ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrapups

Weekly Wrapup: Mega Content Sites, Gen Y on Twitter, iPhone App Recommendation Services, And More...

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

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze a new breed of content site that is rapidly gaining momentum, look into recent statistics showing that Gen Y is using Twitter more, compare five recommendation services for iPhone apps, review the new-look MSN, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Web Trends

The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media

Two companies that produce massive quantities of new content every day, Answers.com and Demand Media, are rapidly moving up the list of top U.S. web properties, as measured by comScore. Answers.com has risen from #26 to #13 in just two months, and Demand Media has risen from #24 to #15 in the same time period. Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web?

As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

Amazon Turns Twitter into a Marketplace - Are You Concerned?

This week, Amazon sent out emails to their Amazon Associates members touting the latest addition to the company's affiliate program: a new feature called "Share with Twitter." According to the email, participants can generate "tweetable" links to any Amazon product after first logging into their Associates account. After updating Twitter, any person who clicks through on the link and makes a purchase will earn the participant referral fees payable through the Associates program.

Thanks to Mozilla, Web Gets Less Ugly, Good Type Gets Machine Readable

Recently, a consortium of type designers and web designers have gathered around a new font format specification called Web Open Font Format (WOFF). The format would allow more typefaces to appear across the web and to be readable by both humans and search engines. With support from Mozilla announced with the release of Firefox 3.6, the question of web fonts might be satisfactorily resolved in the near future.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Enterprise 2.0: Declaring War Does Not Work

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week, Andrew McAfee made a few points about the approach to enterprise technology and how it might be changed. McAffee, of the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, is considered the father of Enterprise 2.0. His views reflect how Enterprise 2.0 is evolving but still with a fair degree of resistance for its adoption.

ReadWriteStart

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

Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad: Newbies Take the Stage

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, we witnessed some of the enterprise community's brightest new stars. Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad offered early-stage companies a chance to shine. In a gong-show like presentation series, the four finalists took to the stage to battle it out for the title of best newcomer.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Discovering Great iPhone Apps: 5 Recommendation Services Compared

The iPhone App Store is a blessing and a curse. It's one of the best things about the mobile platform, but it's so popular that finding great new apps to download can be a real challenge. Where there's a monetizable pain-point, services will flower! Enter a variety of new iPhone app recommendation services that aim to point you toward your next download and pocket the affiliate fees for paid apps.

Below we've posted a chart comparing the features of 5 new services for iPhone app discovery.

The New MSN: Will More White Space and Local News Make You Visit It?

Microsoft announced this week a radical redesign of its MSN homepage. Today's MSN homepage for the US market is a busy mix of ads, hundreds of links and some customizable local news and weather widgets. The redesign, MSN's first major redesign since 2004, puts a new emphasis on search, local news, video and integration with social networks. The new page features more white space, a tabbed design and a new MSN logo.

The Very Strange Story of the Startup That Says It Made $10m Before Launching

Ben Behrouzi came from the shadowy Lead Generation business, but some people in that field said he played too dirty. Now he's got a real-time search engine that just came out of beta today, called Leapfish, and he says the company will already report $10 million in revenue this year despite having barely launched to the public. This is a strange story, so consider suspending your disbelief so you can see what Leapfish has to offer.

PayPal's X: A Platform to Pick Your Pocket

After waiting for two months for PayPal to release its much-anticipated platform, the day finally arrived for PayPal X. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's announcement in late July and this week, at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition Center, developers and press people waited with baited breath to see what was earlier described as a "platform as ubiquitous as the electrical outlet."

Ribbit Launches Google Voice Challenger

Ribbit announced this week the launch of Ribbit Mobile. Ribbit Mobile is a cloud-based VoIP telephony service that brings together web-based calling, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions. It is hard to look at Ribbit Mobile without comparing it to Google Voice. Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users a new phone number or they can use call forwarding. Ribbit Mobile also has quite a few features that Google doesn't offer, including the ability to make calls from within the browser.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: The Web in 5 Years, Hulu's Plans, Google Wave Use Cases, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze how Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks the Web will evolve, review Hulu's latest plans to make money, investigate use cases for Google Wave, ask why VCs aren't investing in Augmented Reality, review the latest Mobile Web statistics, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Web Trends

Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

Mobile Web's Explosive Growth

Mobile ad firm AdMob has revealed the dramatic changes the mobile industry has seen in their latest Mobile Metrics Report. It was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone in America. One year later and half of the top ten are touchscreen devices, six include Wi-Fi capabilities, and six have mobile application stores. And as you would expect, this new crop of super-powered phones are making heavy use of the mobile web.

Why Aren't VCs Backing Augmented Reality?

Some people believe that Augmented Reality (AR), the class of technologies that place images or data on top of other views of the physical world, could be the web browser of the future. AR has rocketed out of the research labs and is catching mass market interest fast - e.g. mobile phones displaying restaurant reviews when you look through your phone's camera. Why then are VCs not investing more in Augmented Reality? Here are three reasons why we think investment in this sector has been slow so far.

Facebook Announces Roadmap for Developers

This week Facebook published a developer roadmap outlining upcoming relevant changes and a rough timeline for each. Changes include developer access to user emails, more prominent app displays on user profiles, all-new homepage dashboards for apps and games, and improvements to Open Graph and Analytics APIs. Read on for details and screenshots of the new faces of Facebook apps.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Calendaring, Scheduling Meetings: Timebridge CEO Interview Reveals Strategic Importance of This Space

We have looked at Calendaring many times (such as in our round-up of 10 players). In our own work, we have started working with both Tungle and Doodle. To understand more about why this market is strategically interesting, we recently spoke with Yori Nelken, CEO of Timebridge (see our previous coverage here).

ReadWriteStart

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

Paul Graham: Priority Access to Twitter Is Practical Necessity

If hardcore hackers had any doubts whether the real-time web was a legitimate development environment, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham is dispelling them. In an interview with Graham, ReadWriteWeb learned that the entrepreneur-turned-investor issued a "Request for Startups" (RFS) asking for ideas from companies utilizing Twitter and Justin.tv's live video API. Groups who are accepted to Y-Combinator and fall under these categories will be given "priority access" to Twitter and Justin.tv.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Google Wave Use Cases: Education

Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a 'Preview' product shortly after and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September. Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? We started this series by looking at the education sector.

What are Hulu's Mysterious Plans?

Everyone is looking to Hulu as the future of Internet TV. A joint venture between several major networks, Hulu delivers free, ad-supported programming via online streams - an untested model for long-term profitability, at least when it comes to television. While consumers have been enjoying the service since its launch in 2007, recent statements by a News Corp exec have people wondering: can Hulu make the ad-supported model work? Or does the company have other plans?

Google Launches Music Search: Partners with MySpace, Lala, Gracenote and Others

This week Google announced the launch of Google Music. This new service is powered by Lala and MySpace's iLike. Other partners include Gracenote, iMeem, Pandora and Rhapsody. Google has also partnered with the major music labels: EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. Through Lala and iLike, Google will also be able to feature music from a large number of independent labels.

Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs

Social Search went live in Google Labs this week. Google announced that it was working on this Social Search feature at the Web 2.0 Summit last week. Social Search taps into a user's social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user's own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.

Brizzly Adds Facebook - Aims to be The Blogger.com of Social Media

Brizzly wants to be to microblogging what Blogger.com was to blogging five years ago. Currently, Brizzly offers a user-friendly browser-based interface for Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook integration went live this weekand more social media applications will be added as the product evolves. Brizzly shares much of the same philosophy as Blogger. It's simple to use and aims to make microblogging easy to understand and use by a mainstream audience.

Currently Brizzly is in private beta, but ReadWriteWeb has scored 2000 invites for our readers to test it out! (see the post for the code).

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Countdown to The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit

Richard MacManus — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we continue the build-up to our first event: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. You can register here for the low price of $270.

Also this week we analyzed applications from The Internet of Things, looked into a new class of tools that surface influencers from Twitter data, questioned whether 'app addiction' is real, reviewed the latest eBook trends, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Next Week: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit

ReadWriteWeb's very first event is happening this coming Thursday! The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit is on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It's a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face conversation.

In conjunction with the Summit, we'll be releasing our second original premium research report in October. Registration is still open for the The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, we hope to see you there!

Web Trends

Applications From The Internet of Things - An Analysis of Pachube

Last week we reported that Pachube, an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web, had released a real-time notifications feature. We at ReadWriteWeb think that Pachube is an excellent example of one of our Top 5 Trends of 2009: Internet of Things. So this week we explored Pachube in-depth in a 3-part series. In Part 2, we looked at what applications we can expect to see in the coming years.

