When we talk to our less technologically-inclined friends about Twitter , we often run across the objection that they really don't care what so-and-so ate for lunch today or what movie they are seeing tonight. And every time, we try to extol all the other benefits of the world's most popular microblogging service. But could we be wrong? Is Twitter mostly people talking about themselves and what they ate for lunch? Well, SemanticHacker , the blog of contextual ad platform Textwise , has crunched some numbers and we may have to eat our hat. Sponsor Parlez vous Twitterspeak? The blog used Twitter's streaming API to gather nearly 9 million tweets from over 2 million individual users. Before looking at the data for meaning, the company first took a look at the language distribution of their sample. While the SemanticHacker team expressed their surprise at the language distribution, particularly the strong showing of Portuguese, we at ReadWriteWeb couldn't help but wonder about the 10% labeled as "Unknown/Misclassified." Are these tweets simply so horribly misspelled that the language-guessing program they used on the data could not venture a guess? Or could it be that 10% of the Twitter populous is now writing in that contracted form of text message Twitter-speak that it could no longer be classified as a recognizable language? (If you're looking for a good example, find a 12-year-old and exchange text messages or just give Sarah Palin's Twitter a look.) What We're A-Twittering About The folks at SemanticHacker then took a random sample of 1,000 English-language tweets and broke them down into eight categories. According to their findings, it seems that Twitter really is full of people talking about themselves. A full 57% of the sample falls into tweets about what a person is doing, or private conversations between individuals. That leaves just 43% for other purposes, but when we take a look at that, the findings seem to become even more dismal. If we take away another 8% for "Other Messages" and "Unknown," and another 8% for "Spam" and "Advertising," we're left with a mere 27% of the information on Twitter having some sort of value. Maybe it isn't as bad as it looks, though. We're willing to bet that if we wrote down everything we said in a day, the meaningful parts might not even reach the 27% mark. Oh, did I tell you about the tasty lentils I had for lunch today? Discuss

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Is Twitter a Mental Vacuum?

Recently I wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. I noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What I learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Not to mention new tools worth checking out. So in this more optimistic post, I list 5 reasons why you should continue to use RSS Readers. Sponsor My conclusions in the previous post still stand: 1) Google now dominates what's left of the RSS Reader market; and 2) RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009/2010 due to Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, Firefox bookmarks, and more. However, a lot of commenters wrote that they still use RSS Readers each and every day. Here are the main reasons why: 1. Control over Information Flow RSS Readers allow users to control their flow of information , whereas it's impossible to keep up with the Twitter firehose of real-time information. Mathew Ballad (comment 11) put it well: "I tend to check Google Reader multiple times a day. While I do keep up with bigger news through Friendfeed or Twitter. I like to keep up with multiple Graphic Design blogs, tech blogs, entertainment blogs, photography blogs and Apple blogs on my own. I just can't see myself ditching RSS Readers for something that I really don't have much control over." It's not just about controlling your stream of daily news. Many people have feeds that they just don't want to miss. Tim Bray has a folder of feeds in NetNewsWire that he feels is "unacceptable when I don't at least glance at everything those people have to say." Some people would argue that it's a thankless task trying to control your RSS Reader. I am one of those people who long ago gave up trying to keep my "mark all read" count at zero. Indeed I don't even try to mark as read my email nowadays (I just let it all flow in and I mark the ones I should reply to with stars, in Gmail). On a similar point, RSS pioneer Dave Winer remarked (comment 80) that Google Reader "has the wrong view of RSS." In a follow-up post , he wrote that "fundamentally, Google Reader views RSS as email," by which I think he means users feel compelled to read everything in it. His view is that "reading every story is a meaningless concept" and that RSS Readers need to find a way around this issue. 2. Evolving User Interfaces Some readers are expecting RSS Readers to transform their UIs in 2010, in particular for "processing life and news streams in the same interface." ( Marco A Torres ) This has already happened to a degree in Google Reader, which has many nice social sharing features. @businessquests (comment 57) called Google Reader "a monitoring and intelligence tool enabled by tagging and publication of tag-based RSS feeds." Eric (comment 19) agreed, commenting: "I use it [Google Reader] not only as a constantly evolving newspaper, but to share and to create new snippets using the "Note in Reader..." bookmarklet. I also subscribe to others' interests and see what they have marked to share with me." Eric also noted that he gets breaking news in Google Reader, thanks to its support of the real-time standard PubSubHubbub. However a number of people complained that Google Reader isn't evolving fast enough in terms of user experience. I would put myself in that camp too. So, like me, you may want to check out some new feed reading innovations. Feedly (one of our Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 ), Fever (one of our Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009 ) and my6sense (an iPhone app - our review ) are 3 apps that received multiple mentions from our readers. We use Fever internally at ReadWriteWeb and I just today downloaded my6sense onto my iPhone. As an aside, note that two of those apps (Feedly and my6sense) integrate Twitter as well as RSS feeds. 3. Tracking Twitter It's not necessarily an either/or situation between RSS Readers and Twitter. Lynne Pope from New Zealand pointed out (comment 44) that she uses Google Reader to track some Twitter accounts: "Time zone differences mean a lot of good information can be missed in a tweet stream. Pulling the important streams into a reader means the information is readily available." 4. Mobile News A number of people remarked that they commonly read their feeds via a mobile version of an RSS Reader. Something for those of us who are sick of being tied to PCs to do more of, perhaps. Bill (comment 46) wrote: "I use NewsRob on Android to pull the most recent 250 articles from Google Reader via my home wifi. Then I walk out the door and head for the commuter train, where I will read my feeds while other poor souls are stuck with the newspaper. Same on the way home and late at night when I'm rocking the baby to sleep." 5. Categorized News Perhaps some of us are finding RSS Readers difficult to use nowadays because we don't use them efficiently. If you spend some initial time setting up your Reader and categorizing your feeds, then chances are you will get a lot more out of it. Randy Orrison (comment 78) described a good use case that you may want to emulate: "I have folders in Google Reader for the blogs that I check every day, new release feeds for software I use (I could never remember to check all 20+ websites regularly), and down at the bottom of the folder list feeds from busy aggregators (like TechMeme) and news sites (like the BBC)." Conclusion Reading through all 160+ comments on my post restored some of my faith in RSS Readers. Viva la read/write Web! I'm going to test out some of the tools people suggested, find new ways to integrate Twitter streams with my RSS feeds, read more on my iPhone using my6sense and other services, and do some re-ordering in my Google Reader. What are your thoughts now about RSS Readers, given the discussion summarized here? Discuss

