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Another busy week of Web Tech. And you may’ve noticed a new daily voice on Read/WriteWeb – Josh Catone is now a lead writer here, so welcome aboard Josh! OK, here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email (see form in the sidebar on the website).
Top Web News
There were two big pieces of news this week. The first was a subtle, but major, upgrade to the Google search interface. Called Universal Search, it unifies search results across Google’s properties, so that web search, news, blogs, images, videos, etc are all integrated into the main search results. Josh Catone reviewed how this compares to other bigco ‘next-generation search’ sites – Yahoo! Alpha, Ask X, Microsoft Imagine Live and Google’s Own test sandbox, Searchmash. Alex Iskold then analyzed how this news impacts the many vertical search engines competing against Google. His somewhat troubling verdict is that the vertical search space may be finished!
Note that Read/WriteWeb, ironically, started the week by profiling a site called ‘Simply Google’, which offers All You Can Eat Google, On One Page. We had no clue at that point (Monday) that Google would actually implement this principle (in a different way) by Friday! In another ironic twist, earlier in the week we also covered the launch of a meta network of vertical search engines called netsearchengine.
The other big news of the week, which came on Friday, was Microsoft announcing the purchase of aQuantive, a 10-year-old publicly traded digital marketing company, in an all cash deal worth approximately $6 billion – the biggest acquisition in Microsoft history. As Josh Catone reported, the acquisition caps a hot month of consolidation across ad networks – including Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick for $3.1B, Yahoo! spending $680M to purchase Right Media, AOL acquired a controlling stake of German ad-serving company ADTECH AG on Wednesday, and WPP’s purchase of 24/7 yesterday.
Other news we reported on this week:
- Corel’s WordPerfect Lightning Integrates with WordPress
- YouTube Will Fight US Military Block
- Stanford Turns DMCA Complaints Into Cash
- Yahoo!’s New Mission: It’s About the People
- Yahoo! Pushes Green Living
- Amazon to Offer DRM-free MP3 Downloads
Analysis Posts
Google seemed to be on our collective brains a lot this week. Sean Ammirati wrote a compelling post, arguing that Google’s potential vulnerability is an open ad network. He got some takers too, as a few people in the comments stated their interest in building the kind of open network that Sean proposed. To those people: keep us informed! 😉
Also on the topic of online advertising, Alex Iskold wrote about The Race to Conquer Video Advertising.
Josh Catone wrote on the ‘who can beat Google’ theme too, with a post entitled Are Social Bookmarking Sites Better at Search than Google?.
Lest you think that we are obsessed with Google (but who would ever accuse bloggers of that?), we also wrote an overview of Adobe’s web deployment platform, Apollo. See my post Understanding Apollo if (like me) you have been wondering what this Apollo thing is really all about. The comments are well worth checking out, lots of interesting comparisons between Adobe, Microsoft, Sun and others.
Josh Catone wrote a couple of insightful posts on online video this week: Report: Paid Video Download Is A ‘Dead End’ and CBS’ New Online Video Strategy: Court Web 2.0.
If Web Office is your thing, check out Enterprise RSS – 3 Major Vendors Show The Way.
Last (and probably least), I ranted about Jakob Nielsen dissing Web 2.0 again.
Startup Action
Other than the two search startups mentioned above, here are some other startups we profiled this week:
- Get Your Own Theme at Method Music
- Interclue – New Web Previews App Launches
- Here Are All My Points: I’m In Like With You
- ChaCha and blinkx Announce Partnership
- Meebo Rooms Launched – “like a very very rich widget”
Poll
Our poll this week asked: Whose vision of web app deployment do you like the best?. We got a great response, nearly 700 people voted, and here are the results:
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Mozilla (open source, microformats, browser-based) 39% (267 votes)
Google (Ajax, mostly browser-based) 26% (175 votes)
Adobe (Apollo, browser/desktop) 21% (142 votes)
Microsoft (Silverlight, DotNet, browser/desktop) 11% (76 votes)
Sun (JavaFX, alternative to Ajax, browser/desktop) 2% (15 votes)
Other (please note in comments) 2% (11 votes)
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I noted in a mid-week update that Mozilla, Google were being voted ahead of Adobe, Microsoft and that trend continued till the end of the week. Almost 4 out of 10 respondents prefer Mozilla’s web deployment platform, suggesting that browser-based, open source and microformats are key elements in what people want to see. Google’s platform is also mostly browser-based. Together, Adobe and Microsoft polled 32% – which I must admit is much lower than I would’ve predicted. Sun’s platform had little support amongst our readers. There weren’t any ‘other’ platforms mentioned in the comments, but examples could be Laszlo or Morfik.
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