Uncovering Connections on Twitter Could Become Big Business

If there's a hard-to-reach person you want to meet, one of the best ways to do so is through their friends. A new class of tools intended to surface influencers and the people they are influenced by, is focusing on Twitter. Could analysis of individual behavior on Twitter become a valuable tool for business development and marketing? A growing number of startup companies are making a case that it could.

Is App Addiction a Real Thing?

Do you jokingly refer to yourself as an "app addict?" That is, are you someone so obsessed with your mobile phone applications that you've filled numerous screens full of apps? USA Today recently asked: "What is app addiction doing to people's health? What indeed, we wonder. How about nothing at all?

Holiday Outlook for eReaders and eBooks: Even Better Than Previously Thought

There can be little doubt that eBook and eReaders are having a breakout year. This week, Forrester Research moved its original projection of 2 million US eReader sales in 2009 up 50%. They argue that sales are growing much faster than expected because of falling prices, better retail distribution, and the media buzz that currently surrounds eBooks and eReaders.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Real-Time Collaboration Has Stalled...For Now

A Forrester study reports that real-time collaboration has stalled in the enterprise, due in most part to the lack of adoption in technologies such as web conferencing and instant messaging. That may be true with existing technologies but it is important to note the new generation of applications that extend real-time collaboration tools. The report covers devices, productivity, mobility, collaboration, intranet portals, and Web 2.0.

ReadWriteStart

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

Morpheus: Y Combinator-Like Incubator in India (RWS Interview)

Morpheus describes itself as "a gang of serial entrepreneurs and around 40 startup founders" who are "trying to make a small contribution towards India's startup revolution." The venture aims to fill the gap in early-stage financing with a decidedly hands-on approach. We spoke recently with Indus Kaitan, a Valley entrepreneur who returned to India as a Morpheus partner. Read on and listen to find out more about the early-stage scene in India.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Gmail Users Get Real-Time Updates in their Email Messages

Recently, some Gmail users spotted a new feature in which small favicons were appearing next to certain email messages in the inbox view. The icons only appear next to commercially sent emails such as those delivered by Netflix. They indicate which messages include what Google is calling "enhanced content" - that is, real-time updates from companies contained within the body of the email messages themselves.

Facebook Now Tracking Gross National Happiness; Continues Hoarding Data

Facebook announced this week that it is tracking what it calls Gross National Happiness, based on an analysis of the positive and negative words people use when updating their Facebook status. The new index is interesting, but it's also a frustrating example of just how much value Facebook is withholding by not allowing everyone access to the anonymous, aggregated activity and conversation of more than 300 million people.

Shiny, Happy Brightkite: Check Out the Site's New Look, Enhanced Features

Last week, we noticed some downtime for location-based web service and TechStars grad Brightkite. We emailed founder Brady Becker and learned that soon, his team would be rolling out a second version of the site. Read on for a glimpse of what the site now looks and feels like, as well as an exhaustive list of new features and improvements.

iPhone's Flash Apps: Let the Games Begin

This week at the MAX 2009 Conference, Adobe previewed Flash Professional CS5 and announced that the new release will let Flash developers export their files as iPhone apps. In the past, developers have had to create separate iPhone apps and web-based tools. The significance of this announcement is that development time for thousands of Flash-based gaming and music companies will be cut significantly.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Google Wave, Real-Time Web Trends, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:00:00 -0800

Also this week we published a list of 50 leading Real-Time Web companies, looked at the release of 100,000 Google Wave invites, compared Twitter and Facebook game plans, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form:

Less Than 2 Weeks Till The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit

ReadWriteWeb's very first event is coming soon: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It's a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face conversation.

In conjunction with the Summit, we'll be releasing our second original premium research report in October. Registration is now open for the The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, we hope to see you there!

Web Trends

Top 50 Real-Time Web Companies

As part of our lead-up to The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, this week we listed 50 leading companies of the Real-Time Web. Like any list, it is bound to be missing some worthy companies - so we invite you to add more in the comments. Our aim is to unveil the top 100 Real-Time Web companies at our event.

Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action

The Real-Time Web - it's more than just immediate delivery of Twitter messages to an always-on mobile device, disrupting the concentration that civilization is based on and bringing a rush to crazed social media addicts obsessed with the hottest new buzzwords. No, there are scores of companies building and selling systems today that deliver very real value via the real-time web.

We've interviewed 40 companies in the real-time web market in preparation for the forthcoming ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit and a companion research report. In this post are nine solid examples of real-time web technology that illustrate what it is and why it's important - and one possible future scenario that's important enough it has to be discussed as well.

What Early Birds Want to Know About the Real-Time Web

The real-time web is a broad and rich phenomenon emerging online. A wide variety of companies are building and using it in really diverse ways. Because this field is so new and is seeing such breadth of innovation, people have a lot of questions about it. In this post are some of our favorite questions that Early Bird registrants said that they want to tackle.

More Proof: Facebook for the Rich, MySpace for the Poor

Oh how the mighty have fallen. The one time king of social networks, MySpace, now has the honor of being the site where the less affluent members of the online population stake their claims by way of bedazzled profiles overrun with auto-playing videos and songs. Meanwhile, the upscale, financially solvent users have moved on - and by moved on, we mean to Facebook, of course. At least those are the findings of the latest social networking study done by American consumer behavior analysis firm Nielsen Claritas.

Kiva's Causemopolitan on World Tour: Social Media for Social Good

It's been a long and winding road for serial volunteer and social media philanthropist Sloane Berrent. Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Trading Scarcity: Is This the Killer App for the Real-Time Web?

Most platforms gain traction through a killer app. In the second generation of real time, that killer app was market data for financial traders. What will it be in the third generation? Today, the real-time Web is associated with social networking status updates via services such as Twitter and Facebook. But whether this will be the killer app for this generation is not clear. The killer app matters, because the winner at the platform layer will be the company that hosts it.

ReadWriteStart

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

TechStars Investor Day Hits a Home Run

With bleary eyes and bellies full of coffee, a roomful of investors, journalists and young entrepreneurs gathered this morning for the Bay Area TechStars Investor day. The Boulder and Boston-based startup incubator pulled out all the stops as 13 companies took to the stage to plead their case for funding. In this post are the summaries of each.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

100,000 Google Wave Preview Invites: Everything You Need to Know

Google officially announced this week that it will send out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave. These accounts will go to developers who are already in the developers preview and users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com on a first-come, first-served basis. A select number of Google Apps users will also get access to Wave. Google first unveiled Wave in May and since then the team has focused almost exclusively on making the system more stable and scalable.

Twitter and Facebook Investment Terms and Game Plans

There is a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about the recent $100 million investment in Twitter at a $1 billion valuation, but most of it based on speculation. Twitter and Facebook are private companies. You cannot get the facts simply by typing a stock symbol into Yahoo Finance. Our mission at ReadWriteWeb is to add to the facts, not just the speculation. Rather than posting confidential information that someone has leaked to us, we prefer to start with publicly available data. We could not refrain from a bit of game theory speculation on how this could play out, and we invited a specialist in startup deals to add his speculation as well.

2 Billion Downloads Later, Apple's App Store is Still Going Strong

Apple this week announced that a total of 2 billion apps have now been downloaded from the App Store. There are now over 85,000 apps in the store, up from 65,000 on July 14, and the number of developers has grown from 100,000 in July to around 125,000 today. iPhone and iPod touch users now download close to 6.6 million apps every day and this number continues to grow.

Google and Best Buy Partner on Mobile Applications

This week major electronics retailer Best Buy and internet powerhouse Google announced a partnership designed to help the retailer compete in the mobile sales arena. In addition to other Best Buy strategies for ramping up their mobile division, one key aspect to their multiphase plan involves collaborating with Google on a series of exclusive mobile applications, the first one being a shopping app that helps customers find the item they're looking for within their nearest Best Buy store.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit

Richard MacManus — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we announce our first event: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It's a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face conversation. Also this week we look at which 'light blogging' service is the most popular, tell you how to fix your Facebook privacy settings, analyze web tech VC trends in August, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form:

Announcing the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit

ReadWriteWeb is pleased to announce our very first event, The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It's a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face conversation.

Web Trends

ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009

Last week we ran a series of posts outlining the 5 biggest Internet trends of this year: Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things. Effectively this was ReadWriteWeb's State of the Web 2009.

We've now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. You can view the presentation in full screen by clicking the "full" button at the bottom of the presentation. You can also download the presentation as a Powerpoint file. All of the links in the presentation are clickable, should you wish to explore a certain topic more.

