Siri is not available to developers, and there’s no guarantee it will be. But it hasn’t stopped developers from tapping its power. Appsfire, an app discovery service, has created a little hack that allows iPhone 4S users to find apps with their voice. 

Users tell Siri to send an email to Ask Appsfire and in the subject line they can put in the keywords they’re looking for, like “personal finance apps” or “apps for Halloween.” You’ll need to create a contact for Ask Appsfire’s email address first. Leave the body of the email blank, then send it off. Appsfire receives the email, comes up with appropriate answers and emails back the best suggestions, which can take you directly to the App Store for downloading.

If a user has already downloaded an Appsfire App or App Deals app on their phone and signed in though Facebook Connect, they can get a push notification for every matching result. If you don’t have an iPhone 4S, you can still access Ask Appsfire by emailing it the old-fashioned way.

This is a simple fix that works because Appsfire has enabled its service to be accessed via email. But it shows how developers can get Siri to work for them to engage consumers. Ideally, developers will be able to have this built into iOS 5 or into the Appsfire apps, but until that happens, this is one way to leverage the ease of use of Siri.

Ouriel Ohayon, founder of Appsfire, said using Siri was more of a test to see how it can work, and the functionality was designed to help give consumers faster access to the App Store while on the go without having to go through a browsing list. He said until Apple opens up Siri, others will also be looking at this opportunity.

“Siri is a great add-on, and it would be so much better if it was open to developers. I think many services will try to hack it because it is convenient on the go,” he said.

I think Apple will have increasing requests from developers who want to leverage the intelligence of Siri. It’s a great opportunity to really empower a lot of apps if Siri can be embedded; it would help people interact with a lot more apps if they could connect using Siri instead of manually opening apps every time.

Take a look at a video of Ask Appsfire and Siri in action:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”Social media reactions to the iPhone 4SNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

I knew this day would eventually be here, but it still saddens me: According to The Telegraph, Google’s Hugo Barra has said that the Nexus One smartphone won’t officially gain the Android 4.0 upgrade. That means no Ice Cream Sandwich features and updated user interface for my faithful (but dinged up) Nexus One. Unofficially, of course, there’s every reason to believe that my 22 month old handset will get a third-party port.

My Nexus has seen at least 100 custom ROM flashes, so one more is no big deal, especially if the hardware itself can handle it. I initially figured that Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich software would require a dual-core processor, but that’s not the case. Google will be bringing Android 4.0 to the Nexus S, which like my Nexus One, uses a single-core CPU.

The biggest internal difference between the two Nexus phones is actually in the storage capacity. My Nexus One has a scant 512 MB of internal memory, of which only 190 MB is available for application storage. In contrast, the Nexus S has 16 GB of storage, with 1 GB considered internal storage and the remaining 15 GB as external / USB memory. A third-part port of Android 4.0 then, could be a tight squeeze on the Nexus One.

This is just another sign that it might be time for me to let go of the ol’ Nexus. I hung on to it mainly because as a Google phone, it was often the first to see Android update – directly from Google itself, not from the carriers. Now that it won’t, and considering there are far more advanced Android phones available — yes, I’m looking at you Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy Nexus — I’m planning moving on to a new Android phone.

So long, Google Nexus One. Thanks for the ride and for showing me how Android has matured from a clunky touchscreen user interface to something far more useful and usable. Your dessert-named software always satisfied my tastes.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProMobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continuesU.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008

Facebook isn’t a true PayPal competitor, but it’s taking some steps toward becoming an online payments provider outside of its Facebook properties. The social networking giant has begun testing the use of Facebook Credits on two games, Uno Boost and Collapse! Blast, both available on gaming portal GameHouse.

In the test, users of those games will have only one choice of payment option, Facebook Credits, instead of the usual GameHouse options of paying by credit card or PayPal. Players will be able to integrate their game experience of these games on both GameHouse and Facebook and pay for goods from one funding source. Facebook and GameHouse, a unit of RealNetworks, are looking to see how players react to the option, which will determine how each proceeds with Facebook Credits.

This could be a big springboard for Facebook to become a major payments player if it aggressively takes its Facebook Credits to other properties on the web. It’s already made Facebook Credits mandatory for gaming apps on Facebook as of July 1 and an option for other Facebook apps. It recently extended credits to mobile app developers who want to build HTML5 apps on its mobile platform. It was also allowing people to pay using Facebook Credits for things like Facebook Deals. If it can leverage its relationships with Facebook Connect publishers, it can offer a fast and easy payment alternative to credit cards, PayPal or other phone billing options.

Facebook would likely have to lower its cut of transactions, which is currently 30 percent for Facebook developers, if it wants to move beyond virtual goods. But if it got it down to a percentage that was competitive, say around 5 percent or so, it could build off the many Facebook users that already have Facebook Credits. Websites like GameHouse, as well as independent game developers, may stand to benefit if they can drive more transactions with the help of Facebook Credits.

As I wrote before, this could be a stepping stone to Facebook Credits becoming a larger payment service. Right now, it’s not really participating in that battle, but if it can tap its existing relationships with more than 800 million users it might be able to put together a formidable mobile payment competitor. As Erick Tseng, head of mobile products for Facebook, told the crowd at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference last month, the social networking giant is increasingly becoming a mobile company. It stands to reason that Facebook would love to see how far it can take Facebook Credits and make it into a tool that can start with online mobile transactions for virtual goods but could transition into something bigger, first with purchases of physical goods online and then, who knows, perhaps into offline transactions.

