2007

Interesting new directory of “music 2.0” services, which includes the following useful categorization: Music Services – places like iTunes and Rhapsody where you can purchase or subscribe to music Music Discovery – places that help you find music – these fall generally into 3 subcategories: Social – wisdom of the crowds sites like last.fm, iLike. … Read more

The latest browser stats are causing some discussion – mainly because of this article by InformationWeek, which pours water over Microsoft’s claims about IE7: “Although Microsoft recently touted the 100 millionth installation of Internet Explorer 7, Web measurement firms said that the new browser is simply being swapped out for older editions and hasn’t had … Read more

Spotted tonight by John Milan, Google has a promotion for its online shopping product Google Checkout on its homepage – probably the most traffiked web page in the world. Also there’s some interesting speculation over on the Cost Per News site that Google Checkout is set to ramp up: “I’ve heard rumblings from my sources … Read more

I was reading a post by Ryan Stewart, who is my main source of news and information about anything to do with RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Wikipedia defines RIA as “web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications.” When I think of RIAs, I usually think of Adobe’s Flex or Microsoft’s … Read more

Twango is a new media sharing service, for video, photos and other media. It’s similar to eSnips, Multiply and PeopleAggregator, in that it combines media sharing with social networking. Twango was founded by a group of 5 ex-Microsoft employees in fall 2004 and officially launched in October 2006. I spoke to co-founder, Randy Kerr, yesterday … Read more

I am always one to promote the ‘read/write’ meme and today I noticed a post by Rod Boothby, on what he’s calling the read/write Intranet. I didn’t see a definition for what this is exactly, but in any case Rod’s asking people to vote for the best read/write intranet systems. In the interests of finding … Read more

We’re starting to see a lot of startups either shutting down, fading away or being put up for sale. The latest is Talkr, an automated text-to-voice service that we actually use here on Read/WriteWeb. At the bottom of each R/WW post, you’ll see an Audio link – click on that to hear a computer-generated female … Read more

I’ve been following usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s annual Best Intranets column for as long as I can remember. This year Nielsen specifically mentions web 2.0, albeit in a very condescending way. The summary is just the start: “This year’s winners emphasized an editorial approach to news on the homepage. They also took a pragmatic approach … Read more

James Corbett has an interesting post speculating that Google Reader might become a ‘read/write’ app over the course of 2007. Says James: “The addition of support for tagging and link blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a fully fledged Reader/Writer (let’s call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is … Read more

sphereit start Greg Linden just posted on his blog that Findory, the personalized news service he created and has been running for the past 3 years, is to slowly “fade away”. In other words, he’s not going to put any more effort into developing it or the business. However findory.com will continue to be a … Read more

Todd Bishop at Seattle P-I newspaper has published a telling tag cloud view of Bill Gates’ speech at CES earlier this week. Notes Bishop: “Putting our fancy new gizmo to work, we fed the text of Bill Gates’ Sunday night Consumer Electronics Show keynote into the tag-cloud generator, and added the results to our scrolling … Read more

OK so Jobs didn’t use the word “ain’t”. But in a Newsweek interview with Steven Levy, Jobs put the kibosh on any talk about the iPhone opening up its platform for third party developers: ‘You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,’? meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum … Read more

Ever wondered what a MySpace-like social network site, which are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, is worth on the open market? Well the developers of ShoutCentral.com, which claims to have “over 1,000 users”, has just sold their SNS for $13,800 on eBay. The sellers were originally after $15k, so it was close to … Read more

Ugenie, a comparison shopping service that we profiled in November, has released a new textbook service. You may remember that Ugenie’s defining feature is the the ability to group items into a ‘bundle’ and find the best price for that bundle – i.e. find the best price for multiple items across multiple merchants. This takes … Read more

There’s one industry which has continued to flourish, whether it be web 1.0 or 2.0 or anything in between. And that’s the domain name market. The Domain Name Values Weekly site polled 30 domain name experts to find out their Top 20 Domain Transactions of 2006. The main criteria wasn’t most money paid, but best … Read more