If you're reading this, you already know you're screwed. Someone, somewhere has been forgotten on your gift list, and you're scrambling. As per usual, we at RWW have got your back. Here are five ideas that will not only save you from certain disgrace but just might make you look a little more with it and wired than your loved ones expected. Sponsor 1) Of-The-Month Clubs Flowers, beers, books, even dog treats - for every hobby, there's a club membership that will bring the recipient monthly or even weekly gifts. With this kind of gift, you'll be the hero all year round - in fact it'll give you and the lucky recipient added incentive to communicate more often if you don't now. 2) Netflix Membership For the movie buff or couch potato in your life, this gift says you condone and embrace the cinematic lifestyle. Memberships are tiered, so you can be as budget-conscious (or as generous) as you like. 3) Pro Apps or Paid Features For all the free web apps we use and enjoy, there are often pro versions with special benefits. I've personally enjoyed a pro Flickr account for ages, and the RWW gang love the speedy, unlimited-HD goodness of our pro Vimeo account. If you have new parents in your life, try a kid-centric subscription model web service such as LilGrams . 4) Multimedia Gifts Piracy is a dying art, so for the music, movie and game aficionados on your gift list, look around the web for legitimate sources of multimedia content. Gamers will love Microsoft Points for XBox Live or similar goodies for Wii and PS3. And for the youngsters and musicians, you can't go wrong with an eMusic or similar subscription. 5) Know Thy Geek: Fonts, Domains, and Software I've been lusting after a particular domain name for a few months now. If someone knew me well enough to buy it, that lady or dude would be the most awesome Santa to date. And I won some brownie points myself for buying a special person a very special font he'd been wanting for quite some time. Likewise, if you've heard a hobbyist or nerd enthusing about a software update that might qualify as a bit of a splurge, the holiday is the perfect time to surprise him or her with a shiny, new email notification or ZIP file. These kinds of gifts show that you know the person well enough to understand and support his or her need to geek out. And what better gift is there, after all? Discuss

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5 Very Last-Minute Gifts from the Internet Hero/Shopping Mall Zero

5 years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we're hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites. MyBlogLog was a wildly innovative service that grew fast after launching and was acquired in January 2007 by Yahoo! for $10 million. It made a deal with users: give us your personal information and we'll show you the faces of people who read your blog. That was a compelling offer and the resulting data amassed could have proven invaluable, had Yahoo! chosen to cultivate it and a developer ecosystem around it. That potential was so great, in fact, that sunset for MyBlogLog is downright tragic. It's also likely to anger bloggers all around the web. Sponsor In addition to showing the faces of recent blog visitors, MyBlogLog also offered programatic access to activity streams from social networks that users associated with their MyBlogLog accounts. For example, Yahoo's Kent Brewster, now at Netflix, built a bookmarklet that would display the recent bookmarks on Delicious, photos on Flickr and job titles from LinkedIn of the latest MyBlogLog users to visit any given blog. Yahoo! has let the service atrophy for years and will now put it to rest. To think that this service offered publishers and developers access to personal, demographic, taste and activity data of a website's readers - and yet that offering has in the end gone no where - that's downright crazy. Here at ReadWriteWeb we scraped a feed from our MyBlogLog page of the new users just added to our community, then reached out to thank them for their support and welcome them personally. That was just the beginning of what could have been a very valuable source of data. Imagine getting a feed of the LinkedIn job titles of all your recent readers and presenting that to a blog's advertisers. Both analytically and financially, there was so much potential in MyBlogLog. See our 2008 post The Significance of the MyBlogLog API if you're a social web geek and want to have your heart broken. Looking at the ecosystems beginning to form around Twitter, Facebook and other user data - MyBlogLog may just have been ahead of its time. The service isn't alone among potentially world-changing technologies acquired and then starved of support at Yahoo! We've asked Yahoo! for comment and will update this post if we receive any. We called co-founder Eric Marcoulier for comment and he offered the following perspective: "So much of your company's long term sucess when it's acquired is based on the amount of executive juice it has. The only way it survives and flourishes is if you have an executive champion who promotes it internally. Shortly after we were acquired we were transfered away from our champion and under someone who didn't feel the same way about MyBlogLog. In those circumstances, things simply slow down. "For any startup that has earn outs, and this didn't affect us, you've got to keep in mind that in 3 months you could be reorganized and the new guy could shut you down. The picture that gets painted early on when you have your product champions can change in a heartbeat and it's important for entreprenuers to consider that when looking at the deal terms." R.I.P. MyBlogLog. Discuss

