In October 2006 Google acquired the hottest online video property on the planet, YouTube. Later on that same month, news came out that the founders of Kazaa and Skype were building an Internet TV service, nicknamed The Venice Project (later named Joost). To underscore the point that online was Where It’s At, in December Read/WriteWeb … Read more

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. News The latter part of this week was dominated by the major outage suffered by popular VoIP product Skype. Also this week eBay stepped up … Read more

This week is Online Music Week at Read/WriteWeb, so I decided to check out how the leading music streaming services compared. I used this week’s poll to determine the top 5 apps. As of writing, the top 5 are quite a bit ahead of the the rest of the services in our poll. They are: … Read more

fav.or.it is a new type of RSS Reader currently in private beta, which aims to solve the long-standing issue of feed content being separated from commenting. The fav.or.it RSS Reader lets you read feed content and comment, all within the app. The comments can be two-way, meaning publishers can choose to aggregate fav.or.it comments into … Read more

Our poll this week asks: What is your favorite online music streaming service? So far, last.fm and Pandora have been engaged in an epic struggle – both have led the poll at various times during the week. As of now, last.fm has gone back into the lead. Here’s the top 5 so far: last.fm 32% … Read more

M:Metrics has released some interesting data about mobile social networking. It states that MySpace has the largest mobile network in the United States and UK, while MSN/Windows Live Spaces is preferred in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Overall 12.3 million consumers in the United States and Western Europe reported accessing a social networking site with … Read more

We just received a tipoff that Bolt.com, the online video site that settled a lawsuit with Universal in March, has ceased operations and closed its website. More on this as it develops, but for now this is the message on Bolt’s website: “Please be advised that the operations of Bolt, Inc. and Bolt.com have ceased. … Read more

last100 has an interesting post on Microsoft Points, a kind of virtual currency for the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Zune Marketplace. In a lot of ways, Microsoft Points act just like real money and functions in a similar way to Paypal. Mack D. Male wrote that “if you see a movie you want to … Read more

Web Office suite provider ThinkFree has announced it has hit the 1 Million mark in number of hosted documents, up from 654,000 in late February when we last reported ThinkFree’s usage. Their community uploads between 60,000 to 80,000 documents per month and currently ThinkFree has 335,000 users, up from the 250,000 in February. ThinkFree also … Read more

Six Apart has today announced the commercial release of Movable Type 4, just over two months since it was launched as a beta. MT4 is now the main product on the Movable Type homepage, replacing 3.x. Billed as “the largest release in the product’s history”, MT4 has new community management features and a completely re-designed … Read more

The Filter, a social music recommendation service backed by rock star Peter Gabriel, has released a new version of their software – featuring an improved user interface, a Facebook app and a partnership with Nokia. The Filter is a “playlist creation suite” for iTunes, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV. It works across Windows and Macintosh … Read more

A new study released today by the National School Boards Association shows that 96 percent of students with online access use social networking technologies – defined as as chatting, text messaging, blogging, and visiting online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Webkinz. 81 percent say they have visited a social networking Web site within the … Read more

This week’s Read/WriteWeb Files is about Online Music. And the whole R/WW family is contributing. Both AltSearchEngines and last100 have written posts on this theme. AltSearchEngines has listed their Top 10 Music Search Engines. There were a few I’d never heard of before, so go check it out if you’re a music fan. AltSearchEngines editor … Read more

div for entry content including hero We’ve started a new links blog here at Read/WriteWeb, called Web Tech News. As the name suggests, this mini-blog will cover Web Technology news on a daily basis. We’re focusing specifically on Web news, because that is our niche here at R/WW. We think this will be a handy … Read more

div for entry content including hero Today Microsoft announced a number of upgrades to its Windows Live Hotmail service, the web email product previously known as just Hotmail. Included in the upgrades is more storage – free users will get 5 GB and paid users will get 10 GB of Hotmail storage. The free 5GB … Read more