MacSteamy. Is the Mobile Pendulum Swinging From Apps to the Web? The number of mobile-friendly websites is increasing faster than expected, according to the latest data from Taptu, a touch-focused mobile search company. Not only is the touch web growing, it’s growing at a faster rate than Apple’s iTunes App Store, which currently has an annualized revenue rate of nearly a billion dollars.
Taptu forecast in December of last year that more than 500,000 touch-friendly websites would exist by the end of 2010. According to its latest count, there are 440,100 such sites — an annualized growth rate of 232 percent. In contrast, Apple’s iTunes App Store holds roughly 185,000 software titles, which translates into a 144 percent annual growth rate.
Taptu now expects the number of touch-friendly websites to hit 1.1 million by year’s end. Driving this trend is an increased availability of non-Apple touchscreen devices, a lack of a centralized application store for developers to contend with and the notion of the web as lowest common denominator. Facebook’s Social Plugins Now on 100,000+ Sites. Study: Twitter Is Not a Very Social Network. According to a group of researchers at Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Twitter is not a very social network. After analyzing over 41 million user profiles and 1.47 billion follower/following relationships, the researchers concluded that only 22% of all connections on Twitter are reciprocal. On Flickr, this number is closer to 68% and on Yahoo 360 it’s 84%. The large majority (78%) of connections between users on Twitter are one-way relationships.
New Social Networking Darling Diaspora* Has An Idea Problem. To begin, congratulations to the Diaspora* team on their initial fundraising success. I fully appreciate the sentiment behind their project; they have touched a nerve among the thousands of people who feel jilted by Facebook’s recent actions. That said, the idea behind Diaspora* (its implementation) is overly complex and won’t work for the large majority of Facebook users. That is not to say that there is no problem to fix, as we’ve seen online privacy is being eroded by Facebook at wicked speed. New Facebook users don’t understand how the site’s privacy settings work, and are thus overly exposed from their first day on Facebook on.
As Facebook finds its legs among the older and less technologically inclined, it needs serious competition to force it to abdicate its new system of assumed openness. Technology Overview Diaspora* gives its users privacy by forcing them to host their own node that contains their information. This Is Too Complex Your parents probably recently joined Facebook. The Local Advertising War Will Be a Clash of the Internet Titans. When Google upgraded their Local Business Center to Google Places, it launched the opening salvo in what we expect to be a long war for local advertising dollars. With local advertising revenues expected to reach $144.9 billion in 2014 according to BIA/Kelsey — and more and more dollars are shifting away from traditional media toward digital media buys — the new war for local ad spend will be a battle between the Internet titans and social networks.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Yelp and even Apple are all attempting to carve out their own niche offering for local advertising dollars. Who will succeed remains to be seen, but this is a fight you won't want to miss. The War of the Worlds The challengers fighting for local advertising budgets can be separated into three categories: Search, consumer review sites and social networks. Search For businesses, the advantages of being highlighted in local search results over competitors is significant. Consumer Review Sites. It's time for universal data plans | Molly Rants. AT&T announced this week that it will phase out unlimited data plans and start a metered approach, with tethering available for an extra cost.
And although some elements of the new data plans will work for some customers, AT&T is moving in the opposite direction it should be going. I'm tired of multiple data plans, artificial caps, and arbitrary monthly usage charges. And I'm tired of paying the same companies multiple times for what is, essentially, the exact same service. That service? Data.
Between multiple cell phones, high-speed Internet connections, and even digital TV subscriptions, most households are now paying for data delivery at least three times over, and frequently paying the same provider twice. Think about it. Plus, you pay extra for texting--up to an astonishing $20 a month--and do you know how texts are delivered? It's all the same data, but a mobile broadband plan costs more than an "unlimited" smartphone data plan, and either way, it's still two plans.