Real Time

The headline of the AppNexus job description jumps out with a question: Have you built RESTful APIs?? It’s the newest requirement for job listings, already known for their acronyms requiring OOP and MVC. You not only need to be able to consume web services. Now you have to have experience creating them.

As they describe in their job listing:

We need an efficient and agile engineer motivated by solving interesting technical challenges and building new applications quickly. Our team is rapidly developing RESTful APIs for our clients, functionality, and tools for our platform. The position requires a problem solving mindset as much as it requires strong PHP, API design and scalable and maintainable software development skills.

The real-time ad platform company that placed the ad certainly knows the importance of APIs. For an ad network these days APIs are becoming more of a key requirement because media buyers are increasingly making decisions based on data, with tools automatically adjusting for better performing ads.

It’s also interesting to notice the specific type of API AppNexus wants to create. It’s not a SOAP API. As ProgrammableWeb’s John Musser pointed out in his talk last month at GlueCon (see slides here), in the world of open APIs, simple wins. We’ve seen far fewer SOAP APIs than REST APIs over the last two years, as the slide above shows.

So, have you built RESTful APIs? And do you think it’s destined to be seen in more developer job listings in the future?

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Google Moderator is a feature that has allowed some pretty big names to have discussions with their audience without chaos ensuing. It provides a controlled environment where viewers on YouTube can ask questions and, if their question is popular among other Youtubers, get it voted up and answered. It’s like your own personal version of Digg…with video. Now, it’s available to all users.

Moderator is a versatile, social platform that allows you to solicit ideas or questions on any topic, and have the community vote the best ones up to the top in real-time.

Moderator was used in discussions on YouTube with Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It’s also been used to facilitate discussion about the future of the African continent and who is the best slam dunker not in the NBA. While YouTube has made updates to the commenting system to make it more manageable and inviting, it’s still difficult to have any type of meaningful discussion within the comments. The noise easily drowns out the signal. Google moderator turns the tables in your favor.

Your first step is to add the Moderator module to your YouTube Channel. Just open the Modules drop down from your channel page and check the Moderator box (don’t forget to Save Changes).

The next step is to create your first series. This refers to the entire discussion thread. Your Title is where you ask your community for questions, ideas, or suggestions on some topic. The Description allows you to got a little more in-depth as to what you want from your audience. You can optionally include a link to a YouTube video here if you are more comfortable expressing yourself on camera or need to attach related video content. One thing to note is that you can actually specify whether users will submit mostly questions, ideas, or suggestions. You can also specify start and end times for the series if it coincides with an actual event or you just want to limit responses.

Each user response can also have a video link attached. There is no way to comment on individual post, which helps to keep things clean and focused. The only way a viewer can give feedback is by giving an item a thumbs up/down. Those items that get the most positive attention float to the top so that you can provide a video response.

Besides being a great way to get user feedback on serious issues, this is a great feature for YouTube personalities that thrive by entertaining or helping their audience. It will be easier to crowdsource your audience. Whether it’s a certain song they want to see performed, some problem that needs a solution, or some type of challenge they want to see completed. A great way to keep the good content flowing.

How will you use Google Moderator?

LucidMedia, provider of an online advertising demand-side platform (DSP) with integrated real-time bidding, this morning announced that is has secured $4.5 million in funding, led by MMV Financial (MMV).

The news comes merely a day after word got out that Google reportedly acquired rival Invite Media in a “$70 million range” deal (still unconfirmed at this point), which would significantly narrow down the exit possibilities for LucidMedia.

Either way, LucidMedia plans to use the funds to expand its recently launched self-service DSP platform, which enables agencies and advertisers manage their online advertising campaigns. The DSP leverages LucidMedia’s contextual targeting technologies, which the company says are patent-protected, to provide more than 14,000 categories.

This funding follows a December 2008 investment from investors like Lake Street Capital and Redleaf Group. LucidMedia has now raised $13.3 million in total, according to CrunchBase data. The company was originally founded in 1999.

(Via press release)

What if Chris Dixon and John Borthwick were sitting at the same table as you, ready to have a real conversation about what's next for the real-time Web? Would you like to sit across from Marshall Kirkpatrick and Richard MacManus and have a straight-shooting conversation about real-time online media? If so, then the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit is for you. And thanks to its unconference format, the day will be like participating in a think tank - you and a group of tech luminaries collaborating on the future of the Web.

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The ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit - will take place on June 11 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. Register here.

If you're a student and would like to participate, please email us at students@readwriteweb.com.

