Home Weekly Wrapup, 19-23 March 2007

Weekly Wrapup, 19-23 March 2007

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb, with the
results of our poll at the end.

Top Web News

Much of the discussion in the blogosphere this week revolved around two
pieces of big news. Firstly Google announced that it is beta testing a new CPA (Cost
Per Action) online advertising service. Our
take is
here
, in which we posed the question: will Microsoft and Yahoo have to buy
their way into the CPA game?
This generated
some interesting comments. Adam noted:

“Google’s key advantage with CPA could be the integration with Google
Checkout. If Checkout takes off, then Yahoo’s in trouble with trying to catch up
on CPA because it can’t just buy into the race and be as effective as Goog.”

SEO Mash wrote:

“CPC will still be king and there is no need for Yahoo or MSN to be
that worried. CPA/PPA only make sense when there is a well defined
“purchase” action that can be directly related back to the original
click-thru and for many/most Adwords advertisers that is not the case.”

Bob Jones said:

“….an interesting post would be to examine why the hell Microsoft
and Yahoo are so slow to take the initiative on this, and everything else that
Google has won on in the past few years.”

The second big news of the week was the News Corp/NBC
Online Video Deal
, in which News Corporation and NBC Universal partnered
with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! – in an attempt to compete with Google/YouTube. 

In other bigco news, Adobe
launched Apollo, Alpha Version
this week and Yahoo launched oneSearch to the US Mobile Web.
The latter essentially means that Yahoo’s new mobile search service is now available to millions more people. In
our post, we had an interview with Yahoo’s Director of Mobile Web Lee Ott and
explored what the news means exactly.

Analysis Posts

Once again we had some outstanding (if we do say so ourselves) analysis posts
this week, with our writers going super-in-depth into the latest Web trends and products.

Alex Iskold wrote two excellent posts:
Web
3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services
and Current
Mashup and API Trends
. The first one was notable for almost causing a Web
2.0 crisis of confidence
! Well, it at least proved some inspiration for Peter
Rip’s controversial post this week entitled Web
2.0 – Over and Out
and Valleywag’s
follow-up post
. Both cited Alex’s “Web 3.0” post as evidence that
the tide is turning. In any case, our post is well worth reading for anyone
interested in what’s next in the Web’s evolution. FWIW, we only used the term
‘web 3.0’ to signify something between what has come to be known as
‘web 2.0’ and the Semantic Web. 

Josh Catone wrote a comprehensive overview of the growing crowdsourcing
market
. And to emphasize the point, there is some excellent “crowdsourcing”
going on in the comments – where many people listed other crowdsourcing projects
worth checking out.

There were two great posts this week on the topic of building and marketing
your startup. Check out Jitendra Gupta’s
How
to Build a Profitable Startup by Knowing Your Users Better
and then Emre
Sokullu’s How
To Market Your Web App
.


Sramana Mitra’s latest post analyzed MSN Money, concluding that it is a stronger
offering than Yahoo Personal Finance.

Finally, for those of you interested in the enterprise space, check out CIOs
Spurn Web 2.0 Startups – Enterprises Want Suites and Large, Incumbent Software
Vendors
.

Startup Action

We profiled the following startups this week:

Poll

Our poll this week asked
Which Personalized Homepage Do You Use?
. It was a hot topic, as at the start
of the week Netvibes
launched its “Coriander Edition”
and later in the week Google
launched new themes
. Here are the final results of the poll:

Google Personalized Homepage          27%
(409 votes)

Pageflakes                                       
27% (397 votes)

Netvibes                                          
22% (326 votes)

I don’t use a personalized homepage  12% (174 votes)

My
Yahoo                                        
5% (76 votes)

Yourminis                                        
2% (36 votes)

Live.com                                         
2% (31 votes)

Webwag                                         
0% (7 votes)

Other (please note in comments)       2% (34
votes)

There was a late
flurry of votes
for Pageflakes, bringing it to second place just behind
Google Personalized Homepage. Netvibes was also very popular. Those 3 ‘start
pages’ have a clear lead in innovation and are favorites of the web 2.0-savvy
crowd.

While it was perhaps to be expected that market leader My Yahoo isn’t well
used by Read/WriteWeb’s early adopter readership (although now that My Yahoo is innovating
again, that may begin to change), it did surprise me that Microsoft’s live.com
rated so poorly. Only 31 out of nearly 1,500 poll respondents said that live.com
is their favorite personalized homepage, perhaps reflecting the confused
branding of live.com and its barebones look n’ feel. However it does actually
have some nifty gadgets, so I was a little surprised it only got 2% of votes. It
also seems that relative
newcomer
Webwag is struggling to make an impression.

The other noteworthy piece of data was that 12% of respondents don’t use a
personalized homepage at all, which suggests the market is still growing.

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

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The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines.

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