World's Largest Paid Blogging Platform Goes Real-Time

Typepad, the SixApart-owned paid blogging service believed to be larger than any other online, announced this week that every one of its blogs will now make updates available in real time. A fast-growing number of sites around the web are now flying the real-time banner, so blogging could steal a little thunder back from immediacy-rich social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd

Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks.

VC Series A Web Tech Deals in August

This week was the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, which triggered the financial meltdown. That was when ReadWriteWeb started tracking Series A deals in Web technology. Executive summary for August: down from July, with seed deals very weak. Analysis: decadent Europeans are not the only ones who take holidays in August. Read on for details.

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.
Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
Codero, Dedicated Hosting with Backup & Managed Services.
Groupsite.com, How Groups Make Things Happen.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Adobe Acquires Omniture: It's All About the Revenue Model

Adobe is looking to stall falling sales and profit by entering into a new market: analytics. But rather looking to R&D, Adobe is instead coughing up $1.8 billion for analytics leader Omniture. This is the largest acquisition by Adobe since the purchase of Macromedia for $3 billion in 2005.

The acquisition has puzzled many, since Adobe and Omniture products really have no natural cooperation. There have been comments about the measurement capabilities that Omniture will give to content built with Adobe products. But in the end the entire deal revolves around two words: recurring revenue.

ReadWriteStart

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

Going Viral in 6 Questions, Part One: Spymaster

Many web apps claim virality; very few actually find it. In a new series exploring the anatomy of truly viral apps, our first specimen is Spymaster, the Twitter- and Facebook-based social game that exploded with tens of thousands of users within hours of the creators throwing up a simple page and absolutely no media coverage. From creating addiction to managing site traffic, read on to learn how they did it and what they're doing next.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Poll: Which Light Blogging Service Do You Use?

This week we reported that Posterous, a popular minimalist blogging service, had added the ability for its users to import their Tumblr content. Tumblr is a competing 'light blogging' service - the market leader in fact. Other similar services include Soup.io, Noovo, Vox, Profilactic and even Wordpress.com and Blogger.com are used for this purpose (although they're more used for long-form blogging).

5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook

When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we've got a problem. People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road.

But what can be done? It's not like you can just quit Facebook, right? No - and you don't have to either. You just need to take a few precautions.

Google Acquires reCAPTCHA to Fight Spam and Improve Google Books OCR

Google announced this week that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, one of the leading providers of CPATCHAs, the hard-to-read puzzles you often have to solve before you can sign up for a new web service. Google is looking at reCAPTCHA as a way to improve the optical character recognition (OCR) software it uses for large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and the Google News Archive Search.

Making Search Prettier: Bing Launches Visual Search

Since Microsoft launched Bing, the company has been trying to position it as a 'decision engine' and not just as another search engine. This week, Microsoft took another step in this direction with the launch of Visual Search in Bing. For a growing number of searches, instead of giving users a list of 10 blue links, Bing will now give users the option to visualize the search results on a 3D grid with icons or photos.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Top 5 Web Trends of 2009, New iTunes Features, Real-Time Blogs, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze the 5 biggest trends of 2009 on the Web, review the iTunes and iPhone announcements made by Apple during the week, tell you about a new Wordpress feature that makes blogs more real-time, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management is a premium report for businesses seeking to engage with online communities. It is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. You will also get a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day. All of this is available for purchase at a price of $299. You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Top 5 Web Trends of 2009

This week ReadWriteWeb ran a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. Click each story below for the full-length posts:

1. Structured Data

Structured data is rapidly becoming a feature of today's Web. Companies like Thomson Reuters and Google are enabling data to be structured, and new types of products (like Wolfram|Alpha) will make use of structured data in ways we perhaps can't imagine right now.

2. The Real-Time Web

This has been probably the most hyped trend of 2009. The Real-Time Web has become a core part of many Internet products this year: Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google, Delicious, Wordpress, and many others.

3. Personalization

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations.

4. Mobile Web & Augmented Reality

Clearly mobile devices are an increasingly important way to access the Web. What's perhaps most encouraging however, is the entirely new class of mobile apps we're seeing. Augmented Reality is the most obvious example. It's been a big year for mobile, with much promise to come.

5. The Internet of Things

The fifth and final part of our series is about the Internet of Things, when real world objects (such as fridges, lights and toasters) get connected to the Internet. In 2009, this trend has ramped up and is adding a significant amount of new data to the Web.

Other Web Trends

Forget the iTunes LP, Apps are the New Album

The "iTunes LP" was just one of many new iTunes features revealed this week. Butit has a heavy burden on its shoulders. It's supposed to revitalize the music industry by encouraging consumers to once again purchase entire albums as opposed to single tracks. However, innovative artists are already discovering how to monetize their music while engaging fans in new ways that have nothing to do with a re-imagined LP. Instead, the "interactive format" of the future isn't the album, it's the app.

In 8 Years, Online Video Consumption Will be Measured in Exabytes

One exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It's one quintillion bytes. And yes, "quintillion" is a number so large, it almost seems made-up. But that's how much online video will be consumed by 2017, according to new reports from U.K.-based research firm Coda. Actually, to be precise, they're claiming that mobile broadband users accessing the net via laptops and netbooks will consume 1.8 exabytes of video. Per month.

How Facebook Beat MySpace: From College Dorm to Platform

Two years ago Danah Boyd described Facebook as "hegemonic" and MySpace as the haven of "subaltern" teens. Whether Boyd intended it or not, Facebook became characterized as the privileged space of college kids and MySpace was plagued with the perception of lowbrow tackiness. But now, according to a recent Hitwise blog post, Facebook is not only beating MySpace's traffic - it's the second ranked site overall in the US behind Google.

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.
Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
Codero, Dedicated Hosting with Backup & Managed Services.
Faroo, Real-Time search.
Groupsite.com, How Groups Make Things Happen.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Salesforce.com Service Cloud 2: Customer Service for the Social Web

Salesforce.com is best known for its CRM and its cloud computing platform. But according to the company its fastest growing product is Service Cloud, a kind of SaaS customer service software meant to replace the traditional call center. Salesforce.com has launched the second version of Service Cloud, which incorporates new capabilities for handling content as well as a close connection with the social networks.

ReadWriteStart

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

Design for Startups: The Aesthetics of Web Apps in 6 Questions

Look and feel is the first thing we see and notice about most web apps and is often critical to an app's user experience, adoption, and ultimate success. We chatted with a panel of expert aesthetes in the space, including Spymaster designer Eston Bond, veteran creative director Rich Barrett, designer/developer Warren Benedetto, Mike Rundle of 9rules and Beak fame, and the Paul du Coudray Lowdown. Here's what they had to say about developers doing double duty as designers, trends they'd like to see disappear, and how aesthetics can help a startup sink or swim.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

It's Only Rock and Roll: Steve Jobs is Back, iPhone 3.1, iTunes 9 & iPod Updates

Steve Jobs returned to a standing ovation at Apple's annual iPod event this week, where Apple introduced version 3.1 of the iPhone OS and the next version of iTunes. With iTunes 9, Apple introduces a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps, a major redesign, 'iTunes LPs' that will bring liner notes and artwork to digital albums, and app management for the iPhone and iPod touch built in to iTunes.

WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud

All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in (using this plug-in) will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. RSSCloud is an element that's always been present in the RSS 2.0 spec but has drawn new attention with the rise of interest in the Real-Time Web.

Android Market Passes 10K Apps; Marshall's 5 Favorites (With QR Codes)

Google's Android mobile operating system isn't as popular as the iPhone, but its application marketplace is wide open and one service tracking Android apps reports that there are now more than ten thousand available. In this post lead RWW writer Marshall Kirkpatrick outlines his five favorite Android apps so far, along with QR codes you can scan.

Facebook Open Sources FriendFeed's Ultra-Fast Real-Time Web Framework

Facebook announced this week that it has released Tornado, the real-time web framework that powers FriendFeed, as open source code. According to Facebook's David Recordon, Tornado is one of the core infrastructure pieces that power FriendFeed's real-time functionality.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Smart Cards, Android, eReader Pricing, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we review the state of smart cards around the world, update you on the latest Augmented Reality news, ask whether eReaders are being priced too high, analyze Google's Chrome OS browser plans, present our hands-on impressions of an Android phone, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Awareness Inc Webinar: Marketing to the Social Web:

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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Purchase 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. 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 report is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. You will also get a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day. All of this is available for purchase at a price of $299. You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Trends

Hong Kong's Octopus Card: Utility Outweighs Privacy Concerns

This week we looked at Smart Cards. We profiled Japan's cutting edge Suica Card, London's Oyster Card, and a widely used smart card that has been in service since 1997: the Octopus Card in Hong Kong. Octopus is used as a form of electronic payment in a wide variety of public transport, shops, restaurants, car parks and more. Indeed the Octopus has become an all-purpose identification system in Hong Kong - but at what cost to privacy?

