Guest author Richard MacManus is the founder of ReadWrite. This article originally appeared in his Augment Intelligence newsletter. 

If you’re thinking that virtual reality (VR) is all about gaming, then think again. 

Are you a sports fan? The US Open Golf Tournament was livestreamed in VR last year. A music fan? Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, Jack White and others have experimented with 360-degree 3D videos. A movie buff? The 2016 Sundance movie festival, being held this week, will showcase thirty VR stories and three full-length VR feature films. Or maybe you just want to catch up on the latest news. There’s an app for that, in the form of the New York Times VR app for your smartphone.

So virtual reality isn’t just about gaming. It’s the Next Big Thing in entertainment, media, social networking, and a whole lot more. There are three types of VR content other than gaming that will shake up your world in 2016 and beyond—and some promising VR content companies to watch out for.

Why 2016 Is The Year of VR

2016 is the year that VR headsets—finally—hit the mainstream. The Oculus Rift is the most anticipated, since it is owned by Facebook. It’s already on sale and the first headsets will be shipped in March (I’ve preordered mine). Sony is another big player; its PlayStation VR is expected to arrive by the end of June. HTC Vive is the third big player and it will come out in April.

Okay, these headsets all look kind of dorky, but never mind what you’ll look like wearing one. What’s more important is what you’ll be looking at.

There are already solid mobile VR options too, including Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. 360-degree 3D cameras are also a big driver of new VR content, as we’ll see.

So the hardware is ready and will be in the hands of millions of people by mid-2016. Now let’s focus on how VR will change content.

Live Sports & Entertainment

NextVR is one of the most promising VR content companies. It aims to broadcast big sporting events in 3D virtual reality. In October last year, NextVR streamed an entire NBA basketball game through its app for the Samsung Gear VR. The view was restricted to 180 degrees, but that was more than enough to deliver a compelling experience. 

According to UploadVR, the view of the action was “low, at table level, with the scorer’s table at center court.” Road to VR declared it “an exciting way to watch the game,” because it was “a much more realistic POV [point of view] than you would get watching it on a traditional monitor.”

Other events broadcast so far by NextVR include the US Open in golf and NASCAR. If I was to bet on one type of content (other than gaming) to take virtual reality to a mass audience, it’d be VR coverage of major sporting events. NextVR is a company to keep an eye on.

It’s not hard to foresee a near future where entire television networks are VR. That’s what big thinking CNET founder Halsey Minor is projecting, with one of his new companies, Reality Lab. At CES 2016, Minor showed off Reality Lab’s first product, the Quantum Leap VR system, which livestreams 360-degree video content. Minor sees an opportunity to disrupt existing TV networks with such content. But take that with a grain of salt, because Minor has a checkered history and Quantum Leap is not yet on the market.

Social Networking

This is the billion-dollar question for virtual reality: How will Facebook use Oculus to enable social networking via VR? The low-hanging fruit is 360-degree video. There are already plenty of video cameras on the market that enable ordinary people to take 360-degree videos and share them on Facebook. Take a look at Robert Scoble’s Facebook feed for some examples.

But there must be more to VR on Facebook than putting on Oculus Rift and watching a 360-degree video of your dog. (That’ll be my first use case!) When he announced the purchase of Oculus in March 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked us to “imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.” Two examples he gave were “studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face.”

It remains to be seen what Facebook will announce in terms of VR “experiences and adventures,” but we can get a sense by looking at a startup like New Zealand’s own 8i. This company is building a platform that enables you to interact with 3D video of real people. For example, watch this video of a woman with her new-born baby.

The following is 8i’s description of its new portal for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. As you read it, I’d like you to imagine doing this with a Facebook friend: “You can now walk up to someone in VR who looks real and not computer generated, move around them, make eye contact, and feel true presence.” That may be what Facebook is like in a few years.

Movies

VR will also disrupt movies. The latest Hollywood experiment is The Martian VR Experience, a VR spinoff of the movie The Martian. Created by 20th Century Fox in collaboration with the film’s director Ridley Scott, the 15-20 minute “immersive adventure” puts you in the shoes of astronaut Mark Watney.

Perhaps more innovative is The Rose And I, a VR story from Penrose Studios currently being shown at Sundance. It’s notable for going beyond 360-degree video and introducing more interactivity to the movie watching experience. Penrose has come up with something called “Touch Orbit” (“Torbit” for short), which allows the viewer to change perspective while watching a film. VRfocus explains: “By swiping on the pad, viewers can rotate a ‘primary object’ in front to them to assume different viewpoints as the film unfolds.”

Since we’re discussing interactivity in VR, I’d be remiss not to mention the increasing use of VR by the porn industry. Tech blog Wareable reviewed the latest on that front (NSFW).

As for mainstream movies, VR is set to become a blockbuster technology. Ridley Scott is obviously exploring it and there are indications that Peter Jackson is working with VR too.

Why VR Must Reach Beyond Gamers

Those are just three ways VR will change the way we consume—and interact with—content: live sports and entertainment, social networking, and movies.

There are many other opportunities for VR to change our content. They include news (immerse yourself safely in a war zone using the New York Times VR app), retail (hunt for your next house using a pair of VR goggles), and fashion (try on a new pair of shoes in VR).

Of course most of what I’ve discussed is in an early stage. But if there’s one thing I’d love you to take away from this newsletter, it’s this: VR headsets aren’t just for gamers. There will be highly compelling VR content for sports fans, music lovers, movie buffs, news hounds—whatever type of content you’re into.

Photos courtesy of NextVR and Oculus

For more from Augment Intelligence, please subscribe to the newsletter. 

The post The Future Of Virtual Reality Lies Beyond Gaming appeared first on ReadWrite.

MyFitnessPal recently sold to Under Armour for $475 million. In this exclusive excerpt from ReadWrite founder Richard MacManus’s new book, Trackers: How Technology Is Helping Us Monitor & Improve Our Health, he reveals founder Mike Lee’s secrets for building an app that has helped millions lose weight.  Trackers is now available on Kindle and in other digital bookstores.

It was the summer of 2003 and Mike Lee, a 32-year-old Silicon Valley marketing executive, was looking forward to his wedding day later that year. The only trouble was he had put on weight over the summer and didn’t want to walk down the aisle with a pudgy tummy. 

His fiancée also wanted to lose some weight before the big day, so the couple went to see a personal fitness trainer at their local gym, 24 Hour Fitness. At the end of the first session, after Mike Lee and his fiancée had sweated off maybe half a pound, the trainer handed them a small book. It contained calorie counts for about 3,000 foods. “You need to start counting your calories,” the trainer advised, tapping the book. “Write down everything that you eat in a notebook.”

Lee is a veteran of Silicon Valley. In the early 2000s, he’d worked for Handspring, a manufacturer of PDAs, or personal digital assistants, that went on to merge with Palm in 2003. PDAs were the precursor of the modern smartphone—some of you will remember the PalmPilot from the late 1990s—and so Lee had gotten an early entry into the world of mobile communications. His first reaction to being told to count calories on paper? There’s got to be a digital method! 

So he immediately threw the calorie counting book away and looked for an online solution. Lee looked at over a dozen existing online calorie counters in the summer of 2003. There was no shortage of online solutions. 

“But to my amazement,” Lee recalled a decade later, “none of them worked the way I thought they should work.”

The first thing Mike Lee wanted to change about 2003-era calorie counters was the user experience, which he found frustrating. Many foods were either not available in these products, and so had to be manually input, or if they were available then they were hard to find. 

“When I was trying to use other products back then,” Lee told me, “the user interfaces were just really cringe-y.” 

He concluded that it was actually easier to write down calorie counts on paper than to use these online products. The second thing he noticed was the lack of intelligence in the online calorie counters of 2003. A simple yet powerful notion, which would become a key feature of MyFitnessPal, was to remember the foods you eat the most. 

“People tend to eat the same things fairly often,” Lee told me, adding that his own breakfast “doesn’t vary that much.” So he reasoned that an online calorie counter “should just remember what you eat most often and make that easy for you.”

Lee left Palm in October 2004. It was at that point that he began development work on MyFitnessPal. 

“I started building the diet tracker I really wanted, because I finally had the time to sit down and build it,” he told me. It was also a good chance to brush up on his programing skills, being a long-time computing enthusiast and amateur programmer. “I had done a ton of programing when I was young,” he said. “I’d started at ten and programed all the way through high school and college. But it had been a long time.”

So it was that MyFitnessPal was born, as a side project in 2004 for a slightly overweight Silicon Valley executive. It was officially launched less than a year later, in September 2005.

MyFitnessPal Goes Mobile

In August 2009, after five years of part-time work building up MyFitnessPal, Lee finally decided to take the big step and quit his day job. His brother Al also joined him as a full-time employee of MyFitnessPal. It was to be a turning point for the young company. 

It was also a key period for the consumer health technology market. As profiled in another chapter of Trackers, 2009 was the year that the Fitbit activity tracker began shipping. Other health-focused websites and apps began to appear too. The primary reason for the increased popularity of health apps like Fitbit and MyFitnessPal in 2009 was the smartphone.

The second half of 2008 saw two milestones on the Internet landscape, which ultimately propelled the smartphone into the limelight. Following the launch of the first-generation iPhone in 2007, in July 2008 Apple launched a second-generation model, the iPhone 3G, and—just as importantly—the App Store. 

The first Android-powered smartphone to be released came just a few months later, in October 2008. So coming into the New Year, 2009, the market was primed for a new way to use the Internet: smartphone apps. 

In an August 2009 blog post announcing that he and Al were devoting themselves to MyFitnessPal full-time, Mike Lee noted that they were already working on “an iPhone app which we modestly think will be the best calorie counting app in the app store.” The iPhone app was duly launched in December 2009. It led to a surge in popularity for MyFitnessPal. Like many health-related Internet products, MyFitnessPal was a perfect match for the smartphone. 

“You want to be tracking when you’re actually eating,” explained Mike, “and that’s when you’re out and about. So, mobile was critical to us.”

