SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 9 – As the Macworld keynote fires up, all the press and attendees focus on Steve Jobs as he gives his presentation on stage. As usual, the drama and theatrics are high at this flagship event. Steve is a master at creating suspense and wooing the crowd. However, the vast majority of people can’t see him at all. Instead, they’re huddled in front of computer screens, staring intently at static text and pictures that are updated almost in real time as the presentation unfolds.

Welcome to the world of live blogging, where passionate bloggers beam out the instant scoop regarding current events and news. Unlike normal blogging, which is asynchronous, live blogging is more akin to a one way IM conversation. The people who really care about the topic will keep the post open, and refresh constantly to find out what’s happening. In the case of the Macworld keynote, blogs were the only way for people not in the room to get the scoop. I was one of many people who oohed and ahhed as Steve unveiled the details of the iPhone.

Blog posts as instant messaging
Live blogging is not a new thing, and has been around since the early days of blogging. Whether it’s the Macworld keynote, the CES conference, or the Oscars, there will be people live blogging on the scene. How people consume these live posts is very different than normal posts. As I mentioned before, live posts are like one way instant messages. The audience expects updates on the order of seconds and minutes, not hour or days.

During the Macworld keynote, there were dozens of blogs that were engaged in live blogging–some more successful than others. The two leaders were Engadget and Mac Rumors. Both were providing pictures along with the text, and keeping the post updated at least once every few minutes.

However, there was a key difference between the two. Mac Rumors actually implemented an AJAX refresh that updated the post without needing to send an HTML refresh of the page. This served to reduce the bandwidth needed to push out the information to a large audience, and also to reduce the potential wait time to get the information. This made the Mac Rumors live blogging experience to be more fluid and timely.

Using the right tools
The problem is that most blogging software isn’t well suited for live blogging. The blogger needs to continuously edit and save the post, using a potentially clunky interface involving form submissions. A better solution would be a chat-like interface where the blogger simply types in the next bit of news, and the post would be automatically updated in place with a timestamp without the need for a page reload. Mac Rumors probably cooked something up on their own for their AJAX live blogging page.

Live blogging is a great tool for instantly disseminating information. With the addition of comments, live blogging creates a virtual forum in parallel with the unfolding events. In many ways, this is somewhere between static blog posts and IRC. It would be interesting to peruse a whole network of live blogs, where you can peer into events across the world in real time.

It’s been quite a year for social web technologies — blogs, social networks, and online video broke into the mainstream consciousness, even earning a tip from Time Magazine for person of the year. And, this has definitely been reflected in the 9 months that BuzzShout has been online.

Top categories

The top company categories for BuzzShout from this year are:

1. Social Networking (175)
2. Blogs (151)
3. Photos (110)
4. Listings (103)
5. Videos (102)
6. Bookmarking (94)
7. Reviews (93)

I really wasn’t kidding when I said that companies are springing up all over the place. For some the weeks, I was literally hearing about company launches on a daily basis. The Web 2.0 bubble is growing, and with it, we’re seeing a glut of companies that are all doing very similar things.

Go ahead, try browsing any one of the top categories for a glimpse of the ever crowding spaces.

Growing trends

Some trends have planted their seeds this year, and should begin to blossom in 2007. These include:

• Sharing what you wear — Companies like Shoutfit and StyleFeeder are leading the way for social fashion sharing and trendspotting.
• Getting paid for social media content — Digital Journal, Social Roots, and Yepic hope to actually pay the person of the year, You, for all that social media effort.
• Blog and news aggregating — TechMeme, Tailrank, and Megite have yet to garner mainstream attention. However, as blogs continue to grow in popularity, these aggregators will become increasingly important as a tool to filter out the wheat from the chaff.

Predictions

2006 really was a wild ride, full of mashups, agile development, and quick hacks. In contrast, 2007 should bring a more mature look at Web 2.0 (and, I daresay, Web 3.0). In particular, we’ll be seeing a lot more focus on creating fully functional web applications, and not just simple tools.

I expect 2007 to bring a healthy shake up of existing companies. There are just too many social networking and video sites to be sustainable. We’ll probably start seeing this happen in the latter part of next year, as major players get bought out or go big on their own.

