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Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we covered announcements by Google about Gears and App Engine, we looked at some compelling Yahoo! Pipes apps, we checked out Strands Lifestreaming, and we reviewed promising Semantic Apps Faviki and Freebase. On the trends side we analyzed the contentious Semantic Search market, we looked at Google’s Android vs iPhone, we put the Social Networking battle between Google and Facebook in context, and we explored more social media trends.

Web Apps

Google Gears Turns One: Future is in Open Standards

Google Gears, the offline web application API it debuted last year at its developer conference, turned one this week. To celebrate, Google dropped the company name from Gears. The name change is a symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google’s commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.

See also: Google App Engine Announces Pricing Plan, APIs, Open Access; Why Google is Wooing Web Developers

The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List

Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest ways to mashup the RSS feeds of various sites and sources to get the data you want. Since our initial coverage of Yahoo! Pipes, thousands of creations are now available. However, finding the best picks can be tough. ReadWriteWeb has done the hardest part and comprised a list of some of the best Yahoo Pipes created by users. We give you the ultimate Yahoo! Pipes list.

Strands Lifestreaming: What They’re Doing and Invites for Readers

Recommendation service Strands.com launched a lifestreaming service this week that aims to pull together the company’s wide range of services in particular media and online activity into one central place for users to share socially. The new Strands is a way to share your music, bookmarks, blog posts and other activity with friends, family and groups. It’s a major entry into one of the most interesting sectors of the new web. We give it a mixed review…

See also: Recommendation and RSS: A Look at Two Readers Filtering the Noise

Semantic Tagging with Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki’s suggestions don’t just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism

Freebase, the first product of semantic web company Metaweb, is an open, semantically marked up database of information that we called one of the “10 semantic apps to watch” last year. With $57.4 million in funding, a smart team, and a tech legend in Danny Hillis at the helm, Metaweb is considered to be one of the most serious players in the Semantic Web space. Yet the company’s
efforts to date have been met with skepticism. Particularly, people have asked how is Freebase different to Wikipedia? Jamie Taylor, the Minister of Information at Metaweb, spoke at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose last week in an effort to dispel some of that skepticism.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality

For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search.
Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest
to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results.
In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?

See also: Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey

Android Is Out For iPhone Blood

Wednesday, at Google’s I/O Event, the company demonstrated their Android prototype phone, a device which has been greatly improved since its last public outing at this year’s CES and Mobile World conferences. Today, Android looks classy enough that you half-expected them to pull a Steve Jobs and announce that you could run out and buy it right now. During the demo, the company showed off some of the applications that will run on Android - like a Google Maps Street View app that drew cheers from the crowd. From the buzz surrounding the Google Phone at this event, it’s clear that Android has a shot at knocking that other touchscreen phone off its pedestal.

See also: Google’s Android: How Will it Compare to iPhone?

The Social Networking Arms Race

Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google’s platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example — the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war.

See also: How Many Friends is Too Many?

The Fork in the Road for Social Media

Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.

See also: Sometimes Crowds Aren’t That Wise

Who Are The “Digitally Savvy?”

A new report put about by consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research has revealed some interesting information about the section of the U.S. population that’s being called the “digitally savvy.” These are the consumers who are more likely to own high-tech items like DVRs, satellite radios, and VoIP phones and are more likely to engage in Internet activities that include blogging, downloading music, and other web 2.0 activities. In other words - they’re us.

See also: When User-Generated Content Goes Bad

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Original post:
Weekly Wrapup, 26-30 May 2008

Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we explored: next gen apps outside the browser, uses for wikis, Facebook’s usefulness (or lack thereof), the public launch of Google Health, and 4 promising mobile social networks. On the trends side we analyzed: the Mobile Web, how to utilize Social Media in education and social change, and the state of the URL. Last but not least we covered this week’s SemTech conference, about the Semantic Web.

Web Apps

Next Gen Apps Won’t Be Pushed Around By the Browser

The invention of the browser was a huge boon to the internet and a substantial amount of computing now goes on through that interface we’ve grown to love. The internet is not a place where innovation takes a break, though, and a new generation of applications are emerging that have a different relationship with the web browser.