How MyFitnessPal Tamed My Diet

I was a relative latecomer to MyFitnessPal. I started to use it in early 2013, when I began to follow a low-carb diet. I used the MyFitnessPal iPhone app to enter my food for a period of about three months. I focused mainly on counting carbohydrate intake each day, since that was what my new diet required. But I found myself interested in all of the different food data, for comparative reasons. For example, I could compare the calories that MyFitnessPal said I consumed with the calories that Fitbit said I expended. Every time I ate something, it took a couple of minutes at most to enter the data into MyFitnessPal.

I don’t think I would have used the product at all if it wasn’t for the mobile app. It would have been too much of a hassle for me to open my computer and enter the data multiple times a day. But I carry my smartphone around with me everywhere, so it was easy to track my food intake. That, in a nutshell, is why MyFitnessPal became so popular in 2010 and beyond: It was a killer smartphone app waiting to happen.

It became even easier when MyFitnessPal added barcode scanning to its Android app in November 2010 (the iPhone app got this feature in July 2011). The feature used the smartphone’s camera to take a photo of a product barcode, which the MyFitnessPal app would attempt to match to a product in its food database. If a match was found, which in my experience was more often than not, the food would be automatically added to your meal. In my discussions with Mike Lee, I was somewhat surprised to learn that the data doesn’t come from the food manufacturers. “We don’t go direct to the food manufacturers to get the food data, in most cases,” said Lee. Rather, it is crowdsourced. In other words, MyFitnessPal’s users upload the data and check it for accuracy.

One of the items I scanned into my food log every now and then was Kraft’s Philadelphia Regular Cream Cheese Spread. The calorie, carb, fat and other nutrition data for this product was member-submitted. It had “2 confirmations” when I last checked, meaning that two people had reviewed the data against the product’s label and deemed it correct. It’s easy enough to check yourself, since many countries legally require food manufacturers to have a nutrition facts label on the packaging. The one thing to be wary of is that some nutrition labels can be misleading or wrong. The US Food and Drug Administration states on its website: “Manufacturers are responsible for the accuracy of the nutrition labeling values on their products.” The FDA does random sampling for accuracy and it will prosecute violations, but it simply doesn’t have the resources to check everything.

The barcode-scanning feature led to more MyFitnessPal users adding data to an already impressive database of food information. MyFitnessPal’s food database has been critical to its success over the years. Mike Lee realized very early on that in a food tracking app, there’s nothing more frustrating for a user than not finding an item—because then they’d need to check the food packaging and manually input the data. What should be a quick one-minute update becomes a five- or even ten-minute time suck. 

So top of mind for Mike Lee when he began developing MyFitnessPal in 2004 was building up a large food database. He began by manually adding the data himself, using product information from food manufacturers and retailers where available. In September 2007, he blogged: “Last night, I was able to add nutritional information for the entire Starbucks menu and all Amy’s Kitchen products to the food database. My goal is to more than triple the size of the current food database by the end of the year.”

But he also realized that MyFitnessPal would only truly scale if he called on his users to help—in other words, crowdsourced it by enabling MyFitnessPal’s users to input and check data. The alternatives were to get the data from open food nutrition databases or directly pipe it from food manufacturers. However, there wasn’t a comprehensive open database of barcodes that MyFitnessPal could tap into and getting the data from food manufacturers was far too much work. 

Besides, if their own users entered the data then MyFitnessPal would own it. One of the defining characteristics of so-called “social” software—like Facebook and Twitter—is that the value of the business is almost all derived from the amount and quality of user data in its databases. MyFitnessPal is no exception, so Mike Lee was very smart to go the crowdsourcing route. Everything its users enter into MyFitnessPal’s food database belongs to MyFitnessPal.

Still, it was no easy task to build up the food database. If he wasn’t adding new foods himself, Mike Lee spent his time checking the accuracy on user submissions. It was a chicken-and-egg situation in 2005 when MyFitnessPal launched because there needed to be enough food data to grow its user base, but there was a danger that early users would be frustrated by lack of data and immediately quit. Lee got around this dilemma by letting users check data accuracy with just one click of a button. So gradually, from 2005 onwards, the database began to fill out.

MyFitnessPal has come a long way since 2005. Nowadays, with tens of millions of users, it has built-in quality control. “We have a million QA people now,” Lee said, chuckling … probably with relief that he no longer needs to check the data himself.

Different Strokes For Different Folks

When MyFitnessPal released its iPhone app in December 2009, it enabled people to track their food on the go. I asked Mike Lee what he’s learned since then about how to track food intake. The first thing a new MyFitnessPal user should do, he replied, is “track everything.” But it’s OK to estimate food data, he added. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. The most important thing is just keep tracking.” 

He also advises not to worry about missing the odd meal. 

“The more you do it,” he said about food tracking, “the easier it becomes and the more of a habit it becomes. Basically, the longer you stick with it, the more success that you’re going to have.” 

Another tip Mike Lee offered is to enter your food before you eat, not after. That’s where the smartphone app really helps, because it takes a couple of minutes at most to enter this data. The benefit of doing it before you eat is that you can make adjustments if a food you’re about to consume is high in calories, or carbohydrates, or whatever your key metric is.

Some of the power users of MyFitnessPal use the app to plan their meals throughout the day, although many people will prefer less structure. Mike Lee himself prefers a more flexible approach. 

“There isn’t some kind of rigid plan that we ask people to do,” he told me. “It’s not like you can never have a piece of chocolate cake again. It’s about making your own decisions about what you eat and understanding that there are big ramifications.”

In his own life, as a startup CEO, he often needs to go to industry events. Such events tend to serve nibbles along with alcohol and so are likely to push his calorie count up for that day. “So I’ll go lighter on lunch,” explained Lee, “or I’ll go for a run in the afternoon to try to burn off some extra calories.” 

For Mike Lee, his app gives him an understanding of what tradeoffs he can make every day about his food and exercise mix. “It’s just really empowering,” he said. “You feel like you’re in control of what you want and goals that you’re trying to achieve and that’s kind of what I like about it.”

Ultimately the benefit of food tracking apps like MyFitnessPal is that they help you make better food choices, whatever flavor of diet you subscribe to. 

“Everybody can benefit from eating better,” Mike Lee remarked. “Until, recently, we didn’t have the tools to make the [food] information we need easily accessible.” For example, Lee—who still uses calories as his primary measure—stopped using mayonnaise on his sandwiches after discovering how many calories it had. “One tablespoon of mayonnaise has 90 calories. Before I started calorie counting, I had no idea that was the case. Whereas mustard has five calories. So I just stopped using mayonnaise.” 

This is the kind of food knowledge, says Mike Lee, that stays with you and helps you make better daily decisions.

It’s important to note that it’s not scientific knowledge that Mike Lee is referring to, but self-knowledge. The diet industry is one of the most confusing and contradictory around. When two diametrically opposed diets—low fat and low carb—both have science “facts” to back them up, it’s no surprise that most people have little clue which foods are truly healthy. In the final analysis, food facts may not matter that much. Mike Lee to this day emphasizes calorie counting in his own ongoing weight maintenance plan, even though counting carbs is more in fashion now. Whichever metric you use, monitoring your food intake will at the very least make you more mindful of what you’re eating and the impact it has on your weight.

There is no one diet to fit all. Each of us is different. What’s more, our circumstances change over time—from experience, I can tell you that getting type 1 diabetes will make you change your diet! 

Ultimately, the only way you’ll find out which type of diet is effective for you is by testing them and tracking your progress. Whether you use a smartphone calorie (or carb, or salt, etc.) counter like MyFitnessPal, or whether you use good old paper and pen, it doesn’t matter, although the technology in MyFitnessPal does make things easier for you. The main point, though, is to test for yourself what works.

But how often do you need to use a tool like MyFitnessPal? From my own usage, I can attest that although it only takes five to ten minutes a day in total, it does take a conscious effort to do every update. Also, some updates are difficult to make, for example when you’re eating out and you don’t know exactly what’s in the foods you’re consuming.

Many people use MyFitnessPal intensely for a short period, then stop. I was one of those users. I began my low-carb diet in mid-March 2013 and started using MyFitnessPal at the same time. It helped me immensely in knowing how many carbs I was consuming every day, as well as avoiding eating foods that were high carb. After a few months of using MyFitnessPal regularly, I came to an understanding of what my average daily carb consumption was. At that point I stopped using the app. That’s because what I eat every day is fairly consistent. Even when I deviate from my eating routines, I know which foods to avoid now and so I don’t feel I need to enter the data into MyFitnessPal.

Mike Lee admitted that this kind of usage is fairly common for his app. Some users, he said, “use the app for a while, maybe they’ll hit their goal weight, for example, and they’ll feel like they don’t need to track anymore. But then, oftentimes they’ll come back a few months later for a little clean-up.” 

MyFitnessPal sees a broad pattern of behavior, said Lee. “Some people calling it off, some people doing it every single day. It really depends on what the user is looking for.” 

Even Lee himself doesn’t use MyFitnessPal for every single meal. 

“I log most of the time,” he told me. “There are some meals that I’ll skip. But in those cases, I still use the general knowledge that I’ve gained from the app.”

On that last point, I differ from Lee. It’s not “general” knowledge he’s gained from tracking his foods on the app he created—it’s the specific knowledge of what is best for his own body.

Read more from Trackers, available on Kindle and in other digital bookstores.

The post How MyFitnessPal Became The King Of Diet Trackers appeared first on ReadWrite.

ReadWrite celebrates its 10th anniversary on Saturday, April 20, 2013. For the occasion, we’re running a series of articles  looking back—and looking forward.

Ten years ago, I published the first post on this weblog. Entitled simply “The Read/Write Web,” it was a manifesto of sorts. The first era of the Web, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, had been largely read-only. It was stuck in the old broadcast model: professionals published the content, the rest of us merely read it.

But in 2002 and 2003, I could sense that a sea change was near. Tools were being developed that empowered everyone—including me—to publish to the Web.

“The goal now is to convert the Web into a two-way system,” I wrote in that debut post. “Ordinary people should be able to write to the Web, just as easily as they can browse and read it.”