What's an Unconference?

It's simple: With the help of a professional facilitator, Kaliya Hamlin, you and everyone attending the conference create an agenda in real-time on the day of the event. This ensures that what's covered is important, timely, and exactly what you want to talk about. To see the power of the unconference format in action, check out this video of session pitching at the recentReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit:

Watch live video from ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 on Justin.tv

The rest of the day is spent debating and discussing the issues. Notetakers record the sessions throughout, and we record video when possible.

We can assure that by the end of the day, you'll have made new contacts, participated in some ground-breaking discussions, and, if you were brave enough, worked side-by-side with people you admire.

We hope to see you there.

Today we're giving away five free tickets to our readers who have the most interesting thoughts about the real-time Web. Let us know your comments, concerns, predictions and premonitions in the comments below!

What a massive week for Facebook news, eh? What you, dear reader, loved most about our coverage was when Marshall Kirkpatrick stood up and called out CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his half-truths regarding the new privacy policies. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: We looked at how books are now a part of the Internet of Things; how you can create code-free augmented reality in less than five minutes; and how the real-time Web affected the Gulf oil disaster. Read on for more.

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Story of the Week

• The Half Truths of Mark Zuckerberg
• Firefox Losing Early Adopters to Chrome - Will Mainstream Users Follow?
• New Type of Database Gets High-Profile Funding
• Twitter Bans In-Stream Ads
• How To Use Google Wave for Live Blogging
• Facebook CEO: "I know we've made a bunch of mistakes"

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

The Real-Time Web Summit, New York City

You're invited to join ReadWriteWeb for our third event and our first on the East Coast: the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit, on June 11 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. This is our second Summit on the Real-Time Web, following on from our successful debut event in Mountain View last October. It will follow the same unconference format, which we have gotten a lot of great feedback on.

The Real-Time Web is a set of technologies that impacts almost every service, activity and application on the Web. We were one of the first news outlets to analyze the Real-Time Web and we've since written extensively about it. Come to the summit to understand how it impacts you, your business and your next development.

The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our first New York event and we look forward to seeing you there! Click here to get a 30% discount on your registration.

Real-Time Web

• YouTube Adds Real-Time Discussion Support with Google Moderator
• 5 Intersections of the Real-Time Web and the Deepwater Horizon
• Need a Program Guide for the Real-Time Web? Try Live Matrix

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

Augmented Reality

• AR Developers Ogmento Raise $3.5M for Augmented Gaming Apps
• Code-Free Augmented Reality in Under 5 Minutes [VIDEO]

More Augmented Reality coverage

Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report

We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future. This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here.

Internet of Things

• Hotels Test Smartphones as Room Keys
• Why HP Thinks Sensors Will Lead to The Next Big Wave of Computing
• Books Come Alive with QR Codes & Data in the Cloud

More Internet of Things coverage

Mobile Web

• Kids More Likely to Own a Cellphone Than a Book, Study Finds
• Mozilla Bringing Firefox to the iPhone With "Get Up and Go" Browsing
• Anonymous Mobile Social Network Gets Venture Backing

More Mobile Web coverage

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• New Type of Database Gets High-Profile Funding
• "You're Fired!" (Or Not): Advice on When to Fire Your Startup's Staff
• Entrepreneurs, Say No to (Poorly Run, Unnecessary) Meetings

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• Open API Madness: The Party Has Just Begun for Cloud Developers
• Map Reduce your Inbox: Yahoo Mail is Fighting Spam with Big Data
• S3 Companies That Tackle Complexity in the Cloud

Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Technologist Tim O'Reilly likes to say that the software of the future will be cloud-delivered data, augmenting mobile reality, based on real-world sensor feedback, in real time. Peter Batty (left), VP of geospatial technology at Ubisense, showed what some of those technologies may look like in a presentation earlier this month titled Location and the Internet of Things.

"Your phone is going to be a proxy for yourself," Batty argues. For example, "before long our smartphones will open all doors for us, cars etc." Location, sensors and the web aren't limited just to our phones either. "As you're driving along," Batty says, "your [GPS and web-enabled] car will communicate with gas stations allong your route and be negotiating for gas prices, doing things like reverse auctions. There will be factors involved like 'how much gas do you have left?'"

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Betty also writes an excellent blog called Geo Thought.

Google Wave is now officially one year old today, but despite Google’s admirable year long dedication to Wave as well as opening it up to anyone with a Google account last week at Google I/O, we’re wondering if people are ever going to show up to the party.