That’s a long ways off, but it’s not unheard of. PayPal is making the transition from an online payment company to one that is now poised to target point of sale transactions. Facebook obviously would need to do a whole lot of work to follow in those footsteps. And it has a lot of hurdles in becoming a major payment player: Ogilvy & Mather conducted a survey and found that Facebook was the least trusted option for mobile payments trailing Visa, MasterCard, American Express and PayPal by a wide distance.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is eyeing this market. Mobile payments is booming now and expected to become a $670 billion market by 2015. But it starts with small tests like the one with GameHouse. GameHouse president Matthew Hulett said the test will help drive more users to GameHouse as it tries to expand its business to both social and mobile. He said he’s looking forward to bringing Facebook Credits to its 75 mobile apps as well.

“People already have cash balances on Facebook and the amount of friction this reduces is so much greater for us, we haven’t seen any negative impact on us using Facebook Credits after the mandated date of July 1 and I’m very confident consumers like to pay this way,” he said.

Hulett said he believes though its early Facebook Credits could be a big driver of revenue for Facebook, similar to how PayPal has become the main engine of growth for eBay. That will still be ways off, but if Facebook plays its cards right and learns important lessons along the way, it might not be a stretch.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Mobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunitiesReport: Monetizing Digital ContentFlash analysis: the future of Yahoo

Talk of government regulation of web entities has been all over the news lately, from the near daily privacy complaints to Google’s antitrust woes to questions about how the Fourth Amendment applies to email. While these are important discussions to have, almost every attempt to shoehorn current practices into existing legal frameworks suffers from a common problem: Yesterday’s laws are antiquated in a web-driven world that rarely sits still.

Software development is always evolving and advancing, and business models and cultural norms evolve along with it. Entirely new capabilities spring up regularly, and business models can change overnight, meaning a law written to address a specific concern can fast become obsolete or, perhaps worse, a hindrance to innovation. Three recent situations illustrate what I’m talking about.

Netflix, Facebook and privacy
I’ve discussed the issue of online privacy in numerous posts, and two considerations strike me as absolutely critical. One is that in the free-to-consumers-but-ad-supported business model that underpins most social media, data is the currency. Failure to recognize this and allow certain freedoms could cripple not only the user experience, but also the high rate of analytics innovation that companies like Facebook produce.

Another — probably even more important issue — is an apparent failure to acknowledge that social norms are changing with regard to how willingly citizens share their information. My colleague Ryan Lawler wrote about a prime example of this disconnect earlier this week, in the form of congressmen debating the decades-old, reactionary and wholly archaic Video Privacy Protection Act that currently prevents U.S. consumers from automatically displaying their Netflix rentals on Facebook.

That law, which prohibits companies from publicly sharing viewer records, “was enacted in the wake of the Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination hearings (after Bork’s video rental records were released to a newspaper by his local video store).”

The problem — aside from the its reactionary and therefore inherently inflexible foundation — is that the law was written in an era when video stores still existed (and were the primary method of renting movies, in fact) and well before the advent of social media. In the latter world, automation and APIs rule, and many users really do want what Facebook calls “frictionless sharing.” Certainly, many more will want it in the future. That might not comport with many congresspersons’ views on personal privacy, but it’s reality.

Google’s violating antitrust laws in what market, exactly?
The recent congressional inquiry into Google’s trade practices highlights the bad fit between traditional antitrust law and the web. Mathew Ingram has written a lot about why the questions about Google’s search dominance are misguided, addressing the question of whether there’s such a thing as consumer harm when we’re talking about free products that no one is forced to use. That point alone highlights a big difference between the web and traditional businesses, but there’s another consideration that’s even more damning.

However, as Mathew also points out, the web world is one of constant disruption, and Google, despite its considerable size, is constantly fighting to define its place in the ecosystem. Antitrust violations require abusing one’s power in a particular market, and Google doesn’t operate in a clearly defined market of any sort. In its inquiry, Congress focused heavily on search as the relevant market, but that’s fast becoming yesterday’s news. As Google continues losing traffic to Facebook and other platforms, search becomes part of a broader effort that includes social elements, location services and other components.

This raises questions around how to define the market in which Google actually plays, and whether it’s actually even in the lead. Sure, there’s search for the sake of search, but if Google’s search engine is part of a greater platform market that aims to connect users with relevant information, services and other people, then it’s arguable that Google doesn’t have a monopoly position at all.

No warrant needed for tweets
Then there’s the old argument over what web-based activities are covered by the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. This issue reared its head again when we learned that Twitter, Google and an ISP called Sonic.net had been forced to turn over information about a particular WikiLeaks supporter. The law in question, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (or ECPA), was enacted in 1986 — ages ago in technology terms — and services such as Twitter fall far beyond its scope.

There’s a fair amount of momentum to amend the act (something attorney Nolan Goldberg and I discussed during a chat at Structure 2011), but you have to wonder how thoroughly that actually can be done. We still don’t really know how it applies to email, especially of the web-based variety. But in the past few years alone Facebook, Twitter, text messages and other communication methods have usurped email’s dominance.

Assuming an amended ECPA fairly addresses today’s forms of electronic communications, it will take some careful wording to account for tomorrow’s methods that have yet to emerge. The alternative, given the pace of innovation, is a constant battle over what communications are constitutionally protected, which only serves to hinder adoption and stoke fears over undue government surveillance.

There’s no easy answer
Unfortunately, while it’s easy to criticize existing laws, figuring out a workable strategy for regulating the web is difficult. Laws and regulations by nature involve establishing boundaries so those of us tasked with following them know what we can and can’t do. But because code can be edited, added and rolled back with relative ease, nothing is ever static — and we don’t always know what we’ll be doing next.

