This week I came across an interesting little app called Mosoto. Mosoto is an instant messager for Facebook — you are able to sign on via Facebook and then see who within your network is online and chat with them. There are lots of other features added on such as file sharing and even video conferencing! I won’t go into the breadth of features since there is a really nice screencast which does a good job of explaining how it works. What I do want to discuss is the impact this will have on the major messaging networks such as MSN, AIM et al.

Is your social network more important than your messaging buddies? There has been little to challenge the dominance of the big IM networks over the years but services like Mosoto are going to do a pretty good job. Mosoto was only possible due to the release of the Facebook API and with the possibility of other social networks creating APIs we could see other sites such as hi5 and Bebo added to the mix. On the other hand, MySpace’s instant messaging client hasn’t done much to dent the popularity of the established IM services; but then again, there is a difference. MySpace created their own proprietary IM client whilst Facebook is relying on independent developers to use their API to create such services. As a result I think that features built around Facebook will be far more compelling since quality will rise out of competition between developers trying to create the best new services.

If Mosoto and others succeed in making instant messaging mainstream on your social network, the likes of MSN, AIM and Yahoo Messenger should wonder where their futures lie.

I’m sure the dream of most of the founders of Web 2.0 companies today is being bought by Google; famously Google acquired YouTube late last year for $1.65bn. From the other perspective, the acquisition of startups can allow Google to move into new areas and develop current activities. I thought it would be interesting to write a post with a couple of my acquisition targets, if I were entrusted with the Goog’s billions.

FeedBurner
If I were Google, FeedBurner would be pretty high on my list of priorities. FeedBurner is a free feed analytics tool, which GizBuzz and most other ‘serious’ blogs use to see how many people are subscribing to their RSS feed and reading their content. FeedBurner works by reprocessing your feed, and if it has enough subscribers, it gives you the option to sell adverts in your feed, through the FeedBurner Advertising Network (FAN). So, whilst initially FeedBurner appears that it is a tool for publishers, in reality it is an advertising company. What does that remind you of? Google.

Google looks like a search company, but is actually an advertising company. As such, it is always looking for more places to stick its adverts, and more ways to help advertisers measure how those ads are performing. FeedBurner is a perfect fit, as it has access to far more inventory in RSS feeds than Google has. Google could simply incorporate FAN into their Adsense programme, and keep FeedBurner as a tool for blog publishers to manage and measure their feeds. I recently wrote why I think negotiations may be happening already between FB and Google.

Pluggd
Pluggd is a podcast directory. However, that’s not what the exciting part of their technology is. They recently released a search technology for podcasts called HearHere (demo and information), which allows you to select a podcast episode and enter a search term. It will then produce a heatmap showing where that term is being spoken about on the podcast, which enables you to go straight to the relevant part of a podcast, finding the relevant information quickly.

An increasing trend around at the moment is that of podcasting, and a vast amount of information is being published in audio files to the internet. Google prides itself on indexing and searching information on the internet. At the moment, however, Google can’t see inside those audio files. This will become more important going forward, and it is a problem that must be solved. Pluggd’s technology goes a long way towards solving it, and does it in an innovative and useful way. It would be a great fit as Google currently has no (published) technology in this area. I also guess that Pluggd would be fairly cheap, as it hasn’t got much of a network effect going and isn’t even funded yet.

Leo Laporte, podcasting celebrity and chief of the TWiT podcast network, has announced on his blog that he is leaving Twitter and moving to rival service Jaiku.

We’ve talked about Twitter previously on GizBuzz, but it’s basically a ‘nano-blogging’ service where you answer the question “what are you doing?”. It’s very addictive and there are many tech personalites, and normal people alike, using the service.

Laporte cites one main reason for leaving Twitter, the fact that the name is too similar to his podcast network TWiT. Laporte was an early adopter of Twitter, and mentioning it in his podcast was one of the reasons it was able to gain so much popularity.

But I’m leaving it [Twitter].

