Richard MacManus

At the Microsoft TechEd conference in Auckland on Monday, I got a chance to sit down with George Moore – GM for the Windows Live Developer Platform. He is of course based in Redmond, but was over in NZ for TechEd. I started off by asking George about the “largest blogging service on the planet” … Read more

I can’t resist posting an excerpt from the Tim Berners-Lee podcast with IBM. This should hopefully put the matter of ‘what is web 2.0’ to rest, permanantly: LANINGHAM: “You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting … Read more

Google’s just announced a potentially significant update to its Google Base product, by releasing a data API for it. This essentially means Google is opening up Google Base, their database of structured content and home for many different verticals currently (jobs, vehicles, classified). The official blog post states: “We’re excited to announce the availability of … Read more

IBM has a podcast with Tim Berners-Lee. In a conversation with Scott Laningham of IBM developerWorks, Sir Tim discusses his early history with the Web, opportunities and challenges of the present, emerging technologies, and of course the semantic web. Reading news on your mobile device – Another Web inventor, Dave Winer of RSS fame, is … Read more

Webwag is a new personalized start page set to be released at the end of this month. According to E-consultancy.com, it’s the latest creation of ex-Google France chief Franck Poisson – who says it “will move out of beta on August 28” and be officially announced in early September. More from E-Consultancy.com: “According to Poisson, … Read more

68% of New Zealand’s Internet traffic is to online auction site TradeMe, CEO Sam Morgan and Development Manager Rowan Simpson told me when I visited their Wellington office last Thursday. TradeMe is New Zealand’s version of eBay, even down to the color scheme. But it’s more than just an auction site now – over the … Read more

Today George Moore, GM of Windows Live, announced the Windows Live Contacts Gadget beta at the Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference, in Auckland New Zealand (I’m here at the conference courtesy of Microsoft NZ). Live Contacts provides programmatic access to a user’s contact list, providing secure access to 400+ M active users with 12B contact records. … Read more

This week I interviewed Microsoft’s Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for IE, to address the issue of Web standards compliance and IE7. There has been controversy about this lately, sparked by a Slashdot thread last week that claimed IE7 was basically non-compliant with CSS standards. I then repeated those claims on my ZDNet blog, … Read more

Next in my series on top international Web apps is Spain. The previous countries profiled were Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom and Russia. The information in this post comes from two people: Eduardo Perez Orue from the Spanish Virtual Desktop product EyeOS, plus a R/WW reader named Carlos (sorry I didn’t get his last … Read more

This week there has been a slew of news about social networks and big companies ramping up their social software features. Here’s a quick summary of the latest news and some thoughts below. Apple Making Huge Social Software Push – Josh Porter digs into Apple releases to find a Wiki Server, iCal Calendar Sharing, iChat … Read more

Webmail.us has just released the fourth generation of its Web Email platform, replacing its legacy software with an AJAX framework. They’re promising their users “a markedly faster, better performing experience” with its new Ajax version. Webmail.us provides email hosting services to more than 23,000 small-medium businesses and is one of a number of smaller, niche … Read more

One of the more ambitious and innovative Web apps I’ve heard of recently is InnovAlarm, a Web-based platform for security, safety and health monitoring services. Although their website has little information about the product, InnovAlarm CTO David Albert sent me more details. He told me their aim is “to ‘Skype’ the security monitoring and home … Read more

While the pros and cons of P2P networks on the Web are still being debated, there are a number of private invite-only P2P networks (aka darknets) out there which enable users to get quality-approved media and software. They are decentralized, secret and almost certainly not very legal in their media-sharing activities. Many of them use … Read more

I’m really enjoying writing my series on international Web apps and I’ve gotten some great feedback that others are enjoying it too. The previous post about Russian Web apps has gotten the most interest so far, including from some people in Russia who took issue with it. The comments on my post are informative, but … Read more

US Web stats company Compete has some interesting analysis on how Social Networking sites compare to portals. From a sample size of around 2 million US people, Compete concludes that social networking sites are quickly approaching the traffic level of the big portals like Google and Yahoo. Their key findings: 1. In June, 2 out … Read more