Image courtesy of Flickr user RecoilRick.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaConnected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shinesConnected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes

Screenshot of Foursquare 4.0 Radar (click to enlarge)

Foursquare on Wednesday launched a new version of its mobile application for the iPhone, Foursquare 4.0.

The biggest change in Foursquare 4.0 is the addition of an opt-in feature called Radar, which is made possible by the latest version of Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, iOS 5.

Radar sends notifications to users based on where they are to remind them to check-in. These alerts are triggered in several ways: when users are close to a place they’ve added to their To-Do list, when they’re close to a place that’s on a Foursquare list they follow, or when three or more friends are checked into a nearby venue. The Radar feature works whether the Foursquare app is open or not, the company said in a blog post.

Radar is an interesting extension of Foursquare’s lists feature, which made its debut in August. Now that the app knows about places a user hopes to visit, vs only knowing about places she’s visited in the past, a feature like Radar can be useful instead of annoying. In all, it seems like a smart evolution for Foursquare, which has been on a growth and R&D tear since it secured $50 million in new venture capital in June.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Shopping Matters When it Comes to Location-Based AppsNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaThe future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Zynga may be best known for its hit online and mobile games — household names such as FarmVille and Words with Friends — but the company has its eye on a much bigger prize. On Tuesday, Zynga held “Zynga Unleashed,” its first major press event at the company’s expansive new headquarters in San Francisco to give the public a look at the size and scope of its ambitions.

“We’re not trying to be the company that makes the next hit game,” Zynga’s founder and CEO Mark Pincus said. “We’re trying to do something broader than that. We’re trying to make a platform for play… We want to inspire you to connect with more people in meaningful ways, similar to what Facebook’s doing but at a game level.”

Project Z unveiled
As part of that mission, Zynga unveiled Zynga Direct, which Pincus said is an over-arching strategy that has been in the works for two years to let Zynga establish a direct relationship with its users — as opposed to accessing them through a third-party platform like Facebook. The first move in the Zynga Direct strategy is the upcoming launch of a social games platform, which has been codenamed internally Project Z. Project Z isn’t launching now, but starting Tuesday, users can reserve “gamer identity tags” known as zTags at ztag.zynga.com.

Zynga Direct's zTag signup page (click to enlarge)

At the press event, Zynga COO John Schappert described Project Z as “a platform that leverages your incredible network of Facebook friends to play in an environment made just for games.” Within Project Z users will be able to play any Zynga game within the same environment on any browser. Since Project Z is enabled by Facebook Connect, it’s not completely independent of third-party platforms, but it is certainly a major autonomous step for Zynga.

Also on Tuesday, Zynga announced several new games, including CastleVille, Hidden Chronicles and Zynga Casino featuring Zynga Bingo. The company also said it will soon have three HTML5 games that run on Facebook’s new HTML5-powered mobile site.

Showing financial strength — very quietly
Since the company has filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in anticipation of the initial public offering of its stock, Zynga is currently in a “quiet period” that forbids its executives from talking about business or financial details. But while Zynga kept the conversation purely focused on its products, and not the massive amount of money they pull in, the company is clearly keen to show off the way it has been reinvesting its sizable revenues into new initiatives.

Zynga currently has 1,700 employees, half of whom are engineers, and company CTO Cadir Lee said it is investing heavily in technology development and infrastructure. “We’re one of the world’s largest users of public and private cloud computing,” Lee said, adding that Zynga “has been known to deploy 1,000 servers in a week.”

That certainly sounds like a lot, but for a company looking to raise up to $1 billion in its planned IPO, it is actually right on track. One thing is clear: There’s a lot of serious money behind all of Zynga’s fun and games.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Flash analysis: the tech startup investment environment, Q3 2011Post-IPO strategies for LinkedInA 2011 NewNet Forecast

The Dutch Senate is going paperless, and the iPad is going to get them there. The upper house of parliament for the Netherlands was told two weeks ago it would only have paper to rely on for one more week, after which point, the iPad and a special Senate-specific app would replace documents and printouts (via Reuters).

Dutch Senators are the first in Europe to try such an ambitious project, and two weeks into the experiment, reported being mostly “delighted” with how it’s progressing so far. Some document printing is still permitted, but by and large, reference information, calendars, proposed legislation, correspondence and meeting notes are handled through the special Senate app on iPads.

While the program, including the app development and iPad purchases, cost €150,000 (around $204,150 USD), Dutch Senate Secretary General Geert Jan Hamilton told Reuters it would save the Senate around €140,000 in paper printing costs during the first year alone. After that, upkeep for the program will only be around €35,000 per year, so the Senate will quickly be able to recoup their initial investment and save plenty besides.

The program by the Dutch Senate is only the latest example of a growing push to replace paper workflows and supporting documents with digital equivalents via the iPad. Airlines are also testing similar programs, as are local municipal governments in the U.S., and medical professionals. The iPad’s disruptive effective in government, education and business may eventually become its most financially advantage outcome for Apple. Though it will take longer to materialize than the iPad’s consumer success, since large organizations move at a slower pace than the average gadget-buyer, we could eventually see the iPad become for business what the Dell PC tower once was.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Millennials in the enterprise, part 2: benchmarking IT’s readiness for the new digital workforceMillennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforceNewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

LG introduced a new 4.5-inch smartphone display on Monday that rivals the resolution of a high-definition television set. The True HD IPS screen packs a 1280×720 resolution (720p) and LG’s Mobile HD Graphics Engine, which “offers advanced resolution, brightness and clarity and shows colors in their most natural tones.”

