ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrapups

Weekly Wrapup: iPhone 3GS, Real-Time Web Platforms, Social Media Trolls, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we cover the latest iPhone announcements from Apple, look at some new real-time web products that we have high hopes for, investigate the impact trolls are having on social media, discuss the sociology of Twitter, and more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

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Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

Recently we released our first premium report: The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. It's been in the works for more than four months and we believe it's unlike anything else you've seen. Businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web will find the guide invaluable in getting up to speed on the state of the art and making sure their employees have the foundation they need to be effective.

The end product is in two parts. Part one is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. Part two is a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. The Guide is available for purchase at a price of $299. (You won't be charged until you complete a few simple steps on that page.) You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Products

Hemlock: An Open-Source Real-Time Web Platform

Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York. Real time apps that use efficient methods of communicating information between the browser and the server are all the rage these days. Now Flash developers will have an easy way to get in the game. Hemlock joins services like Notify.me (our review), Urban Airship (our review) and others in offering developers a way to get hip to the real-time just like the big guys at Facebook, Twitter, etc. Some of these implementations are open source, like Hemlock, and some are not. It's clear though that the developer world is ready for some real time technology to build on.

Morgan Stanley's Matrix: An App From the Future

Financial services company Morgan Stanley released an incredibly ambitious new application this week called Matix and many of its features will make hard-core web users hopeful that apps like this will emerge in other sectors as well. Matrix is a Rich Internet Application, or software that sits on the desktop but leverages web connectivity, and it's pretty as can be. Adobe worked closely with the company to create what it believes is an app that pushes the envelope with regard to what can be done with Adobe technology. We believe there are a number of trends in play here that go beyond Adobe as well and are likely to be key features for many apps in the future.

Apple's WWDC 2009: MacBook Updates, Snow Leopard, iPhone 3GS

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Apple announced aew iPhone: iPhone 3GS. The S stands for Speed: it's apparently 2.1x faster to send messages and large websites load 2.9x faster. The pricees are: $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB in black and white (prices are for new customers). The old iPhone 3G will retail for $99. The release date is June 19 in US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Switzerland, UK. It will be released in 6 more countries a week later.

Trillian Astra Enters Public Beta: Does Anyone Still Care?

Nearly three years ago, internet users were buzzing about the upcoming new version of the multi-network instant messaging program from Trillian, a software application that would be called "Astra." But as time went on, Trillian just couldn't deliver. Eventually, we all moved on...to Digsby, to Meebo, and to plain ol' Google Talk, which we could easily access from our email inboxes. Then, out of the blue, Trillian Astra emerged into private beta last month, although how "private" a beta is debatable - it seemed anyone asking got an invite. Now, the Trillian blog is announcing that Astra has gone public - no invite code needed. Yet as the long-anticipated Astra finally emerges, we have to wonder is it "too little, too late" for this company?

AccuTerra iPhone Maps win Apple Design Award

Anyone who has read the tragic true story Into the Wild will understand why Intermap's AccuTerra for iPhone is an amazing and possibly lifesaving service. While many map-based applications utilize Google maps and require a wireless connection, AccuTerra and competitor GPS Motion X let recreational adventurers view maps of U.S. national and state parks, both online and offline from their iPhones. It's not surprising AccuTerra was just awarded an Apple Design Award for best iPhone OS 3.0 Beta App.

Google Launches A Guide to Enterprise Apps Deployment

If you're about to deploy Google Apps for your business, an official site dedicated to Google Apps Deployment for Enterprise was unveiled this week. Broken down into deployment planning and user adoption, the new resource is basically a treasure-trove of information on rolling out Google Apps in your business. It's targeted specifically at larger organizations; for deployments of less-than 100 users, Google recommends their usual "Getting Started" guide. In the wake of yesterday's announcement of syncing with Microsoft Outlook, this is just one more reason why Google is getting serious about pushing Apps into larger enterprise deployments.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

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

IBM's Venture Capital Group (RWS Interview)

We recently spoke with Claudia Fan Munce of IBM's Venture Capital Group. IBM doesn't invest equity in startups; rather, this small group within IBM works with 120 of the world's leading VCs to give their startups access to IBM technology and, more importantly, IBM's customers in 170 countries. Since forming in 2001, the IBM Venture Capital Group has nurtured close to 1400 of these relationships. So, it is (1) oriented around later-stage ventures, and (2) focused more on B2B and enterprise ventures than consumer ones.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

Are Trolls Ruining Social Media?

You may have heard the news this week about Trent Reznor quitting Twitter due to the behavior of internet trolls who made the experience both uncomfortable and upsetting. OK, he didn't quite use those exact words - his rant was much more profane - but you get the drift. However, Reznor is not alone in wanting out of the social media scene. Popular author Stephenie Meyer also recently ditched her MySpace page for good, lamenting how she missed the early days when she could hang out with people online. But "hanging out with people online" is supposed to be the promise and the potential of social media today, not something from days gone by...so what's going wrong here? Have the trolls ruined social media for good?

The Sociology of Twitter, Video Interview with Liz Pullen

Sociologist and ethnographer, Liz Pullen, spent a month tracking the top 500 Twitter users (as ranked by number of followers) as well as the much-contested suggested users list. In tracking these accounts, she also closely analyzed the behaviors of new adopters and their expectations of the service. Perhaps her conclusions will help us all understand - and hopefully improve - the dismal attrition rates for the service.

Facebook Gets Vanity URLs

We've heard rumors about this for at least the last couple of weeks, but this week Facebook finally announced that it will allow users to pick and choose their own vanity URLs. Instead of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=432123451, you will now be able to pick something like http://www.facebook.com/ihazvanityurl as your URL. Facebook opened this new feature up at 12:01am EDT on Saturday (9:01pm PDT on Friday). At that time, Facebook users saw a notice on their homepages with instructions for how to obtain their new URLs.

Social Networks Around the World

Italian PR professional and former Microsoft Italy marketer Vincenzo Cosenza sent us an interesting visualization this week. It's a map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country. The map was built using Alexa and Google Trends for Website traffic data in June 2009 and we think it shows some interesting trends. After all, our world is becoming smaller and it's good to know what services our friends on the other side of the globe are using to connect with each other.

The Digital Magazine: Has its Time Come?

We all love to flip through a glossy, interesting magazine on the plane, in the dentist's waiting room, or stretched out on the sofa in the evening. However magazines have not been isolated from the troubles that print media are having due to the online world. Many magazines are struggling to survive and some of them are moving completely online in order to stick around. In November we reported that leading tech magazine PC Magazine would go 100% online from February 2009, after 27 years of existing in print form. Let's look at how PC Magazine is doing, along with another digital magazine that we like called Avantoure.

Common Tag Brings Standards to Metadata

Let's suppose you uploaded some pictures of a trip to New York City to an online account. Do you tag them "New York City," "NYC," "newyork," or all of the above? How do you know your content will be correctly identified and related to other content on the web? And if you come across the tag "Tesla," how do you know whether it refers to the scientist, the car company, or the band? Common Tag is a new tagging format that creates references to concretely defined concepts with their own metadata and URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can simply topic hubs, cross-promote content, and enrich pages with data, images, and widgets.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Google Wave Hands-On, Microsoft Bing Goes Live, Real-Time Cellphone Data, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we have one of the very first hands-on reviews of Google Wave, we check out the new Microsoft Bing search engine, analyze another new Google product called Squared, look at what applications will be built on top of real-time cellphone data, take a nosey at the latest eBook trends, and much more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

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Web Products

Google Wave: Our First Hands-On Impressions

When Google Wave made its public debut last week, it created quite a stir, but without being able to get a hands-on look at the product, it was quite hard to really grasp the implications of what Google was trying to do. This week, we got access to Wave, and after testing it for a while, we can confidently say that Google is indeed on to something. The developer sandbox version we have access to is still a bit rough around the edges, and quite a few functions are still unavailable.

Bing Goes Live - Is it More Than Just Hot Air?

Microsoft's new search engine Bing unexpectedly went live at the start of this week, including a re-direct from http://www.live.com - previously Microsoft's 'personalized start page' destination. So search has usurped a Netvibes-like start page as Microsoft's default homepage for its web services.

In last week's launch announcement, Bing was being bandied about as Microsoft's latest attempt to steal market share away from Google. In particular, according to Microsoft, Bing will focus on four verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business. We took the new search engine for a test run.

Google Squared Goes Live: Who Knew Structured Data Could Be So Unhelpful?

Three weeks ago Google demonstrated a new product in Labs called Google Squared; it's a search engine that creates structured data from big piles of information and lets users compare various things by their attributes. There have been suggestions that Google Squared will crush Wolfram Alpha. Well, Google Squared went live this week and while it's a great idea, in reality the service doesn't look very useful. It doesn't look like it's going to crush anyone. The user interface is inflexible, the data is odd looking and it's hard to imagine using Squared regularly. It's a great idea but we'll see where it goes.

Ficly: AOL's Fiction Community Gets a New Face

Need to get the creative juices flowing? Put down the peyote and pick up your laptop. Ficly is a collaborative writing community where members can buck their writer's block and contribute to shared works of fiction. Armed with 1,024 characters, Ficly users issue story challenges, start new story stubs and add sequels and prequels to existing stories. It's a grade school English exercise without the bullies.

OhPan's Recommendation System for News Comes to iPhone

Ohpan, the scrolling news ticker web site we covered a few months prior, recently released an iPhone application which uses their same recommendation engine technology to deliver you the best content. As with their main web site, the iPhone app lets you rate the content you see to allow Ohpan to learn your preferences. However, the app also takes advantage of the iPhone platform to offer localized content as well as some other unique features.

