Home Weekly Wrapup: Google Product Purge, Jailbroken iPhones, Enterprise RSS, And More…

Weekly Wrapup: Google Product Purge, Jailbroken iPhones, Enterprise RSS, And More…

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at Google’s product line adjustments, explain why you should jailbreak your iPhone, analyze the world of Enterprise RSS, and tell you how to build a Social Media ‘cheat sheet’ for virtually any topic. Also we review the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb’s new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

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The Weekly Wrapup reviews the leading stories posted to ReadWriteWeb during the week. We hope it is particularly useful for those people who can’t keep up with the 10+ stories we post every day, but who still want to stay on top of the latest web technology and social media trends. You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapupby RSS or by email:




Web Products

Google Giveth, and Taketh Away: Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Jaiku, and Dodgeball to Shut Down

A number of Google services announced this week that they are about to shut down. The Google Video team announced that it will shut down uploads in a few months, while the Google Notebook team announced that it is stopping development (the service will continue to function, however). According to Danny Sullivan, Google is also closing Jaiku, a Twitter-like micro-blogging service that was bought by Google before it even launched, but which has lingered in invite-only mode ever since. Google Catalog search, which made shopping catalogs searchable, will also be closed soon.

Why You Have To Jailbreak the iPhone

If you own an iPhone and you’re fairly technical, then you’ve no doubt gone through the steps necessary to “jailbreak” your iPhone – the process that opens up the phone to allow for the installation of unapproved third-party applications. However, for the non-technical consumers who are now purchasing the iPhone in droves, this final, critical step in making the device more usable is often unknown or overlooked.

Calais 4.0 Released: Linked Data Meets the Commercial Web

This week Thomson Reuters launched the latest version of its Calais web service and open API, Calais 4.0. Calais is a toolkit of products that enables publishers to incorporate semantic functionality within their properties – enabling them to categorize content as people, places, companies, facts, events, and more. Calais 4.0 is perhaps the most significant version since the launch of Calais one year ago, because it enables publishers to connect to the Linked Data web standard that Sir Tim-Berners Lee and others in the Semantic Web community have been promoting over the past few years.

Userfly: Get Usability Insights with One Line of Code

When it comes to Web design and development, one thing trumps the latest technology and cool features: usability. Why? Because all of the features and functions in the world are completely worthless if a human user is unable to figure out how to use them. But testing against human factors, creating use cases, and observing focus groups can prove to be a costly endeavor for even the largest of companies.

Now, there’s a cost-effective means of seeing how usable your pages are: Userfly, a simple way to test your site’s usability for free – with one line of code.

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.
  • Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
  • Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
  • TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
  • Babylon is the world’s leading dictionary and translation software.
  • Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
  • WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
  • DEMO09 is the launchpad for emerging technology.
  • MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
  • VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
  • Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
  • SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.


RWW Jobwire

Delicious Founder Joins Google

Joshua Schachter, the creator of one of the most important consumer web applications in recent time, has joined Google, according to venture capitalist Josh Koppleman. Schachter’s social bookmarking service Delicious was acquired by Yahoo! three years ago last month. Schachter was required to spend 2 years at the company after the acquisition but has now been a free man for six months.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB’S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Trends

R.I.P. Enterprise RSS

It’s with a heavy heart and a sense of bewilderment that we conclude that the market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead. Two years ago there were three major players offering software that delivered information to the computers of business users via RSS. Today it looks to us like the demand simply never arose and that market is over.

A smattering of employees in big companies are using the free consumer app Google Reader, a paltry substitute for a business class RSS reader, and the rest of the business world is apparently satisfied to get information whenever they happen to stumble over it. It’s insane – a solid RSS strategy can be a huge competitive advantage in any field. We have no idea why so relatively few people see that.

Does Mobile TV Have a Future?

According to a new report from Nielsen Mobile, only 5% of all U.S. cell phone owners subscribe to a mobile TV service. Yet that number is the highest out of of all the other worldwide markets tracked by the company. Only France and Italy came close, each at 4 percent. According to Nielsen, mobile video use isn’t more prevalent due to lack of differentiating capabilities, high cost, and lack of compelling content. In fact, we are now even seeing mobile video’s plateau – a point where you would normally expect to see adoption slow considerably.

How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic

Let’s say you’re a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you’re a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you’ve got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest.

Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the “Google and wander” method? We think there is. In this post you’ll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

Personal Health Records: Lots of Interest, but Few Users

According to Manhattan Research, a healthcare market research company, personal health records (PHR) are slowly becoming more popular in the U.S., but concerns about privacy and a lack of understanding, as well as doubts about the efficiency of PHRs are holding back widespread adoption. Only about 7 million adults in the U.S. actually use PHRs. Especially those without serious illnesses often don’t see the need for using electronic health records.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Evolution of Tools for Sales

Revenue growth is priority #1 for most businesses today. So, good salespeople are in demand, and management wants to give them the best possible tools to make them productive. Selling is a numbers game. As long as you do reasonably sensible things, the time invested tends to corelate to revenue earned. Therefore, productivity really does matter. This is not an area to skimp on. If you can make somebody who brings in $1 million in revenue 10% more productive, that would mean an additional $100,000. So, what is happening in the market with tools for those who hustle on the front lines of business, the people who sell the products and services, who get capital for your business and sell it when the time comes, who hire the people who can grow your business? What will they be using in future?

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

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

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

About ReadWrite’s Editorial Process

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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