Amazon’s seemingly unshakable stranglehold on the eBook industry may have just met its match. According to a B&N Press Release offered up yesterday, the “nation’s largest bookseller” has launched the Barnes and Noble eBookstore. The new book store will enable “customers to buy eBooks and read them on a wide range of platforms including 
the iPhone and iPod touch (opens iTunes), BlackBerry smartphones, as well as most Windows and Mac computers. In addition, Barnes & Noble announced that it will be the exclusive eBook store on “the forthcoming and much anticipated Plastic Logic eReader device,” which will compete head-on with Amazon’d Kindle. Barnes and Noble will meet Amazon’s per book price of $9.99 as well as offer access to over 700,000 titles, “making it the world’s largest selection of eBooks available in one place.” B&N also revealed that it plans to expand that library to over 1 million titles. Read more »
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Blogging,
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Industry News,
PR
As Twitter keeps growing in popularity, more websites are getting “Twitter friendly”. Whether this is adding a follow me button or ways to Tweet out the content, the web is getting more “Twittified”. But where is the real news, you might ask? Well when you put it that way, nothing here is “news”. However, I think it’s sometimes healthy to take a step back from the hugeness of YouTube, new search engine launches, and social network acquisitions and take a look at trends on the web.
The fact that just two years ago, all the rage was to add Delicious and Digg buttons is evidence enough of how fast the web moves. But you probably knew that already. What’s interesting, though, is that Twitter buttons have begun to replace social buttons from other sites as the most prominent buttons on the web. Now that is real change. When your social network was all the rage two years ago but now it might not even get a button on blogs across the web, it’s telling of not only how quickly the web moves, but also how fickle the web is: people are ready to hop on to the next new thing and leave whatever it is they were using before.
Twitter-related buttons can be prominently seen in many places on the web now, especially on blogs – where it’s easy to implement with plugins and embeddable code. But let me emphasize one last thing: I’m not saying that Twitter-related buttons are replacing buttons from other sites. What I am saying is that Twitter-related buttons are replacing buttons from other sites as the most prominent, top-most, brightest social button on the web. Take TNR, for example: we have a fairly large ReTweet button right at the top of our posts. Readers can still Digg, Reddit, BuzzUp, add to Facebook, and even email our posts (as well as many other services) using the ShareThis link on the bottom of each post, but Twitter takes center stage. What service will take center stage two years from now? Talk to me in the comments!
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Blogging,
Social Networking,
Trends,
Twitter,
Web design
Notice the lack of a Twitter button
I don’t think I need to tell you how important Twitter has become (and is continuing to become). You know, it doesn’t matter if the social network is growing by leaps and bounds, or that it’s generating three to five posts on some of the most prominent tech blogs on the planet. Yet the social button on TUAW – the Unofficial Apple Weblog – doesn’t have an option to share via Twitter. TUAW is using the social button provided by AddThis. But the interesting thing is that the AddThis button includes Twitter as an option by default. Why anyone would disable the option to Tweet a post is beyond me.
Actually, that’s exactly what I was planning on doing when reading this post on TUAW. But without the option to Tweet the post… well, no Tweet for TUAW.
On a more serious note, this is aimed to be a mini “feedback” post and less of a criticizing one. I hope TUAW adds Twitter in its social button loop ASAP.
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Blogging,
Decisions,
Feedback,
Twitter