Atlassian Announces Confluence 3.0 & Plugin Exchange, Acquires GreenHopper

Leading enterprise software provider Atlassian announced this week the launch of Confluence 3.0, an upgrade to the wiki platform that we named one of the top 10 enterprise products of 2008. The new release significantly enhances the social networking side of Confluence, adding activity streams and Twitter-like status updates. Atlassian has simultaneously debuted the Plugin Exchange, allowing users to download, rate, and review hundreds of 3rd party plugins, including the popular GreenHopper plugin for JIRA that it just acquired. All three announcements are part of the lineup for the company's sold-out user conference, the Atlassian Summit.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

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

Building an Advisory Board

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

This is part of your pre-financing team-building. The term "Board" may be confusing here. This is not a Board Of Directors: that is the subject of a later chapter. Nor is it a couple of your buddies. Nor is it someone who gives you one specific bit of advice. Also, don't look at this as a brand-building exercise by throwing big names on your website. Look for people who really complement your skills, really believe in what you are doing, and, as a by-product, open doors and bring some credibility.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

US CIO Kundra Calls for Web 2.0 Co-Creation of Knowledge With Citizens

The US Government's Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, called this week for a radical new approach to government information technology, focusing on utilization of consumer-type Web 2.0 tools that can "tap into the vast amounts of knowledge...in communities across the country."

"We've got to recognize that we can't treat the American people as subjects but as a co-creator of ideas," Kundra was quoted as saying by Government Computer News writer Wyatt Kash. "We need to tap into the vast amounts of knowledge...in communities across the country. The federal government doesn't have a monopoly on the best ideas." That's exciting, if it's more than just words.

The Emerging World of Real-Time Cellphone Data

At ReadWriteWeb we've been following with interest the projects of the MIT SENSEeable City Lab, which is producing some excellent analysis and visualizations of cellphone data in urban centers. MIT refers to this data as "digital footprints," because it essentially tracks the movement and sometimes actions of people in an environment. Our most recent post looked at what cellphone data revealed about who attended the Obama Inauguration in January.

Recently we spoke to Andrea Vaccari, a research associate at the lab. He gave us a fascinating glimpse into the coming world of practical apps built on top of digital footprints.

Report: EReader and EBook Market Ready for Growth

According to a new report from Forrester, the eBook and eReader market has now hit a point where it is ready to break out of its niche and become a mainstream phenomenon. In the report, Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps argues that while early readers like the Rocket eBook in 1998 and the Sony Librié in 2004 failed to garner a large enough audience, today's consumers have embraced mobile, on-the-go media consumption thanks to the prevalence of MP3 players and handheld video games. Thanks to this, consumers are now also more likely to buy electronic goods than ever before.

Ten Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed

Ten years ago yesterday, Napster revolutionized commercial music by - we're all grownups; let's call a spade a spade - democratizing piracy. Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album, and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And ten years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica!), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they've tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Google Wave, Microsoft Bing, What's New in '09, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sun, 31 May 2009 04:15:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we report on Google's announcement of a new communications and collaboration platform called Google Wave, look at Microsoft's latest challenger in the search market with Bing, analyze the current trends we're seeing on the Web, look at the latest smartphone statistics, and more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by PowerReviews:

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

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Web Trends

Web Trends: What's New in 2009, Part 2

Last week we discussed some of the new trends we're seeing on the Web in 2009: open data, structured data, apps that filter content effectively, real-time, personalization, mobile (especially location-based), and Internet of Things (the Web in real-world objects). We asked for your thoughts on these trends, along with your suggestions on what we should add. Also we were interested to know what products you've seen this year that are doing something new and 'beyond Web 2.0'. In this post we look at some of your responses, to try to define further what defines this current era of the Web.

Web 3.0 Might Be Really Stupid

What are you doing? How about now? Has anything changed since you started reading this blog post? Every story has a who, what, where, when, and why - but the event-driven nature of the social Web may be putting such a premium on broadcasting about what we're doing, that software designed to help us answer important questions like who and why are at risk of being neglected. It seems quite likely that we're going to miss those opportunities because our software is focused entirely on doing (and advertising) instead of on helping us think as much as it could. Of course that's much harder to do.

ClearSpring Sees What 1/2 The Internet is Doing (API Coming Soon)

It's a little bit scary, but widget and sharing service ClearSpring said this morning that the company's media widgets and newly acquired AddThis plug-in are now seen by more than 500 million unique viewers each month, according to Comscore. That's half the people on the internet, the company says. That's a whole lot of information. ClearSpring sees not just what you're sharing, but nearly everything you're doing on the pages its products are on. (AddThis is on ReadWriteWeb, for example.) So what on earth is it going to do with all that data? Like they said in Spiderman, "with great power, comes great responsibility." We asked ClearSpring's CEO about these super hero-like responsibilities and his thoughts are in this post.

Report on Mobile Web Use Shows Apple/Android Usability Issues, Successes

According to a report released this week from mobile advertising company AdMob, smartphones accounted for nearly three times more use than their relative market share last month. The report also found that relative use of both mobile-specific websites and HTML sites was highest on Apple and Android devices. Results were based on user-generated requests for mobile ads during April 2009 as well as on a Gartner report on smartphone sales in Q4 2008.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
Smub, a bookmarking and link posting tool for the iPhone.
Power Reviews, get the facts about customer reviews.
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

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

Working Booms and Busts to Your Advantage (Cyclical Trends)

Figuring out which wave to ride (secular trends) is vital. Figuring out when to get on and when to get off is also important. You will never get the timing exactly right. It is like calling the top or bottom of a market. If you do manage to make exactly the right call, it is probably luck. But you can get the basic timing right. It doesn't take a genius to see which cycle you're in at any given time. What matters is figuring out what to do in each stage of the cycle.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Google Wave: Google Tries to Reinvent Email

Google this week announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform; Google Wave. While some of the details are still a bit sketchy, Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.

Bing It Is: Microsoft Rolls Out Its New Search Engine

It was no secret that Microsoft was getting ready to roll out a new search engine, and this week, the company began the official roll-out of Bing - the successor of the company's less than successful Live Search efforts. Formerly known as Kumo, Bing, which should become available worldwide by June 3, is Microsoft's latest attempt to steal market share away from Google. According to Microsoft, Bing, while providing a good general search experience, wants to focus on providing an especially good user experience in four verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business.

Comparing Yahoo and Google's Voice Search Applications

At the end of last week, Yahoo! introduced an update to their iPhone application (iTunes URL) which now includes the ability to perform web searches using only your voice. This is the first real competitor to Google's Mobile App, whose voice recognition technology came to the iPhone back in November of 2008. Now the only question is how do these two apps compare?

PeopleBrowsr Launches Beta

PeopleBrowsr, the online dashboard for tracking the social web (previous coverage) left alpha this week and moved into beta. Although many people use the app for tracking Twitter, it's actually capable of tracking a ton of the top web properties including Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and even RSS feeds. You can also use the app to update multiple networks at once. The service was built more with the needs of brand managers, social media marketers, and other customer service professionals in mind than it was built for the casual everyday user.

Mir:ror: A Glimpse Into The Future of an RFID World

Mir:ror is an Internet of Things app from the company Violet (follow on Twitter @violetOS). As the name suggests, it is literally a mirror - but an Internet-connected one which detects the objects you show it, triggering applications and multimedia content on your computer. It works via RFID stamps, known as "ztamp:s" in the company's terminology. These are colorful adhesive stamps that contain a relay chip. When the user waves a stamped object over the mir:ror, a pre-programmed action occurs. For example waving a stamped coffee mug over the mir:ror might trigger your computer to read the news aloud to you.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Linked Data, Facebook Adds OpenID, What's New in '09, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 23 May 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we report on why and how Facebook has opened up to OpenID, explore the rising popularity of Linked Data, analyze the current trends we're seeing on the Web, look at the future of the iPhone, and more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Smub:

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

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Web Trends

Web 3.0 or Not, There's Something Different About 2009

This week ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus gave a short presentation at a local event, Webstock Mini, in which he looked at some of the trends we're seeing in Web Technology this year. The presentation is embedded below. He gave the term 'Web 3.0' a bit of a ribbing. But his overall theme was that there is indeed a difference in the products we're seeing in 2009, compared to the ones we saw at the height of 'Web 2.0' (2005-08).

Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care

Last week we discussed how the current era of the Web is evolving. One of the concepts we noted was Linked Data, an idea whose time has come in 2009. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, gave a must-view talk at the TED Conference earlier this year, evangelizing Linked Data. He said that Linked Data was a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We've gone from a Web of documents, via the WWW, to a Web of data. Berners-Lee is now on a crusade for everyone from government departments, to individuals, to open up their data and put it on the Web - so that others can link to it and use it. In this post we give a high-level overview of Linked Data. Read on to stop and smell the roses.

Report: Mint Considers Selling Anonymized Data from Its Users

According to a report from Bloomberg this week, Mint.com's CEO Aaron Patzer is considering selling anonymized data about the service's users. Mint, the online personal finance aggregator, obviously sits on a lot of very interesting data, some of which the company has shared on its blog now and then. Given that this was just a short interview, the details about this plan are more than vague, and it would be interesting to know what kind of data Mint might be planning to sell. What is clear, though, is that Mint will have to be very careful if it doesn't want to scare away its customers.

Baratunde Thurston on Content Curation, Real-Time Search, and "Analytics Porn"

In New York City, on the 16th floor of the Roger Smith Hotel, we caught up with social media superhero Baratunde Thurston, web editor for The Onion. Thurston started getting into this whole "Internet" thing in simpler times when the social web was called Usenet. He now carves out his niche at the overlap of the Venn diagram of comedy, politics, and tech. As an official Internet old-timer who makes it his business to stay relevant, Thurston has particularly useful insights on the business of curating applicable content with great efficiency and timeliness.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
Smub, a bookmarking and link posting tool for the iPhone.
Power Reviews, get the facts about customer reviews.
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

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

Finding the Right Wave to Ride (Secular Trends)

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

Surfing sure sounds like more fun than work, but when you catch a technology or market wave just right, it seems almost as good. But you need the right-sized wave.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

The Dam Just Broke: Facebook Opens Up to OpenID

This week Facebook became the biggest example of a social network that allows users to log-in with OpenID credentials granted to them by other companies' websites. Major networks have said for months that their ID could be used as OpenID, but becoming "relying parties" that accepted OpenID from elsewhere was the step everyone was waiting for. The dam has broken. It's ironic that it's Facebook that did it. Facebook is probably the most closed of all the major social networks (other than LinkedIn) and is so far ahead of everyone else in market share that traditional logic would argue that they have no interest in this kind of interoperability. This is the kind of step that was expected from networks more open and, frankly, far behind Facebook. Nevertheless, it has happened and it's big news.

