Weekly Wrapup, 14-18 July 2008
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
It’s time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we continued our ongoing analysis of the iPhone 3G and its accompanying App Store, we looked closely at a Gmail update to its contact management system, covered the US launch of Microsoft Live Mesh, and reported on a developer revolt with Google’s Android. On the trends side we revisited the Facebook platform, asked whether startups need Community Managers, looked into mainstream usage of the browser address bar, and told you a story about how Twitter’s “Fail Whale” was created.
Web Products
Gmail Tries to Be Less Creepy, Fails
Gmail, Google’s powerful web based email service, announced some changes to its contact management features this week. Contact management has for some time been a contentious matter among Google Account holders – the company does strange and mysterious things with your email contacts, including tying them in to some other applications without anyone’s permission. This week’s new changes failed to alleviate those concerns, perhaps making the situation even less clear than it was before.
See also: Google Gears Coming to Gmail and Google Calendar Soon
iPhone: The New Personal Computer
When Apple first announced the launch of its iPhone platform, we wrote here that it is a game changer.
Even the core of iPhone is a major advance in mobile computing, but with
the platform iPhone
becomes
the new personal computer. The desktop from now on will be for professional and business work.
Laptops aren’t
going away, but will get increasingly less personal use.
The reason is that iPhone with its application platform is a better
personal
computer and it’s widely accessible.
See also: RWW Predictions: iPhone Sales in 2008
Apple’s App Store: 10 Million Downloads Later
Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch has been growing quickly since last weekend. As at Monday, close to 250 applications had been added. As Medialets reports, at the same time, the average price of those applications has dropped. Interestingly, free applications are getting higher average ratings from their users than paid apps.
See also: iPhone Apps For Social Networks and News Apps for the iPhone: NYTimes, AP, Bloomberg
Live Mesh Now Open to All of U.S.
Windows Live Mesh is Microsoft’s software+services data synchronization platform. Because of its complex nature, most people assume that file synchronization is all there is to Live Mesh, but in reality, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft has big plans for the service and syncing files between computers and the cloud is just the start. When Live Mesh launched, it was currently a closed “technical preview” (that’s Microsoft for “beta”). But now it appears that the Live Mesh guys have quietly opened up the platform for all of the U.S.
gPhone? Just a Rumor – The Real Story Is The Android Developer Revolt
Of course, we all know that the event of the past week (or perhaps we should say the event of the year, given the news coverage), has been the launch of the iPhone 2.0. Yet even amidst the iPhone news frenzy – the lines at the stores, the activations, the failures, the apps! – there was another phone getting some press too – the Google Phone. The rumor was that Google was going to build its own phone after all. Yet while that rumor was catching the headlines, the real story was taking place within the developer community itself.
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Web Trends
Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited
When the Facebook platform debuted last year it was touted as the next big thing.
Media, VC, startups and big companies shared the enthusiasm for its future.
And no wonder: Facebook enabled access to 50 million users.
You no longer needed to bring the audience to your app. Instead your app could be
delivered to one of the largest audiences around the web. And not just delivered,
but injected into a massive social network. While it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issues
surfaced (read on for the details).
Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?
You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world – being social is becoming an important full time job. “Community Manager” is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang’s growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.
See also: Do Facebook Users Care About Commenting On Mini-Feeds?
Will Mainstream Users Ever Learn About The Browser’s Address Bar?
Traffic analytics company Hitwise released search market share numbers for dating websites in June this week and two things were striking about the data. Ad supported free site PlentyOfFish is trouncing everyone in the dating game and huge numbers of mainstream users are still afraid to navigate there directly using their browser’s address bar. The economics of user ignorance are serious and could have big implications for online innovation. Also check out the great discussion on this in the comments – we may have been convinced that this isn’t such a bad thing after all.
See also: Google Getting Close to 70% of U.S. Search Market
How An Unknown Artist’s Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community
Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale. This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter’s downtime, but also as a representation of the community’s love for the service and their hope for its triumph over their many struggles. Despite Twitter’s troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale “over capacity” image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own. This is the story of the Fail Whale.
See also: Cartoon: Twitter Dating
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
RWW Live
This week we did our fourth RWW Live podcast, which we’re running fortnightly on the TalkShoe platform. RWW Live is where a group of the ReadWriteWeb Network writers and editors get together to discuss the latest in web technology.
This week we devoted the whole episode to the iPhone. Participants were: ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati, Steve O’Hear from our network blog last100, RWW founder and editor Richard MacManus, RWW Feature Writer Bernard Lunn and RWW Lead Writer Marshall Kirkpatrick, who joined about halfway through. You can listen to the podcast below (email readers click through).
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
Originally posted here:
Weekly Wrapup, 14-18 July 2008
The new 
Yahoo! announced at the Web 2.0 Expo the availability of the first program in its large vision for a dramatic overhaul of the company across all its properties. The 
We can’t all eat, breathe, and live social media 24×7, as much as we might like to. Some of have day jobs that require a bit of our attention, too. And unlike the web-app embracing startups we read about, the policies at more traditional companies actually discourage mindless web surfing, tweeting, facebooking, and the like. However, there are still plenty of ways to fit in your social media addictions at work, without getting noticed by your nosy co-workers or getting blocked by I.T. 