Augmented Reality for iPhone May Not Come Next Month After All

Developers and enthusiasts had hoped that official support for Augmented Reality (AR), the display of data on top of a view of the real world, would come to the iPhone in early September. This week's announcement of a big Apple event on September 9th focused on the iPod, however, gives reason to suspect that the next version of the iPhone operating system will spend more time in the oven.

Your Cyborg Eye Will Talk to You

Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer.

Would You Pay More Than $99 For an eReader?

EBooks and eReaders are a hot topic right now, especially with the new line-up of Kindle competitors scheduled to arrive before the holiday season. However, according to a new report by Forrester Research, most people aren't willing to pay a lot for these devices. Forrester asked consumers at what price they would consider an eReader expensive but still buy it. The answer was generally somewhere between $50 and $99.

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.
Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
Codero, Dedicated Hosting with Backup & Managed Services.
Groupsite.com, How Groups Make Things Happen.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

RSS isn't Dead (Just Ask Executives)

It's become fashionable among a certain set to declare that RSS is no longer the foremost pipeline for news and information on the Web. Many have abandoned their RSS readers in favor of Twitter. But what do businesses think about RSS? The McKinsey Global Survey on Web 2.0 in business states that 42% of executives see a measurable benefit from RSS. That's 24% more than those who see any benefit from microblogging (i.e. Twitter).

ReadWriteStart

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

Rails Rumble: Micro-App Competition Winners Announced

In 48 hours last weekend, 237 developer teams competed and generated a total of 137 qualifying web applications, all developed with Ruby and Rails on the back end. The 2009 Rails Rumble was, according to organizers, the strongest yet in the contest's history.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Google Chrome OS to Feature Single Sign-On for Chrome Browser

We don't know much about the upcoming OS from Google, Chrome OS. However recent reports tell us how tightly integrated the Google Chrome web browser will be with the operating system. It makes us wonder if Google will be required to support other web browsers on their new platform? After all, it's one thing to integrate your own browser with your OS (as Microsoft does with IE) but it's another thing to not even offer a choice.

Facebook Connect Expands: Next Stop, Mobile Web

Facebook announced this week the launch of a new program called "Facebook Connect For Mobile Web." The Connect platform, which originally launched in 2008, is already available for traditional websites as well as Apple's iPhone. With this update, it can now exist for any mobile platform, too.

My First Day as an Android Owner; by Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer

I've been a happy iPhone user for about a year but I just bought an Android phone this week and I like it a lot. Android is not as polished, as popular, maybe not even as good as the iPhone so far - but if I had to choose between them right now...I might pick Android. Below are some thoughts about the hardware, the learning curve, the App Market and Augmented Reality apps in particular.

Opera 10: A Pretty Good Browser, But Will Anybody Use It?

After numerous betas and two release candidates, Opera this week released the final version of Opera 10, the company's flagship desktop Internet browser. Users who skipped all the pre-release versions of Opera 10 will be pleasantly surprised with the updates that Opera has brought to its browser. These include Opera Turbo (the company's compression technology), visual tabs, a smarter spell checker, and a faster rendering engine.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Augmented Reality Apps, Top U.S. Websites, Tweeting Teens, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we explain why augmented reality is ramping up (and look at three new iPhone examples), analyze the top websites in the U.S., check out new Twitter statistics suggesting that teens don't tweet, review recent Wikipedia changes, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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

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Purchase The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

The report is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. You will also get a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. All of this is available for purchase at a price of $299. You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Trends

Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere

Fifty years after its invention by the British Royal Navy for use by fighter pilots, the technology of layering information on top of our naked view of the world may soon cross over the line between science fiction and mass consumer experience. "The internet smeared all over everything." An "enchanted window" that turns contextual information hidden all around us inside out. A platform that will be bigger than the Web. Those are the kinds of phrases being used to describe the future of what's called Augmented Reality (AR), by specialists developing the technology to enable it. Big questions remain unanswered, though, about the viability of what could be a radical next step in humanity's use of computers.

5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009

The New York Times had an article this week about sentiment analysis, a trend which has been accelerating on the back of the Real-time Web - and Twitter in particular. Sentiment analysis is no short-term hot trend. It will eventually become a key feature of search engines, which will integrate the aggregate sentiment of the crowd into search results. In our post we take a look at five examples of how sentiment analysis is starting to ramp up on the Web.

Top 50 U.S. Web Properties: Facebook Enters Top 5 For The First Time

Annual changes of note: Facebook #5 with a rocket; Twitter entered Top 50 in June; Demand Media, Answers.com and Break Media sites to watch.

comScore has just released their latest Media Metrix rankings for the Top 50 U.S. Web Properties. If we compare the top 50 to one year ago, we see that the top 4 is still the same: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL. But there's one notable entrant to the top 5: Facebook. Last year the same list by comScore had Facebook ranked number 16. As of July 2009, it is number 5; Facebook's highest ranking yet.

Teens Don't Tweet? They May Start Soon

"Teens don't tweet." Over the past few weeks, this fact has been reported time and time again by analysts, bloggers, and mainstream media. But before all you adults get too comfortable with your Twitter dominance, take a look at the recent data from comScore. It appears that the youngest Twitter users - those in the 12-24 bracket - are now the fastest-growing segment of Twitter's population.

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.
WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
Codero, Dedicated Hosting with Backup & Managed Services.
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
IronScale, Managed Hosting. The Cloud Gets Physical.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Why Zoho Wants You to Sign in With Google Apps

Not long ago, Google revamped its sign-on system using the federated protocols of OpenID. Now Zoho, a major provider of SaaS productivity and enterprise tools, has decided to support Google Apps accounts for anyone logging into its services. Although the two companies have overlap in areas such as online document editing, the majority of Zoho's suite is not in competition with Google.

ReadWriteStart

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

When and How Founders Should Hire a Professional CEO

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

There are two schools of thought about founders as CEOs. One school says that founders rarely make good CEOs: the skill sets are simply different. The other school says that no one has as much passion, drive, and deep market and technological understanding as the founder, and so they are best off remaining as CEO.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

The Wall Has Fallen: 3 Augmented Reality Apps Now Live in iPhone App Store

First Paris Metro, then Yelp, now London Buses. The newest is even selling database layers through in-app purchases.

It has been widely reported that the API required to display Augmented Reality (AR) layers of data on top of the camera view of a non-jailbroken iPhone 3Gs would not be publicly exposed until the launch of the next version of the iPhone Operating System, expected this Fall. Many developers are patiently waiting, but some have now found a way around the restriction. This week we discovered 3 AR-enabled apps hitting the iTunes store.

Confused About Wikipedia's Flagged Revisions? What's Really Happening

Wikipedia's new 'flagged revision' policy will radically change how entries about living persons will be maintained. There seems to be some confusion about the extent to which these new policies, once implemented, will change the nature of Wikipedia. According to some, Wikipedia will cease to be free and open. Instead, a group of editors with dictatorial powers will patrol the site. The reality, however, is far less dramatic.

Opera Mini Is Most Downloaded Mobile App

The Opera Mini application is now considered not only the world's most popular mobile browser, but also the world's most downloaded app. According to independent applications marketplace GetJar, the browser has been downloaded more than 25 million times from its store.

Bing Continues to Grow, But Yahoo Loses Market Share

Since the launch of Bing, watching the developments in the search engine market is finally interesting again. According to the latest data from Compete for July, Bing continues to grow slowly but surely. At the same time, though, Compete notes that Bing has not been able to convert its growing search share into a rise in paid clicks on ads 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: 10 Exciting Web Apps, Top Twitter Clients, State of Netbook Market, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we poll our readers on their 3 most exciting web apps or services, analyze the latest Twitter client stats, report on MySpace's acquisition of Facebook app iLike, review the state of the netbook market, talk to Tim O'Reilly about his vision for a government web platform, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Raptivity, create interactive websites:

Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

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

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Purchase The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

The report is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. You will also get a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. All of this is available for purchase at a price of $299. You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Products

Top 10 Most Exciting Web Apps or Services

This week we asked what 3 web apps or services you find the most exciting right now. Not your 3 most used or favorite, but the apps that currently make you tingly with excitement. We got some great responses in the comments, so in this post we picked out our top 10 from your choices. We chose 5 services that got the most number of mentions, plus 5 lesser known web apps or services which got multiple mentions.

