• How to save social readers from extinction (Fortune/Alex Konrad)  “Like a twenty-first century version of the loud-mouthed newsy on the corner, readers from the likes of The Guardian and The Washington Post allow users to peruse articles while sharing their literary habits with friends and contacts on Facebook. That’s all well and good when you’re reading a sober, in-depth analysis of super-PAC financing, for instance. But broadcasting that diversionary gallery of Lindsay Lohan’s evolving locks? Not so much.”
• Facebook social readers are all collapsing (BuzzFeed/John Herrman)  “My brain already associates those little blocks of auto-fed stories with second-class content. I mean, I know my friends didn’t really mean to show it to me. Why would I click? And god, why would I sign up for the thing that seems to have tricked its way into my timeline? It’s an app that broadcasts internet illiteracy for everyone to see.”
• Privacy perils of social reading (KurzweilAI News)  “[Privacy law expert Neil] Richards notes that the work of the American Libraries Association and its Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) offers an attractive solution to the problem of reader records. ‘The OIF has argued passionately and correctly for the importance of solitary reading as well as the ethical need for those who enable reading – librarians, but also Internet companies – to protect the privacy and confidentiality of reading records,’ he says.”
• Data shows social readers have mixed results, but aren’t ‘collapsing’ (Inside Facebook/Brittany Darwell)  “Many users have complained about social reader applications, mostly those that require users to authorize the app and share their activity in order to read any article. We recommend developers add clear controls for users to decide what to share, when and with whom. There also seems to be a lack of explanation of what users gain from enabling this type of sharing.”

Popularity fact:
The Washington Post social reader was one of the first available and once had 17 million monthly users, but now has less than 10 million.

• Target will yank Kindles–why? (GigaOM/Laura Hazard Owen)  “Target may simply not want to carry a product from a major competitor. After all, this reasoning could go, why should Target serve as a store showroom for Amazon products? Somewhat similarly, Barnes & Noble has refused to carry Amazon Publishing titles in its stores.”
• B&N and Microsoft: Why it’s not about ebooks (Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog)  “It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can create the same sort of buzz or ROI in their stores that Apple has managed to achieve, but why go to the trouble and expense of creating a larger standalone presence when a store-within-a-store might be even more effective? What if B&N stores added mini Microsoft Stores in each of their locations? The foot traffic is already there and what a great place to showcase and sell that new Windows 8-based nook they’ll undoubtedly create.”
• Microsoft + Nook: It just got (more) interesting… (Wired/Felix Salmon)  “Barnes & Noble no longer needs to sell Nooks, or persuade people to download the Nook app on their iPad: everybody with a Windows 8 device will have the Nook reader built-in. The e-book market is still young; if Amazon continues to be seen as the enemy, there’s no reason in theory why the Nook shouldn’t become just as popular, if not more so.”
• Barnes & Noble marries Microsoft (The Future of Publishing/Thad McIlroy)  “Skip to the end of the official announcement and you find out what $300 million really means to Microsoft. Barnes & Noble gave Microsoft something it desperately needed: an agreement to honor (and pay fees on) Microsoft’s key anti-Android patents.”

Windows 8 fact:
A couple of these articles mention Windows 8 devices, which are generally expected to become available in the fourth quarter of this year, just in time for Christmas.

• How Passpoint could make Wi-Fi hotspots more like cellular data services (Network World/Brad Reed)  “Known as the Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint program, the initiative essentially creates a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and allows you to access any in your area that take part in the program. What’s more, any hotspots that take part in Passpoint will allow you to connect without entering in any login or billing information since the program supports Subscriber Identity Module (SIM)-based authentication that cellular networks currently use to grant users seamless handoffs between cell sites.”
• Wi-Fi Passpoint standard could end hotspot sign-on hassles (Computerworld/Stephen Lawson)  “The most obvious advantage of the Passpoint standard may be doing away with the browser ‘splash screens’ that greet visitors to most public hotspots. Instead, admission to the network will happen in the background, through a variety of mechanisms that can include an SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card and certificate-based methods.”
• Passpoint: a recipe for wider Wi-Fi (CEA Digital Dialogue/Rob Pegoraro)  “There’s a precedent for this: over the past few years, AT&T has been shifting a steadily increasing amount of data to Wi-Fi, thanks to the ability of iOS and Android devices to switch automatically to its hotspots whenever one’s in range. But that is a single-company effort. Passpoint/Hotspot 2.0 would widen the scope of participating access points – and it shouldn’t cost you extra.”
• With new standard, Wi-Fi could become as widespread as cellular (Popular Science/Stewart Wolpin)  “In a Passpoint and Super [long-range] Wi-Fi world, a user within a short drive of a city or town could have instant, ultrafast Internet access without having to rely on cellular service. Business travelers could use their laptops without cellular USB dongles, tablets wouldn’t need power-hungry 3G and 4G radios, and a Skype account could practically replace a phone line.”

