Tech analyst, AI & the web
I founded the tech blog ReadWriteWeb in April 2003 and ran it until October 2012. During my time running the business, it was well known for its cutting edge content (“What’s next on the Web”) and its influential global audience. At its peak, RWW was ranked among the top ten blogs in the world by Technorati.
This category contains all of the articles I personally wrote for RWW, now archived on ricmac.org for easier browsing and search. If you’d like to explore the original context, you can also view a year-by-year archive with links to the Wayback Machine
At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week, Google held a special press roundtable with Google co-founder Sergey Brin and SVP of Engineering for Google Plus Vic Gundotra. As he had been earlier in the day, Gundotra was relentlessly upbeat about the performance of Google Plus. Yet there continues to be a frustrating … Read more
One of the talking points of Mary Meeker’s presentation at Web 2.0 Summit yesterday was the future of sound. Meeker claimed that sound would soon be bigger than video on the Web. Specifically, she name-checked Spotify, Siri and SoundCloud. Siri is already a part of Apple, but the other two startups are independent. One of … Read more
Every time I come to a Web 2.0 conference, Mary Meeker’s presentation is what I most look forward to! She’s been doing them for eight years now and they’re always big on data, long on vision. You can view the presentation below, along with real-time notes taken while Meeker spoke. Mobile has been a big … Read more
One of the more interesting presentations this morning at Web 2.0 Summit was Moneyball for the Consumer Web, from Aileen Lee of the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Lee used the Michael Lewis book, Moneyball, as inspiration for how to improve a consumer Web startup. Moneyball is the real-life story of Billy Beane, … Read more
Last week Facebook launched an iPad app, along with improved versions of its iPhone app and mobile browser site (m.facebook.com). The mobile site is based on the latest, interactive version of HTML (HTML5). If browsed on the iPad, it looks almost identical to the iPad app. However, there is still a significant difference between the … Read more
The term “Web 2.0” became synonymous with the emergence, over 2004-05, of social services like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Flickr. It was coined in 2004 by O’Reilly Media for the inaugural Web 2.0 Conference, held in October 2004. At the time, Web 2.0 was meant to convey the beginning of a second major era in … Read more
Earlier today, the tech world was rocked by the sad news that Steve Jobs had died. I’d like to pay tribute to Steve Jobs, on behalf of ReadWriteWeb, for what he brought to the Web world. There will be hundreds of different tributes written by many tech publications – deservedly so, as Steve Jobs had … Read more
One of the announcements from today’s Apple event was iCloud, described as “a set of free [with iOS5] cloud services that work with your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices.” In other words, iCloud is a file synchronization … Read more
Dropbox, the online file sync and sharing service, was recently named 5th in a list of the The World’s Most Valuable Startups by Business Insider. To put that in context, the only 4 companies ranked above Dropbox were (in order of valuation): Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter. Dropbox was listed above the likes of Wikipedia, … Read more
One of the most controversial aspects of Facebook’s re-design announcements last week was the introduction of “frictionless sharing.” That’s Facebook’s term for when something you are reading, listening to or watching is automatically shared to your Facebook Timeline. Up till now, sharing on the social Web has largely been a manual process. You click a … Read more
“We’re not a social network, we’re an information network.” That’s what Twitter’s vice president of engineering, Michael Abbott, told the crowd at Mobilize 2011 this week. That isn’t new branding, Twitter has been denying it’s a social network since at least a year ago. It all dates back to November 2009, when Twitter changed the … Read more
The term “Web 2.0” isn’t often used these days, but it signifies the era of the Web in which social, read/write technologies came to the fore. Google was the golden child in Web 2.0, whereas Facebook is the equivalent today in the ‘Social Media’ era. Regardless of the terminology, the leading Internet companies of today … Read more
After the emergence of Google Plus this year, many people were wondering if Facebook had finally met its match. Maybe that’s so, but Facebook has upped the ante over the past couple of weeks. It has significantly scaled up the amount of information it tracks about you – and many millions of other people. The … Read more
While the focus of today’s Facebook announcements was the new Timeline profile, the Read, Watch, Listen media sharing apps have generated a lot of interest too. These so-called “social apps” haven’t been widely launched yet, but you can get a sense of what they will do by adding a couple of brand new newspaper social … Read more
The biggest announcement at Facebook’s f8 event in San Francisco today was a radical new profile design. Called Timeline, the new design turns your profile into a colorful, easily searchable timeline of your entire life – at least the parts of it on Facebook. The Timeline won’t go live until a few weeks, but you … Read more