2008

In the first real sign that recommendation engine Strands (formally MyStrands) is branching out from mobile and music, the company has announced the acquisition of Expensr, an online personal finance application. Strands is also launching moneyStrands, a personal money management solution. We’ve noted before that Strands is a company to watch, having taken $55m in … Read more

Universal McCann has released a new report on the impact of social media (such as blogs, social networks, online video) on the media landscape. It surveyed 17,000 Internet users worldwide in March 2008. The report found that social media, in particular blogs, are “becoming a more important part of global media consumption for internet users … Read more

Last week trendy micro-blogging service Twitter launched officially in Japan, after the company had “noticed a significant percent of Twitter usage consistently originating from Japan”. At the time of launch, Joi Ito – an investor in Twitter – claimed that Japan usage “was nearly 30% of Twitter earlier on”, but had dropped to “about 13% … Read more

This week was a hectic one, with a number of RWW writers present at the annual Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The big Internet news of the week was the launch of Microsoft’s Live Mesh. Yahoo also announced key support for Social Graph and data portability. In social networking news, MySpace officially opened its … Read more

The ReadWriteWeb team is at the Web 2.0 Expo. Tim O’Reilly opens the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes with a discussion on the opportunities in web 2.0 today. Here are some real-time notes on his session. His main message is to “not follow the headlines” and the hot consumer apps, but go after “big, hard problems”. … Read more

As we wrote last night, the new Live Mesh service that just launched as an invite only “technology preview” is Microsoft’s attempt to tie all of our data together. Live Mesh synchronizes data across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but theoretically it will extend to mobile and other devices in the future) as well … Read more

Bungee Labs announced today at Web 2.0 Expo that it is expanding its hosting options, and also looking into open source as a way to connect with the developer community. Bungee Labs’ main product is Bungee Connect, an end-to-end, cloud-based development platform for web applications. We covered the launch of the public beta of Connect … Read more

Tonight Microsoft is launching a “tech preview” version of its latest platform, Live Mesh. The new platform is all about connecting devices to the Internet via Windows software. From an end user standpoint, it will enable users to sync their data across multiple devices and share with others. As of now, in preview mode, Live … Read more

I’m at the Alternative Search Engines Day, in San Francisco, an event put on by our network blog AltSearchEngines. We started out with a keynote talk by ASE editor Charles Knight, who noted that alternative search engines only have about 1.7% market share combined. He thinks this is too small, so he wants all of … Read more

On 20 April, 2003, ReadWriteWeb was born. My first post here was appropriately entitled The Read/Write Web and it began: “The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it.” At the time I started ReadWriteWeb, web 2.0 hadn’t … Read more

Here are the highlights from the week’s stories on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side, we analyzed the increasing mainstreaming of social news site digg; and we reviewed some awesome new web apps (Grooveshark, SixApart’s BlogIt, Twhirl, Alert Thingy, and others). On web trends, there was a meme this week that declared the Mobile Web dead … Read more

We had a great response to last night’s competition offering 2 full passes to the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo. Over 100 people left a comment telling us their favorite web app(s). Sadly, there can only be 2 winners. They were selected at random, using a cool web app called Random.org. The winners are: comment #79, … Read more

ReadWriteWeb has 2 tickets to next week’s Web 2.0 Expo to give away, courtesy of Technorati. These are full conference passes, worth $1,895 each, so they will get you into every workshop and conference session. To be in with a chance to win one of these passes, all you have to do is enter a … Read more

If you’re a fan of digg, you’ve probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of … Read more

Facebook has just launched a neat new trend mapping tool, called Lexicon. Similar to Google Trends, it allows you to create a trend graph for different words and (two-word) phrases on Facebook Walls. It has a surprisingly slick UI too, with the scroll bar enabling you to zoom in and out to get different views … Read more