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Yahoo! Will Kill MyBlogLog Next Month

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. The holidays are underway and 'tis the season of flowing eggnog, overgenerous meals, and contemplation of both the year gone by and the year to come. Reflecting on 2009, it's obvious that there has been phenomenal growth in the business of APIs with recognized sites Best Buy, Netflix, Etsy, New York Times, CBS Interactive , PayPal, LinkedIn, and others keeping busy ramping up their API platforms to extend their businesses in new directions. Sponsor What's not so obvious is that cool, compelling API offerings are only part of the equation. The true key to a successful API platform is successful developers. Launching an open API platform requires a holistic strategy that includes a value proposition for developers as well as your company, plus an actionable plan for cultivating a community inspired by economic opportunity. Here we present you with some thought-starters to help you with your 2010 developer community resolutions: Give the gift of self-help documentation and support Developers are smart. They are motivated to find the answers themselves. Establish your developer portal as the face for your API platform. Supply effective tools and the latest information about your API to give developers the answers that they are seeking. Always start with a value statement about your platform that answers the question: "Why would a developer want to build an application on this API?" Consider both new and experienced developers and cater the value proposition so you can provide a reason for developers to build once... twice... and keep on building in order to grow your application portfolio. Your portal is the knowledge gateway to your community, whether they are new to your API offer or seasoned partners who want to get the latest status and release information -"Gee, I wonder when that bug fix will be taken care of so I can pick up development?" Achieve this by applying a three-pronged approach to your developer portal and community tools: Developers go to your forums to search for answers, not to ask basic questions and wait days for the answers. Optimize search and prune your threads so that your discussion boards are a living knowledge base of accurate FAQs for your API platform. Always add a status dimension to your discussion boards. Badges, exposing number of posts, and user ratings are a simple way to provide your most knowledgeable and active community members with a stamp of expertise. Offer small incentives to your experienced posters who are willing to handle the newbie questions. Their help will free up your resources to focus on the more complex issues. So keep 'em happy. Include an open source dimension to your tools and documentation. Solicit input and suggestions, verify and proof the activity, publish or deny the post, and alert the contributors of the action. Open sourcing allows your API platform to support a greater breadth in coding languages and get updates updated more frequently. Above all, if you launch an API platform, support it. By establishing the developer portal you are making a commitment that someone on your team will be there to respond to the developer community you are attempting to grow. Always continue to monitor and contribute to the discussions, and provide updates when and where relevant. Stay factual, be helpful, and don't hit send if you're feeling defensive. Moderators should be strong listeners because lessons from your community are the best feedback for successful growth. Marketing is not a bad word Don't be afraid of marketing. Bad marketing is a used car salesman trying to sell you something you don't need. Good marketing is information you need to make the best decision. Developers may say otherwise but they do respond to marketing that gives them useful information. Elevate and showcase the voices of developers who find information about your API useful. In many cases all you have to do is add a dimension of developer participation in marketing you are already doing. Feeds, Feeds, Feeds. Customizable, automated, real-time feeds. Blogs, Twitter, and RSS status alerts are simple to implement and create a stream of multi-channel activity that can be maintained with a lean team. Additionally, comments, re-tweets, and @replies are easy ways to track community interest, opinions, and trends. Be sure to list your API on ProgrammableWeb , a high-traffic directory and news source for the world of APIs. ProgrammableWeb is a prime resource for developers looking for new APIs. Look into adding a customer-centric Net Promoter Score (or NPS) metric to measure your program success. Knowing if your developer community would recommend your service to others adds an important satisfaction metric to gauge adoption and activation. Join the events bandwagon. No need to earmark non-existent funds for massive, impersonal developers conferences . Aim for an intimate, well-organized, and focused event to activate dormant developers into friendly evangelists. Recognize, celebrate, and reward good behavior. The more positive interactions you can create enables and grows ambassadors who do the job for you. Build a team of evangelists and allow developers to reap the rewards from their hard work. Provide developers with compelling incentives and data sets to create value Yes, of course, the business comes first. The decision of what data to expose with your API platform needs to support and align with your corporate and product strategy. But don't develop an API platform ecosystem built only to maximize value for your company positioning developers as the contributors. All stakeholders both contribute and extract value from a sustainable, healthy ecosystem. Don't forget to consider the value that your platform will provide to developers. Who are the customers of your platform and what are their needs? What monetization models would create the best incentives? What is the economic appeal of participation to developers? A popular API provides a compelling value proposition to the platform provider, the platform participants, and end users. Know what to measure and why you're measuring it A community for community's sake is a beautiful idea. But when backed by company resources, the community should exist to create value and opportunity around your API. Have the foresight to build in the right measurement tools to validate the effort. Consider your budget decision makers and track for success. Start with straightforward quantitative numbers: live applications, developers that signed up for the program, API keys distributed; then calculate the activation rate percentage (number of live applications / total developers). Identify any revenue figures attributable to your API. Depending on your API monetization strategy this could be through direct sales, revenue-share, advertising, affiliate programs, or another creative model. Look into positive qualitative feedback and voices of members of your community - posts, tweets, comments - items that can showcase developer appreciation, interest, and evangelism. This feedback should be monitored year-round and shared with the platform team and executives on a regular basis. It's a human reminder of the intrinsic value the community work brings to the brand and business. Would you host a holiday soiree and forget to prepare for your guests? So there it is. Don't fall into the "build it and they will come" mentality. It's no fun to stand on the sidelines watching other communities have all the fun; you need to invite them to your developer party! Whether you are newly launching or extending your community efforts, try some of these approaches to propel your API platform strategy in the direction of growth in 2010 and beyond. Discuss