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5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock

This week ReadWriteWeb will run a series of posts detailing what we think are the five biggest, most cutting-edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We'll be posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we'll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. The first major Web trend we're looking at is Structured Data . In prior presentations , this has sometimes been referred to under the umbrella term of 'Semantic Web'. However the way 2009 has panned out so far, it's become clear that this trend is much more than the Semantic Web. In this post, we'll analyze the developments in Structured Data this year and provide you with 3 product examples: OpenCalais, Google, Wolfram Alpha. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Web of Data, Not Documents Tim Berners-Lee said in February this year that we're now in a Web of Data , rather than a Web of Documents. The organization that Berners-Lee heads, the W3C, has heavily promoted two key initiatives that are helping to build this Web of Data: the Semantic Web and more recently Linked Data . However over the past few years, we've seen that there are many other ways to structure data and enable others to build off it. The best current example is surely Twitter , whose API has historically been responsible for around 90% of Twitter's activity - via third party apps. The basic principle of the Web of Data is still the same as what Alex Iskold articulated on ReadWriteWeb back in March 2007: "unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing." Example 1: OpenCalais Our first example product, OpenCalais , is probably the best current example of Linked Data (which is a type of structured data endorsed by W3C). Thomson Reuters, the international business and financial news giant, launched an API called OpenCalais in Feb '08 . In a nutshell, OpenCalais turns unstructured HTML into semantically marked up data. It orders data into groups such as 'people,' 'places,' 'companies' and more. This way, third party applications and sites can build interesting new things from that data - one of the defining principles of Linked Data. For a full explanation of Linked Data, read Alexander Korth's technical introduction The Web of Data: Creating Machine-Accessible Information from April 2009. I also explained the background and benefits of Linked Data in a May '09 post entitled Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care . Example 2: Google Rich Snippets In May this year, Google added structured data to its core search, in the form of a feature called 'Rich snippets.' Essentially this feature extracts and shows useful information from web pages, by way of structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa. On launch in May, Google invited publishers to mark up their HTML. While it will take a while for this markup to become widespread, the fact that a huge company like Google implemented it shows the increasing importance of structured data on the Web. Other big companies are also heading in this direction - in particular, Yahoo was an early leader . Example 3: Wolfram Alpha Ever since Wolfram|Alpha 's much hyped launch in May , we've been tracking this innovative product closely. It's a self-described "computational knowledge engine" and while it's not quite the Google killer some predicted, it has many potential uses . Wolfram|Alpha has a search engine-like interface, allowing you to type natural language statements into it. But the main part of the product is the computations you can do on data. The product is premised on using and computing data . If Web 2.0 was about creating data (a.k.a. user generated content), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Conclusion We can see from the above three examples that structured data is rapidly becoming a feature of today's Web. Companies like Thomson Reuters and Google are enabling data to be structured, and new types of products (like Wolfram|Alpha) will make use of structured data in ways we perhaps can't imagine right now. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data

