At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative – which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It’s an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today’s update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly. Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google’s Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages. Sponsor Gupta told the SemTech audience that there are now more than 50 reviews sites using rich snippets, for example sites that offer restaurant reviews. Also there has been uptake on social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn. The most common use cases are events (which was added in January ) and recipe formats. Google is adding support for more formats, such as video, local businesses and shopping. Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. As the below chart shows, microformats is more common than RDFa for this feature. Google spent a good deal of today’s panel continuing its drive to get webmasters to adopt rich snippets. It has a tool called the Rich Snippets Testing Tool , which helps publishers utilize rich snippets. Finally, Kavi Goel from Google talked about how Google can accelerate growth of the ecosystem, noting that less than 5% of webpages currently have semantic markup. Google wants to see this rise to 50% or more. It is looking for critical mass, which includes adding more formats and encouraging more “beneficial peer pressure” for companies to support rich snippets. Goel cited restaurant review sites as an example – it’s not just Yelp which supports it, but other restaurant review services too. Rich snippets is an example of how the Semantic Web is being adopted by large and powerful Internet companies, so it’s encouraging to see that Google is pushing for rapid adoption. Discuss

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Imagine a small chip you could plug into any device in your home that would enable it to communicate with your web-based electricity and device management dashboard. Or it could be trained to simply turn the device off at times of day when electricity was particularly expensive. Such is the vision of the USNAP consortium, a group of companies including GE and Google that seeks to create a standard for the meter-to-device in-home monitoring stage of the promised smart grid . (“Enabling the device ecosystem for the smart grid,” is the group’s tagline.) USNAP released this week a proposed 2.0 standard spec for small modules that can be connected to devices to render them individually instrumented – measurable and manipulable as discrete sources of data. Where there is plug-and-play data, there is a platform for online innovation. Sponsor “This is the equivalent of USB for consumer products,” Barry Haaser of the USNAP Alliance says. USNAP is an acronym for Utility Smart Network Access Port and the consortium has been developing its technical specifications for three years. It has created the design for a little module, 55 mm long, with 10 pins and weighing no more than 40 grams – about as heavy as 17 pennies. The module is programmed to send and receive messages to and from the smart meter, in a standard format, using a wide variety of messaging technologies, including protocols like WiFi, and lesser-known systems with names like ZigBee, Z-Wave, RDS, and FlexNetWiFi. Any companies that apply, are accepted to and pay the USNAP Alliance a $5,000 annual fee may manufacture USNAP modules. USNAP focuses on the cost benefits of its technology, but interoperable device-level data availability could hold long-term promise for the development of innovative services as well, and thus a larger economy. That’s the hope behind the smart grid in general. The easiest way to explain its value is as a system for automated energy demand reduction. That’s very big, but the potential is much larger. Self-awareness of our mechanical world, with a web interface, might be one way to explain it. Electrical consumption data, down to the device level, is today largely abandoned to what is sometimes called our data exhaust. Making that data manageable opens up a world of possibilities for new services dedicated to analyzing it, servicing patterns and deriving unanticipated forms of value from individual and aggregate information. In part on top of USNAP, for example, a whole other technical standard called Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) is being built, a technology that enables buildings to automatically respond to Internet-based signals that provide electricity grid prices and reliability messages. Just as we’ve seen in the world of human-published social networking data, however, ownership of this resource is something that’s been too lightly considered for several years . If your refrigerator’s data is suddenly captured, leveraged and recognized as a thing of value to an emerging supply chain of services – what are your rights concerning control and exploitation of that data? It is your refrigerator, after all! This is truly the read/write web beyond the individual gazing into the browser. The Internet of Things is expected to be a big part of the future, and technical standards that facilitate interoperable communication between devices is very important within that context. USNAP has opened its ” Serial Interface Specification Version 2.0 Public Review Document ” for 30 days of public consideration and comment. Discuss

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Curverider , the company behind the open-source social network Elgg , is launching a hosted enterprise social networking solution called Elgg.com . The product, in private beta until September, will compete directly with other social enterprise vendors such as Socialtext , Yammer , and Salesforce.com ’s Chatter . Sponsor Curverider plans to distinguish Elgg.com in this quickly crowding market in a few ways – notably by using data portability to help customers avoid vendor lock-in – a major reason some enterprises have avoided SaaS solutions. Curverider is making data ownership and a control a priority. All Elgg.com data will be exportable, so businesses using Elgg.com could eventually migrate all their hosted data to their own Elgg servers or to a future product that might support importing from Elgg. Since the core Elgg software is open-source, enterprises could develop their own Elgg-based solutions, or potentially find other vendors using the software, even if Curverider were to shut the service down completely. Curverider is also hoping to compete on functionality and features. The company has been developing the the core Elgg software and creating custom implementations for six years and have built a robust, mature platform. The company is also planning on integrating its products with other enterprise software in future. However, features in this class of software are becoming quickly commoditized. Curverider will do well to emphasize their support and expertise over features. Elgg.com will offer a unique “per network” pricing model instead of per user or freemium pricing models. Elgg.com faces an uphill battle: the service will compete not only with established hosted services like Yammer and Chatter, but with self-hosted products like the well entrenched Microsoft Sharepoint. But Elgg.com’s openness and affordability, along with Elgg’s maturity and Curverider’s experience, could position the product for success. We interviewed Elgg’s David Tosh in 2008. Discuss

