Weekly Wrapup: iPhone 3.0, Facebook Privacy Controls, Web-based Books, And More...

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we cover the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, review the highlights from Microsoft’s MIX event, look at Facebook’s new privacy controls, check out some cutting edge web-based books, analyze the latest social media and Twitter stats, and more. Also we look at a featured story from Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb’s new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

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Web Products

iPhone 3.0: Push Notifications, Copy and Paste, MMS, and More

Apple this week previewed a new version of its iPhone firmware, as well as a new version of its SDK for the iPhone. Among the highlights of the announcement were the availability of a new homescreen, MMS, copy and paste, and the long expected arrival of push notifications. Developers will now also be able to sell in game accessories and subscriptions through Apple’s App Store.

iPhone developers will be able to download the new firmware this week, while the rest of us will have to wait until it is released to the public later this summer.

MIX09: Microsoft Announces Silverlight 3 Beta, Blend 3, and Updates to Azure

At its annual MIX conference, Microsoft this week introduced a number of interesting new products, including a beta of Silverlight 3 and a preview version of Blend 3, its Silverlight development tool. Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform also received a number of major updates this week. Microsoft also announced that Silverlight 2 has been installed on more than 300 million PCs since its launch in October 2008 and that NBC will use Silverlight 3 to power its online coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Facebook’s New Privacy Controls Encourage Openness

Facebook announced new privacy settings this week which let you selectively open up portions of your personal profile to everyone on the Facebook social network. As an alternative to the new “Public Profiles” (formerly called “Pages”), these additional settings allow you to pick and choose which parts – if any – of your private Facebook profile are available for anyone to see. According to a company blog post, this means that now people won’t need to friend you in order to view the content you want to make public.

Twine Could Soon Surpass Delicious, Prepares Ontology Authoring Tool

Nova Spivack’s semantic web company Twine is developing a free service to write and host semantic ontologies; the classification trees that enable machines to put concepts in topical context. Ready to play Aristotle and create an ontology of cheese, model airplanes, global anti-hunger organizations or any other topic?

What blogging was to publishing, a simple tool that made far more people able to participate, Twine’s new ontology writing and hosting service could be to the act of teaching machines about new topics.

IBM Announces Web-Based Radiology Theatre

IBM has announced an online “radiology theatre” product, currently at the prototype stage, which allows teams of medical experts to “simultaneously discuss and review patients’ medical test data using a Web browser.” The project is being run in collaboration with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Boston and is built on IBM’s next-generation browser platform Blue Spruce, which ReadWriteWeb reviewed when it was first announced back in November. IBM also used the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine. The app runs on the Linux or MacOS X operating systems and the browser may be Safari or Internet Explorer.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

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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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Jobwire

Netflix API Team Snags Yahoo’s Kent Brewster

Business troubles at Yahoo! haven’t changed the fact that the company has some of the most innovative Open Web advocates in the industry in its ranks, but this week one of those innovative people has left. API wizard Kent Brewster told us that he’s joining Netflix as the company’s newest API developer and evangelist. He’ll start there at the top of next month.

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

Web Trends

Being Harry Potter, While You Walk to Work

Dan Hon is building a radical new future for one of humanity’s oldest activities – the telling of stories. The modest young UK CEO’s design company Six to Start won Best in Show at this week’s SXSW Web Awards. The company’s project, called Telling Stories, is a six part experiment with the book publisher Penguin.

Hon’s vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the “urban games” of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of “Harry Potter ether” that we can dip in and out of while we’re walking to work.

SXSW Panel: Beyond Aggregation

One of the more popular panels at SXSW Interactive this year was one called Beyond Aggregation. The panel included our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick, as well as Gabe Rivera (Techmeme), Louis Gray (LouisGray.com), Melanie Baker (PostRank) and Micah Baldwin (Lijit). The topics revolved around information gathering and management.

From the panel, Marshall and Louis had new sources and gathering tips, Gabe and Melanie weighed in heavily on how to manage information and Micah had some great suggestions on discovery of new information sources.

Despite Recession, More Than 50% of Marketers Increase Spending on Social Media

In a recession, budgets are tightened, jobs are cut, and those who remain are expected to do more with less. Given this type of economic reality, it’s surprising to hear of an industry reporting an increase in spending on anything, much less on something as new as social media. Yet that’s exactly what’s occurring. According to a new Forrester Research survey of 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees, the use of social media as a marketing tool is on the rise. What’s more, Forrester reports that over 50% of marketers said they will be increasing their spending on social media marketing in the coming months.

Nielsen: Twitter Was Fastest Growing Community Last Month

This week, Nielsen Online reported that Twitter has now surpassed Facebook and others to become the fastest-growing site in the “Member Communities” category for the month of February. Although Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, has more members than Twitter, that’s not what this measurement is about – it’s about growth. And Twitter is growing. It’s growing like crazy.

Is There a Reverse Network Effect with Scale?

The Internet economy has been built on the network effect (i.e. the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product for other people). Investors and entrepreneurs have treated this like Moore’s Law. But just as Moore’s Law hits physical constraints, network effects have a limit in many types of online communities. Indeed, in some cases, a reverse network effect may exist: as new people join, others are motivated to leave. This dramatically affects the length of the competitive advantage enjoyed by these ventures. In this post, we’ll look at which ventures suffer from reverse network effects, which don’t, and which may suffer depending on the strategy they choose to adopt.