Home Weekly Wrapup: World’s Most Influential Websites, Thanksgiving Apps, New AOL Branding, And More…

Weekly Wrapup: World’s Most Influential Websites, Thanksgiving Apps, New AOL Branding, And More…

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze a list of the most influential websites in the world, look back on the past decade of e-commerce, suggest a list of products that Twitter might like to acquire, review a collection of Thanksgiving web apps, and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Web Trends

The Most Influential Websites in the World: Wikipedia #1, Twitter #4 With a Bullet

A year ago we profiled an oddly-named service called ://URLFAN, which we concluded was a good ‘Influence Index’ for the Web. ://URLFAN ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. Unlike analytics services like Alexa or Compete, ://URLFAN doesn’t measure website traffic. It’s similar to Technorati, only ://URLFAN ranks all websites and not just blogs. So, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web?

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: E-commerce

In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted. In a follow-up post, we looked at current statistics for online retail.

See also: Online Retail Thriving: 8% Growth Expected This Holiday Season

What Apps Should Twitter Acquire?

According to a statement made this week by Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone, the company is interested in acquiring more companies to expand upon their current core set of features. The ecosystem of Twitter applications has exploded and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter’s service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering?

Firefox’s Plan to Kick the Login’s Butt

Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management. The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ and using social software inside organizations.

Enterprise 2.0: Study Shows Adoption is Real

When you look at Enterprise 2.0, you can see the hype pretty clearly – but what is not so evident is how social computing efforts are faring within corporations and large organizations. That’s what’s striking about the report from the 2.0 Adoption Council. The group did a web survey of its 100 members, with 77 responding. That may seem like a small number to use for any quantifiable conclusion about the state of Enterprise 2.0. But the people who responded lead or help lead Enterprise 2.0 efforts at some of the largest organizations in the world.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Ommwriter: Be Alone with Your Thoughts

Between Skype, chat, texts, push news notifications and three screens of scrolling feeds, it’s easy to get distracted while writing an email or post. If you’ve misspelled names, forgotten words or hit send prematurely on numerous occasions, then you probably just need to slow down. Rather than resorting to a life in the woods of hermit-like solitude, you could just take a few moments to think with Ommwriter.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

5 Mobile Apps to Be Thankful For if You Are Flying This Thanksgiving Weekend

Thanksgiving is generally a horrible day for air travel, but tradition and the sweet smell of Thanksgiving turkey still makes millions of Americans forget the potential horror of being stuck in an airport. If you are one of them, or even if you are just heading to the airport to pick somebody up, here are some mobile applications and web sites than can help you make your Thanksgiving travel less stressful.

See also: How to Prepare Your iPhone for Black Friday and Top 10 Shopping Sites for Gadget, Gear and Geek Gifts

LinkedIn Finally Opens Platform: The Good & Bad News

Two years and a month after announcing that it would launch a more professional-looking developer platform than the wildly successful one at Facebook, this week LinkedIn finally opened up a series of application programming interfaces for other companies to build on top of. Make no mistake about it, though – there’s some good news and there’s some bad news.

@BreakingNews: MSNBC.com Will Now Manage Twitter’s Most Popular Breaking News Account

BNO News, the news wire service famous for publishing breaking news stories through its @BreakingNews Twitter feed, announced that it plans to launch a new news wire service early next year. In order to focus on this project, the BNO team will hand over the management of the @BreakingNews feed to MSNBC.com. According to BNO News, MSNBC will provide 24/7 breaking news headlines via BNO’s Twitter feed.

Is Bing Cashback Costing Users Money? Sometimes, Yes

When Bing debuted a feature called Cashback, the product was intended to save users money while they shopped from online retailers. As we told you last month when discussing the program’s early successes, Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item and then buy it from a participating store. But some users have found the opposite to be true.

Poll: AOL Reveals New Branding, Love it or Loathe It?

This week AOL revealed a sneak peek at a new branding campaign for their soon-to-be standalone content-focused business. The rebranding effort will officially launch on December 10th when AOL begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Time Warner, its current owner. The new logos feature a lowercase “aol” on top of various colorful images that range from an orange goldfish to a green scribble. Are the new logos any good?

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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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