Such a screen rivals that of Apple’s Retina Display, which is used on the current iPod touch and iPhone models. These boast 960×640 resolution in a 3.5-inch screen, which works out to 329.65 pixels per inch. At that level, the human eye can’t detect individual pixels when the phone is held at normal usage distance, making for an extremely crisp viewing experience. LG’s True HD IPS provides 326.36 pixels per inch, which is essentially identical.

Last week, LG introduced its Optimus LTE; the company’s first phone that will use a True HD IPS screen. The handset, debuting in Korea, is launching with Android 2.3. I’d hope that any phones that use a 1280×720 display would see an upgrade to the next version of Android — Ice Cream Sandwich — so high-resolution Android tablet applications could easily run on the handsets.

Android 3.2 introduced new screen-density APIs to help developers code a single application for multiple screen sizes, but that version is intended for tablet applications. Ice Cream Sandwich is expected to unify the Android smartphone and tablet platforms. An upcoming Google Nexus phone, dubbed the Nexus Prime, is expected to showcase Ice Cream Sandwich on a rumored 4.65-inch, 1280×720 screen.

Regardless of the current and future version of Android supported by phones with this display, the end-user benefit will remain the same in terms of visuals. User-created content such as high-definition video and still images will look much better, for starters. High definition video purchases or rentals will also shine and won’t require any conversion to a lower-quality format, while gaming too could be vastly improved.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProA Global Mobile Handset Platform Forecast, 2011 – 2015What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

Apple unveiled its latest handset, the iPhone 4S, at the company’s Cupertino headquarters on Tuesday, showing off new software and updated hardware features. The phone will be available for pre-order on Oct. 7 with a starting price of $199 and availability one week later. Apple’s iOS 5, the updated operating system for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad will be available as a free download on October 12.

I’ve been using Google Android on a full-time basis for almost two years now, having bought a Google Nexus One in January 2010. I’ll be honest; with iOS 5, Apple has addressed some of the reasons why I left the platform in favor of Google. I’ve used iOS 5 for a few months on an iPod touch and it has impressed me — from less intrusive notifications to wireless data synchronization with iCloud to improved Twitter integration.

Still missing for me is the outstanding Google service integration I find native to Android. But even there, I’ve seen improvements. The Google Voice app is now supported. Mail in iOS gained the ability to archive mail instead of simply deleting it all. And it’s pretty simple to connect multiple Google calendars to an iOS device too. I’d love to see Apple add customizable widgets, but I’ve already seen widget-like functionality in the new notification lock screen, so perhaps developers will be able to build some.

Hey phone, I’m talking to you!
New to iOS 5 is a function I haven’t yet seen in the beta operating system; from what I read on our live-blog of the Apple event, Siri Assistant wowed the audience. Near as I can tell, only the new iPhone 4S will be able to use Siri, because only the new phone has the A5 dual-core processor and perhaps enough RAM to make Siri work. Here’s an official Apple demonstration video of Siri:

Android owners likely already know that voice control has long been part of Google’s native platform since 2009. And third-party options with improved speech-to-text recognition, such as Vlingo and Nuance, are also available for Android. I’ve used them all, and while they work well, Siri looks to go a bit further due to its contextual integration with several iOS apps.

Instead of being an afterthought or add-on to the platform, Siri is more accurately described as part of the platform. I expect Apple to expand Siri’s integration over time as well. And unlike the Android voice action solutions, Apple will market the heck out of Siri’s capabilities and likely do more to bring voice recognition to mainstream users as a result.

Hardware wars
As far as the iPhone 4S itself, all the hardware changes are on the inside. Among the more prominent upgrades:

Apple’s A5 dual-core processor
8-megapixel backlit illuminated camera sensor with f/2.4 aperture and 1080p video recording
World phone with CDMA and GSM support, including a 14.4 Mbps HSPA+ radio
8 hours of talk time; 6 hours of 3G talk time; 9 hours of Wi-Fi browsing; 40 hours of listening to music

Many of these features can already be found in today’s Android phones in the price range. The Samsung Galaxy S II I recently showed off on video is a good example. It too has a dual-core chip; the 8-megapixel camera is superb both for stills and 1080p video; and it supports even faster download speeds –up to 21 Mbps — for the same $199 price in a 16 GB model. And that’s just one example; there are a number of capable Android phones that compete well with the iPhone 4S hardware, not to mention many more coming soon.

Not that I’m calling the iPhone 4S an incremental upgrade, but it reminds me of Apple’s jump from iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS, which is now free on contract. Along with software updates, Apple bumped up the hardware specifications a bit. Android was just really starting to take off at that time, so it didn’t have the momentum or market share it currently holds. Times are different now. While the Apple faithful will very likely upgrade to an iPhone 4S, I don’t see the device stealing away much of the Android crowd, because the platforms are more similar now than they were two years ago.

Will I make the switch? Sorta, kinda, maybe.
My personal take as an everyday Android user? I may purchase the iPhone 4S, but I’d swap the SIM for use with a high-end Android phone like the Galaxy S II. Even though the iPhone uses a microSIM, I have verified it will work in some phones that take a full-sized SIM card. Most folks have one primary phone, so I’m in the small minority here, of course. But as it stands now, I use an iPod touch for work purposes to test iOS apps.

Had the new iPhone come with a larger display, I’d surely buy one to supplement Android. The same 3.5-inch screen as the iPhone 4 is a downer to me, but I have to say that Siri, the faster processor (used in my iPad 2), iOS 5 improvements and the updated camera might push me to purchase an iPhone 4S; there’s room for both platforms in my life.

