ReadWriteWeb

Everyone is talking about Twitter (to the consternation of many of our readers, I'm sure), but what are people talking about on Twitter? It is really just a flood of inane status updates and fragmented chat, or are people actually talking about things that matter to them via the service? We've talked about Twitter as a platform for serious discussion, but is anyone really using it that way? We teamed up with Summize to take a closer look about what people are talking about in the Twitosphere.

oEmbed is a newly released spec from Cal Henderson (of Flickr), Mike Malone and Leah Culver (of Pownce), and Richard Crowley (of OpenDNS) that allows web sites to quickly and easily embed media when a user posts a link directly to that resource. oEmbed is an open format which standardizes the process of embedding photos, videos, links, or other media and circumvents the media provider's API (or the need for screen scraping if they don't offer one). It works by turning a link to, say, a photo or video into XML or JSON that tells the user how to embed that media.

Roofarena is basically the Million Dollar Homepage concept built as a graphical layer on top of Google Maps. The idea is that any roof in Manhattan is for sale and users can "virtually" purchase a roof and add their own design. In a post about copycat ideas last year, we advised that if you "do feel the need to borrow an idea, you should definitely make changes and try to innovate and push the concept in new directions." Roofarena definitely does that, but we also advised that you do something to "ensure a greater chance of success" -- we're not sure that the site does that.

You've probably heard people talking about the new "it" book: "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies." The book discusses the current trend of people using online social technologies like blogs, social networks, and podcasts, among other things, and how enterprise must learn to embrace these tools. Along with describing how the public's use of these technologies impacts businesses, the book also provides tools from Forrester to teach companies how to embrace social media as part of their business strategy.

The perennial debate surrounding Twitter's revenue model continues to live on. The micro-blogging service has succeeded in building a strong, loyal following, but failed to capitalize on it. Such a scenario, which lacks a revenue model, isn't sustainable over the long-term, especially when investors begin to question the company's intentions. If an acquisition isn't shaping up, monetization will be necessary to keep Twitter afloat. Having said that, leveraging context may prove to be a great way to drive revenues while maintaining the integrity of the platform.

Yesterday Google announced a new product aimed specifically at Google Apps' enterprise customers. The service, powered by Google acquisition Postini with technology from ScanSafe, is called Google Web Security for Enterprise and it offers real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. Essentially, it's a big Google firewall in the cloud.

Anyone who has followed my posts on ReadWriteWeb, knows that I am interested in how innovation is going global, particularly innovation from India, and that I think P2P is the next great disruptive technology - the only one that could derail the Google steamroller. So it is no wonder that MetaASO caught my eye -- via Pluggd.in, a site that tracks Indian startups.

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped noticed today that Google announced that it will be shuttering its Hello photo sharing and chat application next week. Hello was an instant messenger-like desktop photo sharing application that made it easy to send photos to friends via an encrypted connection. The Hello.com web page has been replaced by a shut down notice and the service will cease to work on May 15th.

While it's fun to follow some of the bigger names on Twitter like Scoble, Jason, Leo, and Kevin, it's even better when you find others with similar interests with whom you can have real conversations. And even better than that is finding others to connect with from your same hometown. Connecting with other locals is something that the site TwitterLocal has helped facilitate for some time, but now they've added a new feature for finding top local Twitterers: a TwitterLocal Leader Board showing a city's top tweeters.

In a surprise move just unveiled this morning, a handful of big players led by MySpace and Yahoo! have announced that public profiles, photos, videos and friend networks will now be portable from one site to another. We're immediately wondering why this was a partnership between a handful of big sites instead of a move to truly open to the web in general.

According to a first report on TechCrunch, the initiative will begin with user information from MySpace being made available to Yahoo, Twitter and eBay in the next few weeks. MySpace is reported to have said that they will seek ways for "mom and pop sites" to participate as well in the future.