2006

This week there has been a slew of news about social networks and big companies ramping up their social software features. Here’s a quick summary of the latest news and some thoughts below. Apple Making Huge Social Software Push – Josh Porter digs into Apple releases to find a Wiki Server, iCal Calendar Sharing, iChat … Read more

Webmail.us has just released the fourth generation of its Web Email platform, replacing its legacy software with an AJAX framework. They’re promising their users “a markedly faster, better performing experience” with its new Ajax version. Webmail.us provides email hosting services to more than 23,000 small-medium businesses and is one of a number of smaller, niche … Read more

One of the more ambitious and innovative Web apps I’ve heard of recently is InnovAlarm, a Web-based platform for security, safety and health monitoring services. Although their website has little information about the product, InnovAlarm CTO David Albert sent me more details. He told me their aim is “to ‘Skype’ the security monitoring and home … Read more

While the pros and cons of P2P networks on the Web are still being debated, there are a number of private invite-only P2P networks (aka darknets) out there which enable users to get quality-approved media and software. They are decentralized, secret and almost certainly not very legal in their media-sharing activities. Many of them use … Read more

I’m really enjoying writing my series on international Web apps and I’ve gotten some great feedback that others are enjoying it too. The previous post about Russian Web apps has gotten the most interest so far, including from some people in Russia who took issue with it. The comments on my post are informative, but … Read more

US Web stats company Compete has some interesting analysis on how Social Networking sites compare to portals. From a sample size of around 2 million US people, Compete concludes that social networking sites are quickly approaching the traffic level of the big portals like Google and Yahoo. Their key findings: 1. In June, 2 out … Read more

Today I interviewed Geoffrey Arone, the co-founder of social Web browser Flock.com. Flock recently released its official beta, which they call version 0.7. They’re currently positioning their product as a mainstream browser which enables people to share and create online. Flock is specifically targeting people who use social networking media tools like MySpace and YouTube. … Read more

Next in my series on top Web apps in international markets is Russia. To remind you of the previous countries profiled: Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea and United Kingdom. Other country profiles coming soon include Spain, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand (if I can rustle up enough web apps from the NZ2.0 mailing list!), Latvia, China (I … Read more

Last night I published the first part of my interview with two senior Sun Microsystems engineers, Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview was to celebrate the 15th birthday of the Web this week. Several commenters on the Slashdot thread about my post said they’d prefer to get the … Read more

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web, today I interviewed two distinguished people from Sun Microsystems – Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). Sun of course was one of the key Web companies from the 90’s and is still going strong today, under the leadership of Jonathan … Read more

While I’ve been busy profiling international “web 2.0” startups and products, Techcrunch has put together a video documentary that explores web 2.0 in Silicon Valley. This seems to be aimed at mainstream business people, telling them what this web 2.0 thing is all about – and positioning the Techcrunch brand at the center of it. … Read more

The Animas Weblog has written a couple of interesting posts in response to Ebrahim Ezzy‘s Search 2.0 posts, featured on Read/WriteWeb recently (part 1 and part 2). In the first post, Animas frames his argument as a David vs Goliath struggle (the search 2.0 startups being, of course, David). Original image However in the Gospel … Read more

Engadget is providing superb coverage of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference, currently in progress in San Francisco. I’ll zero in on the bit that interested me the most – one of my hobby horses, widgets (mini web apps). At the conference Apple said there are currently 2500 widgets in Dashboard. They announced two enhancements … Read more

The latest Technorati State of the Blogosphere report shows that 39% of all blog postings are in english. Japanese is the second-most popular language, at 31% and China third with 12%. Here’s Technorati’s pie graph for June ’06: Dave Sifry notes that there are some significant underreporting issues, especially in Korean and in French. For … Read more

Continuing my series on international Web apps, today I’ll be covering the top products in the United Kingdom market. In case you missed it, over the past week or so I’ve reviewed Germany, Holland, Poland and Korea. This week I’ve got more great non-Silicon Valley startups for you! The information for today’s post about the … Read more