ReadWrite’s Predictive Powers

Well, that goal was well and truly achieved! While nobody could have predicted in 2003 the scale of innovation that would occur, I’m proud that over the years ReadWrite did predict many technologies that people take for granted today.

For example, I remember writing a lot about the Web Office over the first five years of this blog. In our end-of-year predictions post in 2006, I wrote: “The consumerization of the enterprise trend will start to infiltrate corporate IT, in the form of Web-based office apps and more collaborative systems.” Scan your typical office in 2013 and you will see Google Docs, corporate versions of Twitter, Evernote Business, and many more applications that came from the consumer world.

Also look at the rise of Amazon Web Services, a cloud-computing platform from the online retailer that was well ahead of its time and which we wrote about extensively (mostly thanks to Alex Iskold, one of our earliest feature writers).

Our 2006 predictions post stated:

“We also think there will be moves toward an Amazon-like web services stack from other players, particularly Google. For example Google may want to catch up with Amazon’s S3 – EC2 services. And where Google goes, you can expect Microsoft to go too.”

Since 2006, not only have Google and Microsoft created cloud-computing platforms, but so have Apple, Oracle, HP, Rackspace and many other companies.

I’m also proud that ReadWrite wrote about some trends long before they became popular. For example, The Internet of Things—when real-world objects get connected to the Internet. ReadWrite was the only tech blog exploring that trend back in 2009, when only a few brave developers and startups were building consumer products. Fast forward to 2013 and the market for Internet-connected cars, thermostats, security systems, watches and other real-world objects is thriving.

A Decade of Astounding Innovation

In April 2003, I was an unknown 31-year old website manager from New Zealand, about as far away from Silicon Valley as you can get. I may not have been in the right place, but I was certainly at the right time. Over the next ten years, I got to explore and help chronicle the emergence of first the Social Web (2003-2005), then the Mobile Web (2007-2008)—arguably the two biggest waves of technology innovation over the past decade.

ReadWrite has witnessed—and written about—the creation of many revolutionary technologies:

• MySpace, the first mass-market social network, launched in August 2003.
• Flickr, which became the leading photo-sharing website of the era, launched in February 2004.
• Facebook launched to Harvard students in February 2004 and eventually opened to the wider public in September 2006.
• YouTube, the video-sharing phenomenon, opened as a beta site in May 2005.
• Twitter was created in 2006 and had its first tipping point in March 2007 at SXSW.
• The iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs in January 2007.
• Google announced its open-source mobile operating system, Android, in November 2007.
• Apple launched the App Store in July 2008.
• The first Android phone, the HTC Dream, was released in October 2008.
• The iPad was released in April 2010.
• Google+ launched in June 2011.

Here’s To The Next Decade!

When I started ReadWrite in 2003, the Web was primarily about what was happening on your home computer. And as outlined above, a lot of innovation happened in that era of the Web—Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and more.

But today, the Internet is everywhere. As Owen Thomas wrote in his introductory post as ReadWrite’s new editor-in-chief, the Internet is now in our pockets, on our bodies, scattered around the physical world. So I’m thrilled that the blog I founded will chronicle this new era of the Read/Write Web—a world where everything is read/write.

Photo composite by Madeleine Weiss.

The post RW10: A Decade Of Spotting The Future Taking Form appeared first on ReadWrite.

At the end of the Health 2.0 Conference earlier this month, I sat down with the event’s co-founders Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya to discuss the big trends. I’d been impressed and excited by the innovation demonstrated at Health 2.0. It turns out much of it was driven by Big Data.

Healthcare is a huge, important industry and it’s being transformed by technology all across the board: from the personal health apps that many of us use on our smartphones, to the electronic health records in doctor practices and hospitals, to the emerging revolution of digitized genomic data.

What all of those things have in common is digital data, much of it on the Internet. Indeed there’s so much digital health data now that the term “Big Data” is commonly used to describe it. Another trend is that healthcare is moving beyond the doctor’s office and into the daily lives of consumers, via smartphone apps and new platforms that host health data.

Surprises

I began by asking Matthew and Indu what, if anything, surprised them over the few days of the conference.

Matthew noted the evolution of natural language processing tools, which combined with Big Data are leading to surprising innovations. An example is a startup called Treato, an impressive search engine for health data that I got an inside look at during the event. Treato effectively scans millions of pieces of unstructured health data on the Web and orders it – for example creating user reviews of medication.

Matthew also noted the rise of “small data making vital connections.” He pointed to one of two winners of the DCtoVC Startup Showcase, Beyond Lucid Technologies. This company offers an electronic health record (EHR) for emergency response agencies (such as ambulances). It’s an example of a health solution that delivers the right piece of information at the right time and place, enabling better on-the-spot decision making. This service potentially saves lives.

Indu commented that big data is also enabling a “new level of personalization and targeting.” She pointed to the winner of Health 2.0 Developers’ World Cup, New York City-based MedTurner. The service uses natural language processing to monitor tweets for health-related information. It then analyzes those tweets and “offers relevant advice and resources.” Use cases include monitoring for signs of depression or suicide, tracking CDC travelers’ health, rare disease clinical trial matching and Medline Plus drug safety and side effects alerting.

Personalized Medicine

One of the most exciting areas of health technology currently is what’s been termed ‘personalized medicine.’ MedTurner is one example, but the most interest is in consumer genomics companies like 23AndMe. The hope is that genomic data will lead to hyper-personalization of disease prevention and treatment.

As Indu remarked, the current era of personalized medicine is “the oppositie of patient social network PatientsLikeMe. There’s no one like me.”

Once again, Big Data is a key ingredient. Indu explained that “in order to have hyper-personalization, you need to tap the crowd and look for the pattern. It’s a kind of closed loop.”

If there is one major concern though, it’s that doctors aren’t adequately trained to use genomic data. Indu called this a “massive gap” in healthcare. However she mentioned there are a couple of apps that help physicians navigate genomics.

The Danger Of Information Overload

One of the challenges of Big Data is that it may lead to information overload for doctors. Particularly when genomics takes off (it’s still early in that era). I asked Indu and Matthew how doctors will cope.

Indu agreed that it’s “a massive problem [and] there is a firehose coming.” But she sees a lot of potential in dashboard tools that help doctors interpret and manage the data inflow. An example for the consumer audience is TicTrac, the winner of the startup Launch! segment during the Health 2.0 conference. TicTrac, currently in private beta, lets you track a variety of health data in one place.

What’s needed is a kind of advanced TicTrac for doctors. “The hope is in some of the organizational tools that are not going to make single dumps of data, but are going to send a pattern,” said Indu. “Or they’re going to allow somebody very quickly to look at millions of data points and visualize [that] this patient needs an intervention.”

Dashboard tools that do this kind of pattern visualization will become “the doctor’s best friend,” according to Indu.

Matthew agreed, adding that post-operative apps that enable healthcare organizations to monitor a patient’s condition after they leave the hospital will also help.

Technology Down The Stack

Which leads us to another trend in health technology: spreading the workload around. Indu noted that “putting technology all the way down the stack,” so that patients or nurses can actively monitor health data, allows doctors to “just deal with things that need [their] expertise.”

In particular, “the prevention part [of healthcare] is moving more to self-management tools” for consumers.

Matthew remarked that this will allow doctors to see fewer patients for longer time periods, because they will be focusing on the patients that need them the most. So for example, instead of a doctor seeing a lot of patients for 7 minutes each (which is the norm these days) they will be able to spend 45 minutes on 7–8 patients per day.

In summary, the Health 2.0 Conference showcased a lot of innovative health technology that will soon be not only in your physician’s hands – but yours too. Big Data is driving much of this innovation. The more health data we have and the better it is analyzed and structured using technology, the more effective our healthcare system will be.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Health 2.0 Conference: Big Data Making A Big Impact appeared first on ReadWrite.

Today at the DC to VC: Health IT Startup Showcase, a collaboration between Morgenthaler Ventures and the Health 2.0 Conference, I saw firsthand how health IT startups are tackling big, real-world problems. Coming from a world where a photo-sharing mobile app gets bought for $1 Billion, it’s refreshing to see startups trying to solve important issues in the world. For even more context on the digital health market, I spoke to a relative veteran in this space and a keynote speaker at DC to VC today, Jeff Tangney from physician network Doximity. It turns out that fax machines are problem number one!

Jeff Tangney is a 40-year old entrepreneur whose first company, Epocrates, did an IPO in 2011. The windfall from that made Tangney a wealthy man. But rather than go into retirement, he dived back into the digital health market with a new startup called Doximity. It’s a “professional network for physicians,” allowing them to collaborate and share information.

During his DC to VC keynote, Tangney announced that Doximity has reached 100,000 physicians on its network, which is 16% of all U.S. physicians. 15% of Doximity’s physicians use the product at least weekly.

One quote from Tangney during his speech on stage really brought home how difficult the digital health space is. He said that “fax machines are the lingua franca of healthcare.” According to Tangney, 15 billion pages of faxes are sent in the U.S. every year.

Indeed, when I asked Tangney after his keynote what are the main features of Doximity, he replied that eFaxing is one of the top ones. Even with a modern electronic tool like Doximity, faxing is ingrained in the workflow of physicians. Or as Tangney put it to me, “it’s still an industry that runs by and large by the fax machine” – as well as doctors talking to each other on the phone. So moving physicians to digital communication and record-keeping is hard.

But who can blame doctors, because they’re forced to be very vigilant about patient privacy and legal compliance risks every day. I asked Tangney about how these factors influence the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by hospitals and physician practises, which has been generally slow. I described my own experience as a patient with diabetes type 1 – I said it’s frustrating that I cannot share my daily blood sugar readings electronically with my doctor.

Tangney’s reply highlighted the real-world issues that he and other digital health entrepreneurs face. While I can send my blood sugar readings to my doctor, as a CSV file by email for example, my doctor could potentially be sued if he sends it onto a specialist for an opinion. Those risks are a disincentive to adopt new digital technologies.