Is This The Future of the iPhone? Push, Background, Bundles

Version 3.0 of the iPhone operating system is in beta testing among developers and if all the actual and rumored changes come to fruition, the iPhone user experience is likely to be very different soon. In this post we'll take a brief look at three of the biggest changes being talked about: push notifications, background apps and bundled software. Some of these changes are much more likely than others. We've also got a few fantasies about what we wish was coming soon to the iPhone.

Pandora Expects to Make a Profit in 2010 - Still Growing Rapidly

We have seen our fair share of doom and gloom this year, but, according to a report from Bloomberg.com, at least Pandora, the free online music discovery service, expects to be profitable next year. Pandora was founded in in 2000, and derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes. In the interview with Bloomberg, Pandora's founder Tim Westergreen also disclosed that the service is currently adding about 50,000 new users a day, and that the service's successful iPhone app is responsible for bringing in about 20,000 of these new users.

Business Cards Suck: Try These Tools Instead

Business cards are a horror show. When it gets to the point that you have to either resort to a die-cut, motion-sensitive, titanium-plated laser show of a card or get your contact info embossed on beef jerky to avoid being forgotten in the trash heap of useless swag and Clif Bar crumbs at the bottom of some biz dev guy's carry-on, we think it's safe to admit that the whole business card milieu needs an attitude adjustment. Here are a few cool, tech-forward tools to ensure neither you, nor your contact details, are lost in the shuffle.

Digg: Shouts Out, Share on Facebook and Twitter In

During Digg's Townhall (embedded in the post) this week, founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson announced that the shout feature on Digg will be removed later this week to be replaced with a new share option that will "streamline your ability to share on Facebook and Twitter." A Digg spokesperson told us that "we've elected to remove shouts in favor of more popular sharing options, based on user feedback and broader market research." The new share feature will also include an e-mail option.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Google Search Options, Twitter Repliesgate, Web 3.0, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 16 May 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we give you a blow-by-blow account of the Twitter replies policy debacle this week, explain why the new Google Search Options and rich snippets are so significant, analyze what 'Web 3.0' means, and more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Smub:

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Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

This week we released our first premium report: The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. It's been in the works for more than four months and we believe it's unlike anything else you've seen. Businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web will find the guide invaluable in getting up to speed on the state of the art and making sure their employees have the foundation they need to be effective.

Web Products

Twitter Puts a Muzzle on Your Friends: Goodbye People I Never Knew

It's not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter's settings this week greatly reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer saw public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) This isn't a small change at all; it's big, and it's bad. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery. Fortunately in less than 24 hours, Twitter changed this policy. Read our coverage to see what all the fuss was about.

Google Search Evolves: Adds Search Options and Rich Snippets

At this week's Google's Searchology event, which we live-blogged, the search market leader announced two significant features to its search product: Search Options and Rich Snippets. It also previewed a new fact-finding search product called Google Squared. The first two features are already live on google.com and they've notably extended Google's core search product. As we sit back and reflect on the meaning of this, one thing is starkly clear: the core Google search experience is now much more than a simple search box on a plain white background, which it was for so long.

ReadWriteWeb had an opportunity to talk with Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience at Google, about the new products the company announced this week. We've embedded Mayer's video below, it runs about three minutes.

Amazon Opens a Kindle Store for the iPhone

This week, Amazon finally released an iPhone-specific version of its Kindle eBook store, which makes it a lot easier to browse and buy books while on the go. Sadly, though, Amazon did not release a new version of the Kindle app with a built-in browser (yet). So users are still being kicked out of the iPhone app and taken to Safari in order to browse the store and complete transactions. A button that takes users back to the Kindle app only appears after a purchase in Safari has been completed.

OneRiot: Web-Wide, Real-Time Social Search

OneRiot, a social search engine, announced this week that its search results pages now update in real time with content from Twitter, Digg and the wider social web. Results are prioritized based on an algorithm of about 26 factors, filtered for spam, and unduplicated if links are shared through multiple URL-shortening services. There are two search modes: Users can browse real-time results or (in "pulse" mode) see links ranked by social relevance. We spoke with a caffeinated and exuberant Tobias Peggs, general manager at OneRiot, about 20 minutes before the new release went live at 9 a.m. "We're trying to get a sense of current social relevance; what are people talking about right now," he said. And more than any competing product currently available, OneRiot succeeds.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
Smub, a bookmarking and link posting tool for the iPhone.
Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

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

VC Cash Is April Showers on Web Startup Flowers

Do you remember the headlines about VC investment "falling off cliff" after some data was reported by NVCA in early April? We took a contrarian view, saying the trend was down, but challenging the doom and gloom that was jumping from the headlines. This was based on our own online research and some anecdotal data from interviews. Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures also dug a bit deeper. The more we looked into this, the more we saw that the underlying data was not as authoritative as one might imagine. Many people popped up in the comments offering additional data. One was a New York City-based startup research firm (founded as recently as February 2009) called ChubbyBrain (great name!), which tracks this kind of data for a living. So this month, we relied on ChubbyBrain to help us dig deeper and get you the facts.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web

We've been following a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent "Web 3.0" concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web. Greg's series is probably the best explanation we've read all year about the way these trends are converging. In this post we highlight some of Greg's thoughts and add some of our own.

Introduction to the Real-Time Web

Real-time information delivery is fast emerging as one of the most important elements of our online experience. This week alone: Google declared real-time search to be one of the biggest unsolved challenges it faces; the NYTimes put a link to a new real-time view of all its news stories on the front page of its site; Facebook announced a new feature that will let users be notified instantly when their friends interact with media related to themselves on the site. This is big stuff, but what does it all mean? We offer a collection of readings on the real-time web. Give these articles some time and you'll have a solid foundation to understand, discuss and act on this emerging paradigm.

Hulu Keeps on Growing, But the Big Winner in April was MTV

According to the latest data from Nielsen Online (PDF), overall online video usage in April declined slightly compared to March (-2.3%), and all the major players, except for Youtube (+0.2%) and Hulu (+7.1%) saw the number of video streams on their sites decline. The real winner here, though, is MTV, which streamed 15.7% more videos in April than in March, and which has grown 359.6% year-over-year. Interestingly, Disney-owned ABC.com, which just struck a deal to syndicate its videos on Hulu, saw the largest decline in streams since March, with a 15.9% drop in total streams.

BIGOmaha: The Little Conference That Could

Recently in the gorgeous Nebraska sunshine, about 300 techies, entrepreneurs, and creatives from all over the country gathered in a large but simple room to learn, listen, and make connections. The one-day, one-track show was just a hashtag to some and entirely unknown to others; still, the pre-show buzz on Twitter and in various blogs had resonated with freshness, immediacy, and inspiration. A week before it opened, the first-ever BIGOmaha conference was sold out. Our own Jolie O'Dell was there to check it out...

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Google Apps Continues Push Into Enterprise: 30,000 New Users at Valeo

This week marked another step forward for Google in pushing its web office suite Google Apps into large enterprises. Valeo, a leading automotive supplier company, is deploying Google Apps to 30,000 of its employees.

Overall, business is good for Google Apps. Google noted in the annoucement that "more than a million businesses" are now using the Google Apps suite - which includes Gmail, shared calendaring, collaborative word processing and spreadheets, and private video sharing and websites (internal and external). As Google continues to tap into the enterprise market - competing against the desktop office software monolith Microsoft - deals like the Valeo one show that its web office suite can scale for large businesses.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Real Time Web, Larger Kindle, CloneCloud, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 09 May 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we analyze the Real Time Web, interview the founder of a venture tech firm, report on a new and larger version of Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, look at a cloud computing product for the mobile phone, review a promising platform for the 'Internet of Things', and more. We also check out the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, which is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Smub:

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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Follow ReadWriteWeb on Twitter

Web Trends

3 Models of Value in the Real Time Web

Hey web DJ. Reach into your magic bag of search tools and pull out a big result - dripping with related ephemera born just moments ago. Those could hold the grain of information you're really looking for, or they could sparkle with data that changes your course of action in unexpected ways.

Alert! Another factor has emerged, elsewhere on another site. You said you wanted to be told, right away, about any online artifacts that crossed a threshold of popularity within a certain group of people in your field. That has just occurred, so it's time to watch the replay of how it got so hot, evaluate its usefulness and decide whether to bring this emergent phenomenon into the work you were doing before you were interrupted, drop the former for the latter or return to your original focus. How would you like this to be your job description? It could well be - if the red hot Real Time Web keeps showing up on sites all around the internet.

The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next

Paul Buchheit built the first version of Gmail in one day. Then, he built the first prototype of Google's contextual advertising service, Adsense, in one day as well. Now, he's working on a much-watched startup called FriendFeed that he believes just brought to market the next big form of communication online: flowing, multi-person, real-time conversations.

"The open, realtime discussions that occur on FriendFeed," he says, "are going to become a major new communication medium on the same level as email, IM and blogging." That's a pretty ambitious claim, but Buchheit has the credibility to make it.

VIDEO: Interview with Venture Tech Firm Founder on the State of the Startup Economy

In Nashville, Tennessee, Marcus Whitney, founder of venture technology firm Remarkable Wit, takes a moment to talk to us about the struggles and triumphs he's experienced in the wonderful world of tech startups.

Marcus explains a little bit about the differences between venture technology and venture capital models and how his firm adopts good ideas and "A team" executives-in-training to create living, breathing tech startups without blowing through ungodly amounts of cash. He also talks about the need for a solid revenue model for even the best of tech ideas.

Anthropology: The Art of Building a Successful Social Site

Picture if you will, a collaborative site that runs on two servers, is managed by four people, and has attracted a third of its target demographic within six months of launch. A site that has had 800,000 posts submitted by its users in its short lifetime and has 16 million pageviews/month - and growing.

