In our post Social Networks Will Be Tomorrow’s iTunes, Sarah Perez reported on new research indicating that social networks have the potential to be the content distribution platforms of tomorrow. “MySpace the next iTunes?”, said Sarah, “It’s coming.” However commenter Rian from DailySplice.com thinks it should be the other way round: iTunes to become social … Read more

We’ve just spotted the new Facebook privacy options in the wild. As we wrote earlier this week, “the new privacy features will increase the granular control that Facebook has been known for. Users will now have the option of showing private information, including photos, to only specific friends (entered one at a time or by … Read more

Today’s winning comment comes from Aziz Poonawalla, from our post What Happens When WiFi Goes Away? Aziz wrote that “the future of web access will be 802.11n in the home and office (assuming it ever gets out of draft!) and WiMax everywhere else.” Congratulations Aziz, you’ve won a $30 Amazon voucher – courtesy of our … Read more

Blog search engine Blogdigger will be announcing shortly that it has been acquired by SonicMountain, parent company of Odeo – the podcast network that is currently being rebuilt as a full-fledged platform for digital media. Blogdigger’s aggregation and media search technology is being integrated into the new Odeo, and Blogdigger founder and CEO Greg Gershman … Read more

Semantic search engine hakia is announcing today, at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, that it is licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology to other companies. This will enable third parties to build semantic search applications. The first such customer to be made public is RiverGlass, Inc, a provider of real-time analytics. RiverGlass will … Read more

Sarah Perez wrote today: “When Amazon introduced their e-book reader, the Kindle, Steve Jobs made a strong proclamation regarding the book industry that received a lot of attention: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore […]” As it turns out, he was only half-right. … Read more

Slideshare is growing and may even have become the leading pure play online presentations app [Update:Zoli Erdos points out in the comments that Slideshare doesn’t allow you to create online presentations, only share them – which is a key point that I forgot to mention initially]. Two years ago I lamented the shortage of ‘online … Read more

Last week was arguably a tipping point for FriendFeed, the lifestreaming app that aggregates all of your social feeds together. FriendFeed first came to our attention in early February, when Sean Ammirati interviewed the founders on our podcast show ReadWriteTalk. At the end of February FriendFeed officially launched, then at SXSW it gained momentum, and … Read more

Today’s winning comment comes from Brad Garland, from our post Health Care at SXSW – Health Getting Hot With Tech Crowd. Brad asked an open question: “Why can’t we do an OpenEMR system like we are doing for authentication (OpenID). Be able to transfer and control your medical record personally instead of having the doctors … Read more

Yahoo Buzz is a social media experiment by Yahoo! that is currently in a closed beta. We found out today what kind of boost Buzz is giving the current selected blogs and news sources – Muhammad Saleem wrote that it is giving publishers huge bumps in both traffic and comments. Muhammad, you’ll recall, wrote on … Read more

We have 2 comment of the day prizes to give out today, and they both come from our post Ten Sites for Finding Wonderful Things. Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick, it was a list of 10 “online bricolage” websites – i.e. the art of assembling diverse found objects. Sites like Kottke.org (which recently celebrated 10 years … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. It’s been a busy week, with a RWW interview with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, iPhone analysis aplenty, a special look at Web visualization, reviews of Semantic Apps Twine and Reuters Open Calais, and much more. And don’t forget to click through to our website … Read more

This week there’s been a fair bit of action in the Internet TV sector, with announcements from Hulu, Joost and TiVo. Our network blog last100 has been covering the action. This week Hulu – the online video project from Newscorp and NBC/Universal, with participation by Sony, MGM and others (our previous coverage) – launched to … Read more

Over the past couple of days we’ve had two in-depth posts on the theme of visualization. This is one of our trends to watch this year; and so these posts are well worth your time reading (and viewing!). Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload and Sarah Perez wrote The Best Tools … Read more

The big news today is that US portal giant AOL acquired leading social networking site Bebo for $850 million. There has been a lot of coverage about the business aspects of this deal, but from a product view I don’t think this will make much headway for either company. Bebo is a distant third to … Read more