From taking control of the browser to connecting to the web outside of it, there are a number of new strategies being implemented by startups these days. In the following post we discuss seven different ways that new apps are telling browsers “you ‘aint the boss of me now!” Some you’ll be familiar with, but some you may not be.

Wikis Are Now Serious Business

Only a handful of years ago, it was common to hear people laugh at Wikipedia. Anyone can edit it! How could you take it seriously? These days, just as blogs are, wikis are on their way to winning a reputation as serious publishing platforms.

Free hosted wiki provider Wetpaint announced last night that it’s now raised a total of $40 million in venture capital. To celebrate this major financial validation of the wiki world, we thought we’d offer a brief survey of some of the most interesting ways that wikis are being put to serious use today.

How to Make Facebook Useful Again

Oh the heels of some of Facebook’s missteps (ahem, Beacon) and the proliferation of a myriad of useless, silly, and time-wasting apps, some former Facebook users decided to quit the site for good this year. However, a handful of early adopter angst doesn’t have Facebook worried. Why is that? Because Facebook has a whole generation of users who grew up using their site for everything social back when it was just a way to network with their high school or college friends. So what are the everyday Facebook users doing that keeps them engaged in the service? It’s not throwing sheep, apparently. For many Facebook users, there are still useful apps to be found and ways to use the service that the rest of us could learn from.

See also: Why There Should Be Web Search on Facebook and Facebook Censoring User Messaging: Spam Prevention or Unaccountable Control of Conversation?

Google Health Launches - Cautious, Non-Innovative Entry into Health 2.0

This week Google announced the public availability of Google Health, after initially launching as a closed beta back in February. It is described as “a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage [your] medical records and health information online” and is being positioned as a way for users to control their own medical records.

Google Health is a decent entry into the game-changing (and potentially hugely profitable) world of health 2.0. But in comparison with other health startups, Google Health has a limited scope and is not as innovative a service as we’ve come to expect from Google…

The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services

Recently we discussed some of the problems plaguing mobile social networks. These problems include location, marketing strategies and compatibility issues. Our readers also contributed their thoughts on hardware compatibility and GPS. While no network is perfect, in this post we profile some of the key players in the market. Here’s a look at four mobile social networks that may have what it takes.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Report: The Mobile Web is the New Hangout

According to Opera’s survey of the more 11.9 million Opera Mini users in March, almost 41% of mobile traffic now goes to social networking — up to 60% in some countries, including the US. Compare that to about 6% of total web traffic for social networks outside of the mobile web. That’s not overly surprising, though, given the recent proliferation of new smartphones aimed at consumers (or at least phones that can view the full web), made ultra-chic over the past year by Apple’s iPhone. Says Opera, 3/4ths of mobile web traffic is now to the full web, rather than WAP or .mobi sites, which are quickly becoming out-moded.

See Also: To Beat Google, Beat Google to the Mobile Web

Do you use the mobile web? Remember to vote in our poll below.

Social Media U: Take a Class in Social Media

Social media. Web 2.0. You know what these things are and you take advantage of them every day on the net. Whether you’re socializing on Facebook, updating Twitter, or just adding a new bookmark to Ma.gnolia, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s something that everyone innately understands or knows how to use - especially when it comes to using it for marketing, PR, or other business-related purposes. That’s why many of today’s colleges and universities are now offering “social media” classes as an option for their students.

How to Use Social Media for Social Change

Did you participate in the Twit-Out this week? Do you even know what that is? To get you up to speed, a handful of Twitter users, fed up with the regular outages of their favorite service, decided to band together to show Twitter some tough love by boycotting the service for a day. (Unfortunately, despite having fewer users on the service, Twitter still went down). However, in light of recent world events, it’s a shame that the cause the tech community has chosen to rally around is that of Twitter’s instability. Aren’t there more important things going on right now?

The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search

Last week Josh Catone was watching TV and saw something that really caught his eye. It was a commercial for Special K, the breakfast cereal from Kellogg, and rather than end with a plug for the product’s web site — SpecialK.com — it advised people to search Yahoo! for “Special K” instead. He started to wonder two things: 1. is Yahoo! paying Special K for tack-on advertising? and 2. has searching really become so natural that it is more effective to tell people to search for your site than it is to tell them to visit directly?

