Rev2.org

Newly born news distribution platform, News Exchange, made its debut on Monday and has been making waves since. The company behind News Exchange, Publish2 is hoping to challenge Associated Press (AP) with their new platform. Even though AP is a not-for-profit organisation, it is reported to generate revenue of almost $700m, and News Exchange wants a slice of the cake by making an “…AP for the 21st Century…”

Publish2 has engineered a collaborative journalism network where free and paid-for content is distributed to subscribers who can publish free or purchased content via their respective media channels, be it print or online. Squarely aimed at news providers and publishers, Publish2 has signed several new media publishers including Mashable, engadget and TechCrunch to feed the co-operative. This should enable content normally limited to an online audience to be distributed via other more traditional media.

Currently in beta, News Exchange has a limited feature set but Publish2 is using the $2.75 million dollars it raised during it’s initial funding round to implement additional features. Upcoming features include analytics which would allow publishers to quantify views and other important metrics as well as a fully featured tagging system.

A particularly interesting feature is the News Exchange marketplace. Providers could set their own prices and business models for news buyers allowing pay-as-you-go or unlimited access fees.

There’s a big hill to climb in terms of recruiting enough content providers to attain some momentum but as a finalist in TechCrunch’s Disrupt competition, News Exchange looks set to give AP a run for its money.

Spotify Music Pro@ile is the new feature set from popular music service Spotify. Integrating with Facebook, Spotify believes it has created a true social music network. Spotify’s goal is to be ‘your only music source’ in what Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder and chief executive, says is the ‘the biggest change to Spotify since our launch’.

The star feature is the new Facebook integration option, which allows a user to view the tracks that their friends are listening to, as well as a feature allowing them to recommend songs. When signed in, the Spotify/Facebook feature will appear in a people sidebar, listing all Facebook friends who are also subscribed to the Spotify feature.

Spotify now also integrates with the music library on a user’s PC, allowing users to merge their own tracks into Spotify playlists. Using the Gracenote service, Spotify imports and titles the music on the local PC. Premium users can synchronise their playlist with Spotify’s mobile client which works even if the artist is not in the Spotify database, as Spotify will wirelessly upload the content.

Spotify is a closed peer to peer music service streaming application from a Swedish company. The service features instant playing of any track or album, with no buffering. The new features are part of the Spotify 0.4.3 software which is being rolled out now, although Spotify says it might take a while to reach all users, there is currently no way to force the upgrade.

Some people think of Spokeo as just another social networking app.  Others see it as a glorified phone book or search engine.  Both are right, but not quite entirely so.  Spokeo is a social hub that offers information syndication and aggregation from everything you use: search engines, blogs, Twitter, you name it.

Mainly, though, Spokeo is a people search engine.  At least, that’s what it is now.  I spoke with Harrison, one of Spokeo’s founders and a frequent poster to the Spokio Blog.  The company started in 2006 as a search aggregation tool for social networks and has blossomed into a true people finding tool.  He says they’re up to 12 employees and counting now, as the company and app grow quickly.  That’s 4 coders, 1 graphic designer, 1 project designer, 1 business person, and 5 customer service reps.

“The 4.0 version that you see today (the one that gets a lot of press right now) is our first attempt at expanding beyond organizing social information, and it launched only a month ago,” Harrison says.

So far, the app and business of Spokeo runs on its own funding, bootstrapping by the four founders: Harrison, Ray, Eric and Mike.  All Stanford graduates.

The site and app themselves have done well, riding high on recent media attention, but going strong since beginning in 2006.  The popularity of the app, especially in this new iteration, is thanks in large part to its usefulness.  It fills a large hole in the current Web2.0 landscape: users can find one another on individual sites, if they know what to look for, but not across sites very easily.

Spokeo is a great showcase of boostrap entrepreneurs who have found a niche, are filling it, and are growing their business quickly thanks to their ingenuity.

Most developers and their startups are looking to build that ìkiller app.î The one thing that, once people start using it, they’ll wonder how they ever did without. Lately, the platform of choice to build these killer apps around is Twitter. Last week, Twitter’s top investor, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, wrote a piece for Business Insider that rocked the world of Twitter developers.

An uproar of “Twitter is abandoning” and “Twitter is screwing” and “Twitter is [insert evil deed here]” hit the blogosphere and developer forums. Because Twitter is the top interface (API) for building third-party apps around, there was bound to be some backlash to Wilson’s statements.

Just what did he say, anyway?

“Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.”

With this and his article, Wilson intimated that Twitter has been allowing too many non-affiliated application builders to horn in on its basic services. Of course, Twitter’s basic service is micro-blogging at 140 characters or less, but there are so many things that surround that (most of which Wilson names) that it’s hard not to wonder why Twitter doesn’t have built-ins in some of these areas.