MySpace officially opened its 
A new 
So we’re only half a decade at most into the Web 2.0 era, and we still don’t really know what “Web 2.0″ is. Yet for some reason, over the past couple of years there has been an even more confusing meme that seems to keep cropping up: “Web 3.0.” It already feels like we’ve been talking about Web 3.0 for ages, even though we don’t know yet know exactly what Web 2.0 is. What are the various ways that Web 3.0 has been defined over the past three years, and why is it helpful to talk about what the next web will look like?
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a weekend piece entitled 
On 20 April, 2003, ReadWriteWeb was born. My first post here was appropriately entitled 
This week, before Web 2.0 Expo, our network blog 
From our network blog about the digital lifestyle, 
The times are changing, Microsoft is losing and Google has won as computing moves to the web – right? That’s not necessarily the case. In fact, Microsoft has a clear opportunity to come from behind online and dominate the future, albeit in a radically different way than they dominated the past. 
It would appear that an earthquake was just felt across the UK (hopefully not a major one!). Where did the news first break? Well, we heard about it over Twitter. It’s 
This week Google announced Google Sites, a wiki product built from JotSpot. The blogosphere is already comparing the product to Sharepoint and trying to drive nails into Microsoft’s coffin. Sarah argues that it’s far too soon to claim that Google is offering anything that really has a shot at making a dent in the enterprise world.
Over two years ago, Netflix announced a 
A few weeks ago we published a piece on this blog entitled 
The social news space is developing at a mind-boggling pace. There are two ends of a spectrum emerging – Digg,Mixx and Buzz are offering general interest social news about a variety of topics and fueled by large groups of users, whereas services like FriendFeed, the social media marketing site Sphinnn and sites like the Twitter-sliver Pulse of Open Source offer news from a targeted group of users and/or on very specific topics.
This week Adobe launched out of Labs the Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR. AIR is a really exciting platform that combines qualities of the web with a presence on the desktop by making it easy to build attractive Internet connected applications that live outside the browser. Now that AIR has dropped the beta tag (see 
As a complementary post to Alex Iskold’s analysis 
Last November we reported that the web-based scripted drama “
A lot of people scratched their heads when 
Last Friday, a massive outage occured at Amazon Web Services that generated a 
Here’s a test for Web 2.0. Cuba’s Fidel Castro announced yesterday morning that he is resigning from his post as ruler of that communist country. What better way to celebrate the departure of an authoritarian dictator than to look at how the free flow of information in online social media provided coverage of the event? Or, depending on your take on Castro, what better way to celebrate a populist leader in the international fight for social justice and against imperialism than to look at the people-powered social media reaction? 
The 
According to the Guardian, the three largest social networks in the U.K., MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo, all experienced large drops in membership between December, 2007 and January, 2008. Is this one month of falling numbers a fluke or have the networks reached a plateau? Says, Alex Burmaster, Nielsen Online analyst, “One month of falling audiences doesn’t spell the decline of Facebook or social networking. However, most of the leading social networks are less popular in the U.K. than they were a year ago.”
Health 2.0, web-based apps and services for the healthcare sector, is a nascent but potentially huge market for web 2.0. As of now, many of these apps have an emphasis on communication, information sharing and community. These are relatively easy things to address using Web tools. However we’re starting to see health 2.0 apps try to tackle the enormous inefficiencies in the healthcare system – check out our description of Carol.com below. Also, in the longer term, we will see the Web being used in medical diagnosis and practice.
Google this week announced a pilot program (read: closed beta) of their health records application. The program will be conducted at Cleveland Clinic hospital in Cleveland, Ohio and will include under 10,000 patients. The pilot program will run six to eight weeks with the eventual goal to roll the program out to a broader user base if the test is a success. While there are certainly upsides to having medical records stored in a single, patient-accessible location, there are also serious privacy concerns.
Scribd, the online document sharing site, announced today the creation of a new document format built for the web, dubbed 
Outages aside, there’s no doubt that the rise of web scale computing platforms, like Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services, have lowered the barrier of entry for Internet startups. Going completely serverless would have been unheard of during the late-90s dot com boom, but new cloud computing platforms have made it possible for small companies to scale quickly, easily, efficiently, and cost effectively. However, even if services like Amazon’s have made hosting and scaling a web app more simple, there is still a good deal of server management involved. Enter 
The top stories this week from ASE:
This Friday the first annual 
Also this week was Apple’s 
Our network blog 
Everyone loves to get stuff for free. We line up to get a free drink, we sign up for free checking accounts,
While the media and Silicon Valley have lost our collective minds over the rise of Facebook over the past year, traffic analysts 
In mid-december, we 
This week 
Lifestreaming, according to 