Hardware vs. software cycles
One last, related thought pertains to the speed of advancement between iOS and Android. The 12- to 16-month refresh cycles for iPhones are becoming much slower than the constant onslaught of new Android phones and hardware. Chris Pirillo tweeted an insightful tidbit on this:

Follow @ChrisPirillo@ChrisPirilloChris Pirillo
Honestly? Apple has been "behind" with tech specs since the first iPhone. And ya know what? THEY'RE STILL AHEAD.
about 21 hours ago via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

He makes a valid point that I can’t argue with, but I have to wonder: If Google can gain a little more control over hardware, perhaps with its purchase of Motorola, will Apple’s growth continue at the same pace or might Android leverage faster hardware cycles to offer the perception of superior products to the masses?

If I get a new iPhone 4S, that might be the first question I pose to Siri.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProFlash analysis: Steve JobsMobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunities

Rhapsody’s purchase of Napster from Best Buy looks more and more like a glorified funeral. Sure, Rhapsody gains a few hundred thousand new subscribers — even though it’s unclear how many will actually stay around — and the company may even get a few interesting patents as a sugar coating.

But for Napster, the deal pretty much means game over. Here are some of the grim details I was able to gather by talking to sources and going through reports:

Napster’s two offices in Los Angeles and San Diego will close, leaving an estimated 120 people without work. A few may get rehired by Rhapsody, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
The official last day for Napster’s employees is Dec. 16, according to a reliable source close to the company. A Rhapsody spokesperson didn’t want to comment on the specific date, but said a few people may stay longer than others to help with the transition.
Reports put the number of current Napster subscribers at less than 400,000, which is down from around 700,000 to 800,000 when Best Buy bought Napster in 2008.
Rhapsody didn’t pay a single dollar in cash for the Napster assets, but gave Best Buy a minority share in its company. Rhapsody President Jon Irving confirmed yesterday that this was an “all-equity deal.”
The cat will cease to exist. The iconic Napster name and logo won’t be used by Rhapsody, at least not in the U.S.
What about Napster’s services abroad? “Business in Canada, the U.K. and Germany isn’t affected and will continue like before,” I was told by Napster VP Sales & Marketing Europe Thorsten Schliesche. However, it’s unclear for how long. A Rhapsody spokesperson explained that Napster’s foreign operations aren’t part of the deal announced this week, but Rhapsody is looking to buy these services through a separate transaction. At that point, all foreign subscribers will be rolled over to the Rhapsody service, but it may continue to be Napster-branded abroad.

Of course, this could all be seen as a necessary consolidation in an industry that’s bracing for new competitors like Spotify. However, browsing LinkedIn  profiles of current Napster employees last night, I not only got the sense that there are a lot of people who’ve been working at the company for close to a decade, only to suddenly find themselves without a job now.

I also have to wonder: Why wasn’t it possible to turn this hugely popular brand into an opportunity to make online music pay?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Updated: 4 reasons Pandora could win the fight for digital musicRankings: Spotify Leads the Streaming Music SceneFacebook and the future of our online lives

There’s been a lot of attention paid recently to the new “social reading” apps that were launched by a number of publishers and content companies — including The Washington Post and The Guardian — at Facebook’s f8 developer conference. Some of that has focused on the “frictionless sharing” that these apps enable, where all of a reader’s activity from the app is shared through the social network, and we’ve pointed out the risks of putting so many eggs into a basket controlled by a large platform owner. But there’s another aspect of these launches that’s troubling, and that’s the pride so many publishers seem to take in having produced a Facebook app, as though it’s the pinnacle of media innovation.

Don’t get me wrong; obviously, creating a nice-looking Facebook app the way The Guardian has takes some skill, and I’m not demeaning that ability by any means. (I don’t like the look of the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal  apps as much, but that might just be a personal preference.) But how much time and effort could these kinds of apps possibly take? There are plenty of people who have created functional Facebook and iPhone apps in a weekend, and some pretty good-looking ones in a matter of weeks. Is something like that going to make a big difference to an entity as huge as the Washington Post or the Journal? That seems unlikely (I realize that most of these apps involved a lot of work and probably took much longer).

Creating a useful or even fun app that allows people to share your content is great, whether it’s a Facebook app or an iPhone app or an app that runs on Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet. And Washington Post publisher Graham is quite right that reaching out to readers wherever they are and trying to engage them around your content is a good idea. Experimentation is also a good idea, especially for newspapers — which aren’t typically known for that kind of thing. But if all you are doing is creating widgets for people who live inside a specific walled garden, then I think you are missing the boat.

Why play in someone else’s sandbox?
As I tried to argue in my previous post, doing this is no different from setting up a presence inside AOL or CompuServe, or distributing those “multimedia” CD-ROMs that newspapers were so enthused about back in the late 1990s. Having a Facebook app does take advantage of the social-sharing activity that has become a bigger and bigger part of the media landscape over the past few years, thanks to Twitter and other tools, but in many ways it’s no different (and in some ways worse) than having a Twitter button or a Facebook “like” on your content — which has effectively become table stakes for media at this point.

So what does innovation consist of? For a start, it involves rethinking not just where your content lives, but how it’s created and what it consists of — in other words, taking apart your business to really look at what has changed thanks to the web and social media, and how you can adapt to that. No app is going to do that for you, and tinkering around in a “lab” probably isn’t going to do it either.

Some media outlets are trying to do this, and rethinking aspects of what media companies do: Forbes, for example, — has blurred the line between “professional journalists” and other content producers, including those who primarily do marketing or advertising-related content. In the new Forbes, posts from marketers show up alongside posts from staff writers for the magazines, just as blog posts by unpaid contributors at The Huffington Post appear alongside those from paid staff. Not everyone likes the gray area Forbes is living in, but you can’t say editor Lewis Dvorkin isn’t trying to rethink his business.