SemTech Panel: Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses

How will the Semantic Web make the jump to the mainstream? That was the topic of a panel at the SemTech 2008 Conference that happened this week in San Jose. The panel was moderated by Carla Thomson from Guidewire Group and featured Josh Dilworth from Porter Novelli,
Tom Tague, who heads the Calais initiative at Reuters, and Mark Johnson, who is a product manager at Powerset.
This post is based on notes from that panel.

See also: SemTech Panel: Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Excerpted from:
Weekly Wrapup, 19-23 May 2008

Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side: this week we took a look at our readers’ favorite web apps, we covered the social news space in depth (including posts on digg, Mixx and a new app called BlogRize), we brought you the latest news from Facebook, Adobe and YouTube. On the trends side: Bernard Lunn wrote a ‘must read’ 3-part series on the new Web, we analyzed Tim O’Reilly’s recent call for ‘big ideas’ on the Web, we celebrated RSS Day, and we interviewed a top Microsoft exec about Live Mesh.

Sponsor:

Web Apps

The Favorite Web Apps of RWW Readers

A couple of weeks ago we held a competition, asking you to tell us what web 2.0 apps most excite you currently. We had a great response, with 113 comments. I decided to list each web app mentioned in a spreadsheet and count up the most popular. What surprised me was the number of web apps that got at least one mention: 161. No doubt some of those were left by the developers themselves, but many were left by seemingly passionate users. The most popular were the usual suspects: Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Google Reader. See our post for the full list.

BlogRize: Social News Gets Personal

The idea behind BlogRize is that the “wisdom of the crowds” works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize’s solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most…blogs like the one you’re reading now, for example.

Related:

• How Best to Submit Our (Or Any) Stories to Digg
• The Decline and Fall of Quality on Digg
• Mixx Launches Innovative API - Continues to Challenge the Digg Experience
• Yahoo! Tries to Spread Buzz, Adds Widgets, RSS

Facebook Hacked Again

A report on BBC’s technology program, Click, has exposed yet another security flaw in Facebook - one that could comprise users’ privacy. This particular hack involves using a Facebook application to steal a users personal information - and the information of all their friends - without the user’s knowledge.

Related:

• Report: In Emergencies, People Turn to Facebook

Adobe to Publish Flash File Format Specs

Adobe announced this week the “Open Screen Project“, which will seek to create a consistent runtime environment for rich media across a myriad of devices. In other words, Flash on the web, mobile, desktop, television, and other consumer electronic devices. As part of this initiative, Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format. In the future, the project will be expanded to include AIR.

YouTube Aims to Monetize in a Post-TV Era

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made big promises of mysterious, highly-interactive new methods of monetizing YouTube in a CNBC interview this week. “We believe the best products are coming out this year,” he said. “And they’re new products. They’re not announced. They’re not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying.”

As all established media (not just newspapers) face a growing challenge from the internet, with its on-demand, highly personalized and infinitely interactive social connections - can TV, and TV on the internet, learn keep up with the times?

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Dancing With Gorillas: The New Web Era

This week we ran an intriguing 3-part series, by Bernard Lunn, on the new Web. Part 1 was The Whatchamacallit, Post Recession Phase Transition, Part 2 was The Emerging Main Street Web. Part 3, Dancing With Gorillas, is highlighted here — but do read the whole series!

The new Web era is about the mainstream. This is when millions of small businesses and digital free agents make a good living by providing better products to a much more savvy market. This is the point in the Crossing the Chasm model when all the innovation stops, start-ups get consolidated into a few mega players and it all gets a bit boring until the next wave of innovation hits us.

Nevermind The Recession, The Web Will Change The World!

Since the Web 2.0 Expo last week, two parallel questions are being asked about the current era of the Web:

a) Are we about to enter into a recession, and if so does that mean an end to the current ‘web 2.0′ era of innovation in web technology?;
b) Why aren’t we (meaning startups) tackling the “big, hard problems” with web technologies?