To tackle those kinds of barriers, Tangney thinks that the health IT market will “start to break off and create its own Internet” – because it needs security and authentication. There will be a highly secure Internet network for physicians to swap data, such as my blood sugar readings. The consumer Internet will intersect with health networks, but essentially the infrastructure and legal requirements for health data will require a much more secure environment.

So there are difficult challenges for health 2.0 entrepreneurs. But I got the sense that Tangney would be happy enough right now just to transition doctors from fax machines to the iPad!

The post Health 2.0 Challenge #1: Getting Doctors Off Fax Machines appeared first on ReadWrite.

I’m at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco – and it reminds me a lot of the Web 2.0 Conferences of 2006-07. The second coming of the Web, coined “Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly and his company, was entering its peak around 2006. If I ever doubted that Web 2.0 was big business, I certainly didn’t after I spotted IBM teaching it at the 2007 Web 2.0 Expo. What’s more, the IBMers weren’t sporting their traditional blue shirts. Instead they wore red polo shirts – talk about a paradigm shift!

Health 2.0 feels like it’s at the same stage in 2012. The big companies are present at this event, all of them selling “platforms” for digital health. In a single panel today, four BigCos presented their versions of such a platform: AT&T, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Aetna. I sat down with AT&T’s Chief Medical Officer after the panel, to see what it has to offer.

The panel I’m referring to was cheekily entitled ‘Platforms for Unplatforms’ and it was moderated by Matthew Holt, who co-founded the Health 2.0 conference with Indu Subaiya in 2007. The panel description made it clear that these BigCo platforms are a new phenomenon:

“For years at Health 2.0 we’ve been describing the mix of applications and devices working together as “unplatforms”. In the past few months several major health care technology organizations have announced the launch of platforms and are trying to attract developers and health care technology companies to use them.”

The panel itself was an interesting look at the platforms for each company, but to better understand why the BigCos are now entering this space I sat down with AT&T’s Chief Medical Information Officer, Dr. Geeta Nayyar, to talk about its new AT&T mHealth Platform.

As the name suggests, the AT&T mHealth Platform is mobile-focused. It aims to “provide a single environment where consumers can securely aggregate their data from across silos — insurance companies, doctor’s offices, connected devices, applications — and other data sources for better and easier access.” AT&T is partnering with startup health products like Fitbit, myZeo and the Withings WiFi Body Scale. It also plans to create an open platform, meaning that third party developers must make their data available for sharing across applications.

Currently the AT&T mHealth Platform is targeted to enterprises, as an offering for employees. 

An early AT&T health product, although not on the mHealth platform, is DiabetesManager. It was developed in partnership with diabetes software company WellDoc. AT&T tested this out on its own employees, in a pilot program for people with Type 2 diabetes. Dr. Nayyar reported back, in a blog post, that “72 percent rated DiabetesManager as a “highly useful” as a tool to help them manage their diabetes.”

OK, the pilot was somewhat biased – an AT&T product tested on AT&T employees. But after meeting Dr. Nayyar today, I was impressed by her passion for health technology. As well as being AT&T’s Chief Medical Information Officer, Dr. Nayyar is an iPad-toting Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine for the Department of Rheumatology at George Washington University. She definitely walks the talk.

Dr. Nayyar explained that health data is distributed across many “data islands” currently, which is another theme I’m hearing regularly at the Health 2.0 Conference. The reason why AT&T built a platform – indeed the reason why each of the BigCos in the panel I mentioned built a platform – is to aggregate those data islands for users.

It’s a noble goal and one we all want to see achieved, no matter which company – big or small – does it. The scale of technology and expertise of companies like AT&T, Qualcomm, Microsoft and Aetna gives them an advantage. That’s why they’re all building platforms. I do wonder though if AT&T’s approach is too focused on its actual customers: enterprises. I have some doubts about the others too – for example, would you trust all of your health data to an insurance company (Aetna)? I wouldn’t.

One thing is for sure: the digital health platform is a huge opportunity and the market is up for grabs right now. We don’t know which of these, or other, BigCos will end up being the main players. But I for one welcome their entrance to the digital health market.

For Health 2.0 in 2012, just as it was for Web 2.0 in 2006/07, it’s business time.

Top image: IBM at Web 2.0 Expo 2007; photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

The post Health 2.0: Here Come The BigCos! appeared first on ReadWrite.

With the increasing digitization of healthcare, the trend of “Big Data” has been gathering steam. According to a new report from digital health consultancy DrBonnie360, there is an estimated 50 petabytes of data in the healthcare realm. That’s predicted to grow, by a factor of 50, to 25,000 petabytes by 2020. The report, which I’ve summarized in this post, does an outstanding job of profiling the leading products utilizing Big Data in healthcare.

DrBonnie360 principal Dr. Bonnie Feldman, a former dentist, health consultant and sell-side equity analyst, identified six ways Big Data is being applied in healthcare:

• Support Research – Genomics and Beyond
• Transform Data to Information
• Support Self-Care
• Support Providers – Improve Patient Care
• Increase Awareness
• Pool Data to Build a Better Ecosystem

The report neatly outlines an “evolving ecosystem” of healthcare companies that are implementing these types of Big Data solutions.

An example of the first type (“Support Research – Genomics and Beyond”) is GNS Healthcare, which I profiled on ReadWriteWeb earlier this year. GNS Healthcare builds cause-and-effect models, using large genetic data sets, to determine what drives diseases and cures.

Towards Personalized Medicine

Personalized medicine has been a catchphrase of digital health, for good reason: it puts the patient at the center of healthcare.

“Genetic information by itself is useless, unless we can put it into context for the patient,” said Sultan Meghi, Vice President of Product Strategy at analytics company Appistry. Indeed, if you replace the word “genetic” with “health,” you have a good summary of what all of these Big Data focused digital health companies offer.

One of the most exiting aspects of Big Data in healthcare is the potential to predict – and hopefully then prevent – disease. A company called Predixion Software offers “cloud-based predictive analytic software to hospitals […] to reduce readmissions and prevent hospital-acquired conditions.” It might also be used in the near future “as a tool for prevention of chronic disease – e.g., diabetes.”

This wouldn’t be a digital health story without mobile devices being mentioned. The fifth type of Big Data healthcare company is focused on “Increasing Awareness.” A mobile app called Asthmapolis is an example of this type. A mobile sensor device is attached to an asthma inhaler, which then monitors where and when asthma attacks happen. The device wirelessly syncs with an iOS/Android app, allowing users to track their triggers and symptoms.

This short video from Asthmapolis shows how it works; and also succinctly demonstrates the value of Big Data in healthcare.

What About Privacy?

The report does a great job of showcasing current and future Big Data services in healthcare, but it also doesn’t shy away from the elephant in the room: privacy. DrBonnie360 interviewed more than 30 companies for this report and all of them were concerned with privacy. The report states that each company declared “at the very least, adherence to HIPAA requirements, and many claim more.”

The report identifies one company, behavioral analytics platform Ginger.io, as having “a particularly progressive view of data privacy, which includes the philosophy that patients own their own data, they can opt-in, choose when and how to share their data and can discontinue data sharing at any time.”

Reading this excellent white paper reinforces that Big Data will be a big driver in digital health innovation. The full presentation is embedded below.

The post How Big Data Is Improving Healthcare appeared first on ReadWrite.

A week ago Facebook got itself caught up in yet another privacy controversy, when old Wall posts from 2007-09 were automatically converted into Timeline posts. The confusion was that for some people, those old posts seemed private in nature. So it was thought that Facebook had mistakenly turned private messages into Timeline posts. Facebook responded that no, it only converted “older wall posts that had always been visible on the users’ profile pages.” That makes sense, but its users have every right to be angry.

The Facebook of 2007-09 is a totally different ballgame to the Facebook of 2012. Here are three of the more obvious reasons why:

1. Your Facebook profile page used to be a “Wall” of messages to and from your friends. Now it is a multimedia-filled “Timeline” of your everyday life.
2. These days we’re accustomed to using lists to segment our friends. We post different things to different lists.
3. Facebook now allows you to post updates publicly, a concept which didn’t exist back in 2009. Related, people you don’t know can now “subscribe” to your public updates.

The upshot: while those old Wall posts probably were always visible on a user’s profile page, that’s a very different thing to those posts being visible on today’s Facebook Timeline.

Even the concept of a “friend” has changed. In 2008, your entire Facebook network may have been what is now labeled “Close Friends”. In 2012, we also have “Acquaintances” (as the name suggests, people you don’t know very well) and “Subscribers” (people you probably don’t know at all). Not to mention the many custom lists we’re encouraged to create – I have one entitled “Tech Influentials”, for example. These aren’t necessarily friends of mine, but they’re people who I befriended for professional reasons.

The point is, being social on Facebook encompasses far more today. Back in 2008, if you posted something on your Wall then it was very likely meant for real-life friends. But nowadays, if you post something to all your Facebook friends, then it will almost certainly be seen by people you don’t know in real life. Some of us have several hundreds of such “friends”. That’s a big change in context.

Put another way: in 2007-09, Facebook was an exclusive, private social network. You had no reason to think that would ever change. But change it did, from December 2009 when Facebook suddenly set the new default for status messages as public. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote on ReadWriteWeb at the time that “this move cuts against the fundamental proposition of Facebook: that your status updates are only visible to those you opt-in to exposing them to.”

And that’s the crux of this latest privacy bungle from Facebook. Once again, the company has unilaterally decided to impose a new concept of privacy onto its users. It may be technically correct of Facebook to claim that what you posted to your friends via your Wall in 2008 is equivalent to a Timeline post to your friends in 2012. But for most Facebook users today, a friend in 2012 simply doesn’t mean the same thing as a friend in 2008.

So the problem isn’t that Wall posts from 2007-09 “were always public [and] looked like something you might say privately today,” as Gizmodo and other publications are characterizing this.

The problem is that Facebook in 2007-09 was actually a private space. Not quasi-private. Not public-but-looked-like-private. In 2008, Facebook was – hard as it may be to fathom nowadays – private.