The Atlantic and some other publications, meanwhile, have been focusing on things that don’t even involve what most people would consider journalism — such as live events that are related to the content they are publishing. That’s helped turn the company’s fortunes around, just as similar real-world events have for other content companies like the non-profit Texas Tribune. And the Journal-Register, which I’ve written about before, is rethinking how its newspapers work from all kinds of different angles, including the launch of a “community newsroom” at one of its papers.

Why not think of your paper as a platform?
But The Guardian has taken by far the most dramatic steps of any newspaper in rethinking what its business consists of, with what the paper called its “open platform” project, which launched last year. Instead of spending all its time trying to put walls or sandbags around its content and control where it appeared, the Guardian released an open API that allowed outside developers to make use of its content — provided they agreed to either pay for the data, or form an advertising partnership with the paper. Instead of doing a deal just with one platform vendor like Facebook, they made it possible for anyone to become a partner.

More importantly, The Guardian‘s approach — along with other innovations like the crowdsourcing effort behind its feature on MP expenses in 2009 — was driven by a fundamental rewiring of the way it thought about its purpose and function as a newspaper. Editor Alan Rusbridger has talked about a “mutualised” newspaper, one that includes its readers as partners in discovering and reporting the news, and one that doesn’t think about itself in terms of what particular medium it uses to distribute that news. In other words, not a “news-paper” company at all, but just a news-distribution company.

The Financial Times  hasn’t done anything quite that radical, but it has broken its own ground by pinning its online future on a fully open HTML5 version of the site that works on virtually any device, because all it requires is a browser. That feels a lot more innovative than rolling out a Facebook app or an Amazon app so that readers who use one specific device can interact with your content inside some walled garden.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Sandy Honig and Jeremy Mates

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Facebook and the future of our online livesNewNet Q1: Content Farms and Niche Networks on the RiseContent Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Lots of people were happy when Delicious was rescued by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, and whisked away from the neglect it had been suffering under Yahoo. It was a chance for a rebirth of a small but well-liked social bookmarking service, linking up with some proven entrepreneurs who were trying to show they had a second act. It looked like it could be a case of two great tastes that taste great together.

But when the site relaunched yesterday, I noticed there were a few problems — a few elements that didn’t seem to work for me, or felt strange — and my old account had been deleted because I hadn’t gone through the transfer process.

What I didn’t expect was a high volume of comments pointing out that this was just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the response in this comment thread was unanimous: This relaunch appears to be broken.

Here’s one commenter, Suman, explaining what went wrong:

I had a fairly bad experience with the new Delicious today. Just last week I had spent a few hours curating my saved bookmarks and organizing tags. The new Delicious doesn’t seem to know anything about it. All my effort is lost. There is no longer a bulk-edit function to redo my changes. I can no longer manage my tags – could find no option for deleting old tags. Some of my tags with special characters are now broken, I get a 404 when I try to access them. I am done. Goodbye Delicious.

Meanwhile, many seemed to have the same problem as Mindctrl, who said the transfer of accounts from the old Delicious to the new Delicious was proving problematic: “My account is gone, despite me going through the transfer process. I’ve emailed them and am awaiting a reply.”

And lots of people were angry about the changes to tagging and tag bundles. Ellen said “I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into sorting out tag bundles with hundreds of tags… but now only a small fraction of my tags remain listed, and the bundles are gone!”, and you could hear the anguish when DSP pointed out “I had over 4 thousand tags, now I have just 40. Please tell me this is only temporary!” And that’s just the start. The full comment thread is packed with people complaining about broken features, missing pages, dead feeds.

It’s not just our commenters, either. Over at ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick said he wanted to like it but couldn’t. And Matt Lingard summed it up by showing the lengthy list of features that are “still in development” (many of which were entirely functional under the old design), stating simply, “if you’re this far from being ready, don’t launch.”

So what happened?
It strikes me that there were three possible reasons for this mess. Perhaps they were separate, perhaps they were linked together, perhaps there are others:

AVOS didn’t understand how people were using the website

The changes don’t appear to have a major impact on casual users, but how many casual, active users of Delicious were there? The visual chrome is a welcome addition for a site that’s trying to go more mainstream, but it comes at the expense of information: elements now obscured or made invisible include the tagging system (which has always been one of the site’s core strengths) and the network (the basic unit of social currency on the site). Without these, Delicious is of little use to many of the people who had stuck by it over the years.

AVOS didn’t get how people were using the API

Delicious had a lot of web developers and technologists as users. Many of them used the site’s APIs to pull data in and out, particularly to publish elsewhere — on blogs, news websites. Today, those things are pretty much broken — and, more to the point, there were no signals given beforehand. Nothing has been redirected or pushed elsewhere; no parallel systems seem to have been put in place to give anyone that was hooked up to the API the time — and warning — to change what they were doing. It just broke.

AVOS didn’t understand they were playing with a live product

This is probably the crucial element. In the web industry, we are all very used to developing sites in beta, testing things out, seeing the data that comes out. That’s the development process. Except Delicious wasn’t a new product; it was an existing one with a small but committed following. Those users who loved Delicious really loved it: they’d stuck around through years when the product was given minimal development or resources. They’ve been rewarded with deleted accounts and other problems, which has made them pretty angry.

Maybe the long-term future for Delicious lies away from that user base; but you can’t move them along simply by flipping the switch. Reworking an existing product is not the same as starting from scratch.

