Weekly Wrapup, 15-19 October 2007

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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.

Web News

MySpace Evolves – Developer Platform Details, Partnerships, Growth Figures

This week News Corp chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, and MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, were the featured speakers at the Web 2.0 Summit. It is the two year anniversary of the News Corp acquisition of MySpace, so there was some discussion on the growth of MySpace and how it is evolving. The pair also discussed, in a roundabout way, aspects of the upcoming MySpace Platform.

It was revealed that MySpace will formalize relationships with the developer community and “roll out a new platform in the coming months”.¬ï The steps to MySpace’s developer platform strategy will include:

1) In the coming weeks MySpace is launching a catalogue of all widgets and tools available on MySpace;

2) In “several months” they will make industry standard APIs available through a new platform where developers can try new things in a sandbox environment;

3) MySpace users will have the opportunity to participate in an opt-in beta test program, to determine usability;

4) Users will vote and ultimately determine which of the third party widgets get tightly integrated into MySpace;

5) MySpace will formally introduce the best widgets into the community, with what they term “highly developed integration”.

Microsoft Partners with Atlassian & NewsGator – SharePoint Goes Web 2.0

This week Microsoft announced two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft – it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s term for ‘web 2.0’, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).

The aim of the partnerships is to add more “social computing platform” capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an “enterprise productivity platform”. In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator.

Other News

Web Products

Twine: The First Mainstream Semantic Web App?

On Friday Radar Networks announced a new Semantic Web application called Twine. Founder Nova Spivack showed us a demo of the new app, which he described as a “knowledge networking” application. It has aspects of social networking, wikis, blogging, knowledge management systems – but its defining feature is that it’s built with Semantic Web technologies. Spivack told us that Twine aims to bring a usable and scalable interface to the long-promised dream of the Semantic Web.

Vimeo Offering HD Video Option

Vimeo, one of the classiest players in the online video world, is now offering High Definition transcoding for user uploaded video. At 4 times the industry standard bitrate, the new videos look really nice. Unfortunately, the HD quality videos can only be viewed on the Vimeo site and cannot be embedded in HD elsewhere. We hope that will change.

You can find many other product reviews and startup profiles in our Startups category.

Analysis

The Future of Software Development

In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called The Mythical Man-Month. In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster. The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication. […] We have come a long way since then and learned a lot about making software. In the real world, software projects have ill-defined and constantly evolving requirements, making it impossible to think everything through at once. Instead, the best software today is created and evolved using agile methods. These techniques allow engineers to continuously re-align software with business and customer needs.

Adobe Preparing Full Shift to Web Apps

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that the company is working toward shifting all of their apps online, but that it would probably take about 10 years for a complete shift. While the web as the computing platform of the future is currently a popular idea, and while prognostication 10 years out is rarely a good idea, we’re skeptical that Adobe could pull off a full shift of its software catalog to Internet apps.

You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.

Conferences

Web 2.0 Summit

Richard’s post-summit wrapup will be coming soon (after he recovers from jet lag). For now here are his posts from the conference:

– Web 2.0 Summit 2007: Mark Zuckerberg

– Web 2.0 Summit 2007: Mary Meeker and Internet Trends

– Web 2.0 Summit Video

– The New Era of Semantic Apps

Mobile 2.0

Richard was also at he Mobile 2.0 event this weekin San Francisco. Here were his posts:

– Mobile 2.0 – The 7th Mass Media & Business Opportunities

– Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 1

– Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 2

– Taptu Launches New Type of Mobile Search

R/WW Network Blogs

last100

Check out a wrap of the week’s Digital Lifestyle news on last100. Lots of mobile news this week, the biggest of which was probably Apple’s decision to finally open the iPhone to third-party developers. At the Symbian Show in London, Nokia also showed off the new version of the mobile OS S60, which offers an optional iPhone-like touch interface — watch the mobile Internet space heat up.

In Internet TV-related news, the BBC has partnered with Adobe to add an iPlayer streaming option with Mac and Linux support; and Sony — which just launched a cheaper PS3 — talked up its forthcoming online video network for the PS3 / PSP.

Alt Search Engines

AltSearchEngines this week was at the Search Marketing Expo: Social Media conference in New York City. Here is some of their coverage:

Read/WriteTalk

Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk – our new podcast show sat down with Jeff Clavier, Founder & Managing Partner SoftTechVC. They talked a little about the types of deals Jeff is most interested in and how he makes decisions. Jeff ended the interview talking about the most critical success factor in every deal – hint it isn’t the technology or the market.