How to Use Facebook: 5 Tips For Better Social Networking

Facebook is a social networking site that is enormously popular, but it can be a frustrating user experience. The design of Facebook leaves a lot to be desired and there are almost too many choices for things to do on Facebook. So how can you best utilize it and find the good apps? In this post we aimed to find out.

iLike Acquired by MySpace

This week MySpace announced an agreement to acquire iLike, a social music discovery service. iLike is one of the top apps on the Facebook platform, so how will this affect the competition between the two social networking rivals? We live blogged a press conference with MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta to find out more.

The Top Twitter Client Is Still the Web

According to a new study from social media solutions provider Rapleaf, the most popular Twitter client is the web via Twitter.com - with 65% of tweets attributed to this method. As far as the third-party clients go, only a small handful of clients had enough users to warrant their own slice of the pie chart, and those slices were in the single digits.

Tr.im to Go Open Source, Community Owned

After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im this week announced that it's open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available in real time. The new Tr.im may be the most exciting thing to happen in URL shortening since now market leader Bit.ly itself launched.

5 Reasons to Get Excited about Linux on the Netbook

Late last year, we boldly proclaimed that your next computer might be a Linux PC. Thanks to the ever-growing market for the low-end machines dubbed "netbooks," this seemed like a real possibility at the time. In this post we take a look at the state of the market.

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.
Codero, Dedicated Hosting with Backup & Managed Services.
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
IronScale, Managed Hosting. The Cloud Gets Physical.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

15 Fluid Apps You Can Build for Your Business

Fluid is a simple application for creating site-specific browsers (SSBs) on your OSX desktop. Fluid is really for anyone, but the low barrier to entry and the effect it has on productivity make it an attractive tool for getting things done. Though it's been around for a while, few businesses have really taken advantage of its full potential.

ReadWriteStart

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

6 Awesome Apps Begging to Be Developed

Y Combinator's getting pretty fancy with their very detailed Request for Startups idea, which was somewhat like their "Startups We'd Like to Fund" post of yesteryear. While we can't offer funding, it would make us picky little Internet geeks terribly happy if someone developed any of the six apps listed below. You know, while we're waiting for the flying cars and food replicators.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

How Tim O'Reilly Aims to Change Government

Some people go to Washington to try to make the government more honest; others try to make it smaller. Technologist Tim O'Reilly is spending time in Washington, and bringing Washington officials to San Francisco, to do something different - perhaps something more realistic. O'Reilly is trying to help government become a platform for innovation. A "government as platform" would supply raw digital data and other forms of support for private sector innovators to build on top of.

What Does Google's High Customer Satisfaction Rating Mean for Bing?

According to the results of a new survey by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Google's users are extremely happy with their search engine. Google scored 86 points out of a possible 100, followed by Yahoo with 77 points. While this survey was conducted before Microsoft's Bing arrived on the market, they clearly show the problems Bing faces in a marketplace where most consumers are perfectly happy with Google.

Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business: Part 4

In this fourth part of our investigation into the ongoing changes in the book publishing business, we look at the author's point of view. What are they getting today? What would they like to get? What can they reasonably expect to get as this drama unfolds? Authors are the creative juice of the whole eco-system. If they don't create material that people want to read, no one will make any money.

Race To Data Portability: Google Chrome vs. Mozilla Weave

Google announced bookmark sync to the Chrome browser this week. Chrome users can sync their bookmarks across various machines and store them alongside Google Docs. While the feature is not a new concept amongst browsers, the significance is that yet another player is storing your data in the cloud with the ability to distribute it across networks.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Facebook Buys FriendFeed, Distributed Social Networking, Google Caffeine, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we report on and analyze the acquisition of lifestreaming company FriendFeed by Facebook. We also explore a new trend that may route around both companies: distributed social networking. In other news this week: Facebook announced that user updates will be searchable, Google unveiled a faster search infrastructure, Microsoft and Nokia announced a partnership around Office apps, Gartner released its latest Hype Cycle, and social networking statistics were revealed suggesting that younger generations keep track of their online friends better than offline ones. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Raptivity, create interactive websites:

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Purchase The ReadWriteWeb Q2 2009 VC Funding Report

Our Second Premium Report for Businesses

Our Report gives you the facts on 240 deals closed in April, May and June - who invested, in what company, how much they invested and when. Read on to see what's included in the guide and how to purchase it.

Web Products

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed for $50 Million

The big news this week was Facebook acquiring popular lifestreaming company FriendFeed for about $50m, $15m in cash and the rest in Facebook stock. According to a post by Bret Taylor on the FriendFeed blog, FriendFeed will continue to operate normally for the time being while the two companies figure out the long-term plans. The purchase makes sense, as Facebook had continually copied parts of FriendFeed's feature set - including the 'like' feature and Facebook's new focus on the real-time stream.

Facebook Users: Here's What FriendFeed Brings to the Family

It's going to be a little like the Brady Bunch, this union between Facebook and the just-acquired social networking service FriendFeed. Both families will influence each other a lot, though Facebook is far, far bigger. FriendFeed was co-founded by Paul Buchheit, the man who invented GMail, and by Bret Taylor, who co-founded Google Maps. Here's what they bring to Facebook; it's probably going to change Facebook a lot.

Facebook Updates Are Now Searchable

Also this week Facebook announced that it's opened up search across all status messages, notes and shared links that users have marked as public. Searching across all users, whether you know them or not, requires a couple of clicks - but the availability of the feature marks a dramatic turning point in the history of Facebook. For months the company has been pushing users towards being more public and less private. This is why.

10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only 1.5 weeks. That's bad for users and it's definitely bad for data-mining. Unless Twitter corrects this issue on its own, we have to find another solution for archiving tweets ourselves. Here are 10 ways to do so.

Caffeine: Google Tests New Search Infrastructure

Just as Facebook announces internal search for public notes, Google counters with an effort to improve on its existing services. In a blog post, the company unveiled its new Caffeine search infrastructure to web developers. The question is, will Caffeine enhance performance or lead to user anxiety?

Tiny App Confuses, Delights: Check Out Robo.to, Next-Gen Animated GIFs

From "massively small products" shop Particle, itself a startup newly out of stealth mode, comes a new app: Robo.to, pitched to us as a digital calling card. Although the app first struck us as a skinnier Retaggr with an animated GIF-esque Flash avatar slapped on the top, something quirky and cute drew us back and elicited deeper digging.

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.
Codero, Dedicated Hosting with Backup & Managed Services.
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
hakia is a semantic search engine.
Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
IronScale, Managed Hosting. The Cloud Gets Physical.
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.

Microsoft & Nokia: Not Just Office, It's the Whole Mobile Enterprise

This week news broke that Microsoft and Nokia were announcing a partnership that would take Office outside of Windows Mobile for the first time. It's now clear that this isn't just Word, Excel, and PowerPoint slapped onto Nokia smartphones: the world's largest cellphone maker will now support a whole slew of key enterprise software from Microsoft.

ReadWriteStart

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

VC Series A Web Tech Deals in July

We have been tracking Series A deals in Web technology since the market mayhem in October 2008, and since May we have been working with ChubbyBrain, which tracks this kind of data full-time. Early-stage funding is important for the whole economy. The executive summary for July: steady progress and a lot of deals in the Boston area.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking?

Maybe it's better to host your own. That's the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users. The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new - but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed's sale to Facebook, Tr.im's up and down and Twitter's denial of service attacks.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2009: Web 2.0 Trending Up, Twitter Down

Analyst firm Gartner released its latest Hype Cycle white paper this week, detailing some of the biggest trends in technology this year. According to the report, cloud computing, e-books and Internet TV are at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations," while this year's biggest hit Twitter is said to have "tipped over the peak" and is just about to enter the infamous "Trough of Disillusionment." Interestingly, web 2.0 is deemed to be nearly past the Trough and entering the "Slope of Enlightenment."

Product Managers & Marketers: What The Internet of Things Means For You

Some of you may be reading our series on the Internet of Things and wondering: what use is this to me in my daily work? So one day my fridge will be able to tell me when the milk has run out, when I travel my luggage will have an RFID tag and not be lost, my home will be automated via Twitter. But will it affect your job? If you're a product manager or marketer, read on to find out how this will affect you.

Your "Real" Friends are Your Online Friends (or so Says Gen Y)

Is it easier to talk to your online buddies than your friends out there in the "real world?" Do you feel like you know more about what's happening in the lives of your Facebook and MySpace friends than with those who don't have accounts or don't bother to update them? According to a recent UK MySpace study, these sorts of feelings are common among today's younger generation.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Real Time Delicious, Read/Write Digg, Web Squared, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 15:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze the impact of real-time information on the Web, investigate 'web squared' (when web 2.0 meets Internet of Things), tell you why cloud computing is the future of mobile, look at Delicious' new Twitter re-design, check out Digg's read/write API plans, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Web Trends

Could Real Time Information Be An Unfair Advantage?