But in 2012, that is no longer the case. So when we have something to say to real-life friends, we either use private messaging or we do a post to a small subset of our friends – our “Close Friends” or a custom list of people (such as “Family”).

So this isn’t the fault of Facebook’s users. We knew what we were doing then, when we posted to our Walls. And we know what we’re doing now. The lesson here is that Facebook should have given us the option of selecting the privacy setting for those old Wall posts. Or maybe even made those old posts available to “Close Friends” only, as the default. Then we could adjust if we wished.

Facebook’s mistake was that it had no right to assume that our “Friends” of 2007-09 means the same thing as “Friends” in 2012.

The post Sorry Facebook, This Was A Privacy Bungle! Here’s What You Should’ve Done appeared first on ReadWrite.

The adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by doctor practices and hospitals is one of the most exciting developments in health – and the iPad is playing a big part. Up till recently, the typical EMR system was a PC-based enterprise software suite deployed in a large, public hospital. But thanks mainly to the iPad, EMRs are finding their way into tens of thousands of small to medium medical practices. Today, EMR vendor drchrono is releasing a report about EMR adoption and impact. In a phone interview, I discussed the findings with drchrono CEO Michael Nusimow and COO Daniel Kivatonos.

The 2012 EMR Impact Report from drchrono surveys the usage and impact of EMRs in practices of 25 physicians or less. Drchrono surveyed 1,300 U.S. physicians who currently use EMRs, over a 30 day period. 77% of the practices surveyed were independent practices and over half (52.2%) had just one medical practitioner. Only 10.9% were practices with more than ten practitioners.

It should be noted that EMRs still have a fair way to go until they are commonly used by physicians. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2011 55% of physicians had adopted an electronic health record (EHR) system. That indicates that drchrono’s report is a study of relatively early adoptors. Indeed, the report notes that the majority of respondents (60.1%) had only used an EMR for less than one year.

But already, nearly 3/4 (74.5%) say that an EMR has increased the efficiency of their practice. The key efficiency metric, according to drchrono CEO Michael Nusimow and COO Daniel Kivatonos, is time savings.

Doctors are usually busy and harried individuals, as I witness firsthand whenever I go to see my own doctor. So an EMR system that saves a physician time every day is a top priority, Nusimow and Kivatonos told me. The report states that the average time saved using an EMR is 61.7 minutes per day.

Other benefits to physicians include reduced patient paperwork and reduced time spent charting.

What About The Patient?

I asked Nusimow and Kivatonos whether the patients themselves are seeing much benefit of EMRs at this time. The report indicates no, stating that patients are not yet “fully utilizing enhanced forms of patient communications enabled by EMRs.” For example, only 10.9% of physicians reported that patients access test results online via their EMR platform. As a patient myself, with diabetes type 1, this is precisely the kind of data I want to access electronically.

Drchrono’s focus at this time is very much on getting small to medium physician practices to adopt its iPad-based EMR for their own internal records keeping. Because this type of EMR is so new, Nusimow and Kivatonos told me, doctors might not be able to cope with patients pushing a lot of data to them.

However, they view usage from tech savvy patients as an important part of EMR adoption. In order to fully realise the potential of EMRs, patients must become more engaged with their own health data. So the aim of drchrono, said Nusimow and Kivatonos, is to build a great patient-doctor relationship.

Why drchrono Is Bullish On The iPad

In a study by Manhattan Research released in May 2012, 62% of physicians stated that they used a tablet for professional purposes. The iPad was “the dominant platform” in that figure. 62% of physicians using a tablet professionally is an impressive figure and it shows why the tablet – and in particular the market-leading iPad – is key to continued EMR adoption.

Drchrono is a vendor of iPad and iPhone EMR applications. It currently has around 30,000 registered providers and 1 million patients on its service. [note: in my July post about drchrono, I quoted a January 2012 article from the New York Times stating that 50,000 doctors used drchrono. In today’s interview, I was told that the figure the NY Times used was incorrect and should’ve read 15,000.] Drchrono is one of a number of startups offering EMR software. Others include Practice Fusion, HealthFusion, CareCloud, Athenahealth, GloStream and ElationEMR.

It’s clear to me that the tablet is going to be the defining platform for EMRs going forward. It’s the perfect device for an EMR, since the physician can carry it around everywhere they go and the patient can monitor their own health data from home. I’m looking forward to the day when I can sit down with my doctor, iPad in hand, and discuss the EMR data that is so important to my health.

The post Why Tablets Are The Future Of Electronic Medical Records [REPORT] appeared first on ReadWrite.

Earlier this month, I finally purchased a DNA test at 23andMe, the personal genetics company based in Silicon Valley. When the test kit arrived, I duly spat into the plastic tube and posted it back. It isn’t cheap, US$299 plus postage, but the results promise to tell me about my ancestry, inherited traits, and any possible congenital risks. All of this is part of the service 23andMe provides, but the recent announcement of an API could lead to even more enlightenment and uses for your genetic data.

23andMe’s API (application programming interface) allows authorized third-party developers to build applications that make use of your genetic data – if you give permission! The latter point will be a big concern for many people, because according to API specialist blog ProgrammableWeb, the 23andMe API gives access to personally identifiable data such as profile information. As a new 23andMe user myself, I’m going to want some reassurance from 23andMe before I give my permission. Giving third parties access to that kind of data could have big implications down the road, for example being refused access to medical insurance or losing out on a job.

But let’s assume for a moment that the privacy protection gets tighter, or 23andMe is able to convince me and others that their genetic data is safe. What kind of things can we expect from the API?

At the Quantified Self Conference in Palo Alto earlier this month, 23andMe director of engineering Mike Polcari announced the API. Polcari told genetics news website BioInform that conference participants expressed “a lot of enthusiasm” about the API. He mentioned some examples of apps that might be developed:

The API may also enable researchers “to perform linkage studies or genome-wide association studies using 23andMe data,” Polcari told BioInform.

These potential genetic applications won’t assuage the main concern people have with 23andMe and its DNA tests: do you really want to know about your genetic risks, given that it could cause more worry than good? A discussion on Q&A web service Quora has 30 mostly pro replies to that question. Jason Menayan found his results to be “incredibly useful” – for example, he discovered that he is a slow caffeine metabolizer and so “should limit my caffeine intake for my cardiovascular health.”

Ultimately, it’s your choice whether to do one of these tests. The price is still an obstacle for many, but that will continue to come down (it started out at $1000 when it launched at the end of 2007).

The results could potentially be of great benefit to my health. I’m pretty excited about that alone. And I’m cautiously excited about the future applications by third-party developers, because it will hopefully enable me to do useful things with my genetic data.

Have you had a DNA test done and if so, did you find it useful?

The post Coming Soon: Apps That Use Your DNA appeared first on ReadWrite.

In the fifth and final part of our series, Social Books, we explore how the “big six” book publishers use social media. So far in the series we’ve looked at the largest social network for book lovers (Goodreads), a new social network for book writers (Writer’s Bloq), how public libraries use social media, and whether book highlights are being successfully socialized. We’ve learned so far that almost everything to do with books – writing them, reading them, borrowing them, making highlights in them – has been impacted by Web technologies. So surely the biggest book publishers in America will have adapted to online technologies too, right? Let’s find out!

The so-called “big six” in trade book publishing across North America consists of Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster. There are hundreds of other publishing firms, some of them subsidiaries of the big six. But for the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on the biggies and highlight three of the main social networks they use: Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Twitter Book Clubs

Penguin USA has done an innovative thing with Twitter, holding a monthly book club with the help of hashtags and tweeting authors. Every month Penguin staff selects a book by one of its authors and invites people to tweet about it using the hashtag #readpenguin. It holds “mini book club meetings” during the course of the month, in which the book author answers questions from readers. The current book of the month is Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures by Emma Straub.

Simon & Schuster also runs book club type activities on Twitter, plus Facebook.

Facebook – Differing Strategies

The big six don’t all use Facebook in the same way. Hachette irregularly updates its Facebook page (there are only 3 updates in September so far) and probably as a result it only has 3,998 likes currently. Compare that to Random House, which appears to do 3-4 Facebook updates per day on average and has 38,369 likes.

However, it could be that Hachette is simply trying a different Facebook strategy from the norm. Because instead of focusing on its corporate brand page, Hachette promotes the Facebook pages of its authors and fan pages for Hachette books.

One of Hachette’s leading authors, novelist James Patterson, has 3.4 million likes. Patterson appears to be regularly – and personally – updating his Facebook page. He’s not quite as prolific as Paulo Coelho, the master of social media among authors, but it’s still a good effort.

Tumblr Is Popular With Book Publishers

Blog advertising company Blogads did some research In January this year and found that Tumblr is especially popular with book publishers.

HarperCollins, which has a presence on just about every social media service, has a couple of good Tumblrs. The corporate HarperCollins Tumblr features blog posts by staff, alongside quirky promotional ideas like “Seen on the Subway” (photos of everyday people reading HarperCollins books). One of the company’s divisions, Harper Perennial, also does a colorful Tumblr.

The Author & Reader Take Center Stage

That’s just a taste of what book publishers are doing with social media. I got the sense that it’s incredibly varied and that each of the big six is experimenting with social media in a different way. They all had one thing in common though: the author and her audience is paramount when it comes to social media.

Whether it’s helping promote an author’s Facebook page, blogging about an author on Tumblr, or organizing a Twitter discussion between an author and her readers, the publishing houses understand that the Social Web is all about authors engaging with their readers.

The post How The Big Six Book Publishers Are Using Social Media appeared first on ReadWrite.

Like many of you, I’m connected to the Internet virtually every waking hour of my day – via computer, tablet and mobile phone. Yet I still regularly visit my local public library, in order to borrow books, CDs and DVDs. Which made me wonder: are these two worlds disconnected, or is the Social Web being integrated into our public libraries? In this fourth installment in ReadWriteWeb’s Social Books series, I aim to find out!

The American Library Association (ALA) released a report earlier this year entitled The 2012 State of America’s Libraries. The report states that “Facebook and Twitter in particular have proven themselves useful tools not only in publicizing the availability of online collections, but also in building trusted relationships with users.”