When you’re rebuilding or redesigning, you have a legacy to maintain. Yes, that can be a pain — but what else was AVOS buying if it wasn’t the brand and the user base of the site, and the data that they’ve put into it? It clearly wasn’t the technology, which was the first thing to get thrown out the door. When you rebuild a product, you have to remember that it needs to take into account all those people who rely on the service for all sorts of things. At the very least you give them options to fall back on, rather than simply telling them that all the stuff they’ve been using for years will be in the product again… just not yet.

My colleague Mathew Ingram thinks that the only way Delicious can prove it’s really useful in the long term is if the owners can pull quality data out of the site. He may be right, but the trouble is that if the new owners alienate everybody who stuck by it during the bad times, they might not even be able to get that far.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
NewNet Q1: Content Farms and Niche Networks on the RiseContent Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The RisksA 2011 NewNet Forecast

Apple has officially announced its iPhone event, to be held on Oct. 4 as previously reported. The event will take place at Apple’s Cupertino Campus in California, beginning at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT), according to press invitations issued by Apple on Tuesday.

The invitation features a depiction of iPhone home screen icons, and the phrase “Let’s talk iPhone,” so there’s no doubt the next smartphone from Apple will be on the agenda. We’ll be sure to be there watching closely next Tuesday, and will bring you all the news coming out of the event.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProMobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continuesReport: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

Less than a year ago news leaked that Yahoo was planning to “sunset” the social bookmarking service Delicious. Then the company backtracked, saying it didn’t plan to shut Delicious down; a sale was its preferred option.

After a wobbly few months, the site was bought by AVOS, a new company formed by YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, who promised “to take on the challenge of building the best information-discovery service on the web.”

Now we get to see exactly what they mean. The new-look Delicious launched overnight.

So what do you get? Let’s take a look.

First up, signing up is easy. Although I was a long-time Delicious user, first joining back in 2005, I stopped using the service last year and defected to Pinboard.in, a great clone aimed at power users. In fact, when AVOS moved to the new Delicious, they actually deleted my original account. So I was able to use the service as if for the first time.

Once inside, there are some obvious visual changes. Everything has a slightly warmer, softer tone; gone are the sharp edges and minimalist presentations that made Delicious look like the work of an engineer.

Popular links are presented in a straightforward list, while groups of links (known as “stacks”) are pushed to users in a glossy format supported by photographs. It’s nice eye candy, but takes up a lot of screen space.

In terms of functionality? Well, it’s tempting to say that the new Delicious is a bit like Pepsi of old: “new look, same great taste”. But it’s probably more accurate to simply point out that the revamp is less than radical.

Most of the obvious changes are essentially updating the slightly dated lexicon of Delicious and bringing it in line with a more modern, social web context. For example, users can now add avatars — something that seems almost idiotically simple, but had never emerged with its previous, spartan approach.

Elsewhere, users now “follow” somebody instead of adding them to their network. And collections of links — which were previously known as bundles — have become “stacks”. These are described as playlists for the web, a signpost that AVOS wants to make Delicious more appealing to mainstream audiences.

In truth, however, none of this is a major departure from what Delicious already did, and it’s certainly not much of a departure from other link collecting or list-making tools such as Bitly.

In a blog post announcing the launch, AVOS admits that most of the work was behind the scenes, rather than in adding new elements to the site.

We realized that in order to keep innovating over the long term, the eight-year-old site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. The result is a new homepage, interface and back-end architecture designed to make Delicious easier to use.

We’re proud of what we built, but the process has also brought the site “back to beta” as a work in progress.

But in doing so, it’s also managed to break some things that old-time users were used to. A string of my Twitter followers pointed out broken features. For example, existing users complain that their old bundles seem to have disappeared completely; there are lots of reports of problems with browser plug-ins, RSS feeds appear to have stopped working and some of the old pages aren’t working.

Still, these are early days. The product is essentially starting over again, and if users are prepared to accept that this is a beta then there is time — and trust — to rebuild.

Can new users be enticed? Will old users stick around? Even though the new Delicious looks juicier, it’s not clear whether the flavor it had has disappeared or been improved upon. Either way, it looks like the hard work is only just beginning.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
NewNet Market Overview, Q2 2010Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream AdvertisingConnected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up

Data is in demand on college campuses, and it’s putting a strain on shared school networks. The iPad is partly to blame, according to University of Missouri-Columbia IT director Terry Robb (via The St. Louis Post-Dispatch), but it’s mostly acting as a gateway drug for the real culprit: online video.

The report from the Dispatch describes slow or severed connections that students at the University of Missouri-Columbia experienced when coming back to classes this September. At that U.S. school, the number of wireless devices active on the network at any one time maxed out at 900 last year. Already in 2011, it’s hit 8,000 devices actively using the school’s connection at once.

The iPad is the biggest change in terms of the mobile connected-device landscape in recent years. Apple’s tablet still owns the market for that category of device, and it’s an optimal device for consuming streaming video, since it features a much larger display than smartphones, but is much simpler to turn on and hold than a cumbersome notebook computer. The iPad alone was already equal to Android’s share of online mobile video consumption back in May, and Apple’s other devices occupy a huge slice of the pie, too.

While Apple’s iPad may have multiplied the problem, iPhones and other smartphones have already significantly affected demand for Wi-Fi on college campuses. Students now expect strong on-campus Wi-Fi as one of the perks associated with going to school–it factors into their feeling of satisfaction over what they pay in tuition. Washington University’s Andrew Orstadt, who is the associated vice chancellor for information services and technology, says the demand for high capacity should be met within reason, no matter what students end up using the bandwidth for. He told the Dispatch that since students live on campus, schools should “make sure they are doing what they want to do” with their recreation time, too.