This is the story of Stack Overflow, a free question and answer site built by developers for developers that has fostered a strong and committed online community in under one year. How? Easy, according to founder Joel Spolsky; all it takes is an understanding of anthropology and a lot of determination.

Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here's YQL Execute

"I Tried YQL Execute and All I Got Was an Authenticated Javascript API Processing Layer in the Cloud"

There's a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It's all there for the parsing - and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it's the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.

Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
Smub, a bookmarking and link posting tool for the iPhone.
Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

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

Startup 101: Introducing Our Serialized "How to Build a Startup" Book

"Startup 101" is a serialized book about the thrills and spills of starting a Web technology venture. It will be a regular feature in our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. Startup 101 is for first-time entrepreneurs who want to go through the whole startup life cycle - including raising money, building a valuable business, and making a lot of money by selling the venture or taking it public.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Amazon Introduces New Big-Screen EBook Reader: Focus on Newspapers and Textbooks

During an event in New York City this week, Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, unveiled a larger version of the company's successful Kindle eBook reader. The new device, the Kindle DX, has a 9.7" display that is about two and a half times larger than that of the Kindle 2. The Kindle DX will come with a built-in PDF reader, and features an auto-rotate mode, so that readers can easily switch between reading in portrait and landscape modes. The Kindle DX will cost $489 and is scheduled to ship this summer.

Analysis: Would Students Even Want a Kindle for Textbooks?

CloneCloud: The Power of Cloud Computing Comes to Mobile Phones

We love our mobile phones, especially our smart phones, and we've come to think of them as "mini" computers in our pocket. However, the nature of the phones' hardware still limits them when it comes to sheer processing power. And the more work the phone has to do own its own, the quicker its battery life gets eaten up. That's why Intel Research Berkeley scientists Byung-Gon Chun and Petros Maniatis have been working on a solution to this problem. They've come up with something called CloneCloud, a new service that uses cloud computing to provide extra processing power for mobile phones.

Last.fm Launches New Online Radio Player: Adds Combo Stations and Slideshows

Last.fm, the popular online music discovery service, just launched its new Personalized Visual Music player, which, at least from a visual perspective, takes online radio to a new level. The new player automatically plays a slideshow with related images uploaded by the Last.fm community, which looks surprisingly good. More importantly, though, Last.fm now allows users to create combo stations, where a user can create a station with up to three artists or tags.

Pachube: Building a Platform for Internet-Enabled Environments

Pachube was one of 5 Internet of Things services that we profiled in February. Pachube, (pronounced "PATCH-bay" according to the New York Times) lets you tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments both physical and virtual. In a recent monumental blog post by Tish Shute, Pachube founder, Usman Haque, explained that Pachube is about "environments" moreso than "sensors." In other words, Pachube aims to be responsive to and influence your environment - for example your home.

This type of environmentally aware Internet technology will become increasingly important, so in this post we look at the business model of Pachube and an early product built on top of the service.

Google Apps Now Syncs with Directory Systems, Such as Microsoft's Active Directory

According to a post on the Google Enterprise Blog this week, there's a new tool for Google Apps users that lets businesses sync the user account information in Google Apps with the business's LDAP user directory system. If you're in I.T., you probably already know what that means, but if not let me spell it out for you: Google now syncs with Microsoft's Active Directory.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

ReadWriteHire

Who's Getting Hired in Tech? Q1 Numbers from ReadWriteHire

Rapleaf's Auren Hoffman says that hiring is harder in a downturn because the noise goes up but the quality stays the same. That's a pretty strong statement to make, but if it's true then it's all the more remarkable to see which companies are making hires now.

Our site ReadWriteHire covers new hires in tech and new media. We've just published our aggregate numbers for the first 3 months of 2009. Who's hiring? Software and IT companies, social media and social networking companies and marketing and advertising firms.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEHIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Facebook vs Twitter, State of the Web, Google Public Data, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 02 May 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at how and why Google is making public data searchable, provide a succinct update on the state of the Web, review Facebook's latest efforts to open some of its data, question why Facebook is trying to be like Twitter, and more. We also introduce you to our new channel ReadWriteStart, which is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Smub:

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapup by RSS or by email (form below).

RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form:

Follow ReadWriteWeb on Twitter

Web Trends

Google Begins to Make Public Data Searchable

Google just announced its first foray into making public data searchable and viewable in graph form. The company is starting with population and unemployment data from around the US but promises to make far more data sets searchable in the future. The potential significance of making aggregate data about our world easy to visualize, cross reference and compare can't be overstated.

Most of us understand the world based on stories we've put together from our own lived experience. Another way to understand things is by finding patterns drawn from everyone's experience in aggregate. Journalists often find big patterns and then zoom in to particular life stories that exemplify those general trends but make them easier for us to relate to as individuals. Those stories then help move public opinion in favor of policies that aim to change the general trends. That's just one way that easily searchable public data can be very, very important.

Mapping the Current Web Transition

A year ago, I wrote a magnum opus three-part post that attempted to chronicle some of the underlying changes happening in the economy and how this would impact web technology ventures. "Useful, but too long" was a recurring comment. So, here is a one-year update, much shorter. And hopefully a bit clearer, seeing as we are further into this transition.

The Grossly Over-Simplified Web Transition Chart

	Pre-Historic	Recent History	Now	Future
Phase	1.0	2.0	2.5	3.0
A.k.a.	Dot-com	Social media	Get real	Main Street
Social Media	Experiments	Closed SNS	Fragmentation	Open and pervasive
Revenue	Investors	Advertisers	Mixed	Subs. & Trans.
Advertising	CPM	CPC	Mixed	CPA = Subs. & Trans.
Content	HTML paid creators	UGC + RDBMS	Curate & semantify	UGC + semantic
Start-Up Hero	Investment banker	VC	Nobody	Entrepreneur

Despite New Openness, Facebook Remains Fundamentally Closed

What are people saying on Facebook about the swine flu? Facebook knows, but they won't tell you. The company made a major move this week to open up some of the data on the site in some interesting ways - but the conversation on Facebook remains fundamentally closed due to extensive privacy limitations and the company's disinterest in overcoming those limitations in an appropriate way.

Ask Twitter what people are saying on that site about the swine flu and you can get the full story to parse until you're blue in the face. The new Facebook openness is like interoperability between different telephone handset manufacturers but conversation remains closed between individuals. Conversation on Facebook is no more easy to analyze today than it was yesterday; that's the real opportunity here, not just the ability to send and receive Facebook messages through different applications.

Would you accept Facebook making your account public in the future?(online surveys)

Facebook Has Twitter Envy - But Why?

It is no secret that Facebook has Twitter envy. The number one social networking site is not content to win over rival MySpace. It is not satisfied being far ahead of Google on the social web. Facebook now has Twitter firmly in its crosshairs.

True, Twitter traffic has gone through the roof. True, Twitter is the new killer app, the new cool kid on the block. And yes, even Oprah now loves Twitter. But does this mean Facebook should be worried? Well, maybe yes, but likely no, because Twitter and Facebook are two very different services.

The Future of Advertising is Shakable and Location-Based

Last month, you may remember having heard about a special iPhone ad from Dockers. Its claim to fame was that it was the world's first "shakable" ad. Called "Shakedown to Get Down," the ad prompted users to shake the phone in order to set the on-screen freestyle dancer into motion. The dancer, of course, wore Dockers. It was certainly a clever attention-getter at the time, something that had everyone talking. But this ad wasn't just a one-off experimental project - it was representative of the start of a new trend and one that's going to change advertising as we know it.

Opera Reports Explosive Mobile Web Growth Worldwide

If you need any more proof of how fast the mobile web is growing, just look at the latest numbers coming out of Opera this week. The company is reporting a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009. And the mobile web isn't just booming here in the Western world - it's also experiencing rapid growth in places like Latin America and Nigeria, too.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
Smub, a social bookmarking app for the iPhone.
Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

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

Union Square Ventures: The Best of the Valley in New York (RWS Interview)

Albert Wenger is one of three partners at USV. Fred Wilson is the well-known one because of his blog, and Brad Burnham is Fred's original partner from when USV was founded. Albert Wenger became a partner in June 2007, having worked with USV in his role as President of Delicious, and is on the Board of Etsy. One venture that Albert led for USV was 10Gen, and we look at that in this post. We started by asking a question we have been asking of all investors: "How is early-stage financing doing during this downturn compared to the last one in 2001/2002?"

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Consolidation in the EBook Market: Amazon Acquires Stanza

Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, a popular eBook reader for the iPhone, just announced that it has been acquired by Amazon. Amazon, of course, also just released Kindle for iPhone, which is now one of the most popular mobile eBook readers. According to Lexcycle, the company does not plan to make any changes to the Stanza app or user experience because of this acquisition, and Lexcycle will continue its relationships with its content partners. Neither Stanza nor Amazon disclosed the price of the acquisition.

A Mobile App That Saves Lives, Literally

DataDyne's EpiSurveyor program, funded by the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation, has been implementing mobile technology to track and contain disease in developing nations since 2007.

In a recent and potentially devastating polio outbreak in Kenya, EpiSurveyor's new mobile platform was used to track virus carriers and immunize affected children. The campaign targeted around 2 million Kenyan children. Mobile tech will be used exclusively for new nationwide initiatives in children's healthcare, and the World Health Organization has made EpiSurveyor the standard for data collection in sub-Saharan Africa. Screenshots and video included below.

Amazon's Web Services Go To School

Amazon just announced AWS in Education, a new program that will give students and educators free access to Amazon's Web Services (AWS) for work on research projects, class assignments, or other entrepreneurial projects on campus. Grants for researchers will be offered four times a year, and educators can request Teaching Grants, which would give every student in a teacher's class $100 in AWS credits. Students who are working on entrepreneurial class projects can also apply for grants.

IBM Launches World's Geekiest Social Network, My developerWorks

Many a neutech hipster looked askance at the huge IBM-plex situated front and center at this year's Web 2.0 conference.

No one could deny the hardware/software/services giant's place in tech history (their first plant is now almost 100 years old), but what does it have to do with the glassy, streamy, widgety world that tech had become? IBM staff on-site had many answers for that oft-repeated question, which was usually phrased, roughly, "What the hell are you guys doing here?"

