2006

Last week I was briefed about a new product just released by Gotuit, called SceneMaker. It enables people to cut up and tag videos from platforms like YouTube or Metacafe. SceneMaker essentially allows users to embed e.g. a YouTube video in a Gotuit page, then add metadata around it. I was impressed with the usablity … Read more

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. We wrote recently about the renewed web browser war between Microsoft and Mozilla (and some other, smaller, usually very innovative players). Our theory is that in 2006 a lot of the ground work for a major battle was laid out. Microsoft launched a significant upgrade to … Read more

As a follow-up to our previous post covering the top Web Trends of 2006, we’d like to get your vote for Best Internet Bigco of 2006. Long-time R/WW readers will know that at the end of each year we write a post noting our top Web companies of the year. In 2005 the best bigco … Read more

It’s December already and so it’s about that time to reflect on what has happened in Web Technology during 2006 – and ponder what 2007 may bring. Over the next few weeks Read/WriteWeb is going to publish some in-depth posts analyzing the trends and new products we’ve seen in 2006, as well as musing on … Read more

Later today Firefox will begin broadcasting, for the first time, four “fan-produced” commercials on prime time television. Initially the ads will only run in the San Francisco and Boston regions, but this will be expanded over time. The 4 video ads are a sampling of approximately 300 clips which were submitted to Mozilla’s Firefox Flicks … Read more

Spotted on the Google homepage today, using the IE browser, was this blazing advertisement for Firefox: (click image for full screenshot) While Google has advertised Firefox on its homepage before, it was a co-promotion of Firefox with the Google Toolbar. This current advertisement is for Firefox alone. But what does “Optimized for Google” mean??! The … Read more

Adam Carstens from the Attention Company emailed today to tell me about some new research they’ve just published. It’s a report entitled “Out There” and surveys the attitudes of people who participate in online communities. Here is the report as a PDF. I’d not heard of them before, but the Attention Company is made up … Read more

Web metrics firm Compete has an interesting post, outlining the top 20 websites (for US traffic). According to Compete, all 20 of them got over 20 million unique visitors in October 2006. Here is the chart: A couple of people noted in the comments that if you add Microsoft’s 4 top 20 properties together (msn.com, … Read more

While looking through Mary Meeker’s 2006 Web 2.0 Summit presentation, I was struck by the figures on page 19: “Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic was 60% (and rising) of Internet traffic in 2004, with BitTorrent accounting for 30% of traffic, per CacheLogic”. You can definitely see why this is the case, as P2P is normally used to … Read more

Today Microsoft released a beta of Live Search Books, its competitor to Google Book Search. The content inside Live Search Books isn’t that modern – it basically only includes out-of-copyright books. As the Live Search team noted, this release “makes tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books available from our library scanning initiative, including books from … Read more

Online video sharing sites are a dime a dozen these days, but a newly launched one caught my eye this week. Coull.tv promises to enable users to search inside videos – to find specific segments within a video that they want to view – as well as interact with “moving objects” inside the video. You … Read more

Zoho recently released a set of APIs that lets anyone write their own program to use Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet data [disclosure: Zoho is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb]. As Matthew Ingram explained, it “means that other companies — online storage providers such as Box.net, Carbonite or Mozy, for example — can easily build support … Read more

John Milan’s latest article for Read/WriteWeb explores the evolving software environment, with particular focus on Microsoft and Google. The article gets us to thinking: is Google the latest manifestation of an Internet bubble, or is it really different this time? Although comparing two different decades is a little dangerous, perhaps even silly, we can’t help … Read more

Recently I came across a new magazine that is delivered via the Web – and utilizes a lot of Web native functionality in the process. It’s called Avantoure and the tagline is “life is a game”. The contents of the magazine appeal to me, but in this post I’ll focus mainly on the web technologies … Read more

Via Geekzone comes news of a 3D shopping mall, called The Mall Plus, that has just been released in New Zealand. After seeing this, memories of the mid to late 90’s came flooding back to me – a time when websites built on real world metaphors filled the Web landscape. For example the very first … Read more