2007

This week is Online Video Week at R/WW, so our network blog AltSearchEngines went out and found the leading video search engines on the Web. Following is the list that ASE editor Charles Knight came up with – he used Google Video as the benchmark. What is your favorite video search engine? Let us know … Read more

Today the NY Times announced its new personalized start page, called My Times. As with existing ‘start pages’, such as My Yahoo, Pageflakes and Netvibes, My Times is a way to create a personal homepage for news and mini web apps – by adding RSS feeds and other widgets. With My Times you can also … Read more

Alex Iskold’s latest post coins a new term: The Digestion Phase. Alex says that the latest wave of technology, which started in early 2003, has peaked: “We have entered a digestion phase. It is not a burst, nor a recession. Rather, a digestion phase is a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, … Read more

This is Online Video Week at Read/WriteWeb and the folks at Yahoo pinged us about a new inline video player on Yahoo.com. It’s just been rolled out along with a new ‘video’ module, allowing people to watch videos without leaving the page. Users can also see related videos, and email or IM interesting videos to … Read more

Earlier this week a Sydney Morning Herald article claimed that Facebook “may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year.” The quote is from an analytics firm called SurfControl, in a report which calculated “that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There … Read more

Conduit Labs, a stealth startup that is building a mix between social networks and “immersive online gaming”, today announced a $5.5 million Series A investment from Charles River Ventures (CRV) and Prism VentureWorks. Unfortunately we weren’t able to get any screenshots of the product, but the promise of a totally new form of social network … Read more

Tafiti is a new experimental search site from Microsoft. It has rich visualizations and aims to meet the needs of people doing research on the Web. Tafiti runs on the Silverlight browser plug-in platform (Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash) and requires you to install Silverlight if you haven’t already. The underlying search engine is Microsoft’s … Read more

YouTube has come to define the new era of online video, so let’s take a look at their most popular videos of all time. I was expecting something like lonelygirl15 or the original menthos coke video to be number 1. But no, the most popular video of all time on YouTube, so far, has been … Read more

There are two seemingly divergent themes in the Web Office world currently: 1) office software is increasingly heading online, in the form of products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Zoho and ThinkFree; 2) web apps are increasingly adding offline functionality. The reason for the ‘bob each way’ is that broadband service is not yet ubiquitous … Read more

Social networking startup CollectiveX has just launched a new product called Groupsites. TechCrunch has the details of Groupsites, noting that it’s a combination of discussion forums, email lists, calendars and social networks. Groupsites are free to use and there are privacy options. Current use cases include membership groups and clubs, social networks, and company Intranets … Read more

Adobe today announced the latest version of its near ubiquitous Web video software, Adobe Flash Player 9. It’s codenamed Moviestar, because it includes H.264 standard video support’ the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players. In other words, the quality of video has been substantially improved from the previous version of … Read more

Since launching a few weeks ago, the people search engine Spock is experiencing very heavy traffic – according to the company and also external measures like Alexa. Spock is currently rated number 1 on the Movers and Shakers page on Alexa. Other Alexa stats indicate that the site is experiencing good growth in France, Germany, … Read more

Google China has released a Q&A; site, in partnership with Tianya Club. The Make Meaning blog notes that Tianya Club was founded in 1999 and is one of the most popular discussion forums in China. Tianya has almost 20 million registered users, 80% of whom are 18-35 years old. As we wrote in July, social … Read more

A July Pew report indicated that 57% of U.S. internet users have watched videos online and most of them share what they find with others. The 18-29 age group, at 76%, watches the most online video. Our network blog last100 further reported that 19% of adults watch online video on a typical day. News is … Read more

In October 2006 Google acquired the hottest online video property on the planet, YouTube. Later on that same month, news came out that the founders of Kazaa and Skype were building an Internet TV service, nicknamed The Venice Project (later named Joost). To underscore the point that online was Where It’s At, in December Read/WriteWeb … Read more