2007

By the end of this week, the Thunderbird 2.0 Release Candidate will be launched. Thunderbird is Mozilla’s open source desktop email client, similar to Microsoft Outlook in features. However with the 2.0 release, Thunderbird takes on more Web functionality from the Firefox browser (more on that below). Thunderbird is cross-platform and it works on Mac, … Read more

Peepel.com today announced the Beta launch of its Online Office Suite, entering a competitive market alongside existing vendors like Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra – not to mention Google’s growing Web Office suite. Peepel claims to differentiate itself by being “the only competitor offering a true multiple windows system in an online desktop.” Users can open as … Read more

In an attempt to go beyond page views and visits, today web stats company Compete introduced “Attention metrics”. The reason is that interactive Web page technologies such as Ajax and Flash – not to mention online video – are making simple page views and visits increasingly outdated. With Ajax for example, information on a webpage … Read more

Slashdot is running a story stating that Morfik, an Ajax development platform we covered recently on Read/WriteWeb, has filed a patent dated September 2005 for the compiling of high-level languages into AJAX apps. The timing of the news is interesting, because Morfik is just about to release its version 1.0 – after 8 or more … Read more

The big news today is that EMI Music announced a new higher quality DRM-free music download offering. It is a premium service, covering EMI’s entire digital catalogue, and will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms. Steve Jobs of Apple was there at the announcement, to emphasize that iTunes supports the … Read more

This week’s poll is a companion to a thought-provoking post co-written by Emre Sokullu and Charles Knight. The post is a review of alt search engine Quintura, which differentiates itself with clustering technology. But there is a larger question: can search engines such as Quintura, that rely on UI innovation, really be competitive with Google? … Read more

Google always has good April Fools jokes and this year is no exception…. More info here. Classic. Who needs a Web Office after all… But wait there’s more, Google has also ‘launched’ Project teaspoon. A.K.A. TiSP, which stands for “Toilet Internet Service Provider”. It’s described: “Introducing Google TiSP (BETA), our new FREE in-home wireless broadband … Read more

Like many other web 2.0 geeks, today I woke up to Mike Arrington’s elaborate April Fools joke that Techcrunch has acquired infamous dot com site F**kedCompany.com. It actually is 1 April where I live, but it wasn’t until I had finished reading the article that I realised it was probably an April Fools joke (thanks … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Analysis Posts This week Charles Knight released the March edition of his Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. As usual the list provoked a flurry of comments, with the Search Engine of the Month KoolTorch coming under a bit of scrutiny (mostly for being … Read more

Desktop On Demand (DOD) is the latest WebOS to come onto the market. It is a free “online desktop service” that lets you access your desktop remotely. DOD comes with 1GB of free disk space, with extra space available for a fee. DOD is aiming to go beyond simply being a virtual desktop – it … Read more

BlogRovr is an interesting new way of getting blog information, on the go while you’re surfing the Web. It is a download plugin for Firefox 2.0, which works cross-platform on Windows, Mac and Linux. There’s no IE plugin for now, but support for IE6 and IE7 is coming soon (a couple of weeks away). BlogRovr … Read more

The Yahoo Mail news is coming thick and fast this week. Yesterday they announced that Yahoo Mail now has free unlimited email storage space, and today Yahoo has announced an API for Yahoo Mail. Earlier today I spoke with Chad Dickerson, Head of Yahoo! Developer Network, and John Kremer, VP Yahoo! Mail, to find out … Read more

This is a point/counterpoint argument, with John Milan taking the position that online desktop apps are better, while Richard MacManus argues for offline web apps. Let us know what you think, in the comments. Point (John Milan) John Milan: ReadWriteWeb is currently running a poll asking which web apps should also work offline. Shouldn’t we … Read more

“Server Error We’re sorry, but Gmail is temporarily unavailable. We’re currently working to fix the problem — please try logging in to your account in a few minutes.” And 1 hour later… “Server Error We’re sorry, but Gmail is temporarily unavailable. We’re currently working to fix the problem — please try logging in to your … Read more

Later today Web previews product Snap is launching 8 new localized versions of their Snap Preview Anywhere product. They will support 9 languages in all: English (by Default) Japanese Korean Chinese – Simplified Chinese – Traditional French German Spanish Portuguese Web Previews – good or bad? But whatever the language, it’s up to end users … Read more