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

ReadWriteHire

Who's Getting Hired in Tech? Q1 Numbers from ReadWriteHire

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEHIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: State of the Smartphone, Google Me, Oprah on Twitter, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the state of the smartphone industry, study new stats showing Facebook's international market penetration, review 'The Oprah Effect' on Twitter, check out a new product called Google Me, analyze the closure of Web 1.0 icon GeoCities, and more. Also, we look at featured stories from ReadWriteHire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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Web Trends

The State of the Smartphone: iPhone is Way, Way Ahead

A new industry report from mobile analytics firm Flurry reveals some unique insights into the smartphone industry as of right now. Because their firm focuses not just on iPhone, but also on Android, RIM Blackberry, and JavaME, they have the ability to see platform-spanning trends, instead of just those tied to Apple. So what can we learn from their deep dive into their company's data? Anything surprising? Actually, what the report confirms is what we've been hearing for some time now: the iPhone is king, smartphones are the new laptops, and iPhone applications can and do make money.

Facebook Goes International: Sees Impressive Growth Rates in Africa and Asia

According to data compiled by O'Reilly's Ben Lorica, Facebook is currently seeing some very impressive growth outside of the United States. In Africa and Asia, for example, Facebook's active user base grew over 70% in the last 12 weeks, and in Indonesia, Facebook has finally displaced Friendster as the most popular social network. With regards to the basic demographics on Facebook, women still represent the majority of users (51% vs. 45%), and while younger users still represent the majority of active users on the service, users over 55 are driving most of Facebook's current growth.

Nobody is Making Money Online from Susan Boyle Video (Yet)

Unless you lived in an exceptionally dark cave in the last two weeks, you probably weren't able to escape the Susan Boyle phenomenon. According to some metrics, over 100 million people have watched the immaculately edited video of the 'frumpy' 47-year-old's performance on Britain's Got Talent (BGT) by now. While this is most definitely an interesting cultural phenomenon, the Times this week also reports that neither ITV, the network that shows BGT, nor YouTube have really been able to directly profit from this huge hit because the network and YouTube have been arguing about the terms of their advertising agreement.

Jimmy Wales: Social Web Marketing - Good for Some, Not for All

According to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, there are too many Indians and not enough Chiefs in the world of Web 2.0 marketing. "There is a lot of advice about how brands should be interacting [online]," he said in a keynote presentation at Ad:Tech San Francisco this week. "But, unless your brand is information dense, this highly interactive marketing is both expensive and useless." The good news however, is that communities offer the best bang for your buck in this miserable economy and Wales sees return on investment (ROI) as an "incredible steal right now," when it comes to consumer generated media.

Make Your Home Tweet Its Energy Use (Earth Day Project!)

Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home's energy usage stats to Twitter. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast's system also sends his home's energy data to the web, but it's not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts which are annotated by family members then tweeted for everyone to see. If you want to do the same for your home, we've got the info.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

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Now You Can Change What Google Says About You

Google me? I'll Google you! Google has become the de facto public record these days but most people remain in relative obscurity there and/or fear of what past indiscretions Google will expose to people who search for them. This week Google released a product, called Google Me, that aims to change all of that. For a price - though not a monetary one.

GeoCities Closure Signals End of an Era - Will Others Survive on Freemium Model?

Yahoo has announced that its website creation service GeoCities, which it acquired for $4.5 billion in 1999, will close later this year. Existing customers are being encouraged to "upgrade" to Yahoo! Web Hosting, which offers a site-building service and a personalized web address. The closing of GeoCities is the end of an era. Last June, we profiled the rise of "GeoCities 2.0" services, i.e. website creation tools for the Social Web. Many of them will attempt to pick up GeoCities' customers. Although, as Yahoo! itself indicated in its closure message, website building is mostly a 'feature' nowadays rather than a separate product. So, is this a viable business now for the likes of Weebly and Yola?

No Doubt About It - Oprah Brought Lots of New Users to Twitter

Oprah's well publicized first tweet last Friday was definitely a boon for Twitter. According to Hitwise, 37% of all visits to Twitter last Friday were from new visitors, and Twitter's overall share of U.S. Internet visits increased 24% on Friday. It is important to note, though, that Twitter, being the new and growing service that it is, usually gets about 32% new visitors every day, which definitely puts these numbers into perspective. Hitwise, however, also notes that Facebook's ratio of new visitors was only 8% in March.

Sunlight Foundation Funds Six "Apps for America"

Chips, dip and government data are everyone's three favorite things to take to a party, right? Ok, so government data is actually quite boring on its own, but in these exciting times of democratized programming, government data can be turned into some pretty exciting mashups. That's just what the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation is aiming to make more possible with its work to make government and related data more available with its new Apps for America contest. More than 40 open source applications and websites making use of that data entered the contest and this week the six fabulous winners were announced. We've got a five minute screencast tour of the winners below.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Enterprise

IT Consolidation Blues: CHOI Does Not Spell Choice

Oracle is buying Sun, and bankers are looking forward to the next wave of consolidation. To somebody who remembers the innovation and excitement of earlier enterprise hardware and software start-ups, this is a bit gloomy. CHOI (Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM) does not spell "choice" for buyers, employees, or investors. Choose your behemoth. If consolidation means lower prices -- and it will -- buyers will be happy. But, it all sounds like cost-cutting, layoffs, and less innovation to me.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel, which will soon be getting a re-design.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Social Media Monitoring, Future of Firefox, eBay Sells StumbleUpon, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the latest in social media monitoring tools, investigate how cloud computing is being used in scientific research projects, review some future Firefox concepts, check out the latest iPhone app usage stats, report on eBay selling off StumbleUpon and preparing for a Skype IPO, and more. Also, we look at featured stories from ReadWriteHire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

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Web Trends

The Future of Social Media Monitoring

Ten years ago the ClueTrain manifesto said that "markets are conversations" but today a more pertinent statement could be that conversations are becoming markets - or that there's a market for monitoring conversations. A whole class of technologies are emerging to help companies keep track of the conversations exploding online. The web moves fast enough that we may as well start looking at what comes next. Easy to use and affordable tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs that track blog and twitter mentions are a given - but what kinds of crazy innovations can we hope for in the future?

Web as Platform For Research on Oceans, Galaxies

The University of Washington has announced two new research projects that will utilize cloud computing platforms from Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM. According to the press release published on Genetic Engineering News, the University of Washington has won grants from the National Science Foundation to fund projects examining ocean climate simulations and analyzing astronomical images. Both of these projects will utilize cloud computing to examine and interact with "the massive datasets that are becoming more and more common in science."

Twitter Leads to Immorality? C'mon!

This week we heard Fox News reporting that Facebook may be responsible for lower GPA scores and later in the week a new study came to light claiming that rapid-fire media - like that of Twitter for instance - can actually impact our moral compass. In fact, the study says the fast-moving nature of some online social spaces may not provide us with the time we as humans need to feel higher emotions like admiration and compassion.

This Messaging Fragmentation is Crazy

Why do I have to go to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to send messages? Why do people insist on using these non-standard messaging systems? If people said, "Don't call me on the telephone -- I prefer the delephone," you would think they were crazy. For a while, this was a minor inconvenience, but now it is starting to get out of control.

Should the Government Control Internet Standards?

One role of the government is to protect the country and make its citizens feel safe through policy and regulation. But in today's digital era, policy making is moving to the people, and we are witnessing individual corporations - be they for profit or not - getting more involved in Internet standards. A panel of industry experts convened at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this month, and moderated by ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, discussed the issues surrounding Internet standards. We've written up our notes below and hope to begin a conversation about whether Internet standards should be administrated by private organizations or our leaders in the White House.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
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Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
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Web Products

The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity

Thanks to its extensibility, Firefox quickly became the favorite browser for most power users. But while extensions are a great way to make Firefox more functional, Mozilla's designers are also currently thinking about a complete redesign of the way the browser looks and feels, in order to keep up with changing usage patterns. The most radical proposal we have seen so far would do away with the standard browser tabs, and replace them with an interface that looks more like iTunes than Firefox.

The Most Used iPhone Apps (They're Not Games!)

Earlier this month, comScore released statistics regarding the top application downloads of all time for Apple's iPhone platform. According to that information, which showed that nearly half of the top 25 are games, many people assumed that games are making the iPhone the success it is today. However, when looking at another metric, it seems that games might not be as popular as originally thought. When it comes to everyday use of applications, you see, there are several others that rank higher. Can you guess what they are?

StumbleUpon Breaks Free from eBay - Founders Buy it Back

Want a geeky way to chill out after a long work day of focus, focus, focus? There are few better ways online to keep the synapses lubricated than through the semi-serendipity of social sharing service StumbleUpon. Now you can Stumble outside of the shadow of the mega-corporate overlords at eBay - two years after Stumble founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith cashed out and handed their baby over to the ecommerce giant, they've come back with a team of investors and bought StumbleUpon back from eBay. It's pretty exciting.

eBay Lays Groundwork for Skype IPO in 2010

Online auction giant eBay, rumored to be shopping around for a buyer for its 2005 acquisition of voice-over-IP phone service Skype, announced in a press release this week that it has now decided to prep the ground for a 2010 Skype IPO launch. The announcement also says that this is one of several outcomes considered for Skype when eBay president John Donahoe became CEO early in 2008.

Facebook's Redesign: Bad News for Some Developers

According to All Facebook, not only did Facebook's latest redesign frustrate a lot of its users, but the new emphasis on the social network's news feed has turned out to be a major headache for developers. Some of the most popular Facebook applications have seen a 15 to 25% decline in usage over the last few weeks. Causes, the number one Facebook application, saw a drop of 24% in monthly active users since the redesign went live, and a number of popular applications from developers like Slide, RockYou, and FamilyLink saw a similar decline.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Future of Mobile Phones, Sensors and Social Networks, Brands Using Twitter, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the future of mobile phones in light of Google's Android OS, examine the future of journalism, discuss how sensors are becoming more a feature of social networks, advise you when not to use social media, analyze how companies such as Comcast are using Twitter, and more. Also, we look at featured stories from ReadWriteHire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

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Web Trends

Android Isn't a Phone OS Because in the Future There Will Be No Phones

T-Mobile is working on plans to build several devices that run Google's Android operating system but can't really be considered phones, according to internal documents secured by the New York Times this weekend. The revelation appears to provide more evidence to the argument that Android isn't really a mobile phone's operating system because in the future there won't be devices thought of as phones. There's no good reason for phones to continue to exist as distinct devices for voice communication. For all intents and purposes, there will be no phones in the future - only portable data devices used for all kinds of communication, voice being an equal partner with the web.

