Facebook Week Update

This week is Facebook Week on Read/WriteWeb. Here we’ll re-cap the week so far and see what else is happening on other blogs. Firstly the Read/WriteWeb Facebook Group already has over 400 members, after just a few days. It’s open to anyone and you can join here. We’re currently looking at what apps to implement … Read more

Democracy Player Reborn as Miro

last100 has the scoop on the rebirth of the open source Internet TV application as Miro: Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) is an open-source Internet TV application that combines a media player and library, content guide, video search engine, as well as podcast and BitTorrent clients. Developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro aims … Read more

Citizen Journalism Part 2, Localized News – Buffalo Rising and PerthNorg

In our introductory post on Citizen Journalism (CJ), we reviewed Newsvine – an innovative and well-designed citizen journalism web site. In this post we’ll review two examples of ‘localized’ CJ: Buffalo Rising (Buffalo, New York) and PerthNorg (Perth, West Australia). A note for our Canadian readers: NowPublic is coming in a future post 🙂 Buffalo … Read more

How Open Is Facebook, Really?

When Facebook announced their “open platform” in May 2007, it suddenly became all the rage. Third party web app developers rushed to integrate their apps into this increasingly popular social network platform – and who could blame them? It makes sense for startups to have a presence on a platform that has tens of millions … Read more

Facebook Adds Ajax – Abandoning Page Views?

I noticed a small, but perhaps significant, change in Facebook tonight. Usually when you add more friends to your Facebook account, you need to land on 3 separate pages for each friend: 1) the Requests page; 2) a Request Confirmation/Skip This Step page (I always click ‘Skip This Step’), and finally 3) back to the … Read more

Facebook Week: Analyzing The Facebook Platform and Apps

This week is Facebook Week on Read/WriteWeb. Over the next 5 days we’re going to focus on the most impressive Web Company of 2007 – analyzing it and reporting on its top third party apps. To ‘launch’ Facebook Week, let’s review how this company turned itself into the leading web app platform on the Internet, … Read more

Top 10 Worst Web App Names

One aspect of Web 2.0 that continues to entertain is the strange, sometimes awful, names that startups come up with to promote themselves. Some of them turn out to be successful – e.g. del.icio.us – but others prove to be ineffective. Some web 2.0 names have been compared to Star Wars characters and there’s even … Read more

Weekly Wrapup, 9-13 July 2007

Sponsored by: 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. Top Web News After all the iphone buzz of the last couple of weeks, it was a relatively quiet week of web tech … Read more

The State of Citizen Journalism: Part 1, Newsvine

In the young but growing world of user-generated news, sites like digg and slashdot dominate in the tech sphere. In the political arena, it is mostly editorial-driven sites that do well – such as DrudgeReport, HuffingtonPost and RawStory. Those sites get a lot of attention, but there are also a lot of so-called “Citizen Journalism” … Read more

Can Google Be Beat? They Already Have Been in South Korea…

The International Herald Tribune had a good article recently about the search market in South Korea. It points out that local search company Naver.com has more than 77 percent of all Web searches originating in South Korea, according to Internet market research company KoreanClick. This is largely due to user-generated content – specifically Naver’s “Knowledge … Read more

History of Microsoft’s Internet TV Strategy

Our sister site last100 has started a 2-part series exploring Microsoft’s Internet TV strategy: There may not be another company as well-positioned to take advantage of the growth in IPTV as Microsoft. Despite being primarily a software company, Microsoft has long had a passion for television. The company launched the 24-hour cable news channel MSNBC … Read more

Is Blogging Dead?

That’s a dramatic and possibly even sarcastic headline, but it was derived from a real question asked in our current post comparing indie blog platforms Six Apart and Automattic. Commenter jm wrote: “the other vision is that blogging is dead vs myspace/facebook stuff. Where is the need for a individual expression tool when the whole … Read more