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a ban on a stock market practice known as "flash trading," where supercomputers get access to information milliseconds before other traders. This raises similar issues about the growing prominence of real-time information on the web.

Web Squared: When Web 2.0 Meets Internet of Things

Recently Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle released a white paper entitled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. It's a none to subtle attempt to re-brand web 2.0. But less cynically, the report also nicely applies Web 2.0 principles onto the emerging Internet of Things.

Twitter's Most Active Users: Bots, Dogs, and Tila Tequila

Only 5% of Twitter's users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots.

As the EBook Market Matures, Amazon Will Face Stiff Competition

eBooks and eReaders are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. However, while Amazon is the current market leader among early adopters of this technology, there will be a lot of opportunities for other players in the market - including Sony and large mass-market retailers like Walmart.

Why Cloud Computing is the Future of Mobile

The term "cloud computing" is being bandied about a lot these days, mainly in the context of the "future of the web." But cloud computing's potential doesn't begin and end with the personal computer's transformation into a thin client - the mobile platform is going to be heavily impacted by this technology as well.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

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Enterprise 2.0: Awareness is Easier Than Execution, Says Nielsen

In a new report studying social networking on intranets, Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen asserts that despite broad awareness, real execution of Web 2.0 in the enterprise is still rare at this point. This is a sobering reminder of just what it takes to make change happen in business.

ReadWriteStart

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

How to Scale Without Losing Your Shirt

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

There comes a time for every venture when the owners have to decide whether hockey-stick-like growth is feasible or not. In your initial plan, you indicated a sudden surge in revenue at a certain point in time, i.e. where the hockey stick shows up. You have now reached that point. You may have a great business, but will it hit the big time?

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

MySpace to Unveil Integration With Sites Around the Web, Using Open Standards

MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code too.

Delicious Reborn as Real-Time News Tracker

Yahoo's social bookmarking service Delicious launched a new home page this week, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter to deliver what it calls the hottest news from around the web in real time.

Digg Opening Up? New Read/Write API Coming Soon

The social news community at Digg.com may be on the verge of opening up. A forthcoming Digg API will allow people to "not only read data, but also contribute data, too." In other words, a Read/Write API.

SchoolRack Gives Teachers, Students, Parents Interactive Resources Online

SchoolRack is a resource for grade school and high school teachers to create their own websites where they can communicate and interact with their students and those students' parents.

Spotify to Close Up to $50M Round Before US Launch

In anticipation of the company's US launch, the on-demand music streaming site Spotify is finalizing what is rumored to be a $50 million dollar round of investments. This will value the Swedish company at $250 million dollars.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Microsoft-Yahoo Deal, Twitter Re-Design, Internet Fridges, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 05:00:00 -0800

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze the deal to bring Microsoft's Bing search engine to Yahoo, check out the latest social media and Twitter statistics, investigate the state of RFID tags and Internet fridges, look at Apple's "interactive album" concept, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Note: this week ReadWriteWeb released our second premium report: our Q2 2009 VC Funding Report. Full details below...

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Raptivity, create interactive websites:

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Our Second Premium Report for Businesses

We're excited to announce the availability of ReadWriteWeb's Q2 2009 VC Funding Report, our second premium report powered by data from ChubbyBrain. We have been tracking early-stage investment in Internet, mobile and SaaS since the financial crisis in September 2008 and we believe that this report is unlike anything else you've seen. Investors, bankers and advisers involved in the funding of digital innovation will get the facts on the deal-by-deal basis that they need to make decisions.

Web Trends

Yahoo's Bing Deal Puts Delicious, BOSS & More at Risk

This week Microsoft and Yahoo announced a deal (details below) whereby Microsoft's Bing will become the new Yahoo! search engine and Yahoo! will sell ads against those search results on its site. There's a whole lot of money in play, but as users we don't think that's the most interesting part of this story. There may be some very interesting consequences, both positive and negative, for innovation - our favorite part of the online experience. Our guess is that it will be a net negative for forward-looking web users.

Report: Social Networks Growing while Other Social Media Sites Stagnate and Decline

Universal McCann has released a new report that looks at the state of social media today. Apparently, this trend is showing no sign of slowing down. In fact, it's still growing. From posting photos to writing blogs, the desire to share has become a universal phenomenon. However, the latest report shows that internet users are beginning to now center their digital life around social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut, choosing to share their content within these sites instead of on services with a single focus, like Blogger or Flickr.

Internet Fridges

The Internet fridge is probably the most oft-quoted example of what the Internet of Things - when everyday objects are connected to the Internet - will enable. Imagine a refrigerator (so the story goes) that monitors the food inside it and notifies you when you're low on, for example, milk. It also perhaps monitors all of the best food websites, gathering recipes for your dinners and adding the ingredients automatically to your shopping list. And that's just part of the sci-fi story of the Internet fridge.

RFID: State of the Market

RFID is an emerging standard for identification and tracking of goods. It's one of the key underlying technologies for the Internet of Things. Some big names in the retail industry have climbed on board the RFID freight train. Notably Wal-Mart, which has not only adopted RFID big time, but pressured its suppliers to do so too.

For Ask.com, Becoming #3 In Search Must Be Bittersweet

If Microsoft's Bing takes all of Yahoo's US search engine market share then it will be at 26% to Google's 70%, according to traffic analysts Hitwise. Such consolidation would put the venerable Ask.com in third place, with a mere 2.46%. That would mean that the next spot on the ladder will have 10X as much market share as Ask. That can't make the company happy.

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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Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
SiSense, Analytics, Reports and Filters
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
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.
Wix, stunning Flash Websites for Free
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.

OpenID for Google Apps is Here, But Not Everybody's Happy

Google announced this week that everyone using Google Apps enterprise or education editions can now use their organization's domain as a federated single sign-on. That means that millions of schools, businesses and other organizations can now use their Apps accounts as an OpenID. However, a few prominent developers and advocates feel that Google's approach is not entirely acceptable. They are critical of the use of vendor-specific extensions and APIs instead of the open standards that are so important to OpenID.

ReadWriteStart

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

BakeSpace: An Unlikely Startup Success Story from Twiistup

This post is part of our ReadWriteStart channel, which is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. The channel is sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. To sign up for BizSpark, click here.

BakeSpace might not be the sexiest concept on the startup block. A recipe swap community, said founder Babette Pepaj, strikes many in the tech community as "touchy feely" or "a chick site." Nevertheless, the site was named a 2009 Webby Award Nominee for Best Social Network and continues to drive traffic and ad revenue with strong content and a great roadmap for mobile and offline integration.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

It's Official: Microsoft and Yahoo Announce Search Deal

A few months from now, Yahoo's search engine will be "powered by Bing." After months of back and forth between Microsoft and Yahoo, the two companies finally announced a deal this week that will bring Microsoft's search engine to Yahoo's properties, while Yahoo will become the sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers. Barring any roadblocks from industry and government regulators, this deal will grant Microsoft an exclusive license to Yahoo's core search technologies for 10 years. Yahoo expects that this deal will increase the company's cash flow by about $275 million.

Apple Flip Flops on "Mature" iPhone App Policy

Last week, iPhone developers were taken by surprise when Apple unceremoniously removed their ability to promote their "mature" applications (ages 17+) using promo codes. These codes allow application creators to raise awareness about their work by sending out free copies of apps to select individuals, such as those working in the media, in the hopes of having their new app reviewed. Now it seems that Apple has reversed this earlier, controversial decision and is allowing promo codes once again. But we have to wonder: why were they ever removed to begin with?

Twitter Redesigns As Streaming Trends Site

Twitter announced this week its new home page redesign, complete with trending topics and search. Twitter has over the years evolved into a multifaceted real-time tool. The community has given timely updates on earthquakes, the Iran election and we've even seen professional poker players bluff in real-time Tweets. It has evolved into a community where users can discover breaking news and trends; and the new home page complements that.

Why Do You Tweet?

eMarketer reports that, according to the "Consumer Internet Barometer," the majority of Twitter users (42%) use the service to communicate with their friends. About 29% use Twitter to update their status, 26% to find news, and 21% for work-related reasons. Oddly, only 0.3% said that they use Twitter for fun. Significantly more women use Twitter to keep in touch with friends than men (48.4% vs. 33.6%).

Will Apple's "Interactive Album" Cocktail Inspire Better Bands?

In an unsurprising move, Apple is said to be working with major record labels to provide an "interactive album" to consumers. The company is rumored to be working with EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal to bundle photos, lyric sheets, liner notes and videos with album purchases in the iTunes store. According to the FInancial Times, the move is meant to increase album sales. Nevertheless, a number of critics have already argued that the attempt will be ill-fated.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Why Amazon Bought Zappos, IBM's Internet of Things, The Mythical GDrive, And More...