In this post we explore those questions. See also Sarah Perez’s post entitled Wanted: 5 Startups To Change the World, in which she commented on Umair Haque’s open challenge to Silicon Valley: find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and he will help you do it.

Interview: How Will Live Mesh Integrate With Windows Live?

One of the highlights last week at Web 2.0 Expo was the launch of Microsoft’s new cloud computing play, Live Mesh. Mesh is a new development platform for syncing user data between the desktop and the Web, and across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but it’ll support mobile, Mac computers and other devices in the future). It can sync data for single users, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users. Currently Live Mesh is in “technology preview”, so it is not a finished product. Even so, we couldn’t help but notice the overlap between Live Mesh and a number of Windows Live products.

To find out more about how Live Mesh will integrate with Windows Live, RWW editor Richard MacManus interviewed Microsoft’s Brian Hall - GM of Development for the Windows Live Platform.

An Ode to RSS, On RSS Awareness Day

There’s just a few hours left in what should be an international holiday - RSS Awareness Day. Thought up by the good folks at DailyBlogTips.com and unknown until this morning to even RSS forefather Dave Winer, RSS Awareness Day is a fantastic idea. May 1st is a lot of things already but what the heck, let’s pile another one on. We’d like to take a few minutes to reflect on the world-changing tool that RSS is, and consider how different our lives would be without it.

Related:

• Can Web Apps Get Too Drunk on Aggregation?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

AltSearchEngines Update

By ASE Editor Charles Knight:

This past week at AltSearchEngines was a very rich one for the quality and quantity of our Guest Authors. On Sunday, Erick Schonfeld wrote a post entitled Is keyword search about to hit it’s breaking point? On Tuesday, Stephen Arnold conducted an interview with Exalead’s François Bourdoncle. Wednesday Nitin Karandikar reviewed the recent Alternative Search Engines Day, and Kaila Colbin from Search Insider wrote the intriguing “We’re not a Google-killer” is the new Google-killer! Then we had a second interview when Susanne Koch of Pandia interviewed Venky Harinarayan, the co-founder of Kosmix. And finally Paul Heymann asked, “Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?” We were very fortunate to have such a distinguished group of guest writers, and I hope you’ll have time to read some of their posts.

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

The rest is here:
Weekly Wrapup, 28 Apr - 2 May 2008

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 Application Gallery to all users. In our web trends coverage, Sarah analyzed a Forrester report that claimed Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 Billion industry by 2013, Marshall looked at what will build on the emerging foundation of ubiquitous APIs, Josh investigated the current fad for ‘Web 3.0′, and Alex looked at the increasing stress in our online lives.

But wait, there’s more! This week we held the Alternative Search Engines event, and ReadWriteWeb turned 5.

Sponsor:

Web Apps

Live Mesh: First Look at Microsoft’s New Platform

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 as to a web desktop that exists in the cloud. It can sync data across devices used by a single users, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users. On the surface, Mesh is a lot like competing file sync services such as Dropbox, SugarSync (which we covered in January), and even Microsoft’s own FolderShare product. But what sets Live Mesh apart is its platform approach.

See also: Ray Ozzie Memo Explains Live Mesh Strategy; Full Text of Ray Ozzie Mesh Memo

Yahoo! to Rewire for Social Graph and Data Portability

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 Search Monkey developer platform will let site owners alter their search results listing, including through semantic markup.

Search Monkey is just the first of many steps that Yahoo! discussed at Expo. CTO Ari Balogh said that the entire company was rewiring, across all its properties, in the spirit of the social graph and data portability. Flickr’s influence was tangible. In this post we present a high-level overview of some of the biggest changes.

Social Tools for the Office Worker: How to Subvert I.T. and Play at Work

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 Apps Are Go For All Users

MySpace officially opened its Application Gallery to all users this week after launching it in public beta last March. In that time over 1,000 applications have been approved and added to the gallery and there have been over 2.1 million application installs across the site. MySpace began promoting applications to users by adding an icon for the gallery on MySpace.com and a link on user control panels.