Traffic fact:
According to a recent study [pdf] by Informa Telecoms & Media, over 80% of smartphone data traffic in Britain already uses Wi-Fi instead of the cellular networks.

• What is the future of mobile money? (ReadWriteWeb/Dan Rowinski)  “…real, noticeable change of user behavior is between two and three years away. That is the time it will take to separate all of the options that are emerging for mobile payments and determine which dominant systems will emerge.”
• Paying with smartphones to outpace credit cards by 2020, experts say (IDG News/Cameron Scott)  “But there’s little doubt, according to Chris Silva, an analyst with Altimeter Group, that ‘NFC is going to play a much more prominent role, a major role in m-commerce,’ or mobile commerce. Google Wallet already employs NFC technology.”
• Mobile payments won’t replace cash or credit for another decade (AllThingsD/Tricia Duryee)  “It’s unclear whether the 2020 date is optimistic or seems too far out given that so many companies are investing aggressively today. PayPal and Google are the two most notable technology companies going after the opportunity, but so are the incumbents, including Visa, MasterCard and American Express.”
• Mobile payments may replace cash, credit cards by 2020 (Mashable/Samantha Murphy)  “‘The 2020 date might be a bit optimistic, but I’m sure that this will happen,’ said study participant Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. ‘What is in your wallet now? Identification, payment and personal items. All this will easily fit in your mobile device and will inevitably do so.’”

Contrary fact:
Don’t switch your circulation desk to all mobile payments just yet. Another Pew study released just a few days ahead of the mobile money survey found that since 2005, the percentage of U.S. adults who do not use the Internet has stayed stable at about 20-25%. They’ll probably be paying their fines in cash.

• Magazine apps show encouraging take-up, but more disruption ahead (The Guardian/Stuart Dredge)  “One thing about all this innovation: it’s still based around magazines as standalone entities sold a la carte or for single-publication subscriptions. The print model, in other words. Yet there is disruption of this too, with the likes of Next Issue – a joint venture between Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp. and Time Inc in the US.”
• Next Issue Media launches with all-you-can-read pricing model (VentureBeat/Julie Klein)  “Today, Next Issue has tens of thousands of customers who read an average of two magazine titles through the app. The company does allow customers to access content for free if they already have a print subscription. Though [CEO Morgan] Guenther declined to say what percentage of customers are authenticating their print subscriptions, he did say that this option is a ‘big hit, people love it.’”
• Farewell, app store? Netizine turns magazines into social networks, runs on HTML5 (TechCrunch/Sarah Perez)  “Instead of trying to reproduce the print magazine in digital format, with Netizine, the solution is to use social metrics as a way to present a magazine’s articles. For example, readers can dive into the ‘most commented,’ section first, or the ‘most bookmarked,’ ‘most shared,’ or ‘highest rated.’”
• Fewer new magazines, fewer closures this year (Crain’s New York Business/Matthew Flamm)  “Not surprisingly, the numbers also showed more magazines launching as digital-only titles. MediaFinder counted 43 new print titles and nine new online magazines for the quarter. A year ago, the number of launches came to 50 print and four digital.”

Digital subscribers fact:
Hearst Magazines (Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Seventeen, etc.) hopes to have one million subscribers to the digital issues of its magazines by the end of this year.

• Eye-tracking: Consumers disorientated by new Timeline (BizReport/Helen Leggatt)  “SimpleUsability’s eye-tracking research found that consumers dismiss the cover image as advertising and, with little to distinguish pinned posts from other content, they are often missed. According to SimpleUsability, ‘no users realized the pinned post was intended to be highlighted’.”

