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
A well linked to post over the weekend was Andrew Miller’s notes on a Google Apps presentation. The main presenter was Scott Johnston, former VP of Product Development at JotSpot – one of my favorite Web Office apps that was acquired just over a year ago by Google, but has yet to be turned into … Read more
Back in August, we noted that most of the very big Facebook apps seem to be owned by Slide or RockYou!. At that point Slide had the most popular Facebook app (in terms of users), with Top Friends. However now RockYou!’s Super Wall app has overtaken Slide’s similar FunWall app for the #1 spot, with … Read more
Thanks to our sponsors for supporting Read/WriteWeb. We have an amazing line-up of sponsors, all supporting RWW’s mission to provide quality analysis about Web Technology. Compete is an online competitive intelligence service that combines site metrics and search analytics in one site. Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities. As well as … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Web News This week continued the recent theme of Google and Facebook dominating the news. Google … Read more
faberNovel Consulting has released a research paper on social networks. The paper is an excellent theoretical overview of social networks and the trends in this important market. I particularly liked the following two slides, showing the types of social networks and how they’re positioned. Interesting that in terms of identity, Facebook and MySpace are at … Read more
Google announced tonight that the new Blogger (nicknamed ‘Blogger in Draft’) will support OpenID-based commenting. Essentially it means that users of OpenID-enabled services – such as LiveJournal, WordPress and TypeKey – can comment on any Blogger blog using their accounts from those sites, rather than with Blogger/Google accounts. This is another small but significant step … Read more
One of the highlights of October’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was the emergence of ‘Semantic Apps’ as a force. Note that we’re not necessarily talking about the Semantic Web, which is the Tim Berners-Lee W3C led initiative that touts technologies like RDF, OWL and other standards for metadata. Semantic Apps may use those … Read more
Yesterday we noted the launch of a new Nasdaq stock market index tracking only Internet companies, called the NASDAQ Internet Index. The index (^QNET) will track a diverse range of companies covering “Internet access providers, Internet search engines, web hosting, website design, and Internet retail commerce.” The list is now available (thanks TraderMike). The leading … Read more
A new Forrester report by Erica Driver and Ron Rogowski suggests that rich Internet applications (RIAs) may usurp Microsoft Office and enterprise portals as the front-end UIs for “decision-makers and task-oriented workers”. The phrase Forrester uses for this front end is “Information Workplaces (IWs)”. RIAs in the enterprise; source: Forrester The report states that today, … Read more
The Read/WriteWeb Job Board provides job opportunities for Web Technology and New Media professionals, at startups and tech firms all over the world. If you’re looking for the smartest and most innovative staff, people who are one step ahead of the rest – then you’ll find those people in the Read/WriteWeb community! Here are just … Read more
Last Monday I found out from my doctor that I have Diabetes (probably Type 1; I need more tests to confirm), which basically means high blood sugar. It was quite a surprise, as I have no family history of diabetes and it is relatively uncommon to get Type 1 diabetes in your 30’s. However, I … Read more
The NY Times has another of those ‘Mobile Web isn’t living up to the hype’ articles that have become so familiar since, oh, the late 90’s when WAP came onto the scene. The NYT quotes statistics from Rethink Research, stating that data will make up only 12 percent of average mobile phone revenue per user … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Note: This is a shortened version of the Wrapup, due to Thanksgiving in the US. Here … Read more
Indian company InstaColl today formally launchedLive Documents, a mini-office suite of products similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Live Documents has already received plenty of press coverage, mainly because it was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia – the man who famously sold web mail service Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million in 1998. Live Documents was … Read more
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, today published a blog post about what he terms the Graph, which is similar (if not identical) to his Semantic Web vision. Referencing both Brad Fitzpatrick’s influential post earlier this year on Social Graph, and our own Alex Iskold’s analysis of Social Graph concepts, Berners-Lee went on … Read more