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
An alternative search engine launched last night. It’s called Cuil and, if you’re a reader of tech blogs and/or the New York Times, you’ve no doubt been hammered with the news all day. We checked Cuil out and had a mixed user experience, as did most of the commenters in the post. So it’s a … Read more
If there’s a hot new social media trend happening, you can bet that companies are trying to find a way to use it too. It happened of course with blogging, it happened with Twitter, and it is now happening with FriendFeed and other lifestreaming apps. UPDATE: On August 16, 2008 ReadWriteWeb was sent a letter … Read more
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the changing face of the blogging landscape. On one hand many bloggers have turned to the likes of FriendFeed and Twitter to express themselves, instead of their blogs. On the other hand we have a group of professional blogs that are becoming more and more like … Read more
It’s time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we compared Nokia and Apple in the Internet mobile phone market, explored the new-look Facebook, checked out MySpace’s moves to open up, and reviewed new products from Google and Microsoft. On the trends side we looked at what’s beyond the API, … Read more
We received an interesting email from the social network Multiply, saying that Facebook’s new design is “the latest in a series of enhancements that bear striking resemblance to innovations made by Multiply months earlier.” Multiply accuses Facebook of copying it, saying that it has evidence of “a pattern of Multiply’s social networking innovations being implemented … Read more
Earlier today Corvida set a difficult challenge for RWW readers, based on a new service called 12Seconds.tv. The challenge is to say “ReadWriteWeb” 5 times really fast in 12 seconds or less. Now, it’s well known that the name ‘ReadWriteWeb’ is a tongue twister – even I have trouble pronouncing it at times, and I … Read more
Our network blog last100 has an interesting interview with Nicolas Gramlich, founder of anddev.org – an online community for Android developers. As editor Steve O’Hear notes in his intro, there have been issues with Google’s mobile OS of late – an incomplete and buggy SDK, favoritism towards select developers, lack of transparency, and concerns that … Read more
We’ve been as excited as everyone else about the iPhone 3G. But it’s easy to forget that the iphone is just a tiny player in the mobile phone market. Even if it hits Steve Jobs’ target of 10 million iphone sales by end of 2008, that will still be less than 1% of the mobile … Read more
Today’s big news is that Amazon’s S3 online storage service has experienced significant downtime. Allen Stern, who hosts his blog’s images on S3, reported that the downtime lasted3.5 over 6 hours. Startups that use S3 for their storage, such as SmugMug, have also reported problems. Back in February this same thing happened. At the time … Read more
It’s time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we continued our ongoing analysis of the iPhone 3G and its accompanying App Store, we looked closely at a Gmail update to its contact management system, covered the US launch of Microsoft Live Mesh, and reported on a developer revolt with … Read more
As mentioned earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb is partnering with a couple of conferences this year and one of them is DEMOfall 08, the long-running launchpad for startups. DEMOfall 08 is on September 7-9 in San Diego. They’re just announced the sessions, including a “head-to-head” between tech reporters Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of All Things … Read more
Today online music service last.fmreleased the new design they’ve been working on since May. At first glance it looks quite different to the Facebook-like UI that we saw in the beta in June. However as we noted in our review of the beta last month, the beta UI was much criticized – so the fresh … Read more
There are a lot of tech conferences these days and we at ReadWriteWeb get many emails asking us to promote them. We’ve happily done so in the past, but there are now too many events to keep up with. So this year we’ve decided to partner with a couple of conferences in particular: Defrag and … Read more
Today we did our fourth RWW Live podcast, which we’re running fortnightly on the TalkShoe platform. Today we devoted the whole episode to the iPhone, with a segue at one point into Foocamp (Marshall went to that). Participants in today’s RWW Live were: ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati, Steve O’Hear from our network blog last100, myself, … Read more
This week’s prediction is about (what else) the iPhone. We’re asking: How many total units of the iPhone will Apple sell in 2008?. For background, Apple sold 2.3 million units in Q1 2008 and 1.7 million units in Q2 2008. Today Apple announced it’s already sold 1 million 3G units. In 2007 Steve Jobs said … Read more