Evergreen Publishing

Has coffee-table apps become a unique form of evergreen publishing?

TEARN media has been experimenting with various themes for mobile publishing. This post explores our automated features that results in evergreen magazines and books.

Coffee-table Apps Revisited

Legacy book and magazine publishers typically identify a subject; collect data, photos, and illustrations; and write about that subject. Most of that content is now available online.

Search bots at Google, Bing, and Yahoo scour the web for any new content. The best content is presented via search results – and used by the Keys platform.

The Keys Mobile Platform organizes the best of search results into subjects that we call apps; and extends with learning activities to aid memorization.

• Slide shows and video galleries link to the best content on the web.
• Spin, match, and guess provide games for memorization exercises.
• The innovative pictionary with search bots game was the original seed behind our platform.

Evergreen Publishing

Our staff identifies subjects that are potentially interesting to mobile users worldwide. We select a thematic approach to present each subject as a Keys app. It’s our unique form of story telling. The result has been a large collection of apps covering a wide range of subjects.

Each app is evergreen.

• If we select subjects carefully, the app can be timeless and always relevant. This includes historic sports lists, scientific glossaries, and virtual tours by subject.
• Using search bots, the content self updates – reflecting the best of the web and auto-adjusting the app to changes due to society’s evolutionary habits or scientific advancements. Minor editorial adjustments per year should keep these apps focused on the central themes of the selected subject.
• Our approach is objective – not reflecting political, personal, or editorial bias. Each app is simply the result from the best of the web.
• We have pushed the state of the web with apps where little information is currently available – and where we forecast growth in content from the global community. This includes apps for regional areas of countries like India or China. As these local communities become more active on the web, our apps focused on those regions will improve automatically.
• More recently, we’ve experimented with predictive magazines. With subjects like the emerging war among tablet manufacturers, our app is able to automatically track the hundreds of announcements for new products that is expected to occur in 2011. We did the same for hybrid cars.
• Mobile technology will improve with faster devices, networks, and servers. This improves the user experience for mobile users.

Evergreen publishing also implies the battle for a greener enviroment. That’s a good social goal.

Will these Keys apps self improve with age? Only time will tell the results.

PS: Total downloads now exceed 1,350,000. Thank you.

LinkedIn Means Business With New Application Platform

Announcing Applications on LinkedIn

Reid Hoffman Oct 28, 2008

Hi Everyone. I’m writing today to announce the launch of LinkedIn’s applications platform that will enable over 30 million professionals on LinkedIn to communicate, collaborate, and share information even better than before.

This initial roll out features productivity applications that range from gathering information that professionals around you are generating to enhancing your abilities to collaborate and communicate more effectively. You’ll be able to work much more closely with your contacts on LinkedIn with tools such as file sharing, project management, business trips and many more.

The nine applications that you see live today on LinkedIn include productivity enhancing applications from Amazon, Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart, SlideShare, Tripit, and WordPress as well a Company Buzz application developed by LinkedIn. Each of these applications will help you stay current and competitive as a professional in today’s rapidly changing business world…

LinkedIn Means Business With New Application Platform

LinkedIn has launched its new OpenSocial-based application platform called InApps – an answer to the platforms found on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but without the clutter and “junk” apps that plague those sites. Unlike most other social networks, LinkedIn apps must go through an approval process before they will go live on the store, and all apps must be deemed “professional” in purpose to appear on the business-oriented social network. To prevent an overwhelming amount of clutter, users will be restricted to including a maximum of 15 applications on their main profile pages, though they will eventually have the option to install more apps on a separate page.

Beyond the quality assurance process, LinkedIn is also limiting the flexibility apps will have when it comes to monetization. Apps won’t be allowed to use third party ad networks – instead, they’ll have to work with LinkedIn’s ad system. For now applications will only have access to LinkedIn’s current ad inventory, which could make targeting ads less effective (though it sounds like there will be more options for targeted ads in the future). Apps will still be allowed to charge users for individual goods, and can also implement a paid subscription service (launch partner Box.net is using this model)…

Facebook is number 2 website among 10 million

Facebook is number 2 website, but the growth of social networks is slowing

Of the 10,583,351 websites visited by UK Internet users in September, Facebook was the second most popular after Google UK. The number one social network in Britain received 3.16% of all UK Internet visits last month, equivalent to one in every 32. For the 4 weeks ending 27/09/08, one in every 50 UK Internet searches was for the single term ‘facebook’,

Facebook’s success in the UK (and many other markets) is undeniable, and – as the chart below illustrates – the growth hasn’t stopped yet. However, it has slowed: traffic to the site increased by 4% between August and September this year, down from 50% over the same period last year. The site’s annual growth rate remains impressive at 88% between September 2007 and 2008, but was significantly less than the 2905% it experienced the previous year.

Another ominous sign is that Facebook’s average session time has flattened out at 20 minutes; both MySpace and Bebo experienced a fall in average session time in tandem with their declining UK market share. So, Facebook has a while to go yet, but there is no doubt that its growth is slowing. Of course, social networking is about more than just one site – we recorded visits to over 7,000 during September – so what about the market as a whole?

MySpace and Facebook with $1 Billion in Advertising, Says eMarketer

Social Nets Still Promising, Says eMarketer

-By Adweek Staff

NEW YORK Social networks rank among the most popular destinations on the Internet — particularly for the hard-to-reach youth audience — and marketers will continue to look for ways to reach consumers at those sites, according toeMarketer.

Combined, MySpace and Facebook are expected to account for 72 percent of the total U.S. social network ad spending pie this year.

Spending at all other online social network sites (including general social, niche and marketer-created networks) is expected to reach $370 million this year.

Widget and application ad spending is projected to rise to $40 million in 2008, from $15 million in 2007.

Yahoo Email Dominates Web-Mail Landscape, but Losing Mindshare to Social Networks

Yahoo Email Dominates Web-Mail Landscape

Yahoo’s email service dominates the web-mail market with the highest number of email users, monthly minutes spent per user and times users check mail, according to data from comScore(via a New York Times blog post by reporter Saul Hansell.) 

AOL’s email also appears to be holding its own with its user numbers, while Gmail is increasing its number of users but lagging behind other web-mail providers in how often users check mail and how much time they spend on the site.

Among the findings:

• Yahoo leads in email users, with 88.4 million in August 2008, according to comScore. Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail has 45.2 million users, AOL has 44.8 million, and Google’s Gmail has 26.0 million.

• Yahoo mail users spend the most time (286 minutes/month) reading their email, Gmail users spend the least (82 minutes), with AOL and Microsoft in the middle (229 and 204 minutes, respectively).

• Google users check their email the least – 13.6 times on average in August, while Yahoo users visited 18.8 times. AOL and Microsoft fall between these two.

• In terms of total minutes spent reading email on each of the web-mail services, users spent 25 billion minutes in August on Yahoo mail. They spent 10 billion minutes on AOL mail, 9 billion on Microsoft’s mail, and 2 billion on Gmail.

comScore’s numbers also show that AOL is performing worse than Yahoo and MSN in what is a stagnant portal arena, Hansell said.

AOL’s audience of 110.6 million users is down 3% from last year, while its rivals grew slightly. The average number of minutes spent per user on the AOL portal declined 22%, while time on MSN fell 11%. Yahoo’s average time rose, though only a small amount.