According to a survey conducted by the South Carolina State Library, 88% of respondents (all library workers) claimed to use Facebook in their work. Twitter was second most popular, at 46.8%.

So what are libraries using Facebook for and what does “building trusted relationships with users” mean? The ALA report elaborated:

“Social networking is used to publicize library events such as gaming nights; to alert users to additions to collections; to provide links to articles, videos, or Web content that might prove relevant or helpful to patrons; and to provide a conduit for community information. Social media also play an important role in fostering relationships with the community by allowing patrons to ask questions or provide feedback about library services.”

This is precisely how my own local library, Wellington Library, uses Facebook. It’s on a raft of other social media platforms too – including Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Wellington Library even updates its Facebook page using IFTTT, a syndication service beloved by Web geeks.

Enhanced Catalogs & Mobile Apps

But there’s more that libraries can do to create a social experience for their patrons, other than being active on Facebook. LibraryThing for Libraries is a set of services offered by the company LibraryThing. It features catalog enhancements (such as user-generated book reviews and recommendations) and a customizable mobile app called Library Anywhere.

In June, LibraryThing for Libraries had 800,000 “professionally vetted reviews.” While library users could just go and get reviews and recommendations from Amazon or Goodreads, it does seem useful to have them integrated into a library’s catalog.

In a discussion in Branch, Portland librarian Justin Hoenke called LibraryThing “the ultimate social reading tool for libraries.” Although Sarah Houghton, Director of the San Rafael Public Library in California, cast some doubt on whether library patrons use the reviews regularly.

Reimagining The Library Book

Some libraries are experimenting not just with socializing the library catalog, but the reading process itself. New York Public Library has released an interactive website called Candide 2.0, a community annotated version of Voltaire’s 1759 book called Candide. The NYPL version is described as an “experiment in public reading and communal annotation.”

It’ll be fascinating to track how libraries continue to bring the Social Web to their organizations. I haven’t even touched on the increasing prevalence of e-books inside libraries – another trend that potentially creates a more social experience for library patrons (for example, with social book highlights).

How about you, do you still go to your local library? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how Web technologies are being deployed by your public library.

The post The Social Library: How Public Libraries Are Using Social Media appeared first on ReadWrite.

Continuing our Social Books series, today I’m looking at book highlights. The increasing popularity of e-readers, in particular the Kindle, has made it common practice to highlight passages and quotes within books. There have been various efforts to make those highlights social and today I’ll look at the two leading services. One is from Amazon itself, called Kindle Profiles. The other is a startup called Findings. As if to prove that not everything is social, this time the anti-social service is winning…

Last year Amazon launched Kindle Profiles, a kind of homepage on the Web for your Kindle reading. But while indie social network Goodreads has almost doubled its user base over the past year, to now boast 10 million registered users, Kindle Profiles hasn’t captured the imagination of book fans online. That’s because a lot of Kindle activity is private by default. In other words, Kindle Profiles isn’t as social as Goodreads.

It’s not that Kindle Profiles doesn’t offer social options. It does, but they’re usually turned off by default. What’s more, the social options in Kindle Profiles seem almost half-hearted. Take its Facebook integration, for example. Compare the long list of things you can update your Timeline with on Goodreads, to the meagre “change the status of a public book” actions in Kindle Profiles:

Kindle Profiles: Geared Towards Private Highlights

Here’s how Kindle Profiles works. It lists out all of the books you have purchased on Amazon, or that are on your wish list. These aren’t necessarily Kindle books either – the paper-bound books you bought or wish to buy are included in your books list. Each book in your list has a reading status and rating, which is populated from your Amazon profile if available.

The most useful aspect of Kindle Profiles for me over the past year, since I last reviewed it in August 2011, has been the Your Highlights section. This displays all of the – mostly private – highlights I have made in Kindle e-books. I read a lot of non-fiction and highlight passages that interest me. So Kindle Profiles gives me a great archive on the Web of those highlights, for my future reference. I can also save them to Evernote (which I have done for a few recent books).

Why haven’t I made my Kindle Profiles highlights public? Because I can’t be bothered changing them from the default private. I see no need to either, since I’m not overly interested in what other people have highlighted in a book I just read myself.

Amazon doesn’t seem that concerned about marketing Kindle Profiles as a social tool. In my review last year, I remarked that “as Facebook has done over the past couple of years with its initially private service, over time Amazon will likely prompt and tease you to make your private content public.”

But Amazon hasn’t done that. Judging by the Books with the Most Public Notes page, a relatively small proportion of Kindle users are making their notes public. The Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, number 5 on that list, has public notes by 485 people (make that 486, as I just made mine public too – what the heck). 486 Kindle readers with public notes is nothing to be sneezed at, but it’s probably a small percentage of the total Kindle readers who made highlights in this highly quotable Jobs biography.

Findings: Goes Straight For The Public Highlights

While Amazon keeps Kindle Profiles a mostly private affair, a startup is making a bold attempt to turn book highlights and quotes into social objects. Findings was launched in October last year by writer Steven Johnson, BetaWorks Founder and CEO John Borthwick and developer Corey Menscher.

Findings can import your book data from Kindle, via a browser bookmarklet. Interestingly, Findings has opted to make your Kindle highlights public by default. The bookmarklet page warns:

“All of your Kindle highlights (regardless of whether they are marked public or private on Amazon) will be synced to Findings and default to public visibility.”

While I can see the rationale in reversing the privacy settings of your Kindle highlights in bulk (to make Findings social out of the box), it’s also quite presumptuous. Your Kindle Highlights may be private for a reason – for example, you are reading a job hunting book and don’t want your highlights to be made public. Sure you can change the public setting for a particular book back to private, but it’s easy to forget to do that.

Update: The day after this post was published, Findings announced that Amazon has requested the Kindle sync functionality be removed: “Another part of our service has been the ability to make your Kindle reading more social by importing and sharing your Kindle highlights. A few days ago, Amazon formally notified us that they believe this functionality violates their terms of service.”

So are book highlights as social objects going to be a phenomenon? I’m skeptical. Highlighting and note-making in e-books is a personal thing. I make highlights in a book because I want to remember a passage or idea in it. While I am curious sometimes to see what other people highlighted from a book I read, it’s far more valuable to me to see what books other people are reading – and Goodreads is the place to go for that.

So I think Amazon is doing the right thing by keeping highlights and notes private by default. Well, let’s face it – Amazon doesn’t stand to gain much by giving external parties (like Findings) that valuable reader metadata. So it’s simply choosing the path of least resistance.

While I admire the gumption of Findings to try and make highlights social, it will be an uphill battle fighting Amazon’s privacy settings and Goodreads’ social momentum.

The post Why Book Highlights Are Anti-Social appeared first on ReadWrite.

Today I reviewed my magazine subscriptions, partly to see which of Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle and digital magazine indie Zinio has the best offering currently. My check reaffirmed many positive things about digital magazines, but one thing still frustrates me: the user experience for subscriptions in both iTunes and Kindle. Apple and Amazon could learn a thing or two from the specialist in digital magazines, Zinio.

My current tally of magazine subscriptions is 12. Of those, only one is not a digital magazine that I read on my iPad – and that’s because it’s a niche health magazine that isn’t available digitally. I also discovered in my review that only two of my twelve annual subscriptions cost more than US$50 per year. So not only are most magazines that I’m interested in available digitally, they’re all relatively inexpensive.

Here’s a table showing ten of my digital magazine subscriptions: what I pay annually for each of them, and which platform I use. For various reasons, the prices I pay aren’t necessarily the cheapest available. Sometimes my location (New Zealand) increases the cost, or sometimes I opt for a higher priced better reading experience on a certain platform. But in general, I do tend to go with the least expensive option – because the reading experience usually isn’t that much different across platforms. The exception is when a publisher creates an interactive experience for tablet devices, which is Wired’s approach. But a simple PDF is the most common format these days for digital magazines.

As you can see, the pricing is probably the most attractive feature of digital magazines. I pay from 39 cents to $2.50 per issue (if I discount Scientific American, as my subscription for that is for both digital and print). Of course, American customers are long used to paying ridiculously low prices for magazine subscriptions. That’s because advertising is typically the main revenue source for commercial magazines – and that advertising mostly targets US customers. So publishers take the hit on printing and delivery costs, in order to reach the US audience. But what my American friends may not realize is that for the rest of the world, prices for popular magazines like Rolling Stone and Wired have traditionally been high. So digital magazines make the low priced magazine subscription model available to the rest of the world.

Which brings me to the second major advantage of digital magazines: they’re available immediately, no matter where you are located. For me, out here in Middle-earth, that is most appreciated.

The Bad News: Apple & Amazon Don’t Make It Easy

The only bad thing about the state of digital magazines is how poor the user experience for subscriptions is on both iTunes and Kindle.

Apple has a Newsstand concept, but it’s confusing. You first have to download the publisher’s app, then subscribe either from within the app or on the publisher’s website. Once downloaded, each of these apps is housed in the Newsstand – a kind of meta-app. But the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. For example: you need to manually move around the magazine apps, to separate out your subscriptions from magazine apps you downloaded but didn’t subscribe to. Then sometimes you find yourself in the iTunes Store, when you thought you were in Newsstand (or are they the same thing? Yes, kind of… but then no, Newsstand is a separate icon on your iPad). The user experience of Newsstand is very unlike Apple: it’s unintuitive and a bit disorienting.

Managing your subscriptions in iTunes (what you’re subscribed to, when it’s up for renewal, etc.) is even more confusing. Every time I want to check my iTunes magazine subscriptions, it takes me 5 minutes or so to work out where to go. For the record, you need to go to your iTunes account page and it’s an almost hidden option on there.

As for Amazon’s Kindle, if anything it’s even harder than iTunes to manage your subscriptions. There is no option to manage your subscriptions from within the Kindle iPad app, as far as I could see. I eventually found it on the Amazon website under Your Account > Manage Your Kindle > Magazines.

