Adobe builds a social network around Photoshop
Today, Adobe has introduced Photoshop Marketplace a site that is part e-commerce, part social network, and part knowledge base for the company's famous photo editing software.
Adobe hopes to create the definitive site for Photoshop-related resources, tools, and services. To populate the Marketplace by its scheduled launch later in the summer, Adobe encourages partners to sign up and contribute their plug-ins, extensions, educational resources, communities, or event listings to the site. Once launched, users will be able to review and recommend these submissions based upon functionalism and popularity.
Yahoo to close GeoCities
AOL took down its Journals and Hometown services, and now Yahoo's following suit with its own GeoCities, the hosting service that once upon a dot-com bubble seemed to include half the personal sites on the Web.
Yahoo isn't currently providing a lot of detail about what users can expect from the shutdown process, other than that it'll happen "later this year," probably in the summer timeframe. As that unknown date nears, says GeoCities Help Page, "We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time."
Public Broadcasting joins the streaming pack
PBS has unveiled the beta site for online consumption of its most popular programs in the way that network counterparts ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and the CW have already done.
Like Hulu, both clips and full-length episodes are presented in Flash, however, they are not embeddable in other sites, as they are through PBS' YouTube page. Videos include a pre-roll sponsorship slot and no in-video advertisements.
Facebook governance voting ends today
You've got just a few hours to cast your vote for your preferred documents of Facebook governance. Do you prefer the current Facebook-written terms of use (the ones to which the site rolled back after that disastrous sortie back in February)? Or are you more in tune with the version incorporating comments from users and advice from experts not named Zuckerberg? Over half a million people so far have an opinion on the matter.
The gist of the user-input version, as summarized in a Facebook Town Hall blog post, is clarity: clear language, clear limits on how Facebook can use user content, and clear procedures for changing terms of service. And though we don't mean to mess things up with a premature exit poll, there's clearly a preference already among voters, with around three-quarters of the "electorate" pulling for the crowdsourced version of the terms of service. Voting ends today at 11:59am Pacific; go now.
MPAA cheers online distribution, glosses over YouTube
In February, the US Senate cut nearly $250 million in aid to the motion picture industry from the economic stimulus bill. Legislators determined that Hollywood studios didn't need the "bailout" after enjoying several months of record-breaking sales.
Yesterday, however, the Motion Picture Association of America attempted to show lawmakers how important the entertainment industry is to the global economy, releasing a study (PDF available here) which suggests, "The production and distribution of motion pictures and television programs is one of the nation's most valuable cultural and economic resources," and therefore worthy of hefty tax breaks.
At last, Windows Live Messenger has a Web interface
Better late than, um... what took so long, again? Never mind: Microsoft's release this week of a Web interface to its Windows Live Messenger instant-messaging service is good news for users in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the UK and the US. (The rest of you are going to have to wait.)
The interface can be reached from one's Windows Live Hotmail or People pages -- in other words, from any computer that can get online. (It worked fine from my Mac and Linux boxes, and from within Firefox.) Sign in as usual and there's a Messenger option in the upper-right corner; you can sign in or, if you need your privacy at the moment, you can ignore it.
Interview: Former WSJ publisher Gordon Crovitz on paying for online news
For newspapers that have seen their advertising revenue -- especially in classifieds -- cut in half or worse by the rapid acceleration of Internet news as an alternative, publishers are faced with a situation where they must transform themselves in order to survive. Just over the last few days, we've learned that Gannett, publisher of USA Today and The New York Times Co. are posting losses for the last quarter at an annual rate of as much as one-fifth, on account of declining ad revenue. Some may not be able to sustain similar losses through the rest of the year, and the Times Co. is threatening the shutdown of the Boston Globe.
Maybe newspaper publishers can save some form of their print media products, and maybe they can't; but in any event, they will need to find some way to make their online operations workable, because print alone will no longer sustain the newspaper business.
Google debuts even more unbelievably helpful labs
Google Labs today officially announced the "Similar Images" and "Google News Timeline" tools, which have been deepening the well of useful search apps from the number one search provider since late last week.