The challenge now is for schools to be able to meet the growing demand for reliable Wi-Fi with a growing population of connected devices with increasing technical specs. Next-gen devices will be able to stream higher-quality video to and from the web, and do more than one task at a time without as much of a cost on battery life or processor power. Students two years from now could likely be streaming one full HD video to their tablets while downloading another two equally high-bandwidth files in the background.

Apple’s devices may only be fuel for the fire that is demand for college Wi-Fi Internet access, but the iPad’s success and the rise in connected-device usage seen by the University of Missouri-Columbia in the wake of its introduction is a good sign that as far as fuel goes, it’s the rocket-powering kind.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continuesWeb Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right NotesBuilding a better paywall: strategies for monetizing news content

Among the news announcements at Facebook’s giant f8 developers conference on Thursday (we’ve collected the news in one place if you want to catch up) was the launch of social apps for media consumption. This included music apps like Spotify and video apps like Hulu, but also news-reading apps from a series of media players — including newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Guardian, as well as digital-only outlets like News Corp.’s The Daily and Yahoo News. Although Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg championed these apps as “rethinking the whole way the news industry works” through social sharing of content, it seems more like those media outlets have signed over a big part of their destiny to something that feels like an AOL-style web “portal.”

The apps themselves are very similar to what the Wall Street Journal recently launched with its “WSJ Social” app (the Journal wasn’t part of the official Facebook launch, and says it came up with the app on its own). It’s a digital reader that lives inside the social network and allows logged in users to read stories (unless they happen to be behind the Journal’s paywall, of course) and also lets other Facebook users follow that reading activity — turning their friends into real-time “editors” of the content they see. As with the other apps Facebook announced, that reading behavior will also show up in the new “ticker” view of users’ activity (if users agree to allow this to happen).

A cross between a Facebook page and a newspaper
So the Washington Post social app, for example — known as Social Reader — looks like a cross between a traditional Facebook page and a stripped-down version of a newspaper page, with blocks for articles and images, and then beneath that the faces of people who have shared an article (the articles also have the time that they were published or updated in red, which is unusual for a newspaper website). And the app features a “trending now” box that shows which articles are the most read or shared at that time, and the stories that appear in the newspaper view are chosen based on algorithms powered by Trove, the news-recommendation service the Washington Post launched earlier this year.

Among the obvious reasons for media companies to hitch their digital wagons to Facebook’s star are the sheer quantity of potential readers who are using the network: According to Zuckerberg’s keynote on Thursday, Facebook recently crossed a new milestone when over 500 million used the site in a single day. As Alisa Bowen, general manager of the WSJ Digital Network put it, the newspaper created the app so that it could “reach people where they are” — and the sharing that’s built into the platform can accelerate that process immensely. Media companies could also theoretically learn things about what content their readers prefer (as well as what times they like to read, etc.) by looking at the analytics that Facebook provides about users’ behavior.

Those benefits, however, would be just as available to media companies without having to create apps that live inside what Ethernet inventor and web guru Vint Cerf recently called Facebook’s “walled garden.” In fact, if there’s one thing that makes the current partnerships between content companies and Facebook different from the deals they struck with AOL and CompuServe and other online “portals” in the early 1990s — a comparison some made when the WSJ launched its app — it’s that most of them already have full-fledged and highly trafficked websites of their own. In the early 1990s, one of the reasons to hook up with AOL was simply that no one really understood the web at that point.

And as The Huffington Post and some other new-media entities have already shown, many of the advantages Facebook was selling with its app pitch — the sharing, the analytics, the user experience, etc. — are already available with the Facebook open-graph API and platform, which the social network launched at its last f8 conference. In addition to the ubiquitous “like” button and other widgets, that allowed the Huffington Post and other sites to show who among your friends had read or commented on a particular article, and made it easy for users to share those articles themselves as well, including posting that activity back to their Facebook wall as status updates.

Not everyone wants to play inside the walled garden

It’s interesting to note that one media partner announced by Facebook has taken a very different approach from the social-reading apps that live inside the social network: Yahoo News — which just happens to be owned by another large (if somewhat faded) web portal — chose to use the new Facebook social platform to do something very similar to what the Huffington Post and others have. So instead of forcing users to remain inside a Facebook page, clicking a Yahoo link takes you to a webpage at Yahoo’s site with social features embedded in it, such as a filmstrip-style view of all your friends who have clicked the same link. That way, Yahoo keeps the traffic and engagement.

So what do the new social apps offer that the existing platform doesn’t? The most obvious answer is that it pulls all that reading and sharing activity back into Facebook’s garden. Instead of readers just browsing through the Washington Post or Guardian site and links appearing on a Facebook page when they “like” something, users are now being encouraged to go to a specific Facebook page and spend all of their time inside that page, reading and sharing and commenting. That activity exists only inside Facebook (for now, at least) and is only visible to logged-in Facebook users.

That’s an awful lot of power and control to hand over to a service that holds on fairly tightly to the data produced by its users. Yes, Facebook provides huge potential audiences, and there are benefits to knowing who your readers are at all times — just as there are benefits to handing over control of the comments on your newspaper’s website to Facebook. But there are risks to doing this as well, as I’ve pointed out before. Facebook can be a very powerful friend for media companies in all kinds of ways, but they need to remember that this power exists for the benefit of one company: Facebook.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognani

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
NewNet Q1: Content Farms and Niche Networks on the RiseFinding the Value in Social Media DataReport: Monetizing Digital Content