One last confusing aspect for digital magazine consumers is that often publishers have subscription offers on their own websites, which can be different from what’s available in iTunes, Kindle or Zinio. That’s entirely up to the publisher of course, but it does add another level of head scratching for the consumer.

The shining light in the digital magazine space right now is Zinio. It offers a wonderful selection of digital magazines and its pricing is almost always better than either iTunes or Amazon Kindle. After my review today, I ended up moving a couple of my subscriptions from Kindle over to Zinio because the pricing and overall experience is better. While Zinio’s user interface for managing subscriptions is not perfect, it’s markedly better than iTunes or Kindle. Plus it’s about to improve even more, with a redesign (currently in beta, screenshot below).

We can only hope that Apple and Amazon get their acts together and follow the example set by Zinio. Because right now, managing digital magazine subscriptions is a frustrating process.

The post Digital Magazine Subscriptions: iTunes & Kindle Still A Mess appeared first on ReadWrite.

Yesterday I reviewed the leading social network for book readers, Goodreads. In the second post in my Social Books series, I’m checking out a brand new social network for book writers. Called Writer’s Bloq, it was founded by a young wannabe writer from New York named Nayia Moysidis. In a phone interview, I discovered that Moysidis, a graduate of Columbia University’s creative writing program, started Writer’s Bloq because of the frustrations she encountered trying to get her first novel noticed by publishers. She’d sent 93 individualized letters to publishing houses, but only received a few generic rejection letters in response.

Like many entrepreneurs, Moysidis is a very determined person. After being largely ignored by publishers, her next step was to take an intern job at Simon & Schuster. There she was dismayed to find her very own novel – submitted under a pen name – in the slush pile! On the plus side, Moysidis saw first hand that it was impossible for a publishing house like Simon & Schuster to pick up every book sent to them. They simply receive too many manuscripts.

After seeing the writer submission process from the other side, Moysidis concluded that publishers are so overwhelmed that they aren’t discovering enough new talent. She felt that writers needed a better way to try and get noticed, which ultimately would help publishers too. So she created Writer’s Bloq, a wonderfully named social network where writers can post snippets of their work and network with others in the industry.

The first thing that struck me about Writer’s Bloq when I signed up for a nosey, was the crisp and clean design. Goodreads could learn a thing or two from that.

Writer’s Bloq has two main sections: a writing section and a reading section. As with any social network, it’s advisable to have a look around first before posting your own content. There are many ways you can discover the writing of others – by genre, format, status (published or unpublished), or tags.

You can choose to read a piece immediately, or save it for later. You can also send it to your Kindle. The staples of social networks are all there: comments, likes, sharing via Facebook and Twitter, the option to subscribe to the author.

What’s In It For Writers

Writer’s Bloq is clearly very early in its evolution – there isn’t a huge amount of activity on the site right now. That is of course the problem every new social network has. Goodreads is at the opposite end of the social network spectrum. It’s a mature social network that reached its tipping point a few years ago and is now in the midst of mainstreaming (10 million users and counting!).

So the challenge for Writer’s Bloq is to get its core user base – budding writers and people in the publishing industry – to sign up. I asked Nayia Moysidis why new writers should post their work on Writer’s Bloq. Why not just self-publish, if they aren’t able to land a traditional publisher? She replied that when writers submit a manuscript to a publisher, essentially they are after the following three things:

1. Editing and serious feedback on their work.
2. Marketing.
3. Validation.

Writers can’t get those things by self-publishing, said Moysidis. The aim of Writer’s Bloq is to give writers a better opportunity to attract publishers. They can promote their work on Writer’s Bloq and get feedback from peers – and perhaps even from publishers sniffing around the site. The community helps self-select the best writing, through ratings and comments.

Not a Novel Idea

There are many other social networks for writers on the Web. So getting new users is going to be nearly as much of a challenge for Moysidis as getting a publisher to notice her debut novel.

But according to Moysidis, most of the existing social networks for authors are geared towards helping writers self-publish. Writer’s Bloq is all about helping new writers get the attention of publishing houses. Which begs the question: how will Writer’s Bloq attract publishing industry people to the network?

Moysidis replied that Writer’s Bloq is starting out with a focus on writers, but it intends to open up to publishers officially at a later date. In the meantime, she said that industry professionals are already registering… as writers. Many in the industry are budding writers themselves.

Like any new social network, Writer’s Bloq has a very tough road ahead of it. The key is to get network effects going, in other words get more and more writers – and ideally publishing industry people too – signed up and using the site regularly. Easier said than done. But Writer’s Bloq has a great design, enthusiastic early users and a Kickstarter project (see video below) to raise money for offline meetups – cleverly called “bloqparties.”

Perhaps most importantly, Writer’s Bloq has a passionate, focused founder in Nayia Moysidis. Whose ultimate goal, by the way, is still to get her first novel published.

The post Social Networking For Authors & Overcoming The Rejection Slip appeared first on ReadWrite.

My next series of posts is entitled Social Books. Over five posts, I’m going to explore how book readers and writers use social networking tools. Three of the posts will be from the point of view of readers, starting with this one today about the leading social network for bookworms: Goodreads. In the remaining posts, I’ll be checking out a brand new social network for writers and investigating how book publishers are using social media. So let’s get started with far and away the most popular social network for book lovers in the world, Goodreads. Its user base has almost doubled in 2012, which made me wonder whether Goodreads has any real competition now…

Goodreads was launched in January 2007 and currently has over 10 million registered users, who have collectively added 370 million books to the site. Goodreads has experienced strong growth over the past 18 months. It had 5 million registered users in May 2011, increasing to 6 million by December. In 2012 the growth of Goodreads went up another level, thanks mainly to its integration with Facebook Timeline in January.

Goodreads: Onto A Good Thing

In Goodreads you’re encouraged to add books into custom shelves (a.k.a. lists), such as “Currently Reading,” “Read,” and “To Read.” That way, anybody you have connected to can see what you’re reading or intend to read – and vice versa. Goodreads also has all the other common features of a social network: discussions, ratings, reviews, messaging.

Goodreads also has groups galore. Founder and CEO Otis Chandler told ReadWriteWeb in April that “we have 20,000 groups on our site, such as The Sword and Laser (part of the new Geek & Sundry YouTube channel), The Next Best Book Club and small, private, meet-in-real-life groups like the Boston Book Club.”

The foundation of Goodreads is providing social recommendations. As Chandler wrote, when explaining why he built Goodreads, “when I want to know what books to read, I’d rather turn to a friend than any random person or bestseller list.” That core functionality got a huge boost from the Facebook integration in January. After all, the more friends you can connect to on Goodreads, the more books you’ll discover.

One interesting thing to watch is Goodreads’ partnerships with publishing houses and authors. Chandler wrote on Quora last year that “we work with all major book publishers and many mid-majors to help them launch their books to our audience of book readers.” It also helps self-publishers promote their books.

Even authors who aren’t officially connected to Goodreads have their own profile on the site. For example, I’m a fan of Michael Lewis on Goodreads – his page features biographical information, book links, blog posts (from his Blogspot site), video and more.

Are There Good Alternatives To Goodreads?

Goodreads competes with LibraryThing and Shelfari. Both are far behind Goodreads in number of users, however Shelfari remains a threat because of its owner: Amazon. Indeed, as Goodreads has grown, its reliance on Amazon’s product advertising API for book information became untenable. That’s why in January of this year, Goodreads announced that Ingram, the largest wholesaler of books in the U.S., was its new primary data partner.

Whatever qualities LibraryThing and Shelfari have – and both have a better design than Goodreads – it’s hard to go past Goodreads, due to its large user base and excellent Facebook integration. When it comes to getting social recommendations for books, those are the two key factors.

The two biggest threats to Goodreads now are: 1) if Facebook decides to do book reviews itself; and 2) if Amazon gets its act together and starts pushing Shelfari (or Kindle Profiles, its own semi-serious social experiment). However I think the chances of either Facebook or Amazon ruining Goodreads’ good thing is slim, at least in the short term. Facebook is better off supporting and partnering with Goodreads, as it does with other specialist networks (like Spotify). Meanwhile Amazon is too busy trying to control the e-reader and book retail markets, so Shelfari will probably continue being largely ignored by Bezos and crew.

2012 has been a good great year for Goodreads. If you’re a bookworm like me, I recommend you check it out – and friend me there!

The post Book Lovers: If You’re Not Already On Goodreads, Here’s Why You Should Be appeared first on ReadWrite.

“The only thing more perfect than reading is more reading,” declared Amazon in a TV advert for its new Kindle eReader device. At a self-hosted event in Santa Monica today, Amazon launched new versions of its eReader and tablet products. Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos spent over an hour on stage, extolling the virtues of the new hardware. But perhaps more importantly, King Jeff showed that Amazon’s reign over the book publishing kingdom continues to advance.

While Amazon faces stiff competition in the tablet market, in the eReader market Amazon is dominant. The latest version of the Kindle eReader, named the Paperwhite, boasts a higher resolution, front-lit screen and will retail from $119. It’s a compelling upgrade, but the real reason for Amazon’s dominance in the eReader market isn’t the hardware – it’s Amazon’s continued innovation and market power in eBooks.

On stage today, Bezos confirmed that sales of Kindle eBooks overtook paper books around the beginning of 2011. Kindle eBook sales have trended steeply upwards since then.

It’s notable that paper books have also grown, which is evidence of Amazon’s power in the book industry. As Borders and Barnes & Noble shut down more and more of their bricks-and-mortar stores, Amazon’s e-commerce business continues to increase sales – in both paper books and eBooks.

Another reason for Amazon’s increasing book sales is that people are buying more books. In a Guardian article last month, Amazon.co.uk described this as a “renaissance of reading.” Amazon claims this renaissance was ushered in by the Kindle. The UK arm of Amazon told the Guardian that “British Kindle users were buying four times as many books as they were prior to owning a Kindle.” That statistic was repeated by Bezos today.

eBook Sales Now 15% Of Total Book Sales

According to BookStats 2012, a mid-year report from the Association of American Publishers and Book Industry Study Group, eBooks made up 15 percent of all trade book sales in 2011. In particular, in 2011 eBooks became the number one format for adult fiction.