See also: When Will Facebook Be Ready for Business?; Start Pages: The Next Social Networks; Study: Social Networks Mirroring Reality TV

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Enterprise 2.0 To Become a $4.6 Billion Industry By 2013

A new report released by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.

See also: IBM Wants a Piece of Web 2.0 Pie

Web 3.0 Through The Ages

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?

See also: There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web; Tim O’Reilly: Tackle Big, Hard Problems With Web 2.0

So You’re Launching a Platform: After Ubiquitous APIs - What’s the Next Frontier?

We’re here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and are getting inundated with press releases about new APIs and developer platforms, many from companies we’ve never even heard of in the first place. How long ago was it that the forward-looking thinkers argued that APIs and platforms would soon be available everywhere?

That time is clearly fast approaching and it makes us wonder: now that this matter is settled, what comes next? We asked a variety of people here and around the web what they thought will define the next frontier, what will build on the emerging foundation of ubiquitous APIs. We got some interesting answers.

Faster - Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a weekend piece entitled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,
which focused on the stressful nature of blogging. Using our friend Marc Orchant’s death and Om Malik’s heart attack as examples, Matt Richel built a case for web journalism as the cause of certain health woes because of its non-stop, 24/7 real-time nature. There is no doubt that news blogging is stressful.
But it is not just blogging. Real-time anything is stressful. Take TV news, is Anderson Cooper not stressed? Looking broader,
what about air traffic controllers or traders on Wall Street? Any human being that has to make decisions in real-time will be under a lot of stress.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Special: ReadWriteWeb Turns 5

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 yet been invented, Google Adsense hadn’t launched (it would do so in June ‘03), Internet Explorer had 94% of the browser market share (followed by Netscape with 2%), the top blogs of the day according to Technorati were Slashdot (listed as number 1) and Where is Raed ? (a weblog from Baghdad; it closed in 2004). And 5 years ago, there was no money in blogging.

Today the blogging landscape is vastly different. The top blogs now are full-on media businesses. ReadWriteWeb, which started out 5 years ago as an evening hobby for me, has evolved with the times and is now the 11th ranked blog on Technorati’s Top 100 - closing in on #10 Daily Kos! [Update: by the end of the week we’d got to #10!!] The reason we have continued to grow is because ReadWriteWeb is no longer just me. We have a great team of smart, web-savvy and passionate bloggers: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Josh Catone, Sarah Perez, Alex Iskold, Bernard Lunn, Emre Sokullu, and many other occasional and guest writers. ReadWriteWeb nowadays is also a network: last100 (Steve O’Hear and Daniel Langendorf), AltSearchEngines (Charles Knight) and ReadWriteTalk (Sean Ammirati).

Special: Alternative Search Engines Day

This week, before Web 2.0 Expo, our network blog AltSearchEngines held the first ever Alternative Search Engines Day, in San Francisco. It 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 the “alts” - you can see a list of them on our subsite The Search Race - to band together to make a bigger impact on the search market.

The overarching theme to AltSearchEngines Day was to encourage the alts to band together and help each other reach the mainstream audience. Anyone who regularly reads AltSearchEngines will know that there is a ton of innovation in search, literally hundreds of niche and vertical search startups. So this effort to join together to compete with (or complement) the likes of Google and Microsoft is very commendable - and as I mentioned in the opening panel, ReadWriteWeb heartily supports it.

Special thanks to Charles Knight for the vision and pulling this day together, and also LA Lassek and the SeeqPod team for organizing the event. Thanks as well to the sponsors of this event: SeeqPod, UpTake, HealthPricer, MatchPoint, GoPubMed, BlogDimension. Charles is “the voice of alternative search engines” in this industry. He is galvinising and leading the alts forward as a group, so be sure to subscribe to AltSearchEngines to track this initiative.

Last100 News

From our network blog about the digital lifestyle, last100. In Internet TV news, Viacom, Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate announced a joint venture to create a new premium TV channel and VOD service, to be rolled out in the fall of 2009. The project will include a strong online component.