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Sponsor Post: Mashery's Tips to Enrich Your Developer Community

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups. The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following ten have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Real-Time Reference - Aardvark : Reinventing Q&A, ReadWriteWeb covered Aardvark's launch in March 2009 . The service allows users to ask and answer questions through a network of friends via IM, iPhone application, Twitter, email or web interface. Because the system automatically routes questions to people with the right expertise, answers are fairly accurate and there is little need to use the service's flagging system. The company claims that 90% of questions get answered in five minutes or less. Location-based Apps - Foursquare : Launched at SXSW, Foursquare is a location-based social application where users check in on their iPhone at various businesses and compete against their friend network for points. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's launch in March . Since then they've partnered with Bay Area Rapid Transit and a number of businesses to offer location-based deals to users. iPhone App Recommendation - Appsfire : In a world where iPhones seemed to saturate the earth, Appsfire offers a great way for users to share their favorites. Launched in August, ReadWriteWeb praised the convenience of the iPhone app . Four months after downloading it, many of our RWW teammates are still sharing their apps via the embeddable Appsfire widget and the iPhone application. Real-Time Search - Collecta : If you're interested in finding out the latest info on a particular product, Collecta offers real-time search with a variety of results including blog posts, photos and Twitter and Identi.ca posts. Launched in June, ReadWriteWeb covered the company's release . In September the company released its API to developers . Twitter App Discovery - OneForty : Dubbed the "unofficial Twitter app store" OneForty is a marketplace where Twitter developers add their applications for discovery. End-users can add their reviews and recommendation to be featured on the service's front page. Launched in September, Oneforty breaks down the applications into easy to understand categories and features the most popular apps and recently uploaded apps on the homepage. Next Page: Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 6-10 All-You-Can-Eat Music - MOG All Access : Although MOG has been around as a blogging network for a few years, earlier this month the company launched it's much-anticipated $5 dollar per month streaming music service. The product's unique features include a discovery bar slider where users can play streaming radio and tweak the flow of recommendations to their liking. Coupled with an iPhone app that is promised to encompass offline caching, MOG All Access is a great service rivaled only by close competitor Spotify . Web TV - Clicker : Launched in mid November Clicker is considered the TV Guide for internet television . The company indexes 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows and features a DVR-like playlist (including Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD) and integration with Facebook connect. Clicker also has a Boxee app that pulls in metadata for shows, channels and actors. Semantic Search - Evri : Evri is a semantic search engine with a matching algorithm that creates connections between people, products and concepts. Launched in mid-June, ReadWriteWeb first reported the product's ability to distinguish between subjects, verbs and objects to make connections . Conversation Aggregation - JS-Kit's Echo : While JS-Kit has been around for three years, the company' latest product Echo is a better iteration of blog comments. ReadWriteWeb first