If you've ever believed that semantic search is meant exclusively for researchers, then Meaning Tool might prove you wrong. Through Popego , the semantic search engine allows you to add your online profile and interests such as "gadgets" or "current news". From here, Meaning Tool serves you entertaining content from across your social graph. ReadWriteWeb took a look at how the tool works and how it just might bridge the gap between scholars and social media junkies. Sponsor Meaningtool - Demo from Popego on Vimeo . Meaning Tool is a semantic engine that offers users a chance to extract concepts from text using specific semantic trees. As mentioned, you define your categories of interest by creating search parameters and training them with related websites or RSS feeds. Similar to Open Calais , the service appears to use the linked data standard to retrieve data via dereferenceable URIs on the web . From there you can search text in any romantic language to produce relevant words and categories. Categories such as "technology" and "security" are then shown in a pie chart to represent the percentage of relevancy the text has to these key categories. The system also offers a tag cloud of relevant keywords and key concepts. And finally, Meaning Tool extracts entities such as mentioned companies, people and places. Unlike many other semantic search services, your satisfaction with results as a researcher, marketer or general consumer weigh heavily on how you train the system. To find out more about the semantic web, check out For more info on the semantic web, check out our article on semantic search's myths and realities . To add some of your own interests to Meaining Tool visit

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Meaning Tool: Training Semantic Search With Feeds

Over December we have published our best Web products of 2009 over ten posts. This week we've opened up our selections for you to vote on . The poll is embedded below and we invite you to select your favorite web products of 2009. You can vote for up to 10 products. If you don't see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we'll count that as a vote too. We will announce the final top 10, along with the full results, this Friday . After one day of voting, here is the top 10: Sponsor 1 Twitter 2 Google Maps 3 Google Chrome 4 Facebook 5 Hulu 6 Adobe AIR 7 WordPress 8 TweetDeck 9 iPhone platform 10 Evernote Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below. What are your best products of 2009? (multiple choice) ( polling ) Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical Aardvark ActivityStreams Adobe AIR Amazon EC2 Android platform Appsfire Apture Arduino Basecamp BBC's Semantic Music Project Bing Blip.fm BNO (Breaking News Online) box.net Boxee Brightkite ChartBeat Cisco Collaboration Citysense Clicker Cliqset Collecta Data.gov DBpedia Echo (JS-Kit) Evernote Evri Facebook Facebook iPhone app Fedex SenseAware Feedly Fever Foursquare Freebase FreshBooks Glue Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice Hootsuite HP CeNSE Hulu IBM's sensor solutions ioBridge iPhone platform Jimdo Jive Software SBS 4.0 Jolicloud Layar Microsoft Windows Azure MindTouch Mint Mir:ror MOG Moshi Monsters Mozilla Raindrop New York Times APIs OneForty Open Calais OrSiSo Outside.in Pachube Posterous Postrank present.ly PubSubHubbub Rackspace Cloud Drive Regator Ribbit RSSCloud Salesforce.com Seesmic Shazam SocialCast Socialtext Spotify StockTwits Superfeedr Tornado (FriendFeed framework) Tumblr TweetDeck Tweetie Tweetmeme Twidroid Twingly Twitter Vuze Wetoku WideNoise Wikitude Wolfram Alpha Woopra WordPress Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Yelp Zemanta Zoho CRM Discuss

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Interim Results: Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

Over December we have published ten Top 10 lists for the best products of 2009 , in categories ranging from Consumer Web Apps to Real-Time Technologies. Now we're opening up our selections for you to vote on. We've embedded a poll below, with all 100 products that the ReadWriteWeb team selected . We invite you to vote for your favorite web products of 2009. You can select up to 10 products. If you don't see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we'll count that as a vote too. Sponsor We will announce the top 10, along with the full results, at the end of this week. Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below. What are your best products of 2009? (multiple choice) ( polling ) Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical Aardvark ActivityStreams Adobe AIR Amazon EC2 Android platform Appsfire Apture Arduino Basecamp BBC's Semantic Music Project Bing Blip.fm BNO (Breaking News Online) box.net Boxee Brightkite ChartBeat Cisco Collaboration Citysense Clicker Cliqset Collecta Data.gov DBpedia Echo (JS-Kit) Evernote Evri Facebook Facebook iPhone app Fedex SenseAware Feedly Fever Foursquare Freebase FreshBooks Glue Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice Hootsuite HP CeNSE Hulu IBM's sensor solutions ioBridge iPhone platform Jimdo Jive Software SBS 4.0 Jolicloud Layar Microsoft Windows Azure MindTouch Mint Mir:ror MOG Moshi Monsters Mozilla Raindrop New York Times APIs OneForty Open Calais OrSiSo Outside.in Pachube Posterous Postrank present.ly PubSubHubbub Rackspace Cloud Drive Regator Ribbit RSSCloud Salesforce.com Seesmic Shazam SocialCast Socialtext Spotify StockTwits Superfeedr Tornado (FriendFeed framework) Tumblr TweetDeck Tweetie Tweetmeme Twidroid Twingly Twitter Vuze Wetoku WideNoise Wikitude Wolfram Alpha Woopra WordPress Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Yelp Zemanta Zoho CRM Discuss

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Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009