2007

Yesterday we published a 2007 review of the Web Office market. In that post I concluded that Google Apps was the leader in this space – but this point was disputed in the comments by CentralDesktop’s Isaac Garcia, who wrote that “real traction in the business world is yet to be seen or proven for … Read more

Over the next few weeks we’ll be reviewing a number of Web product categories on Read/WriteWeb, summarizing what’s happened in 2007 – and what to look forward to in 2008. We’re starting with the Web Office, a market that underwent a lot of changes this year. Our definition of Web Office is: A Web Office … Read more

The open identity system OpenID 2.0 was launched today at the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, after what Marshall Kirkpatrick recently described as “a long, long time of political infighting over either semi-relevant minutea or deal-breaking technical details.” The new version improves security and usability — and will hopefully be the catalyst for more … Read more

Today Technorati, one of the leading blog search engines along with Google Blog Search and Bloglines/Ask.com, launched a re-design. I chatted with new Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra today about it. He noted that the new design is about “going back to our roots” as a site for bloggers – but he also told me it’s … Read more

A couple of amazing stats have been released about mobile phone use. Firstly industry analyst Informa Telecoms & Media revealed recently that worldwide mobile penetration will hit 50 per cent – or around 3.3 billion subscriptions. Informa estimated that mobile networks covered 90 per cent of the global population by mid-2007. According to the Telecoms … Read more

Nominations are now open for the first annual Crunchies, the competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is a collaboration project between GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. It promises to be a great show! What I like about the Crunchies is … Read more

A well linked to post over the weekend was Andrew Miller’s notes on a Google Apps presentation. The main presenter was Scott Johnston, former VP of Product Development at JotSpot – one of my favorite Web Office apps that was acquired just over a year ago by Google, but has yet to be turned into … Read more

Back in August, we noted that most of the very big Facebook apps seem to be owned by Slide or RockYou!. At that point Slide had the most popular Facebook app (in terms of users), with Top Friends. However now RockYou!’s Super Wall app has overtaken Slide’s similar FunWall app for the #1 spot, with … Read more

Thanks to our sponsors for supporting Read/WriteWeb. We have an amazing line-up of sponsors, all supporting RWW’s mission to provide quality analysis about Web Technology. Compete is an online competitive intelligence service that combines site metrics and search analytics in one site. Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities. As well as … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Web News This week continued the recent theme of Google and Facebook dominating the news. Google … Read more

faberNovel Consulting has released a research paper on social networks. The paper is an excellent theoretical overview of social networks and the trends in this important market. I particularly liked the following two slides, showing the types of social networks and how they’re positioned. Interesting that in terms of identity, Facebook and MySpace are at … Read more

Google announced tonight that the new Blogger (nicknamed ‘Blogger in Draft’) will support OpenID-based commenting. Essentially it means that users of OpenID-enabled services – such as LiveJournal, WordPress and TypeKey – can comment on any Blogger blog using their accounts from those sites, rather than with Blogger/Google accounts. This is another small but significant step … Read more

One of the highlights of October’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was the emergence of ‘Semantic Apps’ as a force. Note that we’re not necessarily talking about the Semantic Web, which is the Tim Berners-Lee W3C led initiative that touts technologies like RDF, OWL and other standards for metadata. Semantic Apps may use those … Read more

Yesterday we noted the launch of a new Nasdaq stock market index tracking only Internet companies, called the NASDAQ Internet Index. The index (^QNET) will track a diverse range of companies covering “Internet access providers, Internet search engines, web hosting, website design, and Internet retail commerce.” The list is now available (thanks TraderMike). The leading … Read more

A new Forrester report by Erica Driver and Ron Rogowski suggests that rich Internet applications (RIAs) may usurp Microsoft Office and enterprise portals as the front-end UIs for “decision-makers and task-oriented workers”. The phrase Forrester uses for this front end is “Information Workplaces (IWs)”. RIAs in the enterprise; source: Forrester The report states that today, … Read more