Latest Articles

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  Web

  Compfight: The Perfect Flickr Image Search Tool

  Searching around for an image for a blog post is one of the most frustrating procedures of blogging. It could take hours to find that perfect image. These are hours, minutes, and seconds that most of us would rather not waste. Normally, one might head to Google Image Search, but...

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  Web

  What’s Killing Twitter: Twitter Gets Help Digging its Grave

  Our beloved Twitter has been digging its own grave for several months now. Recently, the service has experienced an absurd amount of downtime. There have been numerous posts calling for Twitter to be replaced. With so many problems plaguing Twitter, it seems the company could care less. Here are a...

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  Social

  Facebook Will Be the Mainstream Everything

  Whenever a new product comes out that has the early adopter set all atwitter -- like say, Twitter, for example -- there is a certain amount of discussion devoted to when or if the product will go mainstream. Sometimes we're not even sure if a new web app or service...

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  Web

  Weekly Wrapup, 19-23 May 2008

  Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we explored: next gen apps outside the browser, uses for wikis, Facebook's usefulness (or lack thereof), the public launch of Google Health, and 4 promising mobile social networks. On the trends side...

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  Web

  Twitter is Down – Come Join Us in Our FriendFeed Room

  "Goodnight ma!" "Goodnight pa!" "Goodnight, John Boy!" That's what they used to say in every episode of the TV classic The Waltons (see below). That same kind of repetitive chorus has grown more frequent around the web announcing that yes, the Twitter website and API are down again.What do you...

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  Social

  Facebook’s Lifestream Adds More Services

  Last month, we reported the arrival of Facebook's version of a lifestream when they began offering you a way to import content from various online services into your Facebook Mini-Feed. At the time, the only services available were Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us. (Digg was added later on). Today, a...

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  Web

  Government 2.0: The Government as a Platform

  TechPresident points to and interesting article today from the Yale Journal of Law & Technology (draft version of article set to appear in 2008-2009 Fall Issue) that proposes a new form of open government that encourages the closure of government web sites. The idea is that US government web sites...

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  Web

  Nine Company Blogs That Are Fun For Anyone to Read

  Here at ReadWriteWeb we spend a lot of time reading the blogs of companies we write about (send yours to [email protected]) and we've found that some of them are just plain fun. An interesting company blog can be a great way to draw in new people through relevant content of...

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  Social

  Facebook New Profile Dev Sandbox Now Live

  Facebook's new profile design, which we first wrote about in February is now live for developers. Any developer can visit http://www.new.facebook.com/profile/ to access the developer sandbox and play around with the new design, which aims to unclutter the site by breaking the profile into five distinct areas. Will the new...

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  Entertainment

  The Rock Hard Times: the Wikipedia of Music?

  The Rock Hard Times is a music search engine and database where you can perform searches or browse by artists, genres, places (countries), and labels. Each page on the site is filled with content like album listings, photos, videos, and links to lyrics, tabs, fansites, shopping sites, and more.  The...

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  Web

  You Play a Game, Computers Get Smarter, AI Starts to Work

  Last week a new site called Gwap was launched by Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. The site offers an array of multi-player games that have a benefit beyond just that of momentary distraction or amusement. These games are helping improve image and audio searches, teaching computers to see, and...

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  Web

  Interactive Debate on Web’s Future, Featuring Tim Berners-Lee

  ReadWriteWeb is the exclusive Media Partner for an interactive debate on the future of the Web, featuring Tim Berners-Lee. The event is June 11 and is being run by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The debate will address questions such as: Is net neutrality essential for democracy? What role does AI...

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  Web

  PR Needs to Lighten Up

  I am not a journalist. I am an entrepreneur who blogs. I blog on ReadWriteWeb because I don't like talking to myself and there are some great conversations here. Being part of RWW means I get to be on the receiving end of PR processes such as news releases and...

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  Web

  RWW Live: Episode 1

  Today we’re pleased to announce a new biweekly feature on ReadWriteTalk, our podcast show. It's a live discussion with the ReadWriteWeb Network authors that we’re calling RWW Live. On this first episode, host Sean Ammirati is joined by myself (Richard MacManus) and Alex Iskold from ReadWriteWeb, along with Steve O’Hear...

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  Web

  Towards a Value-Added User Data Economy

  Every week it seems like the debate over access to, portability of and privacy over user data on the social web has reached new heights. It's only going to get louder though, just as discussions about other forms of economics will never be resolved.That's a part of what's going on,...

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  Web

  SemTech Panel: Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls

  What sort of funding opportunities exist in the budding Semantic Web space? What are VCs looking for and how much are they will to invest? That was the topic of a panel at the SemTech 2008 Conference that just concluded in San Jose. The panel featured Stephen Hall from Vulcan...

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  Web

  For Some Startups, Blog Coverage Really Matters

  Today, I came across a site from Red Hat called Mugshot that neither I nor Sarah Perez had ever heard of. Mugshot is an open source lifestream aggregation service that went overlooked in our list of 35 such sites last February (though it was mentioned in a comment left about...

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  Web

  Trouble at Eurekster? Things Don’t Look Good

  Social/wiki search engine provider Eurekster has been down for the past two days and users are wondering if the company will return to provide the site search functionality that many have come to depend on. Things look rough for the company.Eurekster provides a service called a Swicki, a search function...

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  Web

  Rifflet, A Home for Unfinished Songs

  Rifflet is a new site where musicians can gather to finish each other's work. The concept involves the uploading of something called a "rifflet," which is a piece of a song - like a bass line, a guitar riff, a drum beat, or something else altogether. Each rifflet must also...

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  Web

  The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search

  Last week I was watching TV and saw something that really caught my eye. It was a commercial for Special K, the breakfast cereal from Kellogg, and rather than end with a plug for the product's web site -- SpecialK.com -- it advised people to search Yahoo! for "Special K"...