• Adapting to Facebook Timeline is a huge challenge for brands, here are some tips on where to focus (The Next Web/Nancy Messieh)  “If you haven’t already filled in your brand’s history into the Timeline, you should do it now. It certainly will take a bit of effort, but it’s worth it. Simple Usability found that users gravitate towards the Timeline navigation on the right hand side of the page. Users are interested in finding out more about the brand, pre-dating its Facebook existence, which represents a chance to communicate with them.”

• Eye movement study reveals six must-know things about Facebook brand Pages (ReadWriteWeb/Dave Copeland)  “Timeline’s biggest benefit for brands, according to the study, is the ability to tell a brand’s story. The Timeline design is particularly effective in accomplishing this online, but users also liked the ease of finding the ‘About’ button on brand pages. In many cases, users said it was easier to learn about a brand than it was on a corporate Web site.”

• Report: How effective is Timeline for Pages? The eyes have it (All Facebook/David Cohen)  “Regular updates are more important than ever with the layout of timeline for pages. Simple Usability found that users consider themselves to be up-to-date on topics such as sports and music, and they expect Facebook pages to be the same way.”

Updates fact:
Another new study by Recommend.ly found that 82% of Facebook brand Pages are updated less than five times a month, while politicians update their Pages more than twice a day.

• Wikidata/Introduction (Wikimedia Meta-Wiki)  “Many Wikipedia articles contain facts and connections to other articles that are not easily understood by a computer, like the population of a country or the place of birth of an actor. In Wikidata you will be able to enter that information in a way that makes it processable by the computer. This means that the machine can provide it in different languages, use it to create overviews of such data, like lists or charts, or answer questions that can hardly be answered automatically today.”
• Wikipedia’s next big thing: Wikidata, a machine-readable, user-editable database funded by Google, Paul Allen and others (TechCrunch/Sarah Perez)  “The data will bring all the localized versions of Wikipedia on par with each other in terms of the basic facts they house. Today, the English, German, French and Dutch versions offer the most coverage, with other languages falling much further behind. Wikidata will also enable users to ask different types of questions, like which of the world’s ten largest cities have a female mayor?, for example.”
• Techies team up to make Wikipedia smarter (Digits/Shira Ovide)  “The Wikidata project hopes to link together each piece of information so when a Wikipedia contributor inputs revised facts, names and figures, this data will automatically update on every Wikipedia page in the world. The Wikidata backers said they believe the project will make Wikipedia more accurate and consistent across countries, and free Wikipedia contributors from doing basic maintenance on the encyclopedia’s pages.”
• Data revolution for Wikipedia (PR Newswire)  “Besides the Wikimedia projects, the data is expected to be beneficial for numerous external applications, especially for annotating and connecting data in the sciences, in e-Government, and for applications using data in very different ways. The data will be published under a free Creative Commons license.”

Language fact:
There are more than 280 language editions of Wikipedia.

• Google+ and the post-Web Google (ChromeBytes)  “I’ve noticed an increasing number of ads that no longer send people to the company’s sites. Instead, the ads only include a link to the official Facebook page. Sites suddenly look outdated, no longer include the latest information and people stop visiting them. There are still people that visit those outdated sites and many are coming from search engines like Google.”
• No corporate website? You don’t need one. Welcome to the post-Web era. (David Strom’s Web Informant)  “My wife is an interior designer and supervises a small staff. Some of her business is coming from the communities that she participates in with HGTV.com and Houzz.com, two places that people go to look at pretty rooms and get ideas for their own decorating. By writing comments on these and other discussion forums, she is sharing her knowledge with the people most likely to hire her.”
• Web officially dead: Sources (ClickZ/Andrew Edwards)  “One of the keynotes at eMetrics San Francisco was given by an engaging pair of digital media experts: Rand Schulman and Pelin Thorogood. Both of them have been at the cutting edge of web measurement and digital communications for years. And they contend we are now shattering the website-centric engagement paradigm in favor of a new world of ‘apps, sapps, and mapps.’”
• The case against Google (Gizmodo/Mat Honan)  “And as it turns out, the open Web is kind of shitty real estate. Yes, the mansion itself is huge, but it’s not built to code and is in constant need of renovation to keep it from falling apart. Meanwhile, there are all these new homes going up in the same neighborhood. Nice places. Built from the ground up to perfectly fit their owners’ needs. Places that people can can get to from the Web, but aren’t really made of Web. Those are the kind of joints users want to go hang out in.”

