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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.
Facebook Week
This week was Facebook Week on Read/WriteWeb. It was a huge success, even if by the end of the week a few people were questioning the intense focus. But the aim was to do a deep drill on the most popular Web company of 2007 – and find out if it deserves all the hype. We learned a lot and I hope our readers did too. Josh Catone wrote an excellent summary post, entitled Is Facebook Worth the Hype?.
Josh concluded that although Facebook has built a compelling development platform, giving third party apps access to potentially tens of millions of users, Facebook hasn’t won anything just yet. Josh pointed out that if MySpace releases an API in the next six months, Facebook’s platform advantage could be greatly minimized. There is also the threat of platforms from Google and Yahoo!.
This week we found out firsthand how popular Facebook is. We created a Read/WriteWeb Facebook Group on Monday – and after just 5 days it has nearly 600 members (as of writing). We haven’t yet had a chance to integrate into the group some of the 50 Facebook apps that Josh wrote about this week (see below), but that is next on the To Do list!
The highlight of Facebook Week for me was Josh Catone’s series of posts on the best third party apps on Facebook. Currently there are nearly 1800 apps and the most popular ten applications reach over 46 million users. Josh picked his favorite 50 apps, across 5 categories. Here are those posts:
Coinciding with Facebook Week, the company itself announced its first major acquisition this week – buying Parakey, a Web OS company founded by Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt.
Our other coverage included Emre Sokullu’s The Impact of Facebook’s Platform, which features an interesting couple of videos from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a young Steve Jobs. Also check out my analysis of how open Facebook’s platform really is – you may be surprised at the results. I also looked at Facebook’s use of Ajax, which I first thought was an indication that Facebook is forsaking the Page View statistics model. But proving the old blog adage that your readers know more than you, a number of comments on the post explained that it makes no difference. TDub pointed out: “A background AJAX request is still regarded as a page view by the webserver – all a page view is is a browser requesting a file from the server. In the background or not, makes no diffrence”.
Analysis Posts
Our most commented-on post of the week was Alex Iskold’s How Apple Can Win The PC Battle. There are over 140 comments so far and we may do a seperate round-up next week of peoples opinions. Alex wrote that given Apple’s spectacular growth in other areas (e.g. iPod) and their recent rise in computer market share, Apple just might win the PC battle this time. The comments are still open if you want to give your view on this.
Emre Sokullu wrote a compelling post this week entitled Competing With Google Search. It lists all the ways that Google has an advantage over its search rivals, but there is also a suggestion that Google can be beat.
Another post to get a lot of comments was Top 10 Worst Web App Names. There was a fair amount of debate about our choices!
Other analysis posts this week:
- Web Apps We Love To Hate
- Feel Good: Top 10 Mood Apps and Visualizers
- Powerset and hakia – Quest For The Semantic Web
- Citizen Journalism Part 2, Localized News – Buffalo Rising and PerthNorg
- Google Leads the Way in Online Video
- 4 Years Ago Today – Netscape Corporation Killed, Mozilla Foundation Born
R/WW Network Blogs
Our Digital Lifestyle blog last100 featured part two of their series exploring Microsoft’s Internet TV strategy. They also reviewed Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) and posted an excellent analysis entitled Google wants to do for TV what it did for the Web. Also check out the week’s video podcast review, Revision3’s “InDigital”, a show all about gadgets.
Over on AltSearchEngines, featured posts include a review of Advertising Search Engines, an overview of charity search engines and an Op-Ed piece by editor Charles Knight entitled The 1% Solution (or “Who wants to be a Billionaire?”).
Startup Action
This week’s Startup of the Week is Streamy, a News Networking Service. Phil Butler explained that Streamy is a beautifully designed site with an intuitive Web 2.0 interface. Streamy users can share, view, filter and drag-and-drop news stories, while communicating via a very slick chat module. On the surface, Streamy appears to be a “next generation” news networking site – but is it? Read Phil’s post to find out.
Also check out Lachlan Hardy’s review of another hot startup, Pownce. It’s self-described as ‘a way to send stuff to your friends.’ You can send links, files, events and messages, each as a distinct type. The messages functionality has prompted comparisons to Twitter, but this is no presence/status application. Lachlan concluded that “Pownce has incredible potential as an application for sharing specific content with particular groups of contacts”, although from a usability perspective there are also a lot of flaws.
Other startups we profiled this week:
Poll
Our poll this week was of course Facebook-related. It asked: How many Facebook ‘friends’ do you have? As of writing, 1173 votes were cast over the week. Here are the results:
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Over 2000 1% (14 votes) 1001-1999 1% (8 votes) 501-1000 3% (37 votes) 101-500 25% (295 votes) 50-100 15% (179 votes) 1-49 31% (358 votes) Zero 3% (41 votes) I’m not a Facebook member 21% (241 votes)
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Most popular was 1-49 friends (31%), but a quarter have 101-500. 21% said they’re not a Facebook member (avoiding the hype?). I wonder who those 14 people are that have over 2000 friends? If you’re one of them, leave a comment here and tell us how you got to that amount.
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)