The problem is the name. I wish to heck he’d named it Tweeter, or Tooter, or anything but Twitter. Twitter is so close to TWiT that I’m afraid it’s really confusing. And it hasn’t helped the confusion that I’ve been such a fan of Twitter. I’m sure half the people there think we have some sort of relationship. But we don’t. And the proliferation of programs like Twitbox and sites like Twit This are not helping things much. So let me repeat…

Twitter has nothing to do with TWiT.

And, I’m afraid, I can’t have anything to do with Twitter, either. It’s just fueling the confusion. Fortunately, there are several similar services including Groovr, Dodgeball, and Jaiku. After a cursory glance at all three Jaiku seems to have the best mix of features for me (I’m too old to be groovy, or hooking up) so I’m moving to Jaiku. My handle is ChiefTWiT. Hope to see some of you there.

Fellow GizBuzz and YouMakeMedia blogger Chris Van Patten speculates that there could be a potential legal battle between Leo and the TWiTs and Odeo (the parent company of Twitter). It’s certainly a possibility, but I do hope that Leo and friends are seeking a non-legal resolution to the problem.

Twitter is certainly making a buzz in the tech community and this move does raise its profile yet further, just unfortunately does so in a bad context.

While I’m on the subject of Twitter, I just want to let everyone know that I’m busy hacking away at a solution so that you can get the latest Oratos posts (from here, FOSSwire and YouMakeMedia) delivered directly to your Twitter account.

It’s not done yet, and it’s currently a bit unstable and temperamental (and we’ve been having some issues with it posting old stories over and over again), but if you want to brave the beta, you can follow us at http://twitter.com/oratos.

The Official Google Blog has announced a new feature in Google Maps called My Maps.

It is described as:

…a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos — all using a simple drag and drop interface.

Developers have been able to do this kind of thing using the Google Maps API for some time, but this is the first step Google are taking to make this kind of customisation available to the average user within the web interface.

After going into Google Maps, you simply click on the My Maps tab on the left and you have the option to create a new map. After signing in with a Google Account, you can then quite easily go about marking places on the map with pushpins, draw lines and add shapes.

It’s quite a nice feature, but I can’t help thinking that all it is just bringing one of the features of Google’s desktop Google Earth client to the web interface. With Google Earth, you can already create your own custom maps and add your own placemarks. Your places are then saved on your computer in the KML format.

The real difference between the Google Earth mapping tools and the new My Map feature of Google Maps is that Maps saves your data on Google’s servers and binds it to your Google Account, whereas Earth stores data on your computer.

One thing that does irritate me slightly is that you can only export Public maps to KML format so that you can then import them into Google Earth. Unlisted maps don’t have any export features as far as I can see.

Still, it is quite nice to be able to make maps on the fly from anywhere, not just computers where Google Earth is installed and to be able to share them with others more easily.

Widgets are fast becoming a prerequisite for most startups to achieve viral growth. Yourminins.com is a platform to distribute your widget creations while being able to easily monitor statistics like number of views, which domains they are coming from and where in the world your viewers are. Essentially a bit like Google Analytics for widgets.

In addition to this, becoming a featured widget and getting on the front page of yourminis.com can in itself generate significant uptake of your embeddable offering. Yourminis.com has tried to create a community around widgets, offering the ability to rate and review each widget and providing dynamic rankings based on popularity. In order to distribute your widgets on the site you have to prepare your widget using their developers’ kit. Essentially the SDK is a Flash container in which the widget is embedded which then makes it easy for yourminis.com to distribute to their users.

It’s a great idea which will certainly make the distribution of widgets a lot easier for startups. The community aspect will also mean that users only need bother with the coolest offerings.

Yourminis.com has been created by the Goowy.com team and is funded by billionaire Mark Cuban famed for selling broadcast.com to Yahoo for over $5bn (in Yahoo stock).