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A survey conducted by the blog Inside Facebook has uncovered some interesting statistics about advertisements on the popular social networking site and how users react to them. Surprisingly enough, according to the results of the survey, the majority of Facebook users either like or are neutral about the presence of ads on the site, as only 40.3% said they dislike the ads. What did these users say is the most disliked products advertised on the site? Online dating services. Sponsor When they asked users which product they least like to see ads for on Facebook, respondents chose online dating sites nearly twice as often as any other type of ad on the site. At 46%, online dating sites were the far and away leader above educational and job ads at 24.6%, games at 13.5% and movies and TV shows at 8.7%. The most acceptable category of ads among those that dislike the ads was food and beverage ads – just over 7% disliked them the most. While it is surprising that dating services are the most detested among Facebook ads, it does make sense. Dating ads can tend to be some of the most transparent of advertisements online, especially on a site like Facebook which has info about your general, sexual preference, age and location, depending on privacy settings. Though the ads are trying to create a personalized experience, when users see ads for meeting singles in their town within their age range, the ads seem intrusive and creepy. There also may be a correlation between how users approach Facebook and their distaste for dating site advertisements. From my personal experience with online dating and matchmaking sites, I can attest that your activity on the site is not something you tend to share with many of your friends. With Facebook’s recent concerns over privacy, users may be afraid to associate their online dating activities with their personal social graph on Facebook. The survey by Inside Facebook also found that advertisements that linked to sites outside of Facebook were less liked by respondents. Nearly two-thirds said they dislike ads for outside links the most as opposed to links to Facebook fan pages or events. An advertisement for Coca-Cola, for example, is preferred when it is an add for Coca-Cola’s fan page, not for an outside site run by the company. Perhaps dating sites need to advertise their fan pages, but something tells me that wouldn’t go over well either. Discuss

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At the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit today, our own co-editor and VP of content development Marshall Kirkpatrick delivered his keynote about the myths, realities and the future of the real-time Web. Among other things, Marshall addressed whether the real-time Web will rot your brain and whether it is more than just streaming updates from Twitter and Facebook. He also highlighted some of the ways that the ReadWriteWeb team uses it to break and research news stories. Sponsor Starting out, Marshall stressed how ambiguous the term “real-time Web” is, so to kick off the discussion, he offered his own definition: The real-time web is the Web in which data is delivered to its recipients (be they human or machine) in real or near real time, as soon as it becomes available. In addition, he noted the enormous scope of the real-time Web, which ranges from finance and medical tools, to social networking and media services. Myth #1: The Real-Time Web is just Twitter and Facebook While this is still a very popular perception, Marshall noted that more than 50% of the links shortened by Bit.ly are now created outside of Twitter. Real-time search engine Collecta , too, doesn’t just index posts from Twitter, but also collects millions of post from platforms like MySpace and WordPress every day. Besides these social tools, it’s worth noting that a lot of real-time information is now being passed between machines and Internet-connected sensors. Myth #2: The Real-Time Web Will Rot Your Brain Does the real-time Web cause shallow thinking, information overload, narcissism and neurological degradation? Referring to Nicholas Carr’s argument that it’s slowly degrading our ability to focus, Marshall noted that he does not think that the real-time Web will rot our brains. Instead, he highlighted some of the ways that we use the real-time Web to our advantage at ReadWriteWeb. We, for example, use lots of robots that alert us to breaking news stories. While we like to chase those stories, we also compliment these real-time methods with legacy research methods and slower news sources for more in-depth coverage. Thanks to this, the real-time Web just becomes another tool and doesn’t replace our traditional research methods. Myth #3: Real-Time Just Lets Us Do What We are Already Doing, Faster Talking about this myth, Marshall noted that the value of a new technology is sometimes not clear until the right use cases appear and the right innovators come along that make use of this new technology. Clearly, though, the real-time Web has already given us lots of new ways of communicating with each other, and given our machines new ways of talking to each other and collect and distribute data. Discuss

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