AOL has just released a new site called
I Am Alpha, which is their version of Yahoo! Widgets or Microsoft Gadgets. Google has modules and all the smaller players have
similar widget featuresets – PageFlakes calls
them “flakes” and Goowy calls them minis. All of these things are
basically little web apps that can be integrated into your desktop or a…
Sometimes we all get so
wrapped up in the latest Web 2.0 calendar, rss reader or search product, that we forget
that some things labeled ‘Web 2.0’ are actually doing social good in the world.
This is the case with NetSquared, which is a
non-profit organization that aims to
“increase nonprofit effectiveness through the use of web-based social…
Rojo,
the web-based RSS Aggregator I’ve used ever since I gave up hope of Bloglines ever
stepping up its functionality, has just come out with some more enhancements.
About a month ago, they re-designed their site and now they’ve done another overhaul and
added 3 new features – one of which (relevance) I will drill down into below. In a
nutshell…
by Ryan Stewart
(Richard’s Note: I’m introducing guest bloggers to Read/WriteWeb, to write
about topics that I think will be of interest to R/WW readers – but which I’m not an
expert in myself. Ryan Stewart is the first of my guest bloggers, writing on the topic of
Flash and ‘rich internet apps’. I’ll be editing the guest posts to fit in with…
Developing a mashup can be
a lot of fun and it’s usually low cost, because you’re using (semi) open tools and data.
Forget fun though for a minute – is there a business in mashups? There are obvious
benefits for the data providers, for example both Google and craigslist benefit from
increased traffic to their sites. In most cases that leads to…
In this exclusive interview with ex-Excite founder and current JotSpot CEO Joe Kraus, I discuss with Joe the Web Office and his ‘Embrace and Extend’ theory.
“Our goal wasn’t just to build Excel online. In fact I believe that Excel will be ‘Excel Online’. Microsoft isn’t dumb and they get this revolution about ‘software as a service’ much more than…
Niall Kennedy is on a roll, having this week published an informative series of posts on the RSS platform and the ‘state of the aggregator’:
NewsGator API
Google Reader platform
Windows RSS Platform
Feeds as a platform
State of the aggregator
I don’t really have…
Is it just me, or does the list of winners announced for the 2006 Bloggies (the blogging oscars) bear a striking resemblance to the last 5-6 years? Slashdot, Boing Boing, Blogger, etc. Where are all the ‘2.0’ sites, like TechCrunch, Scripting News, Digg? Anyway, there was one shining light: Darren Rowse’s Problogger got an award – for Best Web…
My NZ 2.0 buddy Ben Nolan
is selling one of his web apps, bubbletwo, on eBay.
There he is pictured on the
left, pretending he’s zooming down the Silicon Valley highways in a Ferarri (which
may yet happen if he sells his mapping startup zoomin.co.nz).
Ben whipped up bubbletwo recently and he describes it as a “Web 2.0
Instant Blogging Site…
I’ve long been suspicious of some of the stats that certain companies and bloggers push. We all know by now that industry stats tool alexa.com must be taken with a grain of salt, but until today I hadn’t realised the extent of how a site’s own measured traffic can be exaggerated.
You see recently I’ve been using Urchin (owned by Google) web…
Google has acquired what I chose as the ‘best of breed’ Web-based word processing app in my recent ZDNet post Web Office Suite [news via TechCrunch] The Writely blog is rightly chuffed:
“…everyone told us it was crazy to try and give people a way to access their documents from anywhere — not to mention share documents instantly, or…
Yahoo has announced four new APIs for its Developer Network: Photos, Calendar, MyWeb and Shopping. The Shopping 2.0 API is available now, while the Photos, Calendar and MyWeb read/write APIs will be available soon [updated – thanks Jeffrey]. While they’ll be free to use for non commercial purposes, Ash Patel (Yahoo chief product officer) tells us…
The Register investigates. [via]
Full whiteboard image here
I knew Google was up to something big. It’s always the quiet ones you need to watch…
Today I spoke to JotSpot co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus about their latest
product release, pre-packaged “wiki applications”. We also discussed the Web Office,
which I will post about separately on
ZDNet. JotSpot’s latest product is a prebuilt wiki. Basically it’s a wiki with set
templates and functionality, making it easy for people to use ‘out of…
TechCrunch has obtained screenshots of the as yet unreleased Google Calendar, called CL2. The leak came via Google’s closed beta of about 200 participants. Apparently CL2 is a long way away from launch, but there are some meaty details in Mike’s post.
CL2 looks to be a very strong product from Google (which has by no means been a given over the…
Microsoft has just released (or is about to) a series of new products: Windows Live Search Beta, Windows Live Toolbar Beta and the next version of Live.com. Details on my ZDNet blog.
One thing of personal interest to me is that a former Read/WriteWeb sponsor, web research product Onfolio, has been acquired by Microsoft and integrated into the…
ETech 2006 has started and it’s the one conference this year which people
kept telling me I should be at (but oddly, no one offered to pay my airfare…). Oh well, luckily I have my finger on the
blogosphere pulse and so I’m going to post updates of my virtual findings over
the next few days.
–
The
welcome: (“Attenuation is the next aggregator…
Live.com, Microsoft’s personalized start page, has just
been upgraded with some impressive new features. Live.com program manager Sanaz
Ahari sent me details of the release this evening. It was good timing, because earlier today I’d been using the old Live.com and having trouble! The new features are:
Pages – you can have multiple…
Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music
gave an interesting talk at BarcampLA
entitled Media
2.0 Physics. I encourage you to pore over his presentation and notes.
I liked the part about Yahoo and original content:
“So Should Yahoo! be in the (Original) Content Business?
Like HBO before us, Yahoo! should only create content in two cases:
a) When it’s…
The big news in my part of the world today is that trademe.co.nz, a virtual clone of eBay that has risen to dominance in the eBay-less New Zealand market, has been sold to Aussie media company Fairfax for a staggering NZ$700 million [news via Dave]. Mr Barren thinks Fairfax would’ve been attracted by the 15.6 times expected 2007 EBITDA.
TradeMe’s…