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

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze why Amazon spent nearly a billion dollars to purchase online shoe shop Zappos, explain why IBM is an early leader in the Internet of Things, investigate whether the Google Chrome OS will finally deliver us the mythical GDrive, look at why Barnes & Noble is a worthy challenger to Amazon's eBook empire, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Note: this week ReadWriteWeb released our second premium report: our Q2 2009 VC Funding Report. Full details below...

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Web Trends

Getting the Goods: The New Amazon/Zappos Supply Chain Story

Beloved online shoe retailer Zappos this week announced it will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon, in exchange for almost a billion dollars worth of Amazon stock. Both of these companies are interesting because they have mastered making the connection between a quality online experience and physical delivery of tangible goods offline. Is this just a story of a big online shopping mall buying up a hot little online shoe store? Taking a closer look at the offline supply chain of each company indicates that there may be more to this deal.

The Wearable Internet Will Blow Mobile Phones Away

Earlier this year at the TED conference, Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group showcased a wearable computing system that allows users to display and interact with the Web on any surface - including the human body. The video shows the system's main developer, Pranav Mistry, taking photographs with his hand, summoning up Amazon review data onto the cover of a physical book, and more. Look out mobile phones, because in a decade's time wearable systems may be the primary means of accessing the Web.

IBM and The Internet of Things

In the Web world, you know that a trend has major traction when IBM is all over it. Like any large Internet company, Big Blue is careful about which trends it latches onto. However in the case of Internet of Things, IBM is proving itself to be an unusually early adopter. We recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM, who has hooked his house up to Twitter and is driving other Internet of Things initiatives at IBM.

New Study Finds Correlation Between Social Media and Financial Success

A new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers. To determine this relationship, the study focused on 100 companies from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands survey and the various social media platforms they used like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and forums.

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.
WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
SiSense, Analytics, Reports and Filters
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
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.
Wix, stunning Flash Websites for Free
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.

New Zoho CRM Aims to Undercut Salesforce.com

With improvements to email integration and a new marketing campaign, SaaS productivity vendor Zoho is aiming its sights openly at Salesforce.com, the dominant Web-based CRM today. The "Zwitch to Zoho" name might be cheesy marketing, but the cheaper subscription price is no joke. If you want more than 5 users, Salesforce.com will cost you $65/user/month. As of this week, Zoho is offering an unlimited use CRM subscription for just $12.

ReadWriteStart

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

Three Steps to Building an Online Brand

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

The three steps to building an online brand are:

1. Look good,

2. Get noticed,

3. Build trust.

In the long run, only the last one matters. Enron's logo was just fine, and it got noticed, but on that last count, well...

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio

Some newspapers scrambling to survive the internet condemn websites like Google News and the Huffington Post. Aggregators, they say, need to pay for the right to point to a newspaper's site. Public radio stations, on the other hand, face competition from the internet as well and are just as competitive between themselves as they are collaborative. Somehow, they've responded differently to new media. There may be no better example of that than an iPhone application built by several large public radio organizations and called Public Radio Player.

Will Google Chrome OS Bring Us the Mythical GDrive?

Last week, Google announced some interface changes to their Google Docs service that are designed to make finding your files easier. The changes are relatively minor - the "shared with" list has gone away, there's a new "Sharing" menu, and you now have the ability to save your searches - but that hasn't stopped some bloggers from theorizing that the shiny new UI is bringing us one step closer to the often theorized, yet never realized, "Google Drive" service, aka "your hard drive in the cloud."

Can Barnes & Noble Challenge Amazon's eBook Empire?

Barnes & Noble, the beleaguered online bookstore, opened its eBook store this week. It also announced that it has partnered with Plastic Logic, which is expected to release a highly anticipated Kindle competitor soon. Given that B&N seems to have all of the necessary pieces in place, we think that the the company can challenge Amazon - especially given that it offers a larger selection of books and plans to offer a device that is more open than Amazon's Kindle.

Free Alternatives to Photoshop With All the Bells, Whistles, Filters, & Layers

Let's face it: If cropping was all you needed to do, you'd just use MS Paint. Photoshop, Adobe's industry standard for image editing, costs a whopping $600. But when you need tools such as layers, filters, and other effects, 101-level apps such as Picnik and Picasa just don't cut it. So we've rounded up and road-tested seven free resources that pack the punch of Photoshop's bells and whistles without the price.

Seven e-Learning and Teaching Resources

While the down economy continues to hurt funding to our schools, more and more teachers are looking to web-based services to help educate their students. Whether it's through open resource projects like CK-12, virtual classrooms like those in Second Life, or through the repurposing of tools like Twitter, millions of teachers are finding innovative resources to engage their students. If you're a teacher, here are seven great tools to get you started.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Apple App Store Stats, The State of Adobe AIR, Book Publishing Revolutions, And More...

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

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze the continuing popularity of Apple's App store, question the longevity of AIR apps, investigate the waves of changes happening in the book publishing industry, review one 19 year old's innovative and successful news website, tell you about a new trend to track called 'Cross Reality,' report on the latest news about Microsoft's Web-based office initiatives, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Purchase 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 Trends

Bits Of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business: Part 1

"Bits of destruction" is a phrase Fred Wilson uses to describe the destructive part of "creative destruction" brought on by digitization. We hear a lot about the destruction wrought on the newspaper business. A more interesting and nuanced wave is now hitting the book publishing business. Actually, it is three waves: the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand.

Breaking News Online: How One 19-Year Old Is Shaking Up Online Media

Michael van Poppel used to be like a lot of young people, trawling the internet for interesting news about the world. Just like many others have considered doing, he created a place where he could post the most interesting news he finds, as fast as he can. Today he's one of the most-watched movers and shakers in online news media - and he's not yet twenty years old.

Are You Over AIR Applications?

When Adobe AIR was first released, we were in love. These glorious rich internet applications let us interact with web services outside our browser. More complex than simple desktop widgets, these programs delivered the web to us in beautiful little packages. But recently, we've begun to question AIR's longevity. There's no reason why these apps couldn't just run in a browser instead...and that might even be a better place for them.

Cross Reality Will Change Your Life, But at What Cost to Your Privacy?

Yesterday we explored an emerging trend called "Cross Reality", one term for when sensor networks meet online virtual worlds. As this trend becomes more common over the next few years (and it will, as both Web-connected sensors and virtual reality ramp up), what are the implications on how people use the Web? How will it change our interactions in both real and virtual life?

Facebook at 250 Million Users: Could it Be Too Big?

Facebook announced this week that it now has 250 million users, having added 50 million new users in just the past three months. If Facebook was a country it would now be the 4th most populous place on earth. But could Facebook be too big? It has centralized an incredible amount of power over a huge number of peoples' lives; the texture of Facebook now shapes the pattern of a substantial portion of human communication around the world.

Teens Not Into Twitter, TV, Radio, or Newspapers, Reports Young Morgan Stanley Intern

Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old intern at analyst firm Morgan Stanley recently helped compile a report about teenage media habits. Robson's report isn't even based on any sort of statistical analysis, just good ol' fashioned teenage honesty. He noted that teens aren't into traditional media (think TV, radio, newspapers) and yet they're eschewing some new media, too, including sites like Twitter.

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.
WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
SiSense, Analytics, Reports and Filters
Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
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.
Wix, stunning Flash Websites for Free
MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.

The Four Essential Apps for Distributed Teams

Distributed teams. Virtual work. Placeless offices. Whatever you want to call them, groups who work from geographically separate locations are more common than ever. Despite how widespread this mode of coordinating work has become, there are those still wondering just what tools are absolutely crucial to making a distributed team work. Here's a list of the four types of applications you'll need, and some examples of the popular places to get them.

ReadWriteStart

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

A Startup Movie: Never Mind the Valley, Here's Boulder

It's no secret that we at ReadWriteWeb have a lot of love for startups that make their homes outside Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. We've decided to make a few videos spotlighting some unique, unexpected locations where startups thrive, where tech scenes are vibrant, where cooperation outstrips competition, and where creativity runs rampant. One of the first cities we'd like to introduce you to is home to between 150 and 170 startups as well as a thriving entrepreneurial and creative community. Welcome to Boulder, Colorado.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

How Did it Get so Popular? Apple's App Store Hits 1.5 Billion Downloads and 65,000 Apps

This week, Apple announced that iPhone and iPod touch users have now downloaded over 1.5 billion applications. According to Apple, there are now also over 100,000 developers in the iPhone Developer Program and over 65,000 apps in the store. Given this huge success of the App Store, it is worth thinking about the factors that contributed to the App Store's success and what Apple could do to make the store even better.