Back in November 2006, Huw and Peter actually interviewed Alex Bard, CEO of Goowy for the Gizbuzz Podcast. The podcast talks a little bit about the Yourminis service (which at that time had just been launched), so if you’re curious for more information, you might want to check that out.

Today, the Gizbuzz team had the opportunity to interview Dave Hoff, the co-founder of IMified – a new service that’s taking the internet world by storm. The premise is simple; take popular web applications (Remember The Milk, Basecamp, Salesforce, etc.) and break them down so they can be used through popular instant message networks.

We spoke with Dave about all sorts of things: what IMified is, the challenges faced, the instant messaging interface, APIs, and more. It’s a great service with a lot of potential and we got an interesting look into the early stages of what may well become a very influential startup.

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As promised yesterday, I want to take a look at Twitter, a fairly new web application from Evan William’s Obvious company (who also developed podcasting directory Odeo).

The essential concept of Twitter has been called ‘nano blogging’; it allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates on how your friends answered that question via the web interface, instant messenger (IM) or your phone. It acts as a constant status message, and unashamedly advocates the ‘what I had for breakfast this morning’ style of blogging, which is so vehemently shunned by the tech blogosphere normally.

When Twitter first emerged some months ago, I dismissed it out of hand as a stupid idea which would never get traction. I doubted that anyone would choose to use an inferior blog interface to publish updates of incredibly restricted length, making use of a basic friends system, when depending on their needs they already had the choice of anything from their own installation of WordPress, to Vox, to Facebook and MySpace.

I was obviously proved wrong. What I failed to take into account were two factors. Firstly, the ease at which one can recieve updates. If I chose to, I could have Twitter updates follow me everywhere I go, and every time one of my friends posts an update, I have a reminder to use the service. So all I need is one friend on Twitter who is posting regularly, and I have an incentive to respond, either directly to their ‘tweet’ or by posting one of my own. I do not have to remember to visit the Twitter site every so often to check for updates – they come to me. It is surprisingly addictive.

Secondly, Twitter fills an important niche for many of the tech bloggers among whom it is so popular. Take Robert Scoble. He is a ‘web celeb’, whose blog is essential reading for many wanting to understand new media and Web 2.0. He posts many times a day, usually with his thoughts on a particular trend, person, blog or product, often with personal anecdotes to support his arguments. Through these glimpses into Scoble’s life, people have come to be very interested in what he is up to, but his blog does not exist to tell his readers what he had for breakfast this morning. That’s a good thing, because most of his blog readers really couldn’t care less, but there are many who could care, and for them Twitter provides this. In return, Scoble gets the ego trip of having 100s (about 700 at time of writing) of followers who do care what he had for breakfast. He must be doing something right!

Expect Twitter to carry on growing. Twitter will never reach beyond the tech crowd. I tried to explain what it was and why it was addictive to a non-techy friend only yesterday, to be met only by scorn. However, the ‘early adopter’ market will continue to grow, and so Twitter stands every chance of remaining healthy (at least in terms of user numbers) in the coming years.

IMified, an instant messenging bot which allows you to easily control various different third party web services through their APIs (see explainer post) has risen to popularity over the past couple of weeks.

It’s easy to see why – with IMified you can currently post to WordPress, Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type and Typepad blog, keep yourself organised with Remember the Milk, Google or 30boxes calendar and Backpack and collaborate with Basecamp. That’s on top of their own Todo, Reminder and Notes apps, all of which work very nicely.

The three services I’m making use of are IMified’s own Reminders and Todo list functions, as well as using it to post to my personal blog. At first I was a little sceptical as to whether it was a gimmick or a genuinely useful product, but I have actually found it the latter.

IMified represents one of the good things about Web 2.0 – open architecture. It would be brilliant if this could be expanded so that over my IM I can have notifications of new email, updates on selected feeds and maybe even TV listings.