The Future of Journalism Will Be Radically Different

An Interview with Spot.us about the changing nature of journalism.

These days, everywhere you look it seems that some newspaper is closing its doors, stopping its presses, or maybe just going online-only. This sea of change is being heralded by some as the "death of journalism," a transformation that has been brought about thanks to the web. But is the web really killing journalism? Or, is it allowing an entirely new type of journalism to emerge?

When Sensors and Social Networks Mix

The integration of sensors with social networks will lead to real-time data and more useful web apps.

In posts this week we reviewed an MIT experiment called WikiCity, that gathered real-time location data from mobile phones in Rome and graphically mapped trends from it. We then looked at a more commercial product doing similar real-time location data analysis, called Citysense. That product aims to let users find the most popular night spots in San Francisco and the most efficient ways to get to them. The next stage of projects/products such as Wikicity and Citysense will be to enable users to social network, using data from sensors as one input.

When NOT to Use Social Media

These days, everyone is talking about social media and discussing what services and tools to use, how to use them, why you should use them, etc. In fact, if you listened to all the advice out there, you would probably think that no matter who you are, whether an individual wanting to build a personal brand, or a large multinational corporation intent on communicating with customers, you should be using social media. But is social media for everyone? Are there times when you shouldn't be using it at all?

Microsoft Europe: Internet Usage Will Overtake Traditional TV In 2010

Microsoft, in a new report about Internet usage in Europe, predicts that the Internet will overtake TV as the most consumed form of media in Europe by the middle of next year. Broadband connections in Europe have grown by 95% in the last five years, and the average European now spends about 8.9 hours per week online. Microsoft also predicts that over the next 5 years, usage patterns will shift away from traditional PCs to other web enabled devices like game consoles, IPTV, and mobile phones.

State of the Enterprise Market: Slow and Unsteady

The 2.0 web is heralding massive challenges for this week's Enterprise customer. But, who is that customer? Is it the Enterprise buyer with an IT budget? Is it the line of business executive who says, "Screw IT; let's do this" and rolls his own social computing platform by hiring a half dozen open source developers? Is it the departmental user who pays for a wiki with her credit card, recruits her team members and evangelizes on working a different way? The answer is: yes, it's all of these, and no (unfortunately) it's none of these.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
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Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
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Web Products

This Machine Eats Tweets: The System Behind @Comcast and Others

This week my home wifi was having trouble and I posted a message to Twitter saying, "My wife has decided to start the day with a call to Comcast customer service, I should have offered to poke her in the eye with a spoon. Would have been more fun for her." Within minutes a man named Bill (@ComcastBill, really) publicly replied to ask if he could help. I didn't think much of it, I assumed he was camped on a search.twitter results page for the word "Comcast" or maybe had subscribed to an RSS feed for the search. It turns out though, that far more than that was happening behind the scenes. An extensive machinery of tracking, delegation and analysis stood between Bill and my little Tweet. Maybe it has to be that way, maybe it's a good thing - but there's something deeply disturbing about it too.

Yahoo Opens Up Its Music Site: Now Includes YouTube, Pandora, Last.fm

Yahoo introduced a new version of its Yahoo Music artist homepages this week, which now include links to YouTube videos, Pandora radio stations, Last.fm, and photos from Flickr. Yahoo also plans to open up its API so that others can build applications for Yahoo Music, and, at a later point, artists will be able to create their own customized pages on Yahoo Music as well. Thanks to its drag-and-drop interface, users can easily customize the new artist homepages to their own liking.

PostRank Debuts Discovery Engine - Find The Best Blogs on Any Topic

PostRank this week announced a new feature to its website called the Discovery Engine. This leverages the power of its existing automatic ranking algorithms to recommend new information sources to visitors. Along with this new tool comes a completely revamped web page layout that focuses more on the user experience on the site.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Web 2.0 Expo, Skype for iPhone, Local Web, And More...

Richard MacManus — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter where the top stories of the week are summarized, we present highlights from our coverage of the Web 2.0 Expo (held this week in San Francisco), review the new Skype app for iPhone, discuss the local / mobile Web with a panel of experts in our podcast show RWW Live, check out the winners of the Ribbit VOIP KillerApps Challenge, and more. Also, we look at featured stories from ReadWriteHire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

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PhoneGap: People's Choice Winner at Web 2.0 Expo Launch Pad

The Web 2.0 Expo's startup showcase, Launch Pad, gave five companies five minutes each to present their product to a panel of experts and the People's Choice winner was mobile development platform PhoneGap. We present a summary of the pitches in this post. The judges who narrowed the field from more than 80 applicants down to 5 were Matt Marshall (VentureBeat), Anand Iyer (Microsoft) and ReadWriteWeb's own Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Nomee Introduces New Social Aggregation Software

This week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a company called Nomee revealed a new software application for the purpose of aggregating all your social networking sites into a single desktop experience. In a way, this software is somewhat reminiscent of the web-based PeopleBrowsr in the sense that it's attempting to pool all your networks and identities into one single window. However, unlike PeopleBrowsr, Nomee is not just aggregation software - it also functions as a social identity management tool, letting you control which identities are shared with which people. That makes Nomee more like a next-gen social address book than anything else.

Status.net Could Point to the Future of Business Intelligence

Few companies have captured the world's attention online in recent years as much as Twitter has. Rapid, structured, public communication between groups of people is not only a personal paradigm changer for many who have seriously explored the service - it's also an incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation. However, just as Facebook will never be Twitter because of the lack of clear access it offers outsiders to social data, so too does Twitter have its own limitations. A service called Status.net will launch in May that could overcome some of Twitter's limitations and make a significant impact on the world we work in.

Skype for iPhone: It's Real and It's Spectacular

The official Skype iPhone client has arrived. Although video streaming is a no-show, both full IM and voice communication is supported directly over wireless networks. Plus there are a few additional touches specific to this client that make it really great.

Skype May Be The Biggest Winner From The Web 2.0 Era

Skype does not get the respect it deserves because eBay not only publicly admitted to overpaying for it, but is also making a mess of its core business. Another reason may be that Skype flies in the face of conventional Valley wisdom where it has to be all about social media. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that Skype came from Europe, and we all know that Europeans are just lunch-eating dilettantes. Whatever the reason, a company that has $500 million in revenue, is profitable and growing, and has a shot at becoming the largest player in what is now a $2 trillion (yes, "t" for trillion) market, should get more respect.

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A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
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ReadWriteHire

Who's Getting Hired in Tech? Q1 Numbers from ReadWriteHire

Our site ReadWriteHire covers new hires in tech and new media. Today we're publishing our aggregate numbers for the first 3 months of 2009. Who's hiring? Software and IT companies, social media and social networking companies and marketing and advertising firms.

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Web Trends

RWW Live: The Local & Mobile Web

One of the big trends on the web is more and more location aware / sensitive web applications. Increasingly powerful mobile devices are enabling this. In the latest episode of RWW Live, we talked about how the Web is evolving to include more location aware applications and what barriers are still in the way. We also talked about privacy and other user concerns and what is being done to address them. We had special guests from Yahoo! Fire Eagle, Four Square and Outside.in on the show. The podcast is available for listening to here.

Five Technologies Tim O'Reilly Says Point Past Web 2.0

Tim O'Reilly, co-founder of the Web 2.0 Conference, gave a short address on the 5th anniversary of that event at this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and offered some thoughts on what's going to come next. He discussed five applications that he believes point the way.

Two themes stood out: sensors will surpass humans in front of their keyboards as the primary data source on the web, and Moore's Law will need to be applied to humanity's greatest problems.

The Future of Mobile

This week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Jason Grigsby of Cloud Four, a mobile and web development firm, presented at a session about the mobile web's future. Specifically, he focused on the different types of mobile applications we have today - native apps, mobile web apps, and hybrid apps - and the challenges of developing across multiple platforms.

What Can Voice Do For You? Ribbit Announces Winners of KillerApps Challenge

Ribbit, the VOIP platform that was bought by British Telecom last year, announced the winners of its $100,000 KillerApps challenge today. The contest was obviously meant to stimulate interest in Ribbit's APIs among developers, and judging from the line-up of winning applications, a lot of developers came up with highly creative ways of using Ribbit's platform in their apps.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Ghost Twittering, Last.fm Charges, Future of Firefox, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we discuss web apps that have stood the '30 day test' for our writers, analyze the past, present and future uses of the Twitter platform, look into the phenomenon of "ghost twittering", review the latest changes to the Facebook homepage, check out the latest online TV trends, and more. Also we look at featured stories from Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media, and our Enterprise channel.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5:

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Web Products

Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later

Here at ReadWriteWeb we see hundreds of new apps, scripts, plug-ins and doo-das every week. We review some portion of those. Many we get excited about. But few stand the test of time for even 30 days. Here are 23 apps we're still using a month or more after discovering them.

We wrote a similar post last November ("30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using 1 Month After Finding Them") and can happily report that we're still loving almost all the services we wrote about then. If a service can make it past the 30 day mark, it has a good chance of sticking around for awhile. 22 or 23 in a month is a pretty impressive number really, so go web innovators go!

The Future of Firefox: Interview With Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer

In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard - Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla's new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla - such as Weave and Ubiquity - fit into the big picture. In this post we'll focus on the near future of Firefox.

Last.fm to Charge Subscription Fee for Many International Listeners

The CBS-acquired streaming music service Last.fm announced this week that it will "soon" require users outside of the US, UK and Germany to pay €3.00 per month to keep the music rolling. In blog comments on the announcement, the company explained that those three countries were the only ones where ad sales were proving successful enough to monetize the free music that way; elsewhere the money will have to come out of listeners' pockets. It's a dramatic move that could pave the way for other media companies to do the same and effectively open up international markets. People complain, but do you think that viewers would pay a similar monthly fee for international access to Hulu, for example? We do.