Siri: Virtual Personal Assistant Prepares For Debut

Siri, a "Virtual Personal Assistant" (VPA), has been getting a lot of hype over the past year. The product will launch end of summer U.S. time - starting out as an iPhone app, but later other platforms will be supported. The iPhone app will go into private beta July/August time period, then launch in Q4 2009 or Q1 2010. While Siri is still more promise than substance, we at least get to look at some real-life iPhone demos now.

Microsoft Launches Office Web Apps and Office 2010 in Limited Beta

This week at its Wordwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft Office suite has reached the 'technical preview' milestone. The interesting part of the announcement is that Microsoft is also releasing more details about the Office Web applications - which are lightweight, browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (Microsoft's note-taking tool).

Eighteen Streaming Music Resources

According to The Leading Question's recent research report, as many as 65% of UK teens are streaming music on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, file-sharing has decreased significantly since the Digital Britain Report consultation to address illicit P2P file sharing. While music sharing sites have come and gone, here are some of the streaming sites that continue to thrive.

One Time in Bandcamp: Challenging MySpace Music

Hitwise recently reported that MySpace has declined as a traffic generator for entertainment and music sites. MySpace was previously the most significant contributor of traffic to entertainment - multimedia sites, at an estimated 35% of traffic to that category. However that percentage now hovers below 10%, thanks in part to new storefront-style tools like Bandcamp.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

Weekly Wrapup: Tim Berners-Lee Interview, Google Chrome OS, Social Network Stats, And More...

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

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we feature an in-depth interview with the inventor of the Web Tim Berners-Lee. We also cover and analyze the surprise announcement of a Chrome OS (Google's new operating system for netbooks), investigate a raft of new statistics from social networks, analyze the impact of 'freeconomics,' and more. This week we soft-launched a new design for ReadWriteEnterprise, and you can check out our latest posts in that channel. We also update you with the latest from our channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

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ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee

During my recent trip to Boston, I had the opportunity to visit MIT. At the end of a long day of meetings with various MIT tech masterminds, I made my way to the funny shaped building where the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its director Tim Berners-Lee work. Berners-Lee is of course the man who invented the World Wide Web 20 years ago. In Part 1 of the interview we cover the emergence of Linked Data and how it is being used now even by governments.

In Part 2 of the interview we discuss how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.

Who Uses Social Networks and What Are They Like?

A new study by Anderson Analytics looks into the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn with a goal of providing marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today.

Some of the study's findings echo things we've already heard. For example, Facebook users tend to be old, white, and rich. MySpace users are young...and fleeing. Other info is new: Twitterers are more likely to have a part-time job, LinkedIn users like to exercise and own more gadgets.

See also Part 2 of this post for details on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Facebook's Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers; Now More Grandparents Than High School Users

How fickle are kids these days? Just when all the grown ups started figuring out Facebook, college and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site.

Grandma and Grandpa showed up to have a conversation, but Billy and Sally were gone. Facebook cannot be excited about this.

Does Twitter Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe Not Yet, But It Could Someday

It's hard to imagine anything more far out than the suggestion that the founders of Twitter be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, especially since the people who invented the internet never were. But that's what Deputy National Security Advisor, Mark Pfeifle, argues this week in The Christian Science Monitor, because of the company's role in supporting the ongoing uprising in Iran. Pfeifle isn't the only one making this argument, either.

I think the idea is serious enough to warrant some closer consideration. I think those little narcissistic bites of information and the platform people publish them on are serious enough to warrant taking this opportunity to consider what it all really means. You might assume that these most recent platitudes are just about Twitter's celebrated role in Iran - but in fact there's a lot more going on. Twitter is changing the human experience in important ways, for those fortunate enough to experience it.

Free: It Works, It Cries, It Bites

Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (available for free in text form and as an audio book), is stirring controversy and a spicy conversation around the blogosphere. The current wave of discussion started with a critical review by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. In his review, Gladwell defends journalism and goes negative on "Free." Seth Godin, who till then had stayed out of the debate, penned an instantly classic Godin post titled "Malcolm is wrong."

Mike Masnick followed on TechDirt with an insightful post in which he attributes some of Gladwell's confusion to the way that Anderson wrote the book. Masnick says that the book does not provide enough details on the mechanics and applications of Free. (I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on that.) Fred Wilson joined the conversation with a sharply delivered post on Freemium and Freeconomics. He gives examples of the kinds of Free that actually work.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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Smibs Could Rival Both LinkedIn & Salesforce.com

After being in beta for a year, Smibs has launched their SaaS business software into full production mode. The initial series of applications, with more planned for the future, include a Web-based CRM called Doorbell, and the Smibs Network, a business networking service. LinkedIn has largely wasted its potential to be anything other than personal promotion, and Salesforce.com CRM focuses almost solely on internal collaboration. While it has a long way to go to truly compete with either, the way that Smibs bridges the gap between public business networking and in-group workflows makes it a serious future contender.

John Hagel Interview: Implications of the Shift Index for Enterprises

John Hagel, perhaps best known for his book The Only Sustainable Edge, has been one of the leading strategic thinkers for decades. Recently, as Co-Chair of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, he unveiled the Shift Index. This is a fascinating way to look at the economy and goes well beyond the traditional GDP and employment measures. Have a strong cup of coffee before reading or listening to this interview. This is important for enterprises as they think about the big picture related to social media, changing demographics, and increased global competition. It is also valuable for enterprise software vendors as they seek to articulate the value of their products to these clients.

ReadWriteStart

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

Six Reasons to Stick with Your Startup: Survival Stories from the Trenches

Starting a new tech company is a labor of love. Particularly in the beginning, when funds are low, expectations are high, and the product is still a twinkle in the developer's eye, stressful situations under external pressures can lead to pull-the-plug moments.

When we interviewed Pandora founder Tim Westergren last week, he shared his personal brush with startup death: In 2007, it seemed that the music-streaming site would have to declare bankruptcy and close shop. Pandora's success is one reason to stick with your own startup. Here are six more.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

The Google OS Becomes Reality: Google Announces the Google Chrome OS

Just after we heard a number of rumors about the possible arrival of the rumored Google OS this week, Google actually went ahead and announced that it will indeed release its own operating system - the Google Chrome Operating System. For now, Google plans to aim this OS at the netbook market. The OS will only become available for consumers in the second half of 2010, but Google promises that it will open-source the code later this year. According the the announcement on the Google blog, the OS will run on standard x86 chips as well as ARM chips, and Google is already working with a number of OEMs to bring devices that run the Google Chrome OS to the market.

10 Things We're Dying to Know About Chrome OS

This week the blogosphere was abuzz with the late-breaking news about Google's new Chrome OS, a combination of the Chrome browser and windowing system running on top of a Linux kernel. But more important than what's being announced is what hasn't been said. People already have a lot of questions about the Chrome OS and the answers may ultimately determine how well it succeeds as a true competitor to both Microsoft and Apple, as is being widely speculated. We'll explore some of those questions in this post.

Wolfram|Alpha: The Use Cases

At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha's Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it's hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press when it launched in May, as many pundits saw it as a challenger to Google. However in our own extensive tests of the product before launch, we concluded that it isn't a "Google Killer" and that it has more in common with Wikipedia.

Even now there is still confusion about what Wolfram|Alpha is and what its main use cases will be. In this interview with Russell Foltz-Smith, we discuss what people are using Wolfram|Alpha for now; and more importantly what its uses will be in the near future.

Bing and Google: Users Are Willing to Try New Things

According to the latest data from Compete, Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, is still going strong, though even a month after its launch, the majority of Bing's users still switches back and forth between Google and Bing. About 66% of Bing's users also use Google search, and this number has held steady over the last few weeks. 30% of Bing's users also use Yahoo Search, and about 4% use AOL Search. The most interesting aspect of this report, however, is that Google's users seem to be far more interested in trying out a new search engine than users of other services.

Transportation Apps: Are We There Yet?

There are sites devoted to regional public transportation route planning, sites devoted to rail transportation, and city-wide sites for light rail, bus and ferry planning. But if you're looking for something across cities, states or even countries, you're not likely to find it.

Why is it that with GPS applications being so advanced, we're still such a long way from the benefits of seamless transportation? It's doubtful that riders really care which transportation authorities are responsible for their trip. As a user, I want to be able to type in my home address and get inexpensive door-to-door transportation options to any destination in the world.

There's no reason this shouldn't exist. If transportation authorities standardized their data, aggregation services would have no problem mapping routes from Beijing to Belize.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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