? This is a good idea, but it needs more.

Perhaps I am judging this application too quickly and should be more excited about having access to data like nearby destinations, points of interest, recommendations and reviews with simple voice commands. Unfortunately, I just can’t seem to get excited about it. If it offered a way to get real time data and merge it with true GPS functionality, I’d be more excited. however, with the availability of the DASH GPS, I’m not seeing a need for Say Where right now, since DASH already does pretty much everything that I want in a real time, Internet connected GPS interface.

However, if the most you can say about your new iPhone App is that it uses voice commands and won’t cost users a phone call when retrieving the data they request, I’d recommend adding more features to really make it noteworthy. As it stands, when I want unbiased data on the iPhone 3G from voice commands I’ll just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 and either get the answer on the phone or have them SMS me. If I want similar functionality I can use programs like Nearby or Infospace. Meanwhile, if Say Where were to introduce real data instead of canned data, it would become ten times more useful.

A few months ago Yahoo offered a limited peek into its BrowserPlus project. At that time, not much was available. Now we are seeing some activity, and even the developer blog at Yahoo started to talk about the project.

Disappointingly, BrowserPlus is still only available for Yahoo properties, but developers can test the API locally. The benefit of this is that when the API is released to the public, your application can take advantage of it immediately. Obviously, this is a competitor to Google Gears, right? Well, the developer blog actually takes a different stance. They are somewhat complimentary because BrowserPlus allows you to download services instead of one monolithic platform. One major benefit of being service based is the ability to update and add new services on the fly. No browser restart or page reload is necessary. Obviously, that is very cool. From the developer perspective, it sounds like you could provide live updates to your services.

To give you an idea of whether this dynamic updating works, I downloaded the BrowserPlus software. Yahoo had some very nice prompts for what would happen during the download, the typical save the file and run it prompts. Once I ran the downloaded installer, the Yahoo Service Explorer recognized that the software was installed. Several services were automatically activated.

So what services are available? Currently, the Service Explorer lists 12 new services for you to use:

-DragAndDrop - Support drag and drop of files from the desktop to the browser.

-FileBrowse - Present the user with a file browser dialog.

-FlickrUploader - Provides an interface to the Flickr Authorization and Upload API.

-ImageAlter - a corelet based on ImageMagick to alter images locally and serve them over HTTP.

-InactiveServices - a built-in corelet which allows for the exploration of available inactive services, which may be downloaded and activated.

-IRCClient - a service that allows you to connect to IRC chat servers.

-JSONRequest - allows secure cross-domain JSON requests, inspired by http://www.json.org/JSONRequest.html.

-Log - access plugin logging facilities. The available levels in order of severity are Fatal, Error, Warn, Info, Debug

-Notify - a corelet that interfaces the local notification framework (Growl on OSX or Snarl on Win32) to post end-user notifications.

-PStore - provides a persistent store.

-RubyInterpreter - a service which allows other services to be written in Ruby.

-TextToSpeech - a corelet that interfaces the OS provided text to speech facilities.

Only some of the services are activated by default. The JSONRequest and RubyInterpreter are not initially activated, but attempting to activate the JSONRequest service gave me the option of installing both the JSONRequest and RubyInterpreter services. These were installed, active and ready for testing without even a browser restart. Most of the services are testable directly from the Service Explorer. Disappointingly, the RubyInterpreter was not one of those services. However, a basic test of the JSONRequest against the FriendFeed API did work as expected.

The interesting point to note is that most of the services seem to be enabling front-end development as opposed to a local storage platform. Even the developer blog post made a reference to this idea. The persistent storage service, PStore, provides a basic hashmap interface (get, set, keys and clear) for local storage. For most basic applications that a developer would want to locally serialize, a simple hashmap would probably suffice. Otherwise, the list of services provide a very solid developer foundation.

Thankfully, the platform support is very good. Windows XP and Vista are supported as well as Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (intel only). Surprisingly, Linux has no support at this time.  It also supports IE 7 on Windows, FireFox 2 or greater on Windows and the Mac, as well as Safari 3 on the Mac. I am sure that the developer community will be upset by the fact that Linux is not supported, but the BrowserPlus FAQ does mention that “Extending the breadth of platform support in BrowserPlus is a key goal.”

The “sneak peek” may only allow BrowserPlus to run on Yahoo properties, but the FAQ states that they are willing to work with early partners. This is very important to anyone planning on launching a service once BrowserPlus is available to the public. However, it sounds like you may change these security settings in order to test the API locally as long as you realize those security settings may be reset at any time.

Overall, Yahoo BrowserPlus looks like a very solid offering. If they want to make a splash, they really need to market this better. There has been very little coverage about the tools even though there are a good number of services. More importantly, this seems like a framework that will be very easy to start with. The code samples provided show how simple it is to get started, and some of the services are very useful. If this is any indication of a “new” Yahoo, I think we are going to like it.

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Source:Mashable!

RentMineOnline is a recently launched search and recommendation tool that pairs landlords and lessees by leveraging online social media. One core component of this site is its referral system, which enables users to earn cash when someone moves into a property they recommended.

This is one incentive that property managers have been using for decades, but when coupled with the existing networks one already has with their online social networks, the reach is much further and can be more powerful, especially if a given user happens to be somewhat of an influencer. While this online referral system within the apartment rental business is similar to what other sites like introin have started using, RentMineOnline uses a far more integrated approach with its Facebook application.

Similar to Lending Club or even Delver, RentMineOnline takes advantage of the friends you already have in order to promote its referral system (powered by your referrals), as well as its recommendations. So a search for a given property in a certain location will produce results that are not only in that area, but can be connected back to you based on your Facebook friends. This type of recommendation system looks to your extended friends network in order to show how you may be personally connected to someone that’s renting or looking to rent a property.

This may or may not be a comforting factor, but it certainly puts a realistic face on the act of apartment hunting, and can influence one’s decision on either end of the process. Once Facebook Connect is in full gear, I imagine that RentMineOnline will be better able to provide search and recommendations to its users, and better access users through Facebook itself.

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