I’m particularly keen to see IMified and Twitter integration. A post about Twitter, a ‘nano blogging’ service which allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates from your friends via IM, text message and web interface, is coming soon on Gizbuzz. Despite the fact that Twitter already uses IM, it would be nice to be able to use it from one bot which does everything.

Over time I would hope that more and more services would be added. At the moment, services must be added by the IMified team, and so perhaps they should look at developing an IMified API that would allow third party developers to integrate their systems into IMified without any help from IMified.

IMified is a service I’m really excited about, and I think it could do extremely well in time. On a sidenote, as far as I can tell, IMified is a side project for its developers and unfunded. I think it’s an excellent example of how far a good idea can come without needing to enter the private equity game.

Stock markets slipped across the world today, probably fuelled by a drop in China’s Stock Exchange. The Nasdaq (the NY technology SE) has slipped just as all the others have, raising the possible question of a Web 2.0 bubble burst, brought about by other economic factors. Since the question ‘is this a bubble?’ is asked (or answered) by someone just about everyday in the tech blogosphere, I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a look at what might happen from here, using some common-sense economics.

In order to work out if we will see a bubble, we need to take a guess at what this stock slip means for the rest of the economy; this is either a correction of stock prices which were becoming slightly over-optimistic, or it is a more sinister economic downturn.

In the first case, there will be little or no impact on Web 2.0, because private equity is over-funded at the moment anyway, and they want to spend that money. If other areas of the economy, such as advertising and consumer spending, are doing well, then there is no reason why web companies shouldn’t continue to succeed. Therefore venture capital will continue to be available, and companies will continue to succeed.

However, in the other option, there could be a significant impact. Crucially, if the advertising market is hit (which can be one of the first cuts companies make if they are short of cash) then monetisation for much of the Web 2.0 sector becomes much harder. Companies will also have less cash to make acquisitions. Therefore, in a situation when it is difficult for Web 2.0 companies to succeed, the good venture exits (such as that seen with YouTube and Skype) will not happen because a) the companies won’t be making any money, and will have little prospect of making money, and b) no-one will be able to afford them anyway. In this situation, we could see a ‘bubble burst’, although it will be far less dramatic than that seen in 2000.

We’ll have to watch over the coming weeks to see what happens; I’m fairly hopeful that this is just a recognition by the markets that they were getting a little too excited. Given that the economy is inevitably cyclical, it seems much healthier to have mini booms and mini busts with sustained net growth than enormously successful booms and devastating busts.

Google Finance is the best place to get stock prices for the US stock exchanges. Unfortunately they don’t display the FTSE (the UK index), so you have to use Yahoo Finance for that.

The BBC is reporting that Viacom, the network behind MTV and many other major brands, has announced availability of a YouTube-style embeddable player for clips from their shows which can be inserted into third party websites. This follows their demand to YouTube to remove 100,000 of their videos, and the availability of such a player from Comedy Central in late 2006. This is interesting because it marks a change in the way that large media companies are thinking about new media.

The first point is that they are prepared to, to some extent, lose control of their content, in that they are enabling it to be displayed anywhere on the web. Whilst that has clear advantages (because of the viral growth possible with videos displayed on blogs and social networking profiles etc), it is not something that companies like Viacom have been prepared to do before. I could easily set up a splog or exploit site using the Viacom videos as free content. For obvious reasons Viacom would not want to be associated with such a site.

The second interesting point is that they have decided to go it alone, leaving the much higher viewing figures possible by using YouTube on the table. There are a few advantages for them in this. Firstly they maintain more control than otherwise over their content. They get better metrics; they can count how many times their video has been viewed, where it has been embedded, what country the viewers were in and whether they watched the video to the end. They decide, rather than viewers, which clips are posted on the internet. Most importantly, however, is the change in advertising model. By going it alone, Viacom may get fewer views of its videos, but it does keep the whole amount from the advertising rather than being forced to share it with YouTube or a similar service.

Ultimately, if Viacom can make itself an online content destination, this will result in more money for them, which would make this a very sensible move indeed.