In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look into Facebook’s homepages, check out Yahoo’s answer to Facebook Connect, review the new iPhone version of Amazon’s eReader Kindle, analyze the ‘Smarter Web’ trend that came out of the DEMO conference this year, and more. Also we cover the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb’s new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
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Web Products
Facebook Announces New Homepages: It’s All About the Stream
Facebook this week announced a major update to its homepages that will go live next Wednesday. The new homepages will put the news feed front and center and have both a filtering feature as well as a sidebar that highlights the most popular topics and links that are currently being discussed by your friends. The news feed is now also updated in real-time, while the old feed ran on a schedule and only updated a few times per hour.
Yahoo! Launches Major Challenge to Facebook Connect
Yahoo! Updates, the company’s answer to Facebook Connect, became available on more than 600,000 websites this week with the launch of a new partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit. Whereas Facebook’s technology for tying profiles and activity updates between sites around the web has raised concerns about proprietary control over data, Yahoo! has implemented the open standard OAuth in its system. By partnering with JS-Kit, a service that powers comments and ratings on sites big (like AOL and Sun Microsystems) and small (JS-Kit bought up old school market leader Haloscan in July), Yahoo! Updates is coming out of the gate in a big way. How does its technology compare to Facebook Connect?
Amazon’s Kindle Comes to the iPhone
Amazon released a free application for the iPhone and iPod touch (iTunes link) that allows users to download and read any eBook from Amazon’s Kindle store on Apple’s popular mobile devices. This move comes just a few days after Amazon’s Kindle 2 eBook reader arrived in users’ hands, but according to Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president, Amazon does not expect that this app will cannibalize Kindle sales as users will probably only use their phones to read for short periods.
Make Google Real-Time With Twitter Search Add-on
Some people say that “the real-time web” could be the next generation of post-Google search. Social media tools have greatly increased not just the number of people posting content online but also the speed with which they are able to do so. Do we need a new search paradigm that prioritizes publishing freshness higher than page rank? Google backers say that Google is already capable of indexing anything online mere moments after it’s been published – but the user experience in search doesn’t really feel “real time” right now. Movable Type consultant Mark Carey came up with a simple solution this weekend that could change your use of Google more than anything else has in a while.
Twitter VC Laughs at the Idea that Twitter Has No Business Model
Todd Dagres, founder of Spark Capital and one of the VCs that poured an additional $35 million into Twitter recently, finds it amusing when people talk about Twitter’s lack of a business model. “We think it’s kind of funny,” Dagres recently told Innovation Economy. “We know how we’re going to do it, and we’re very confident about how we’re going to do it, and it’s not necessarily in our interest to tell people how we’re going to do it.”
MyBuys: Recommendations as a Service
In this latest installment in our series on recommendation engines, we look at MyBuys – a company purely focused on providing recommendations services to retail websites. We’ve noted in previous posts in this series that each recommendations vendor has a different approach. What distinguishes MyBuys is that it takes a services approach and is not based on a single algorithm. We spoke to Paul Rosenblum, VP Products & Strategy at MyBuys, who told us that most companies in the recommendations market have a “pet algorithm”. However MyBuys, according to Rosenblum, uses a variety of algorithms for different contexts and different kinds of retailers. “Fundamentally”, Rosenblum told ReadWriteWeb, “we don’t actually have a product […] we have a service”.
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.
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- TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
- Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 allows you to create interactive social media experiences.
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- VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
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- SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.
Jobwire
Details of New Executive Team at Yahoo!
This week Yahoo! chose the executives that will lead them into the future under newly appointed CEO Carol Bartz. The moves are part of a major restructuring at Yahoo! that is supposed to last four years. The Yahoo! Tech and Products groups will be combined into a group called Products and be led by Ari Balogh. His title will be Executive Vice President of Products and Chief Technology Officer. he will report directly to CEO Carol Bartz.
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Web Trends
DEMO Trend: The Smarter Web (Part 1)
At this month’s DEMO 09 conference, one of the most apparent trends was the emergence of several new intelligent web services. In this transitional period between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (or whatever it is that comes next), the tools of the future are just now being revealed. Although at first glance some of these services and applications may seem somewhat incomplete, in many cases they actually represent years’ worth of work to have reached the point they’re at now. These are no simple Web 2.0 applications; these are highly complex and intelligent tools of tomorrow’s smarter web.
See also: DEMO Trend: The Smarter Web (Part 2)
Best Mobile App from DEMO 09: Asurion’s Social Address Book
At this week’s DEMO 09 conference Asurion Mobile introduced their new open mobile address book called simply “Asurion Mobile AddressBook.” Although the name may not be all that flashy, the app itself is. With this mobile address book, you can add social elements to your contact list including Flickr photos, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds. This may remind you of the upcoming Palm Pre’s address book which will deliver similar functionality with its Facebook integration, however Asurion’s solution does even more. And thanks to the app’s open framework, it’s not limited to the social add-ons it ships with – developers can extend it any way they like.
See also: Not Quite Right: New Report says iPhone has a Commanding Lead in Mobile Browsing Share
The latest episode of RWW Live focused on online travel applications. We had executives from 4 great travel startups on the call: TripIt, Yapta, Dopplr and PlanetEye. In the show we discussed how the Web is changing the way people travel for work and fun. Our guests were: Gregg Brockway, President & Co-Founder, TripIt; Marko Ahtisaari, CEO & Co-Founder, Dopplr; Hugh Birch, VP of Product Development, Yapta; Jonah Sigel, VP Business Development, PlanetEye. The podcast is available for download here.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
Enterprise
Have Code, Will Travel – Sabre Chooses Open Source to Power its Business
Whenever you buy an airline ticket or book a hotel room these days, chances are that a good part of that transaction will run through Sabre‘s network. Sabre is one of the world’s largest suppliers of technology solutions for the airline and travel industry. What you may not be aware of, however, is that Sabre has made open-source software a cornerstone of its technology strategy. Sabre already relies on a number of open-source projects to handle thousands of transactions every second, and this week, Sabre and Progress FUSE announced a new partnership that will make a number of FUSE’s open-source offerings a cornerstone of Sabre’s technology.
Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.
SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