Similar Images does exactly as its name suggests. When in Google Image search, queries for common or ambiguous terms frequently yield a lot of undesired results. A search for "colt," for example, could return images of a gun, a horse, a car, or an American football player: quite disparate results. By clicking the "Similar Images" tag under an appropriate picture, the search is narrowed to only the pictures that look similar to the chosen result.
Eighteenth W3C tackles the Web at 20
As we mourn the passing of the first great Internet company (into the maw of Larry Ellison), academics are gathering in Barcelona for the eighteenth World Wide Web Conference. Underway already but officially kicking off Wednesday, W3C will look both forward at where researchers believe the Web to be heading, and back at its 20-year history.
In the beginning, of course -- when Sun's sunsite.*.* efforts were supporting the first great explosion of Web creativity -- things were moving so fast they had to have W3C twice a year. (Your reporter was in attendance for the second, "Mosaic and the Web;" for a blast of real nostalgia, check out the best-of-the-Web awards given at the very first W3C, held five months previous.)
Zoho gets widget-y on iGoogle, Facebook, more
Zoho may never have the name recognition of a Google or even an OpenOffice, but the company's quest to provide a comprehensive, extraordinarily Web-friendly business application suite continues. Widgets are the latest addition to its stable.
The six Zoho Gadgets -- Docs, Mail, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, and Planner -- are available for Facebook, iGoogle, and Orkut, as well as sites cognizant of OpenSocial XML (e.g., MySpace, Blogspot, Zoho or other wikis), and there's a generic embeddable version as well. The company says on its blog that more will come.
Guilty verdicts in Pirate Bay case
We'll have more on this story later today, but be advised that the Swedish court has returned with four guilty verdicts in the Pirate Bay trial. Founders Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde have been sentenced to a year each in jail and millions of dollars in damages.
The BBC has an early report, and Sunde, who was made aware of the verdict several hours before its official announcement, tweeted the results and noted that "Nothing will happen to TPB, this is just theatre for the media." Needless to say, an appeal is in the works, as is a press conference by TPB.
Time Warner retreats from plan to test capping subscriber bandwidth
After delaying its plan to test capping subscriber bandwidth usage, Time Warner has opted to retreat from the approach altogether.
In a statement today, Chief Executive Office Glenn Britt said, "It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met."
You can build your own photo mosaics with National Geographic
You know those composite picture mosaics, where thousands of individual photographs are combined into a single, large image? National Geographic Digital Media has debuted a photo community tool that creates an infinitely zoomable loop of that sort called Infinite Photograph.
The application takes between 200 and 500 user-uploaded photographs from the My Shot public database and turns them into the finished mosaic which can be endlessly zoomed through. Eventually, National Geographic says the tool will be turned over to users to let them build an infinite photograph out of solely their own photos.
Simple economics: Week one of the iTunes price change
Billboard magazine today said that sales of newly-priced iTunes tracks are trending downward as a result of last week's price increase. The publication's figures pertain to tracks that were formerly 99¢ and are now $1.29. A price increase of roughly 30% correlated to a 12.5% drop in sales. Meanwhile, tracks that were unchanged in price actually sold 10% more than the previous week, and sales were up 3% overall.
It is a path that labels do not want sales to follow. Before the changes went into effect, a major label executive who wished to remain anonymous, told Reuters, "If we can gain traction with $1.29 that will be good for greater margin."
YouTube, Susan Boyle, and a slap at snark
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra gathered last night at Carnegie Hall to play an original Tan Dun piece composed specifically for the global competition that brought the group together. It's lovely. But I'm willing to bet that instead you were listening to a heretofore obscure singer absolutely flatten a roomful of doubters with a show tune.
Like a lot of us, I've been watching the Susan Boyle video repeatedly this week, trying to get at what it means for the Internet to have taken to heart, as the Britain's Got Talent audience took to heart, a middle-aged Scotswoman with ungroomed eyebrows and a frumpy Best Dress and a voice that seems to have broken something that needed breaking in hearts around the world.
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