2007

With the attention-grabbing headling Social Networking Goes Global, comScore has released its latest stats on the large social network sites. According to comScore, MySpace is over twice as large as its nearest rival, Facebook. Both Facebook and Bebo have had extraordinary growth over the past year (270% and 172% respectively): These are interesting stats which … Read more

Next generation internet messaging product Tangler has just announced embedding and integration functionality. Tangler is a tool for enabling real-time discussions anywhere on the web. It’s part forum, part IM – a hybrid product that uses web services. Tangler is still in beta – and has been for some time. In fact there’s a Tangler … Read more

Most Web users probably use at least one Yahoo product on a regular basis. So as part of our 100 Days For Yahoo week, let’s take a look at 10 that are among the leaders in their particular market segment, or are particularly innovative. These are subjective selections, because it’s almost impossible to use objective … Read more

Read/WriteWeb network blog AltSearchEngines has launched a fascinating series today. It’s a 3-part series attempting to define what is a search engine. While it’s focused on 2007, the series will also address what a search engine might look like in the future. The first part, entitled What is a Search Engine?, is written by Nitin … Read more

Following the success of Facebook Week, every week on Read/WriteWeb we are going to focus on a particular Web Technology topic and investigate it. We’ll write 4-5 feature posts on each topic, run a poll, and also revisit past R/WW posts on the subject. We’re calling this new feature the Read/WriteWeb Files. This week we’ve … Read more

Lending Club is an online lending community where people can borrow and lend money, bypass the banks, and supposedly get better rates. What’s really interesting about this is that Lending Club operates entirely via Facebook. It is a Facebook community and does not operate as a standalone website (although they have plans to). Read/WriteWeb listed … Read more

Alex Iskold wrote a great post on his company’s blog, outlining conference tips for startups. It is written from a vendor or sponsor’s point of view and makes for interesting reading. Alex definitely recommends ETech, SXSW. He gives a firm “maybe” to TechCrunch Party, Web 2.0 Expo, Web 2.0 Summit, Defrag, Blog World, AJAXWorld. His … Read more

A new Forrester report states that Instant Messenging (IM) is by far the most valuable ‘web 2.0’ tool for enterprises: “Web 2.0 tools and technologies are the latest in a long line of technologies that have taken root with consumers who then smuggle them into the business world. IM is one notable example. To this … Read more

Sponsor: 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. News It was a relatively quiet week in terms of Web technology news. Perhaps the most exciting thing to happen was an ‘old media’ … Read more

Web Office suite vendor ThinkFree has offered 50 invites to get into the ThinkFree Premium closed beta. The first 50 respondees who send an email to the inbox readwriteweb@thinkfree.com will get a fully-licensed version of ThinkFree Premium to evaluate. I’m not sure at this point how long the evaluation period is, so I’ve sent an … Read more

Tim Bray announced today on his blog that the Atom Publishing Protocol, a way to create and update Web resources, is “done”. He wrote: “Atom is done. Now the editorial processes grind away and eventually the official specification of the Atom Publishing Protocol will be an RFC substantially identical to draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-17; it’ll join RFC4287 as … Read more

I resisted the headline ‘Desktop RSS Readers Are Dead’, but our latest poll of which methods people use to read RSS feeds is showing a clear trend – more people are using browser-based RSS Readers and less are using desktop Readers. This week’s poll is almost identical to a poll we did 6 months ago, … Read more

Today Nokia has acquired the media sharing service Twango. Twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media. Read/WriteWeb wrote an in-depth profile of Twango back in January, in a post entitled Twango Tackles Lucrative Media Sharing Market. Well it turns out it was a … Read more

Today I spotted a link on YouTube to “Try out the NEW (beta) version of this page!”. Clicking through, I saw a fresh design for their video pages – not a huge re-design, but there were some subtle improvements. The main navigation and theme is largely the same, but links have been re-ordered, usability had … Read more

Last night we broke the news that web hosting company Media Temple is bringing virtualization to Dedicated Physical Servers, with its Nitro product. Today there is further virtualization news, with HP acquiring two companies in this domain: a $1.6 billion acquisition of Opsware (which Netscape founder Marc Andreessen co-founded, under the name LoudCloud) and a … Read more