2008

MyStrands is an ambitious start-up. It has so far raised $55 Million dollars in its quest to “lead the social recommendation industry” (the words the company used in its last funding announcement in December). We at ReadWriteWeb are following the trend of recommendations closely – it was one of the 5 major trends we outlined … Read more

YouTube’s announcement tonight wasn’t higher quality videos (yet), but a set of new APIs and expanded features. YouTube now describes itself as “an open, general purpose, video services platform, available for use by just about any third-party website, desktop application, or consumer device.” There’s a video embedded below with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and others … Read more

Today Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a less than favorable review of Twine, the semantic web knowledge management system that is currently in private beta. Marshall made some great points; and ultimately his post will serve as both excellent feedback for Twine’s developers and a wakeup call that this Semantic Web stuff is hard. However Twine should … Read more

Today Alltop, an aggregator of RSS feeds, launched. It’s a very similar product to one of my daily refreshes, OriginalSignal. Only Alltop covers a much broader range of topics, 40 in total. Alltop’s selection of feeds is savvy and wide-ranging – and I’m not just saying that because ReadWriteWeb is the first feed listed in … Read more

A month ago we wrote about Reuters launching an API called Open Calais, a technology that “does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents – recognizing people, places, companies, and events.” I mentioned Calais in my Media08 presentation last week entitled Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It generated interest in the media-focused audience … Read more

Alex Iskold’s post from last night, Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing, has generated over 70 comments as of writing. Many of them challenged the article – but it was also interesting to see some commenters fact-checking other comments 😉 The comment of the day comes from “IT”, who was skeptical about “the level … Read more

P2P music service Grooveshark is at SXSW Music this week, promoting the upcoming release of an Analytics suite for music artists and labels. The company is also generously offering ReadWriteWeb readers $1000 worth of music vouchers (details below). We reviewed Grooveshark in August last year, when Josh Catone described it as “one part Last.fm, one … Read more

In yesterday’s post Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing, Alex Iskold wrote that Apple’s announcement of iPhone support for Microsoft Exchange “makes perfect sense” – as a competitive move against Blackberry and to position the iPhone as the default consumer / enterprise phone. However, how smart was this move by Microsoft? Specifically, Apple has … Read more

Due to the Ed traveling end of last week, we didn’t announce any Comment of the Day winners. To catch up, we’ve selected 3 random commenters to win: Frandall, YItna Firdyiwek, Jez. Congratulations to those 3 people, you’ve each won a $30 Amazon voucher – courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue … Read more

Today I gave a presentation at the Media08 event in Sydney, entitled: What’s Next on the Web? Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It’s an overview of some of the top trends we cover on ReadWriteWeb; such as Websites becoming web services, Semantic Apps, Open Data, Mobile Web, Recommendation Engines. The presentation is available … Read more

The comment of the day for yesterday was from our post Internet Explorer 8 Has Arrived. Sarah Perez noted that IE8 “showcases many new features and improvements, like Facebook and eBay integration, standards compliance, and the ability to work with AJAX web pages.” Sarah wrote that “this launch shows that Microsoft is not taking Firefox’s … Read more

Today’s winning comment comes from our feature-by-feature comparison of Office Live Workspace and Google Docs. In the post Sarah Perez concluded that “Google Docs, although limited in its capabilities, offers real-time collaboration”, while “Office Live Workspace […] may not have the collaboration features of Google Docs, but the workspaces feature is unique.” As usual when … Read more

We have two $30 Amazon vouchers to give away today – and both come from our current poll: Will Your Mom & Dad Ever Use Twitter? Our two winners are: Merredith and Nick Nichols, who both wrote about how their family members use Twitter. Merredith has a 16 year old daughter, who likes Twitter but … Read more

We’ve been very bullish on Twitter here at ReadWriteWeb. We named it our Best Web LittleCo of 2007, because it “has captured the imagination and become a new hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging.” Twitter also received the Best mobile start-up award at the Crunchies in January. And as RWW’s Josh Catone pointed out … Read more

Today we heard that P2P browser plug-in AllPeers has shut down, a blow to a market that seemed very promising back in 2006. Indeed, with AllPeer’s closure and the lack of progress of similar services such as Skyrider, we have to wonder about the viability of commercialising P2P as a service. Back in August 2006 … Read more