Web prediction fact:
Looking at the future of the Web from a somewhat different angle, Pew Internet just released a survey on The Future of Apps and Web in which 59% of respondents agreed that “…the World Wide Web is stronger than ever,” but a significant 39% felt that “…apps will be seen as superior when compared with the open Web.”

• Google Search will soon ‘answer questions’, instead of just hunting words – a shift which makes it more like Microsoft’s Bing (Daily Mail/Rob Waugh)  “The move echoes what Microsoft has done with its Bing search engine. Bing is the second most-popular search engine in the U.S. – and built to deliver answers to questions. ‘People today expect more than 10 blue links on a page,’ says Microsoft.”
• Google knowledge graph could change search forever (Mashable/Lance Ulanoff)  “The transition from a word-based index to this knowledge graph is a fundamental shift that will radically increase power and complexity. [Google search engineer Amit] Singhal explained that the word index is essentially like the index you find at the back of a book: ‘A knowledge base is huge compared to the word index and far more refined or advanced.’”
• Google semantic search: bad for SEO, good for you (ReadWriteWeb/Jon Mitchell)  “It’s not just the interpretation of queries that will improve; the quality of results will be better since they can’t be gamed with keywords. This will change Google’s ad business profoundly, but that change is inevitable. If Google doesn’t become the most relevant, intelligent search assistant, Apple’s Siri will.”
• Google semantic search – eyeing Siri and other rivals? (Know Your Mobile/Radnyee Chunodkar)  “While in an interview with the WSJ, Google search executive Amit Singhal stated: ‘When we can deliver small nuggets of information, that system is far more suited to mobile phones and searching with voice’. This evidently gives a cue that Google is eyeing to topple rival Siri. Apple’s intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator, Siri uses a natural language user interface by putting into action the semantic technology.”

Entities fact:
Google has prepared for this move by collecting a huge database of 200 million related “entities”: people, places, and products.

• Ambient awareness, crowdsourced funding, and focused apps at SXSW Interactive (Yahoo! News/AFP Relaxnews)  “Unlike existing Foursquare-styled apps, ambient awareness apps help users discover friends, friends of friends or strangers who share similar interests who are in your vicinity. Highlight and Glancee both use your Facebook profile to help you make social connections and to find friends of friends. Banjo pulls in information from social networks like Twitter and Foursquare and apps like Intro and ntro focus on the business side of networking.”
• Wallit lets you leave your digital mark in locations, with an augmented reality twist (VentureBeat/Devindra Hardawar)  “Unlike Foursquare, you can actually hold conversations at locations using Wallit. It also differs from location-based chat services like Yobongo and ChatSquare by allowing you to leave lasting messages at specific locations. Wallit’s augmented reality (AR) aspect, accessible by holding your device in a portrait orientation, takes the conversation a step further by having its virtual walls overlayed on top of your phone’s camera feed.”
• Are location apps really the highlight of SXSW? (The Appside/Paul Smith)  “The number of apps offering ambient location services will explode in the coming months and the functionality pushed by Banjo, Glancee and Highlight will be incorporated into hundreds of competitors desperate to leverage our personal data. Yet nobody wants an app that simply provides more information; they want meaningful information that is focused and relevant.”
• Ambient social location apps will be consumer duds (ReadWriteWeb/Dan Rowinski)  “There is little doubt that both Highlight and Glancee are going to be popular for people at SXSW and in San Francisco. Maybe even an enclave in Boston, New York and D.C. will pony up to these apps. The mass of consumers are not going to adopt these apps. The closest comparison we have to these ambient location apps is Foursquare that has done well but not terrific in the consumer market.”

Foursquare fact:
According to Ignite data from last year, Foursquare is more popular in Indonesia and Singapore than it is in the United States.