Yes, Google has gone to great lengths to say that Wave is being used by schools, for collaboration, at conferences, etc, but many of these uses seem to be for academics/education, and not the general public. Certainly, people receive a better education when they collaborate, but there were plenty of existing online collaboration tools available to educators long before Wave debuted. Heard of IM?

Doesn’t really meet a need

Wave has the same problem one year in as it did when it launched – it doesn’t really meet any real needs. We have phones, Skype and IM for real-time communication, we’ve got Google Docs to collaboratively edit docs online, we’ve got picture and video sharing services, and yes, we have email, which in case you haven’t forgotten was supposed to be made obsolete by Wave. Even a one year old can figure out that that hasn’t happened.

To help the earthquake response in Haiti, Crisis Camps sprung up all over the world to crowdsource and map information coming from the disaster zone. During the first day of camps, many people suggested that volunteers use Wave to collaborate, but it quickly became apparent that it just didn’t do anything better than other existing tools (including Etherpad, which Google acquired to integrate into Wave). It’s true that a few people did decide to push forward using Wave, but the vast majority of the volunteers didn’t.

That said, we at The Next Web use Wave to coordinate our weekly podcast – but while it does the job, it doesn’t particularly do the job better than email or our internal social network would.

It’s just an experiment, live with it

Wave is an experiment, and Google would be best served if it keeps that in mind. Perhaps it will attract a loyal following among academics and educators, and frankly, that’s not a bad thing – online collaboration software for education is a big (not Google big, but still big) business and if Wave can help people to get a better education, then it will have found a noble existence.

However, Google is in the fight of its life with Apple right now, and it needs to focus its energies like never before, so most likely Wave will never get out of Labs, will get a cult following from people that get it and that will be it. Email is safe for awhile yet.

If Google continues to push Wave as a revolutionary product that everyone will one day use, on the other hand, they could end up with cake on their faces.

Image

Google announced this morning that it is enabling real-time discussions on YouTube channels by adding support for Google Moderator. Moderator allows sites to request questions or ideas from its audience that can then be voted up or down by the site's community of visitors. The service had previously only made appearances on YouTube for exclusive interviews with President Obama and the Prime Minister of Canada, but today, every channel has the ability to add this feature.

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The widget sits front and center at the very top of the page, and by placing the most recent questions at the top it creates a real-time stream of suggestions from the audience. Google has already invited 12 popular YouTube channels to participate, including the New York Times, Stanford University and Howcast.

On Stanford's channel, Dr. Euan Ashley, a cardiologist and professor, is taking heart related questions from the audience. Over on Howcast, which creates short videos explaining how to do various tasks, they are soliciting ideas from their audience for their next video creation. And on the New York Times' channel, they have created an open forum for people to ask the Times any question of any sort.

Moderator comes with the ability to flag inappropriate content, as well as sort by highest voted or most recent posts. It's great to see some real-time web functionality coming to YouTube - a platform that already seemed fairly real-time with the ability to nearly instantly create video content online. For channel admins, adding Moderator may be a great way to focus the submission process for ideas within YouTube itself, but if YouTube isn't your thing, you can also embed Moderator on any website.

On June 11th in New York City, Team ReadWriteWeb will convene some of the smartest people on the web to talk about the state and future of real-time technology at the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Summit East. As part of the value-packed activities that day, we'll have a post-lunch demo hour organized in an innovative format called Speed Geeking.

This event is a follow-up to our successful ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit in October in Mountain View, California. Leading real-time web startup investor John Borthwick had this to say of that event: [it] "was excellent - friggin' great in fact. I hauled a handful members of my team across country for it and my only regret was that I didn't bring more of them. I'm looking forward to the next one." Don't you want to demo your startup at an event like that?

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The speed geeking demo hour puts approximately 10 bleeding edge startups at tables around the room, then gives participants 5 minutes to watch a demo and ask questions. When 5 minutes are up, everyone rotates and sees the next demo. It's fast-paced, but it's very effective and a lot of fun.

Would you like to get your startup in front of rotating small groups of industry leaders from all around the world? If you are building an application that leverage real-time web or mobile technology, send an email to marshall@readwriteweb.com with the phrase "speed geeking" in the subject line.

We'll pick ten of the hottest apps we find and if chosen you'll be able to participate in the excellent ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit East at no cost.

We hope you'll join us for the Real-Time Summit next month - and don't be shy about emailing us about your hot new startup. It'll be a great place to find inspiration, support and intellectual challenge.

Sign up now before ticket prices go up! We'll see you in New York City!