Another thing that Wilson alluded to, that goes largely ignored in the commentary around the Web on the subject, is the continually-changing atmosphere that is Web and mobile app development. He mentions that in the early 1980s, companies like General Computer (making external hard drives for the Apple, which had no HD), Lotus (software for the PC), and others all were hot commodities with “killer apps.” They were filling a hole that existed in the current technology and were, thus, doing very well.

Once the original owners of the technology began to fill that hole themselves, however, those killer apps became obsolete. Eventually, Apple started putting hard drives directly into their computers and Microsoft came out with a full Office suite that included a spread sheet to replace Lotus.

When I contacted Fred Wilson to further substantiate this idea, he respectfully declined and said that he’d said all he intended to say on the subject in that original article. He said a lot, I think, but the message is largely being unheard.

What Wilson is saying is that most “killer apps” are not very long lived. They have their heyday and then changes in technology, marketplace movements, or other things eventually make them obsolete. Technology moves fast and even the original platform itself (in this case Twitter) will either move with it or die. Twenty years ago, there was no Facebook, there were no “blogs,” and there was no Twitter. Eventually, there will again be no Facebook and no Twitter and probably no blogs as we know them today.

As if to substantiate the evolutionary nature of apps, Twitter, earlier this week, acquired Tweetie (now to be renamed “Twitter for iPhone”), the popular Twitter application for the Apple smart phone platform. The fact that this popular iPhone app will now be under the Twitter pavilion and offered for free will likely cause some turmoil in the Twitter application development arena.

I mentioned Tweetphoto (a Twitter-based photo-sharing app) recently getting another cash infusion from venture capitalists to Florian Seroussi, an entrepreneur “geek,” and he replied “I share Fred Wilson’s opinion on hole fillers. Moreover I think 3rd party applications that do not offer added value to Twitter are betting on a buy out. Lame attitude.”

All of this goes to show that application developers cannot sit back and be happy once their killer app starts taking off. Apps have a limited lifespan and anyone in this business who doesn’t realize that will go from one disappointment to another.

Zynga is the leading maker of social media games like Farmville and Mafia Wars.  You know, the games you love to hate on Facebook and Myspace.  The equity analysts at SecondShares have put a dollar figure on the value of Zynga if it were publicly traded (it’s a privately-held company).  That value is $5 billion.

Yes, Billion with a B.

They also think that by 2015, the value could double to $10B.

Suddenly, robbing banks and attacking your rivals with a shotgun and two Colt .45s doesn’t seem quite as lame anymore.  Maybe these addictive games are really worth something.

SecondShares based their valuation on a lot of things, including outstanding shares (venture mostly), growth rate, and so forth.  The largest amount of value, however, comes from Zynga’s user base.  It’s sheer size, length of captivity within each game (most spend at least 20 minutes a day), and the current revenues per user (from buying game items to clicking on ads).

This user metric is astoundingly profitable and beats most Web-based user-retention schemes by a long shot.  Few Internet properties can boast the kind of user numbers and time spent engaged that Zynga can.

The authors of the report were Lou Kerner (formerly Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs), Eli Halliwell (Sanford Bernstein), and Jay Gould (Gamers Media CEO).  They measure Zynga as the number one gaming platform online in social media with an estimated 237 million monthly active users and 6 of the top 7 social games right now.  That puts them leagues ahead of the next-largest competitor, Electronic Arts (who owns Playfish) and CrowdStar.

Wow.  Who knew that time wasters like Farmville were actually worth money?

Our lives are becoming increasingly digital and more focused on reputation than ever before. Job applicants aren’t just subject to a couple of calls to listed references and a quick check of past employment. Now, human resource managers are doing background checks, running credit scores, and even Googling their prospects.

Yes, many HR managers now put prospective employees into search engines to see what comes up. You can learn a lot about a person by just putting their name in Google and hitting the search button.

The trouble is, what appears and what is actual may not be the same. The truth is subjective on the Internet and what is displayed as how it is may not be what it really was. A friend of mine, for instance, was horrified to find himself listed as a member of a Neo-Nazi group ñ right on the first page results of a search for his name.

Of course, the person they were referring to wasn’t my friend, but they had the same name. Do you think a prospective employer would have known, though? Worse yet, what if the article had been referring to him directly, as a smear (or even honest reporting mistake)?

This happens and it happens more often than some people might think.

Your online reputation is a valuable commodity. My book, Do It Yourself Online Reputation Management, covers this and shows you how to make your reputation on the Internet appear rock-solid to anyone who checks it. As my co-author Herb Tabin says, “All of us are a brand now. Whether you like it or not, you’re name and reputation are a brand that you present to people when you meet them online or off.”

Making sure that Brand You is all that it can be is easy. Similar to cleaning up your dirty (and inaccurate) credit history on your credit report, scrubbing the dirt away from your online reputation is easy to do and only requires a little knowledge and persistence.

You don’t need specialized knowledge or skills, but you do need to know where to go and what to do in order to remove bad references from search engines, websites, and so forth. Luckily, that knowledge is easy to get and anyone can utilize it to make their online reputation pristine.