wrote about the product launch in July . The service allows users to embed a simple line of javascript in their blogs in order to gather a real-time stream of Diggs, Tweets, comments and reactions. Augmented Reality - Layar : ReadWriteWeb readers first got a glimpse of Layar in June . Created by SPRXmobile , the service places images and data on the mobile browser for a new form of location-based augmented reality discovery. In July SPRX released the company's first developer keys for the API and by August it had celebrated an Android release with an iPhone app to follow. The company currently has a gallery with several cool 3rd party applications. Discuss

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Top 10 Startup Products of 2009

In a world where content is king, Boxee has found a way to give entertainment producers the royal treatment. After a successful App challenge and calculated rollouts of its Mac, Windows and Linux releases, internet television platform Boxee is launching into private beta with a new and improved look. ReadWriteWeb got an early look at the product and found out how the company plans to increase its growing user base. Sponsor Says Boxee's VP of marketing Andrew Kippen, "We're trying to change how people view television. It the past it's been something people have associated with unhealthiness. Instead of force feeding programs to passive audiences, users are exploring and interacting with web and TV content and each other." Kippen hopes that the company's new design will be more conducive to dialogue and exploration. Rather than appearing like the mobile app interface of an iPhone, the new Boxee offers an experience much like that of social dashboard Seesmic. In addition to OAuth integration , users will notice the following changes. New Homepage With Boxee Beta, users are greeted by a dashboard with three columns in the form of a newsfeed, featured content and a program queue. The newsfeed offers starred content and comments from Boxee, Twitter and Facebook friends. The center column is reserved for featured community content. In the future this area will be monetized through a pay-to-promote program. And finally, the program queue lets you to keep track of your Netflix queue and latest Boxee-related TV subscriptions. TV and Video In the past users were asked to differentiate between their local and web files. Boxee Beta mixes local and web content in recognition that users simply want to watch their favorite programs regardless of the formats or location of files. Instead of filtering by types of file or having to open an application, Boxee Beta has a new integrated search feature and allows us to pull up files by genre and price, rather than having to switch between file types. The company also organizes your favorite TV shows by episode and season. Some New Applications Social : While both Justin.tv and Hulu's Watch Now Facebook application allow users to chat alongside their favorite entertainment programs, nothing beats the resolution of your home entertainment system. Clipsync overlays chat on video game programs while Cliqset does the same for regular television. Super Fandom : If you've ever wanted to have yourself a Kurt Russell movie marathon, then the Clicker Boxee application is your answer. ReadWriteWeb recently covered the web version of Clicker as a TV guide for web video and the Boxee application allows users to pull in all the relevant metadata on shows, channels and even actors. Niche Content : Boxee Beta's latest content partners include The Escapist gaming network with episodes like the ever-popular Zero Punctuation video game reviews as well as the Suicide Girls' community programming. By changing Boxee's default settings to allow for adult content, users will discover that a number of additional adult applications exist. Discuss