Facebook Tweaks New Homepages in Response to User Complaints

As we reported last week, Facebook's users clearly disliked the latest updates to their homepages, and now, Facebook is giving in to pressure from its most vocal users. According to Facebook, its users were especially unhappy with the lack of filtering mechanisms for the news stream on their homepages. This week Facebook's Chris Cox announced that the company plans to tweak the current design in order to give users greater control over what updates appear in the news stream.

The White House Has a Digg Clone

The White House has launched a new web site where anyone can submit and vote up their most important questions for President Obama about the economy. That's right - the White House has a Digg clone!

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A Word from Our Sponsors

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Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
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Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
Wistia offers private video sharing for business.
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Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
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Jobwire

Former Yahoo! Now Guitar Hero Frontman

Activision Blizzard announced that it has appointed former Yahoo! COO Dan Rosensweig to be its new President and CEO of of RedOctane, the business unit which develops the mega-popular video game Guitar Hero. Rosensweig will be responsible for Guitar Hero's global operations "including game development, hardware manufacturing, supply chain, logistics and marketing" and report to President & CEO of Activision Publishing Mike Griffith.

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Web Trends

The Twitter Platform: 3 Years Old and Ready to Change the World

Twitter marked its 3rd birthday last weekend and the site that Nielsen called the fastest growing social network last month shows no signs of slowing down. While active participation by users is a great show of strength, the use of Twitter as a platform for developers and aggregate data analysis is the most exciting thing about the company. The story of Twitter as a platform is just beginning; the most exciting developments are still to come. In this post we share our three favorite examples of what Twitter is becoming; these 3rd party uses of the service point the way for the larger Twitter ecosystem to become even more important in the future. We're not talking about Twitter clients, we're talking about Twitter data mining.

How Do You Feel About "Ghost Twittering?"

The New York Times this week had an interesting article about the new trend of "ghost Twittering." If you don't know what that means, it's when someone, usually a celebrity, politician, or a "personal brand" of some sort, pays another person or other people to update their Twitter account on their behalf. This "ghost writer" of tweets thus becomes a "ghost Twitterer." While it may make sense for someone like U.S. President Barack Obama to farm out Twitter updates to staff (he has bigger tasks to focus on than tweets), when individual celebs and micro-celebs engage in this practice it seems a bit disingenuous. Is it really so hard to post 140 characters every now and then?

Gen Y Says: "I Want My Social TV!"

New research from Parks Associates found that many Gen Y TV viewers are ready for a change when it comes to their television-watching experience. According to a recent report, over one-fourth of users ages 18-24 are interested in having more social media features integrated into their TV. This data should come as good news to companies like Verizon and Yahoo!, both of whom have been pushing their new social networking widgets. But it also has broader implications that go beyond kids just wanting Facebook on their TV. The study found that there's a desire to use social networking as a platform to actually enhance the TV-watching experience through interactive chats with other viewers and to have the ability to recommend shows to friends.

Got an Hour? Create a Server in the Cloud

Dave Winer recently announced EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you create a server on Amazon's EC2. "It's time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking about them as things for people with ideas," Winer said in a podcast roadmap he created for this work. The technology available today is enabling anyone with even the slightest technical bent to get out there and create amazing new things; often taking the technology in directions than the company which created it could have ever imagined.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Salesforce.com Integrates Twitter

When Gmail failed a few months ago, I tried using Google to find out what was going on. When that did not get me an answer, I tried Twitter and did find some answers. That alerted me to the power of real-time search in one specific usage case. It was a relatively minor problem for me. But what if I ran customer service for a SaaS firm that just had a major outage? How would I find and monitor the conversations going on out there? That is what this week's announcement by Salesforce.com about Twitter integration is all about.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: iPhone 3.0, Facebook Privacy Controls, Web-based Books, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we cover the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, review the highlights from Microsoft's MIX event, look at Facebook's new privacy controls, check out some cutting edge web-based books, analyze the latest social media and Twitter stats, and more. Also we look at a featured story from Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5:

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Web Products

iPhone 3.0: Push Notifications, Copy and Paste, MMS, and More

Apple this week previewed a new version of its iPhone firmware, as well as a new version of its SDK for the iPhone. Among the highlights of the announcement were the availability of a new homescreen, MMS, copy and paste, and the long expected arrival of push notifications. Developers will now also be able to sell in game accessories and subscriptions through Apple's App Store.

iPhone developers will be able to download the new firmware this week, while the rest of us will have to wait until it is released to the public later this summer.

MIX09: Microsoft Announces Silverlight 3 Beta, Blend 3, and Updates to Azure

At its annual MIX conference, Microsoft this week introduced a number of interesting new products, including a beta of Silverlight 3 and a preview version of Blend 3, its Silverlight development tool. Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform also received a number of major updates this week. Microsoft also announced that Silverlight 2 has been installed on more than 300 million PCs since its launch in October 2008 and that NBC will use Silverlight 3 to power its online coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Facebook's New Privacy Controls Encourage Openness

Facebook announced new privacy settings this week which let you selectively open up portions of your personal profile to everyone on the Facebook social network. As an alternative to the new "Public Profiles" (formerly called "Pages"), these additional settings allow you to pick and choose which parts - if any - of your private Facebook profile are available for anyone to see. According to a company blog post, this means that now people won't need to friend you in order to view the content you want to make public.

Twine Could Soon Surpass Delicious, Prepares Ontology Authoring Tool

Nova Spivack's semantic web company Twine is developing a free service to write and host semantic ontologies; the classification trees that enable machines to put concepts in topical context. Ready to play Aristotle and create an ontology of cheese, model airplanes, global anti-hunger organizations or any other topic?

What blogging was to publishing, a simple tool that made far more people able to participate, Twine's new ontology writing and hosting service could be to the act of teaching machines about new topics.

IBM Announces Web-Based Radiology Theatre

IBM has announced an online "radiology theatre" product, currently at the prototype stage, which allows teams of medical experts to "simultaneously discuss and review patients' medical test data using a Web browser." The project is being run in collaboration with the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Boston and is built on IBM's next-generation browser platform Blue Spruce, which ReadWriteWeb reviewed when it was first announced back in November. IBM also used the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine. The app runs on the Linux or MacOS X operating systems and the browser may be Safari or Internet Explorer.

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A Word from Our Sponsors

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TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 allows you to create interactive social media experiences.
Calais, brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
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VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
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Jobwire

Netflix API Team Snags Yahoo's Kent Brewster

Business troubles at Yahoo! haven't changed the fact that the company has some of the most innovative Open Web advocates in the industry in its ranks, but this week one of those innovative people has left. API wizard Kent Brewster told us that he's joining Netflix as the company's newest API developer and evangelist. He'll start there at the top of next month.

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Web Trends

Being Harry Potter, While You Walk to Work

Dan Hon is building a radical new future for one of humanity's oldest activities - the telling of stories. The modest young UK CEO's design company Six to Start won Best in Show at this week's SXSW Web Awards. The company's project, called Telling Stories, is a six part experiment with the book publisher Penguin.

Hon's vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the "urban games" of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of "Harry Potter ether" that we can dip in and out of while we're walking to work.

SXSW Panel: Beyond Aggregation

One of the more popular panels at SXSW Interactive this year was one called Beyond Aggregation. The panel included our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick, as well as Gabe Rivera (Techmeme), Louis Gray (LouisGray.com), Melanie Baker (PostRank) and Micah Baldwin (Lijit). The topics revolved around information gathering and management.

From the panel, Marshall and Louis had new sources and gathering tips, Gabe and Melanie weighed in heavily on how to manage information and Micah had some great suggestions on discovery of new information sources.

Despite Recession, More Than 50% of Marketers Increase Spending on Social Media

In a recession, budgets are tightened, jobs are cut, and those who remain are expected to do more with less. Given this type of economic reality, it's surprising to hear of an industry reporting an increase in spending on anything, much less on something as new as social media. Yet that's exactly what's occurring. According to a new Forrester Research survey of 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees, the use of social media as a marketing tool is on the rise. What's more, Forrester reports that over 50% of marketers said they will be increasing their spending on social media marketing in the coming months.

Nielsen: Twitter Was Fastest Growing Community Last Month

This week, Nielsen Online reported that Twitter has now surpassed Facebook and others to become the fastest-growing site in the "Member Communities" category for the month of February. Although Facebook, the world's most popular social network, has more members than Twitter, that's not what this measurement is about - it's about growth. And Twitter is growing. It's growing like crazy.

Is There a Reverse Network Effect with Scale?

The Internet economy has been built on the network effect (i.e. the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product for other people). Investors and entrepreneurs have treated this like Moore's Law. But just as Moore's Law hits physical constraints, network effects have a limit in many types of online communities. Indeed, in some cases, a reverse network effect may exist: as new people join, others are motivated to leave. This dramatically affects the length of the competitive advantage enjoyed by these ventures. In this post, we'll look at which ventures suffer from reverse network effects, which don't, and which may suffer depending on the strategy they choose to adopt.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: New Facebook Homepages, Kindle for iPhone, DEMO Smarter Web, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look into Facebook's homepages, check out Yahoo's answer to Facebook Connect, review the new iPhone version of Amazon's eReader Kindle, analyze the 'Smarter Web' trend that came out of the DEMO conference this year, and more. Also we cover the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5:

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Web Products

Facebook Announces New Homepages: It's All About the Stream

Facebook this week announced a major update to its homepages that will go live next Wednesday. The new homepages will put the news feed front and center and have both a filtering feature as well as a sidebar that highlights the most popular topics and links that are currently being discussed by your friends. The news feed is now also updated in real-time, while the old feed ran on a schedule and only updated a few times per hour.

