Memex 1.1

From Webmonkey…

New York-based Betaworks today launched a useful–and cute–URL shortener, Bit.ly. The user-facing features, such as tracking clicks and cookie-based history of recent shortened URLs, are nice. Where Bit.ly really shines is the data it makes available via its simple API.

Without registering for an API key, developers can shorten URLs, expand previously-shortened URLs, and get data about a Bit.ly URL. The information Bit.ly makes available includes the number of clicks, the referring sources of those clicks, and three sizes of thumbnails of the resulting web page.

Bit.ly is a model platform, a great example of how to launch a service with an API.

Yep.

Charles Arthur pointed me to a really interesting idea. Here’s how BBC News describes it:

The UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects.

It is hoping to find new uses for public information in the areas of criminal justice, health and education.

The Power of Information Taskforce - headed by cabinet office minister Tom Watson - is offering a £20,000 prize fund for the best ideas.

To help with the task, the government is opening up gigabytes of information from a variety of sources.

This includes mapping information from the Ordnance Survey, medical information from the NHS , neighbourhood statistics from the Office for National Statistics and a carbon calculator from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

None of the data will be personal information, the government is keen to stress. Ho!

Bill Thompson has a post about this.

Isla sent me a link to Read The Words. Hence this. Lihua pointed out that Odiogo does the same thing.

Interesting article in First Monday by Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy of AT&T. Abstract reads:

Web 2.0 is a buzzword introduced in 2003–04 which is commonly used to encompass various novel phenomena on the World Wide Web. Although largely a marketing term, some of the key attributes associated with Web 2.0 include the growth of social networks, bi–directional communication, various ‘glue’ technologies, and significant diversity in content types. We are not aware of a technical comparison between Web 1.0 and 2.0. While most of Web 2.0 runs on the same substrate as 1.0, there are some key differences. We capture those differences and their implications for technical work in this paper. Our goal is to identify the primary differences leading to the properties of interest in 2.0 to be characterized. We identify novel challenges due to the different structures of Web 2.0 sites, richer methods of user interaction, new technologies, and fundamentally different philosophy. Although a significant amount of past work can be reapplied, some critical thinking is needed for the networking community to analyze the challenges of this new and rapidly evolving environment.

From TechCrunch…

Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.

Fake officially left last Friday. Butterfield (who still officially runs Flickr) will leave on July 12. Kakul Srivastava, the director of product management for Flickr, will take over Stewart’s role as general manager of Flickr. Sara Wood will take over Kakul’s previous position.

From what we hear, neither has imminent plans to work on any new projects, but I suspect we haven’t heard the last from either of them.

Butterfield and Fake created Flickr in 2004. It began as a photo-sharing feature of a gaming project, has since blossomed into one of the premier photo sharing sites on the web. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. In June 2007 Yahoo shutdown Yahoo Photos, making Flickr their exclusive photo sharing website. Today Flickr hosts over 2 billion images.

Wonder what they will do next?

Register report:

The mean size of a web page has more than trebled since 2003 from 97.3KB to more than 312KB, according to a review of available research by WebsiteOptimization.com.

The mean number of objects per page has meanwhile near-doubled from 25.7 to 49.9. The authors blame external objects for the majority of delays experienced by web browsers.

The last calendar year saw sites really pack on the data poundage with widgets, gadgets, web crapps, embedded video and other mashtastic tinsel. The average page swelled by more than 60KB to 312KB by the end of December. Projections put next new year’s weigh-in at 385KB.

While broadband connections have more than kept pace with the rapidly fattening web, those stuck using dial-up are increasingly marginalised, unable to view many sites unless they plan a weekend around it.

What with Amazon S3 and now Google’s App Engine readily available? The Google service is currently free (premium accounts coming later) but even a free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

Webware 100 Awards 2008

Adobe has launched an online version of PhotoShop Elements. Only available to those with US ISPs at present, though.

From Lifehacker.