Note: The Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up is back with a new publishing day (Fri) and a new
format, a countdown of the Top Ten Web 2.0 issues or news stories of the past week. Also I’m
on the lookout for a new sponsor for the Weekly Wrap-Up. It’s had 3 extremely satisfied
sponsors over the past 30 weeks, so if you’re interested send me an email. Here we go then, with the top ten…
1. Yahoo
integrates RSS into Yahoo! Mail and their alerts service. This was the biggest news of the week – see my coverage on
ZDNet and analysis on Read/WriteWeb. Why
was it important? Mainly because Yahoo has 227 million unique users for Yahoo Mail, according to Scott Gatz. It’s a huge, mostly
untapped, market for RSS and will introduce millions more people to the benefits of
syndication.
2. Evan Williams’ Ten Rules for Web
Startups is a must read post for aspiring entrepreneurs. Worth sticking up on your
wall. See also Ben Barren’s 10 Rules
for a Hollywood Startup (“5. Dont have any idea what an API is or what it is like not
to be a VIP.”)
3. The Great Eyeballs Debate started up again this week, courtesy of an Om Malik
article in
Business2. By Om’s numbers, BoingBoing is worth a cool $34M. But Jason
Calacanis did a Good Will Hunting number on Om, saying it’s more like $500k-$3M. How do you like them
apples?
4. Mashups are a hottopic
right now. Check out my Top Mashups post,
inspired by the ProgrammableWeb popular
mashups page. Speaking of mashups, Ning King Jon
Aquino has created yet another interesting app – Google and Yahoo Maps Side By Side.
5. Skype released the next version of its product (yes, 2.0), which includes video calling functionality. Supr.c.ilio.us had blanket coverage.
6. Mobile Opportunity: why Web 2.0 doesn’t cut
it for mobile devices. Good post that explains how mobile web applications need a
different architecture than PC web apps, because of connectivity issues with mobile.
Quote: “they [mobiles] need both a local client and a local cache of the client data, so
the app can be fully functional even when the user is out of coverage.”
7. Jeremy Zawodny posted the results of his 30 Day Gmail and Yahoo! Mail
Challenge. Showing that he’s certainly not biased, Gmail won (Jeremy works at
Yahoo).
8. Nick Denton’s Startup kit
is worthy of mention, if only because bizarrely he included two humans in the kit – VC Fred Wilson and Nick’s attorney.
9. Web browsers were big this week. Firefox 1.5 was released and I wrote two posts about the browser market. On the
PC Microsoft is set to continue its dominance with IE7’s release next year, despite Firefox’s rise. However in
the growing mobile market it
could be the likes of Opera or Mozilla that takes the early lead.
10. Flickr
and Webshots – A classic web2.0 case. This post charted how Web 2.0 wunderkind Flickr has over the course of 2005 gained ground
on, and now overtaken, Web 1.0 photo-sharing site Webshots. Thomas Hawk also did an
analysis. Excellent work all round.
That’s a wrap for another week!