In digital music news, Sony BMG has became the second major label to sign up to Nokia’s ‘Comes With Music’ service, whereby customers who buy a supported handset will get a year of unlimited access to “millions of tracks”. When Nokia first unveiled its all-you-can-eat music offering last December, Universal Music was the sole partner, a natural fit considering that the label has been busy touting its own flat-rate plan known as Total Music. However, the two remaining majors, EMI and Times Warner, have yet to commit to Nokia’s scheme.

Read more: last100 Weekly wrapup, 21-25 April 2008

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Go here to see the original:
Weekly Wrapup, 21-25 April 2008

Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action 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 - we begged to differ. We also looked into two ‘real world’ issues for Web tech this week - the impact of social media on “real people”; and real world data portability.

Sponsor:

Web Apps

The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg

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 frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.

Is it time to accept that Digg is no longer an equivalent to Slashdot, and that it is as much a mainstream news site as say BusinessWeek or People magazine?

SixApart’s BlogIt Could Be the Start of Something Big

SixApart launched BlogIt by TypePad this week, a Facebook app that lets you post to SixApart blogs and other blogging software like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, to your Facebook Newsfeed and to Twitter all from one place. It’s the kind of app that makes Facebook all the closer to being a one stop social media experience.

The service could be more fully developed but it’s certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. This post lists a few reasons why we believe it’s so interesting.

Grooveshark Launches Awesome Streaming Music Service

Gainesville, Florida-based Grooveshark, a music sharing startup that we first profiled in August, this week launched their latest product: Grooveshark Lite. Lite is a slick, flash-based streaming music service that takes Grooveshark’s huge catalog of uploaded music and makes it available to stream, no registration required. Grooveshark Lite is fast, easy to use, and free.

When we reviewed Grooveshark last August, we called it “one part Last.fm, one part Limewire, and one part iTunes store.” With the addition of Grooveshark Lite, the service is now also one part Pandora.

Battle of the AIR Apps: Twhirl vs. Alert Thingy

The battle between the two most popular AIR apps has begun. Earlier this week FriendFeed AIR app Alert Thingy, having only just launched on April 13th, was already getting an update - this one to include Twitter support via a built-in “Tweet” button. Not to be outdone, Twhirl wasted no time in providing an update of their own, seemingly crafting their updated version overnight. Now Twhirl includes FriendFeed support and Alert Thingy does Twitter, but are either of them really giving users what they want?

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Is the Mobile Web Dead? Some Mobile Entrepreneurs Say Yes

Former Yahoo! Mobile evangelist turned startup entrepreneur Russell Beattie announced this week that he’s calling it quits for his company Mowser, because the market for mobile browsing is taking a fast turn for the worse. “The mobile traffic just isn’t there,” Beattie says, “It’s not there now, and it won’t be.”

Beattie’s announcement comes just two months after mobile blogger and consultant Michael Mace wrote a much discussed post titled Mobile Applications, RIP. “The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices,” Mace wrote.

Be sure to check the comments of this post, there were some excellent counterpoints made on both sides of the argument.

Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media

Let’s be honest here: we’re all a bunch of social media addicts. We’re junkies. Whether it’s a new Twitter app, a new Facebook feature, or a new social anything service, we’re all over it. But we may not be the norm. The truth is, being involved in social media takes time, something that most people don’t have a lot of. So how can regular folk get involved with social media? And how much time does it really take?

Where’s Our Real World Data Portability?

In a recent Slashdot thread, someone sought advice on an electronic cash register set up that would output sales data in an open format. While the asker was looking for information from the point of view of a shop owner, it got us thinking about data portability. There’s been a lot of clamor over the past few months about who owns attention data and a major online movement has started with the aim of pushing companies into granting access to that data to the users who create it. But what about offline attention data? Should we demand access to that as well?

13 Seed Funding Options For Entrepreneurs

One of the most difficult parts of starting a startup for any entrepreneur is finding that small bit of seed capital to get things going. As evidenced by small seed funds like Y Combinator, a little can go a long way for startup entrepreneurs, but raising that chunk of change to get started can be tricky. Luckily, there are a number of different roads you can take to get from concept to Series A. This post lists 13 seed funding options for startup entrepreneurs.

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That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Weekly Wrapup, 14-18 April 2008