Most people create applications with a particular use case in mind. Speaking from my experience, I like to meticulously plan things out by imagining exactly how users will react to and use new features. But, what a lot of people don’t realize is that intended use cases in Web 2.0 may be flipped upside down by your users. In most cases, this is a good thing.

Take the Facebook groups feature, for example. The creators probably thought that users would like to create groups for their clubs, friends, and activity partners. Groups would bring comradery to the web of weak links in a social network. As the developers left the drawing board, they probably had a very clear definition in their heads of how groups would be used.

Imagine their surprise when they found out that the most popular groups in Facebook have become rallying points for raising awareness for heavy hitting world and health issues. In fact, there is a group that has exploded to nearly half a million members in a few days called “For Every 1,000 that join this group I will donate $1 for Darfur.” This all happened organically–Facebook never requested their users to do any of this.

This isn’t only happening at Facebook. Dogster, a social networking site for dogs and dog owners, allowed users to maintain a blog. The blogs were meant to be used by owners to let other owners keep in touch about their experiences with their pets. Instead, the owners are now blogging like they are the dogs themselves! Myspace, with the launch of their music features, exploded with music artists wanting to keep their fans up to date on their latest recordings and events. In both of these cases, the users took the creative tools and expressed themselves in surprising ways.

Many companies have met this phenomenon of unforeseen use cases by leaving their system as open to expression as possible. One of the best examples is Flickr, which allows for many creative uses via tagging, albums, and an easy-to-use open API. They never stand in the way of creative uses of their site–in fact, it’s encouraged.

Social web applications should never restrict users to doing one thing one way. Freedom of expression is paramount, and organic growth rules supreme. Successful companies out their will know how to channel this to their advantage.

Read/Write Web writes about a new service called User/Submitter, which pays people to vote for articles on digg. People who want their article or site dugg can pay $20 plus $1 for each desired digg.

At the heart of this is the big gaming elephant in the social news room. Anyone who uses del.icio.us, digg, Wikipedia or any other site that relies on voting has seen the gamers and trolls that lurk behind the curtains. Indeed, we have even seen it here at BuzzShout. In order for such sites to be successful, the barrier to entry for voting should be low enough so that anyone can easily participate. However, this is at odds with the ideal of removing the junk, since it means people and sites like User/Submitter can disrupt the quality chain.

Currently, they are paying $0.50 for every five stories dugg, which is quite low. However, my fear isn’t that people would do this manually. The User/Submitter revenue model may encourage someone to automate the digging process in order to earn the cash. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has already done this.

Is this a dark portent of the future? Will sites like del.icio.us and digg be controlled by the highest bidder? Even though I still hold to the philosophy that people are generally good, I hope User/Submitter isn’t the start of a new trend.

I was following some of the domain hacking discussion on the fo.rtuito.us digg commentary. The general consensus for most people is that gratuitous domain hacking can only lead to confusion and annoyance. I know that when I was first using del.icio.us, it was a pain to type in the url, since I could never remember where all the dots went. But, after a while (like most things), the dot positions got ingrained into my head.

del.icio.us is one of the few domain hacks that have made it big, alongside others like blo.gs. Wikipedia has a nice article detailing some of the history behind domain hacks and their uses. Personally, I think that domain hacks of the kind like fo.rtuito.us can be a challenge for most people to remember (I think the base word “fortuitous” is already a stretch for most!) For a lot of these sites, it’s this split second kind of delay when thinking that can drive away customers.

If you’re still thinking about domain hacking your next web app, try using Xona.com’s domain hacks search, which will suggest different domain hack combinations for a given word. I tried out my name “james yu”, to see if there was anything interesting.

And lo and behold, it turns out that my last name “yu” is perfect for a domain hack, since “yu” is the top-level domain for Yugoslavia. I could theoretically have “james.yu” as my url. But alas, Yugoslavia only allows special agencies to hold a customized second level domain. The best I could do would be “james.co.yu”, which isn’t nearly as cool. The other suggestions included hacks with slashes in them, like “jame.sy/u/” and “jam.es/yu”. If you think remembering dot positions in urls is a pain, try remembering combinations of dots and slashes.

I think I’ll just stick with jamesyu.org.