2007

Music discovery and social networking site MyStrands has undergone a re-vamp. It includes better integration between the online, mobile and physical worlds; excellent new mobile features including a mobile Web portal and personalized radio station; new navigation on the site; and a personal version of partyStrands, their service for party organizers, bars, clubs and DJs. … Read more

We’re piloting a new feature on Read/WriteWeb, called Point/Counterpoint. It’s where two authors (John Milan and Alex Iskold in this case) argue two sides of an intriguing question. We’d also like you, the reader, to contribute YOUR thoughts in the comments section. Who do you agree with the most – John or Alex – and … Read more

The big news today is that IBM has released an enterprise social networking suite, called Lotus Connections. The NY Times explains: “Lotus Connections has five components — activities, communities, dogear (a bookmarking system), profiles and blogs — aimed at helping experts within a company connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs.” The … Read more

3D interfaces have been around since the Web began – and more than one dot com fell by the wayside partly because of an over-reaching 3D interface (cough, boo.com). Indeed as we noted in December, virtual shopping malls are still alive and kicking. But is 3D of any use on the Web, or is it … Read more

A quick thank you to Read/WriteWeb’s excellent sponsors, for supporting quality content on Web Technology. Thanks also to our fast growing community of readers – your comments and encouragement spur us along every day. If you’re a fan of R/WW, you may like to sign up to our MyBlogLog community too. R/WW’s current sponsors are: … Read more

Another startup has bitten the dust, RSS company Syndicate IQ has “ceased operations” according to a notice on its homepage. Syndicate IQ was a company that provided feed management, statistics and adverts – similar to Feedburner. Syndicate IQ launched in December 2004 and its goal was to “manage, measure, and monetize syndicated content”, according to … Read more

Occasional Read/WriteWeb guest writer Rudy De Waele has started up a Mobile 2.0 wiki. Rudy’s intro: “Following the response and feedback on “Understanding Mobile 2.0” article at Read/WriteWeb, I created this wiki space to start categorizing the so-called mobile 2.0 companies, the next generation mobile products and services coming to market.” This is an excellent … Read more

Lately I’ve received some odd emails from wiki vendors Wikia and MindTouch about the domain wiki.com. A brief history: wiki.com (the domain name) was bought last year by entrepreneur John Gotts for a staggering $2.86 Million. After purchasing it, Gotts partnered with MindTouch, a wiki vendor comprised of ex-Microsoft employees. At the time the huge … Read more

Hitwise has released data that suggests Bloglines is still the clear leader in the RSS Reader stakes, with 3 times more US visits than its nearest web-based competitor Rojo. I don’t think a lot can be gleaned from this data though, as it misses out desktop-based RSS Readers, start pages and a number of other … Read more

sphereit start I’ve been impressed with the amount of Mobile Web action we’ve seen already in 2007. With Apple’s iPhone, Google doing deals in Asia, Yahoo ramping up its Go platform, Microsoft hyping up Windows Mobile, small players like Dada doing good business, and innovative startups like Sharpcast and Smartpox, things are looking very bullish … Read more

Carole McManus (no relation) has a great post on the Yahoo! Messenger blog about the innovations we saw in IM over 2006. She says that 2006 was a “watershed year” for IM innovation, citing a Nick Gonzalez post on Techcrunch last November. The features that Nick highlighted then were: interoperability, flexible identities, rich media chat, … Read more

Social networking was King (or Queen) in 2006 and mobile is often seen as the heir to that crown for 2007 and beyond. So what better way to hedge your bets than with a mobile social networking service? We’ve discussed the potential in this market before, specifically noting that Google owns such a service already: … Read more

Well our poll asking whether Ajax is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology resulted in 70% of you saying YES, it is a RIA technology. 22% said no and 8% admitted they don’t know. Total poll contributers was 560. The conversation in the post was revealing though – i.e. it revealed it is a very … Read more

John Milan wrote an excellent two-partarticle for R/WW this week, about the future of software. Because it was a very long article – filled with John’s trademark nature metaphors – I thought I’d pull out a few of the highlights. The question addressed was: what will the software solutions of tomorrow look like? In Part … Read more

Disclosure: One of the products listed in this post, Digication, has been a recent R/WW sponsor. One of the more active markets for web 2.0 is e-learning; for example we’ve written before about ChinesePod (learning Chinese) and Elgg (social network software for education). Also last August Steve O’Hear wrote a very insightful introduction to e-learning … Read more