Richard MacManus

The new combined Writely (online word processing) and Google Spreadsheets interface has just gone live, under the name Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The Writely.com site now re-directs to http://docs.google.com and the Writely brand has been replaced by the usual no-frills Google brand. The homepage allows you to tag and sort your files. There are also … Read more

Both Google and Zoho will be announcing new office product offerings at tomorrow’s Office 2.0 conference. Steve Bryant from eWeek reports: “Google will announce tomorrow at the Office 2.0 conference a new product called Google Docs, which will merge Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a collaboration and document management solution, according to sources.” Google Docs … Read more

With Microsoft’s IE7 just around the corner and the other big Internet companies upgrading key information management products, 2007 is going to be the ‘make it or break it’ year for RSS. Fergus Burns noted these 4 key platforms, which are all set to ramp up over the next 6-12 months (my notes added): 1. … Read more

Co-written with Neeraj Kumar of India Upcoming It’s an exciting time for the economy in India, which is also reflected in its Web market. India has 1.1 Billion people and the average age of the nation is just 24.9 years. The Indian GDP is growing at 8% + and after years of dependence on the … Read more

Well turns out the speculation, which was first reported on Techcrunch on Friday, was true. Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65 Billion in stock. Out of all the reports, the thing that most strikes me is how much Google believes video is the future of the Internet. As Paul Kedrosky put it in his excellent … Read more

For those of us who can’t make the Office 2.0 conference, there is an Office 2.0 Podcast Jam running all this week. I contributed a 5-minute podcast, which was chosen as the keynote to kick off the jam. My topic was: Why Web Office Software is a New Paradigm, Different from Desktop Office Software. I’m … Read more

Zoho announced during the weekend the Zoho Single Sign-on (SSO), which allows existing users to merge their different Zoho services accounts into one. As of now the Zoho Single Sign-on currently covers the following 6 services: Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Creator, Zoho Planner and Zoho Chat. I asked AdventNet CEO Sridhar Vembu … Read more

For those busy souls who don’t have time to read blogs on a regular basis, here are the highlights from Read/WriteWeb this week. It turned out to be a Social Networking special, with a lot of our posts devoted to the future of social networks. Google SNS integration The founders of Dodgeball and Orkut met … Read more

Just a bit of admin: we’ve now introduced RSS feeds for comments onto Read/WriteWeb. On each post you’ll see a “Subscribe to comments for this post” link (just under the Comments header). If you want to subscribe to comments for all posts, there is a single feed for that: http://www.readwriteweb.com/comments.xml I’m hoping this makes it … Read more

Interesting LA Times article about how Google is re-focusing on improving and integrating its current products, rather than pumping out new products willy-nilly. Included in the article is this quote about ‘Google Office’: “The initiative’s primary goal is to make Google products easier to use, especially by packaging disparate products. For example, said Chief Executive … Read more

To continue our interview series on VCs and next generation web, today we speak to Neil Rimer – a co-founder and General Partner of Index Ventures. Neil’s firm Index Ventures is probably best known in the web 2.0 world for investing in these innovative VoIP or WiFi services: Skype, Rebtel and FON. They also have … Read more

Polldaddy, the online poll tool I’ve been testing out in private beta here on R/WW, has just launched as a public beta. It has one of the best designs I’ve come across in a while, with functionality to match. Not only does it make it simple to create polls to include on your blog or … Read more

Ektron and SitePoint did a survey of 5,000 web developers over the US summer, and have just released the results in a report entitled The State of Web Development 2006/2007. It’s packed full of useful data, even in the 25-page preview (which is free). The bits that particularly interested me were the following two charts, … Read more

I recently interviewed del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, who is now with Yahoo after the popular social bookmarking service was acquired last December. Joshua was recently named as top innovator of the year by MIT Technology Review Magazine. Tagging is one example of an innovation that del.icio.us pioneered (at least in its current form). Joshua told … Read more

Thanks once again to Read/WriteWeb’s excellent sponsors, who I’m very grateful to for supporting the aims and ideals of this blog. The goal of R/WW is to provide quality analysis about web technology – and we think this focus on quality reflects very well on our sponsors. It also (may I say) leads to insightful … Read more