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Boxee Beta Releases New Social Dashboard

The web isn't about pages any more. Now it's about streams, feeds and syndication. As part of our annual Best of Series , below are our picks for the most important RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2009. You can see last year's list here and most of those remain important services. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year. It was a very big year for this class of technologies, after a long, sleepy period the Real-Time Web began to cause substantial disruptions over the last 12 months. Check out our list below and let us know if we've missed anything important or who your picks might be for next year. Sponsor This is the fifth in our series on top products of 2009: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 Top 10 International Web Products of 2009 Facebook has 350 million users today. Just 12 months ago there were a mere 140 million Facebook users . A syndicated stream is the default view in Facebook, meaning that 210 million more people have been introduced to this paradigm by Facebook in 2009. That's a powerful cultural change. Twitter may not be anywhere near the size of Facebook, nor growing as fast, but for tens of millions of people, 2009 was a year they got comfortable with streams, lists (just like cute little OPML files!) and soon geolocation data - thanks to Twitter. Echo, from JS-Kit is a reverse syndication service for distributed social media conversations. It brings back tweets and other mentions to the page they refer to. The service is growing fast and becoming more sophisticated every week. New features come so fast and furious that it's overwhelming but the end result is an experience that brings the dispersed social web back together again. Fever is a gorgeous new RSS reader that costs $30 and lives on your own server. It's got a very interesting system for ranking hot stories by your own criteria - we just wish we could change the timeframe so that ranking was for every 2 or 3 hours, not per day. Fever looks great and works wonderfully on the iPhone. If people ask you what good web-based alternatives there are to Google Reader, Fever is a good place to start looking. PubSubHubbub (and RSSCloud ) are two feed formats for the real-time web. PubSubHubbub is method for pushing real-time updates from a publisher, to a hub and then to all subscribed parties - immediately. RSSCloud is a similar technology that originated years ago as a part of the RSS spec. These are the protocols that a whole new era of user and developer experience on the web will be built on. Superfeedr is a new service powering millions of real-time feeds. It's a transformer, from lots of different formats into real-time feeds in PubSubHubbub or XMPP. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web. Tweetdeck (and Seesmic ) are the market's leading stream readers. They are tools for reading and writing to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and someday other social network streams. There are lots of innovative stream readers on the market, from the beautiful Skimmer to the Inspector-Gadget style Favit , but Tweetdeck is the clear market leader. It's in a perpetual back-and-forth battle of the sweet features with Seesmic. Both are dramatically changing the way users experience the flowing social web. Honorable Mentions: Feedly Twingly Twitterfeed Public Radio Tuner Regator Collected.info Postrank just keeps getting smarter. This social media analytics service tracks distributed conversation regarding blogs and feeds and scores items based on the relative engagement of those conversations. The usefulness of this service just doesn't stop and the company's movement into large-publisher analytics and APIs this year should bode well for customers, developers and consumers. Postrank is the only service on this list that was also on 2008's list. ActivityStreams is a proposed standard way to markup user activity data in social networks. If everyone adopted the standard, then streams of data would be interoperable, we could see what friends on other networks were doing and we wouldn't be locked-in to the big networks because little innovators could provide tools for conversation. So far Facebook, MySpace, Netflix, Sun Microsystems and more are working hard at making this a reality. 2009 was a big year for ActivityStreams, right down to last week's announcement that a feed normalization API was released by startup Cliqset . The Breaking News Online iPhone App is the best remnant of a fabulous story that's changed dramatically in recent weeks. BNO is a news organization that's so fast in breaking news from around the world that the Red Cross watches them for disaster news and MSNBC syndicates their stories. Unfortunately, the company owned by now 19 year old Michael van Poppel sold control over its wildly popular Twitter account to MSNBC this Winter, but the iPhone app remains a very valuable resource. BNO's research and original reporting is definitely one of the biggest stories in syndication of 2009 and its iPhone app is a must-have. Discuss