OK, most of that is 50 Shades of Grey, The Hunger Games and similar populist fare (says the snobbish english lit grad). But regardless, it’s undeniable that eBooks have finally taken hold of the publishing industry.

Amazon is profiting mightily from eBook trends – whether or not it caused them. Its new eReader, the Kindle Paperwhite, will very likely increase its market leadership.

It isn’t just eBook trends and new eReader hardware that is responsible for Amazon’s prime position in the book industry. The company is also shaking things up in book publishing and formats.

Kindle Direct Publishing

Amazon’s self-publishing service, called Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), gives authors 70% royalties. In a remarkable statistic, Bezos revealed that 27 of the top 100 Kindle books are from the KDP program.

Kindle Singles

Kindle Singles are short-form books that typically sell for a couple of dollars each. Bezos positioned Kindle Singles as halfway between a magazine article (under 5,000 words) and a book (over 30,000 words). 3.5 million Kindle Singles have been sold to date, said Bezos, 35 of which have reached the Kindle Top 50.

Kindle Serials

Today Amazon introduced a new Kindle book format, which harkens back to an old literature publishing strategy: serials. Just as Charles Dickens used to publish his novels in monthly or weekly installments, Kindle authors can choose to release their books in serial form.

From the consumer’s point of view, buy the first “episode” and you’ll receive all future episodes as they are released.

Amazon is releasing eight serials initially, priced at $1.99 each (which includes all future installments). In addition, Charles Dickens’ books being re-released as Kindle Serials.

All Hail King Jeff

Add to the mix other Amazon offerings – like Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, Kindle-exclusive books and Kindle Highlights – and Amazon has a formidable service offering for books, of all kinds.

Amazon reigns in the book kingdom, which seems to be a good thing for readers and authors. For readers: books are cheaper than ever before, the eReader hardware is getting better (as evidenced by the Paperwhite Kindle launched today), Web services are becoming more flexible (serials, singles) and social (Lending Library, Highlights). For authors: there is an easy and attractive self-publishing option (KDP) and more flexibility in format.

Of course some of King Jeff’s subjects aren’t as happy: book publishing houses and competing book retailers probably see it more like The Spanish Inquisition, than a renaissance. But such is the price of progress. For now King Jeff reigns.

Photos: The Verge

The post Amazon’s Renaissance Of Reading appeared first on ReadWrite.

Last Friday I did a presentation at The Project [R]evolution conference in Auckland, New Zealand. I presented on a topic I’ve been writing a lot about recently: the reimagination of publishing. I haven’t been this excited about innovation in Web publishing since the early, experimental days of blogging, when I started ReadWriteWeb circa 2002-03. In particular, three new products have captured my imagination: App.net, Medium and Branch. It’s too early to tell if any of those three products will be successful, but I like them because they are doing something different – and as a result, shaking things up.

Although it’s Web publishing that has fired up my neurons, I have also been tracking developments in digital books and magazines. I mentioned two iPad apps that have impressed me a lot over the past year: The Atavist and Citia. Neither aims to replace paper. The beauty of both The Atavist and Citia is that they complement traditional magazines and books (respectively).

The Atavist releases multimedia enhanced magazine stories for about $3 a pop. Citia creates digital versions of non-fiction books, using cards and stacks to condense each book into its essential ideas – a concept which fans of 1980s product HyperCard, for Apple Macintosh, will remember fondly.

Summarizing where I think digital magazines and books are going, I listed some of the key drivers. But note the fifth point: people still love paper magazines and books (this author included). The digital publishing products that fascinate me the most are ones that complement paper magazines and books – they don’t aim to replace them.

Next I talked about the transition from the first big wave of Web publishing, which I characterized as the Geocities era of the mid to late 90s – to the latest wave of 2012 (App.net, Medium, Branch, Svbtle). The Clipart-addled Geocities was the third biggest website on the Web in 1999, its peak. Nowadays, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and Tumblr rule.

But things may be shaken up, again, if two of Twitter’s founders and a bolshy Twitter competitor have anything to do with it. I’ve identified five reasons why Web publishing is undergoing a sea change (see presentation embedded below for all five).

What’s intriguing about these new products isn’t that they have a decent chance of becoming as massive as Twitter, Facebook, WordPress or Tumblr. Indeed, I will be surprised if any of the new era become even half as popular. What’s of most interest to me is that each of these new products is challenging the “old” guard (if you can call services born in the mid-to-late 2000s as old!).

App.net is a direct challenge to Twitter’s business model – especially now that Twitter is in the midst of tightening access to its API. Medium is, in a way, trying to make a categorized Tumblr (in other words, make a better Tumblr). Branch is trying to reimagine discussions, which strikes at both Facebook and Twitter. Svbtle is encroaching on the terrain of WordPress, with its elite blog network and minimalist design.

These are exciting times for Web publishers! Here is the whole of my presentation, via Slideshare:

The Reimagination of Publishing

from

Richard MacManus

The post The Reimagination of Publishing appeared first on ReadWrite.

As streams of information become more popular on the Web, we need better ways to consume and manage them. Apps that allow you to aggregate content from different sources – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news websites and more – may become very popular. That’s if they can overcome the increasingly walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter. Which makes creating a streams app a risky proposition, because there is no guarantee they’ll be able to access all of a user’s social data. A new service called State is trying, though. It came onto my radar this week and it passed my initial “I’m still using it after 30 minutes of tinkering” test.

State is currently in private beta. At first glance, it looks part FriendFeed, part TweetDeck, part iGoogle, and part something wholly new.

In an email to me, co-founder Joshua Lewis explained that he and his business partner Galen Wolfe-Pauly built State to try and answer the question of “what the future of the web looks like when you replace static content with streams of data”.

I mentioned a few services that State reminded me of, but for the founders it’s more like “the Photoshop of cloud data.” Lewis said that State is “a general purpose tool to manipulate, filter and publish streams of data.” Incidentally, State’s founders are already worried about the future of Twitter integration in State. It added App.net support soon after, partly as a hedge against Twitter pulling its data completely.

How State Works

You can add streams of content from up to four services (so far): Twitter, App.net, Instagram and Dropbox. This is the part that reminds me of a start page, like early Netvibes or iGoogle, because you end up with panels of content across the web page. You can also connect to Instapaper, enabling you to save content for later reading.

Then, like TweetDeck, you’re able to view various aspects of the stream. For Twitter, you can select to view content by home timeline, mentions, user, place, tag, search and list. The same principle applies to content from App.net and Instagram.

While State only connects to five services so far, you can imagine it eventually hooking into many more. This is where State reminds me of FriendFeed, the early feed management service acquired by Facebook just over three years ago. At the time it was acquired, FriendFeed could connect to 58 services.

One feature I really like in State is the ability to “follow” a page of streams that someone else has created. The State team has created several of these pages: News, Magazines, Food. Each page – or “workspace” to use the service’s parlance – is made up of many different streams of content. The Magazine one features the Twitter streams of various magazine publishers. There is limited ability to filter – for example, you can select to view only images from a stream. But I imagine more filtering options will be added over time.

By default your pages are private, but you can choose to share or make them public.

To get a tour of some of State’s other features, check out this demo. The service is in private beta, but you can register your interest here.

It’s clearly early days for State, but already I’m enjoying playing with it and building pages of streams. Keep an eye on this young service.

The post First Look: State, A Streams App Of The Future appeared first on ReadWrite.

One of the five reasons why Web publishing is changing is the emergence of streams of information. In other words, a constant flow of information ordered chronologically and (ideally) topically too. In the near future, the theory goes, it won’t matter where you enter content – a blog platform, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etcetera – because all of it will be accessible to other people as a stream. Yet this rosy future may not happen, if Twitter and Facebook have their way.

The key about streams is that they are much more than a static web page. In the near future, your stream may be delivered in any number of ways: as an RSS feed to your Reader of choice, a Reader app built using App.net, or even through a good old web page.

The Present: Simple Streams, Twitter Features

Much of the vision about streams is currently either experimental or hasn’t been built yet (like the App.net example I mentioned). But as it happens, there is a good early example of streams from a mainstream publisher: The Wall Street Journal.

On a blog post by streams evangelist Anil Dash, provocatively entitled Stop Publishing Web Pages, Laura Holder from The Wall Street Journal left this comment:

“Although of course still publishing traditional articles, at The Wall Street Journal we’ve started opening streams around event-based news topics, such as Apple Keynotes, Olympics, Campaign 2012 and a 24/7 Markets Stream, compiling a dynamic river of topical articles, tweets, live blogs, photos, videos. They work on mobile, engagement is high, filtering will come, and I suspect advertising integration will evolve.”

The election stream is mostly made up of WSJ news articles and tweets from WSJ staff. There is the odd video too, plus sharing options to Facebook and Twitter.

Probably the best feature is that it’s easily digested via mobile.

This is early days for streams and The Wall Street Journal’s effort is fairly basic, although very nicely implemented using WordPress.

The Future: Twitter & Facebook Don’t Want You To Control Your Stream

So what can we expect of streams in the future? It’s difficult to say, because there is no guarantee that popular publishing services will even support streams in the future. We’re looking at you, Twitter.

There is a battle going on in this era of the Web for control over user content. The most popular social services, Facebook and Twitter, are both trying to keep a hold over their Walled Gardens. Neither company wants its users to have control over their own content. That makes it difficult for third party developers to build stream apps (in other words, interfaces to view streams), because they won’t necessarily be able to access all of your content created in Facebook and Twitter.

This is where App.net is potentially an important development. If it can become the de facto stream for microblogging, then App.net combined with RSS – the syndication format supported by almost all publishers nowadays – may become the standard for streams.

But not if Facebook and Twitter have anything to do with it. So it will be interesting to see how streams evolve over the next couple of years. Let me know in the comments how you think this will pan out.

The post The Future of Streams: Twitter Looms As Biggest Obstacle appeared first on ReadWrite.