Lesenswerte Artikel – 21. February 2010

– „We just received confirmation from Google that Google Reader now consumes PubSubHubbub feeds in real time. Until now, it often took half an hour or longer before new posts from popular blogs and news sites would appear in Google Reader. Now, however, posts from PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds (including our own RSS feed) have started to appear in Google Reader almost immediately after they are published.“

– Gute Übersicht über Data Portability.

– „Sacks told me that Yammer has over 60,000 networks (a.k.a companies using Yammer) and that the average network has more than 10 employees. So that means that they have over 600,000 „seats“.

But most of those are free. The Yammer story is about how well freemium can work if done right. Sacks told me that they have a conversion of about 10% to 15% from free to paid.“

– „Typically, the Facebook games are built with $100,000 to $300,000 budgets over four weeks to 12 weeks with a team of 10 or so people. By contrast, console games cost $10 million to $40 million over two years with teams that can hit 100 people. The Facebook games are more like services, updated every week with new features for users and responses to user feedback, whereas traditional games rarely offer such updates. FarmVille itself was built in just five weeks.“

– „Deutschland unterscheidet sich in Bezug auf die Community-Nutzung von anderen europäischen Ländern: Während nach einer in 2008/2009 durch den CIVB zum Thema Wein in Frankreich durchgeführten Untersuchung große horizontale Communitys wie Facebook oder MySpace eine wichtige Rolle spielen, werden im deutschsprachigen Raum gerade für fachbezogene Diskussionen spezialisierte vertikale Themen-Communitys (Foren) als Diskussionsplattform bevorzugt. Trotz Facebook und Co. haben die Foren mit einem Anteil von 90% klar die Nase vorn. Auf den weiteren Plätzen folgen Blogs (5%), Twitter (3%) und Datenbanken (2%).“

– „Why is this all so important? Buzz is the baby step we need to get to Wave, or at least a new social email experience. Google is putting a lot of effort into truly redefining email. They have seen the problems that many social services create by having their own private messaging system. Many social services allow you to email the user as well without knowing their email address. Google is trying to change the rules like they attempted to do with Wave. This time, they realized that people do not want big, drastic, chaotic change.“