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Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009

"Recommended." -HP Official News "Very thorough. Exceeded my expectations. Nice work." -Henry "Hank" Nothhaft, Jr. Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SRI "The report is excellent -- a great synthesis of why the real time web is different, what changes, what doesn't and what the industry needs in order to press forward." - John Borthwick CEO, Betaworks Those are just a few of the things that people have said about our newly released research report The Real-Time Web and its Future so far. Want to know what's included in the report? Check out the Table of Contents and the full text of the Introduction below. Sponsor RWWfinalTOC That's the Table of Contents and below is the full text of the introduction to the report. We hope you'll purchase this report via this link - and check out our package deals for purchasing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management as well! What is The Real-Time Web? Beyond Twitter and Facebook Dave Winer defines the real-time Web in four words: "It Happens Without Waiting."1 That's true, and appropriately vague. The phrase "real-time Web" means different things for different people and it's too early in the game to have anything but a loose, inclusive definition. Many of the different forms the real-time Web takes do have some common benefits, user experience elements, lessons learned, pitfalls and possibilities. This is what we explore in this report. It's definitely a whole lot more than just Twitter and Facebook, though these are the best known instances of what's referred to as the real-time Web. Someday Facebook may open up its user data and play a larger role in the real-time Web than just the introduction to the stream model that it plays today. Someday Twitter may grow, discover how to retain users and effectively encourage more than the small number of people who today create the vast majority of content on that service. Today engineers estimate that Twitter sees about 1 thousand messages published per second and between 5 and 10 million links shared per day, before de-duplication. That sounds like a lot, but the real-time Web as a whole is already much, much larger than Twitter. For infrastructure provider Kaazing, the real-time Web is using HTML5 Web Sockets technology to push live financial information to the Web browsers of banking customers that had always been limited to desktop applications for security reasons. For consumer web app Pip.io, the real-time Web is creating an XMPP-powered chat-like experience for users to communicate with friends around objects like a Google Map or a streaming Netflix video playing in the Pip.io web OS. For semantic recommendation company Evri, the real-time Web is the ebbing and flowing of traffic data on Wikipedia. That data points to hot topics that Evri needs to build topic pages to serve their publisher customers. For search engine OneRiot, the real-time Web is made up of the links people share on Twitter ...as well as Digg, Delicious and the click-streams of more than a million users who have opted-in to exposing what they see online through the OneRiot toolbar. For Q&A service Aardvark, the real-time Web is the people inside the social circle of a user who happens to be available online at a given moment and interested in the topic of a user's question. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs that now deliver updated content to any other application that subscribes to a PubSubHubbub or RSSCloud feed, immediately after that content is published. NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen says the real-time Web creates a sense of flow for users that's comparable to the way television holds our attention. Google's Brett Slatkin, developer of the PubSubHubbub real-time protocol, says the real-time Web is a foundation for efficient computing and use cases we can't yet even imagine. In writing this report we interviewed 50 people who work on technologies that power or leverage what they consider to be the real-time Web. Those people have had a very diverse array of experiences, but articulate a common story. It's a story of increased computational efficiency - and software that struggles to keep users from feeling overwhelmed. It's a story of radically new possibilities but strategies based on adding value in conjunction with more traditional, slower moving online resources. We hope you enjoy reading this overview of the emerging real-time Web. We believe this phenomenon is one that will play a major role in the Web and world of the future. The page-based model of destination sites, created by centralized expertise and navigated through authority-based search and clicking link by link is being transcended. We think this survey of current strategies and experiences to date will prove very useful in helping you effectively participate in and help build the future of the real-time Web. Discuss

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Introduction to The Real-Time Web and its Future