Yahoo! Launches Major Challenge to Facebook Connect

Yahoo! Updates, the company's answer to Facebook Connect, became available on more than 600,000 websites this week with the launch of a new partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit. Whereas Facebook's technology for tying profiles and activity updates between sites around the web has raised concerns about proprietary control over data, Yahoo! has implemented the open standard OAuth in its system. By partnering with JS-Kit, a service that powers comments and ratings on sites big (like AOL and Sun Microsystems) and small (JS-Kit bought up old school market leader Haloscan in July), Yahoo! Updates is coming out of the gate in a big way. How does its technology compare to Facebook Connect?

Amazon's Kindle Comes to the iPhone

Amazon released a free application for the iPhone and iPod touch (iTunes link) that allows users to download and read any eBook from Amazon's Kindle store on Apple's popular mobile devices. This move comes just a few days after Amazon's Kindle 2 eBook reader arrived in users' hands, but according to Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president, Amazon does not expect that this app will cannibalize Kindle sales as users will probably only use their phones to read for short periods.

Make Google Real-Time With Twitter Search Add-on

Some people say that "the real-time web" could be the next generation of post-Google search. Social media tools have greatly increased not just the number of people posting content online but also the speed with which they are able to do so. Do we need a new search paradigm that prioritizes publishing freshness higher than page rank? Google backers say that Google is already capable of indexing anything online mere moments after it's been published - but the user experience in search doesn't really feel "real time" right now. Movable Type consultant Mark Carey came up with a simple solution this weekend that could change your use of Google more than anything else has in a while.

Twitter VC Laughs at the Idea that Twitter Has No Business Model

Todd Dagres, founder of Spark Capital and one of the VCs that poured an additional $35 million into Twitter recently, finds it amusing when people talk about Twitter's lack of a business model. "We think it's kind of funny," Dagres recently told Innovation Economy. "We know how we're going to do it, and we're very confident about how we're going to do it, and it's not necessarily in our interest to tell people how we're going to do it."

MyBuys: Recommendations as a Service

In this latest installment in our series on recommendation engines, we look at MyBuys - a company purely focused on providing recommendations services to retail websites. We've noted in previous posts in this series that each recommendations vendor has a different approach. What distinguishes MyBuys is that it takes a services approach and is not based on a single algorithm. We spoke to Paul Rosenblum, VP Products & Strategy at MyBuys, who told us that most companies in the recommendations market have a "pet algorithm". However MyBuys, according to Rosenblum, uses a variety of algorithms for different contexts and different kinds of retailers. "Fundamentally", Rosenblum told ReadWriteWeb, "we don't actually have a product [...] we have a service".

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A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 allows you to create interactive social media experiences.
Calais, brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
Wistia offers private video sharing for business.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Jobwire

Details of New Executive Team at Yahoo!

This week Yahoo! chose the executives that will lead them into the future under newly appointed CEO Carol Bartz. The moves are part of a major restructuring at Yahoo! that is supposed to last four years. The Yahoo! Tech and Products groups will be combined into a group called Products and be led by Ari Balogh. His title will be Executive Vice President of Products and Chief Technology Officer. he will report directly to CEO Carol Bartz.

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Web Trends

DEMO Trend: The Smarter Web (Part 1)

At this month's DEMO 09 conference, one of the most apparent trends was the emergence of several new intelligent web services. In this transitional period between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (or whatever it is that comes next), the tools of the future are just now being revealed. Although at first glance some of these services and applications may seem somewhat incomplete, in many cases they actually represent years' worth of work to have reached the point they're at now. These are no simple Web 2.0 applications; these are highly complex and intelligent tools of tomorrow's smarter web.

Best Mobile App from DEMO 09: Asurion's Social Address Book

At this week's DEMO 09 conference Asurion Mobile introduced their new open mobile address book called simply "Asurion Mobile AddressBook." Although the name may not be all that flashy, the app itself is. With this mobile address book, you can add social elements to your contact list including Flickr photos, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds. This may remind you of the upcoming Palm Pre's address book which will deliver similar functionality with its Facebook integration, however Asurion's solution does even more. And thanks to the app's open framework, it's not limited to the social add-ons it ships with - developers can extend it any way they like.

RWW Live: Online Travel

The latest episode of RWW Live focused on online travel applications. We had executives from 4 great travel startups on the call: TripIt, Yapta, Dopplr and PlanetEye. In the show we discussed how the Web is changing the way people travel for work and fun. Our guests were: Gregg Brockway, President & Co-Founder, TripIt; Marko Ahtisaari, CEO & Co-Founder, Dopplr; Hugh Birch, VP of Product Development, Yapta; Jonah Sigel, VP Business Development, PlanetEye. The podcast is available for download here.

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Enterprise

Have Code, Will Travel - Sabre Chooses Open Source to Power its Business

Whenever you buy an airline ticket or book a hotel room these days, chances are that a good part of that transaction will run through Sabre's network. Sabre is one of the world's largest suppliers of technology solutions for the airline and travel industry. What you may not be aware of, however, is that Sabre has made open-source software a cornerstone of its technology strategy. Sabre already relies on a number of open-source projects to handle thousands of transactions every second, and this week, Sabre and Progress FUSE announced a new partnership that will make a number of FUSE's open-source offerings a cornerstone of Sabre's technology.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

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That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup: Facebook Principles, Amazon Public Data, Times Open, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look into Facebook's controversial new "principles", check out the latest OpenID trends, cover Amazon's public data initiative, analyze Wikipedia's possible future as a development platform, investigate the future of 'touch' apps, and more. Also we cover the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5:

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Web Trends

Facebook Management Has Lost Its Grip on Reality

Facebook made one of the most important announcements in the young company's history this week. It has proposed a set of foundational documents, including the first official statement of Facebook Principles. The proposal is made to Facebook's users, who will now have 30 days to read, comment and perhaps vote on the documents. Looking just below the surface of this big news, though, there are a number of things going on that make absolutely no sense to us. Facebook's management appears to have lost its grip on reality. The population of Facebook dwarfs that of scores of countries in the physical world; these foundational documents are of immense importance and raise big red flags.

Bad News for OpenID: People Still Using Same Password Everywhere

A new survey from Gartner Research delivers some bad news regarding our online security practices: two-thirds of U.S. consumers use the same one or two passwords for all the websites they access. And they like it that way. Although people claim they're concerned about security, they still tend to use unsafe password management techniques rather than exploring new methods - be they new hardware, software, or new authentication frameworks like OpenID.

Could Wikipedia's Future Be as a Development Platform?

Content creation at Wikipedia is slowing down. The already small number of active regular editors is on the decline and Jimmy Wales has called for live edits to be held for approval on many pages, a step sure to slow contributions even further. The tapering of fresh content doesn't have to mean Wikipedia's death, though. The site contains a gargantuan amount of human created and tended but largely machine readable and structured data. That's a potential gold mine in terms of a potential pay-off in innovation. Wikipedia can offer developers opportunities to glean analysis, supplemental content and structured data from its years-old store of collaboratively generated information. All of that is possible, but Wikipedia as a platform can't be taken for granted.

The Future of Touch

It's tempting to give Apple's iPhone credit for the birth of touch-based computing, but it was not the first touchscreen user interface - nor is it the only one in existence today. Long before the iPhone, touchscreen LCDs were common, as were touch smartphones from Palm, Sony Ericsson, HTC, and others. In addition, back in 2001 - long before the iPhone launch - Microsoft began work on Microsoft Surface, a touchscreen tabletop computer. Yet it was the iPhone's multi-touch capabilities along with its stellar design that really got the ball rolling for touch computing. The only question that remains now is what will come next?

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A Word from Our Sponsors

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Jobwire

Changes at Google.org

Search engine giant Google is in the middle of reorganizing its philanthropic arm Google.org and this week the company announced a couple of key personnel changes. Dr. Larry Brilliant will step down as Executive Director to take the position of Chief Philanthropy Evangelist. Vice President of New Business Development Megan Smith will assume the role of General Manager. Smith will continue in her Vice President role in addition to taking on this new role.

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Web Products

Amazon Exposes 1 Terabyte of Public Data to Developers

Amazon.com changed the retail world. In the process the company built up so much surplus computing power that it started a dirt cheap "computing in the cloud" business that changed the computing world. This week the company's newest project Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services began offering more than 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) of fascinating public data for developers to access on the fly through Amazon's cloud computing service. We're talking about an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, including the Human Genome, huge amounts of chemistry data, machine readable encyclopedic entries about millions of different topics and an entire dump of Wikipedia. US Census data, data from the US Department of Transportation and more. It's all accessible by web applications in no time at all. What do you think this is going to change?

Google Announces Pricing for App Engine: Allows Developers to Scale Beyond Free Quotas

Google has finally announced its pricing plans for its App Engine service. Google's App Engine allows developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure and, until now, was only available in a free, but restricted, version. The free version currently gives developers up to 500MB of persistent storage and CPU power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Starting this week, however, developers will also be able to purchase additional resources, which will enable them to scale their apps beyond these free quotas.

Times Open: Developers Gather to Discuss The New York Times APIs

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're big fans of the Times Open strategy, the program that focuses on making the data of The New York Times more accessible to the developer community. We heralded the launch of the program, covered the first available API, and marveled at the access to content the APIs have begun to provide. Now the Times has taken another momentous step forward: bringing developers together for Times Open, the publication's inaugural API seminar.

Don't be Silly - The Kindle 2 is No Threat to Audiobooks

A few weeks ago, just after the introduction of the new Kindle 2, the Authors Guild complained that Amazon's eBook reader had a text-to-speech function. According to Paul Aitken, the Guild's executive director, this meant that Amazon would have to pay for audio rights for every book downloaded onto the device. This week, Roy Blount Jr., the Guild's president, echoed this sentiment in an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

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Enterprise

The Other Decoupling Theory

A lifetime ago, before the market meltdown, when it was just an ordinary recession, there was a theory that the big emerging markets (BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India, China) were "decoupled" from the US economy. According to this theory, when America had problems due to subprime mortgages, these countries would only be affected marginally. Well, that theory has been totally discredited. It turns out that the other web, the web of financial transactions, makes the global economy tightly coupled. But it is possible, faintly possible, that there is another form of decoupling happening between the traditional economy and the innovation economy.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.