Richard MacManus
About: Richard is founder and editor of ReadWriteWeb, a popular weblog that provides Web Technology news, reviews and analysis. It is the lead blog in the ReadWriteWeb Network, a growing network of blogs about web technology - the other sites are last100 (a blog about Digital Lifestyle), AltSearchEngines (about search) and ReadWriteTalk (a podcasting show about the people behind the Web).
ReadWriteWeb began publishing on April 20, 2003 and is now one of the most widely read and respected blogs in the world. It has over 200,000 RSS and email subscribers.
Richard co-founded the Web 2.0 Workgroup and from September 2005 – December 2006 he started and ran the Web 2.0 Explorer blog at ZDNet.
Twitter Stream:
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China Detains 5 US Bloggers, Including Alive in Baghdad Founder
--News has emerged that the Chinese government has detained at least five bloggers from the United States for reporting on protests in favor of Tibet...
Yahoo Wants to Bring the Internet to Your Living Room
--At Intel's Developer Forum, Yahoo today announced an initiative to bring the Internet to your TV set through what it has dubbed the 'Widget Channel...
EBay Just Wants to Sell: Moving Away From Auctions
--Today, eBay announced a number of changes to its fee structure, which will emphasize fixed-price sales over eBay's traditional auctions. Fixed-pric...
How Technorati Could Become Relevant Again
--Blog search engine Technorati made a fresh round of promises this morning, assuring users that the service will be less awful soon once a new anti-...
Copy and Paste is Coming to an iPhone Near You
--Thanks to enterprising developer Zac White, we might just see a version of copy and paste working on the iPhone before Apple issues an official upd...
Get A Personal Search Engine Dashboard With Hittery
--As you may know, we are very fond of custom search engines here at ReadWriteWeb. We find them incredibly useful and we hope you do, too. In the pas...
FriendFeed: Hotter Than Ever or Starting to Fade? (POLL)
--No matter how you feel about FriendFeed, you can't argue with the fact that it has been one of most popular services among the early adopter set th...
Enterprise 2.0: The Nature of the Firm
--The break-up of behemoth, vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970's, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980's, and accele...
Pixelpipe: Easily Share Your Media Files on Multiple Sites (1000 Invites)
--We just came across Pixelpipe.com, a new service that allows you to easily post your digital pictures, videos, and audio files to a growing number ...
Most Popular Websites For Kids
--Continuing our coverage of the mainstream web, in this post we look at some of the most popular websites for kids. We've gathered information from ...
29% of Internet Users Have Bought Things From Spam Email?? Say It Aint So!
--Security company Marshal reports that their latest survey found 29% of respondents willing to admit that they have purchased something from a spam ...
Feed.Informer Relaunches Its All-in-one RSS Toolbox
--There is an infinite variety of things you can do with RSS feeds and a substantial number of those things can be done with Feed.Informer, which was...
3jam Launches Twitter SMS Service
--When Twitter announced they were killing SMS for anyone located outside the U.S., Canada, or India for financial reasons, many Twitter SMS users we...
Who Needs a Beta? Apple Extends MobileMe Subscriptions Another 60 Days
--Apple once again had to accept defeat and has announced that it will extend all subscriptions to its bug-ridden MobileMe service for yet another 60...
NewsCred, a Credible News Dashboard Opens to the Public
--NewsCred garnered quite a bit of attention in its initial private beta launch where ReadWriteWeb was considered by its users to be one of the most...
Google Sites Now Home For Spammers
--Google Sites, the Google platform for document sharing and collaboration, has been dubbed "SharePoint Light" by many members of the tech community....
Sponsor Announcement: DEMOfall 08 Agenda
--The conference agenda for DEMOfall 08 has been announced. ReadWriteWeb is one of the media partners for DEMOfall 08, which is on September 7-9 in S...
What Three Web Apps Excite You Most?
--One of our favorite Australians, Lachlan Hardy, twittered an interesting question today: What are the three things online that are exciting you mos...
Yahoo! Opens Buzz Submissions to All - But is It Democratic?
--Yahoo! Buzz, the social news service that launched in February and delivered giant piles of traffic to the lucky few websites that were indexed by ...
RIAA Takes Down Muxtape, Will Future Solutions Please Hurry Up & Arrive?
--Popular playlist sharing site Muxtape is down and says that it's because of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It might have be...
Create a Tour of Web Pages with Agglom
--Sharing web pages in a conversation shouldn't be as tricky as it is. Sometimes you're on the phone, or speaking to a group of people and there isn...
The Future of the Desktop
--Everything is moving to the cloud. As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from native desktop applications towar...
What Would the Perfect Streaming Music Service Look Like?
--Pandora's on the ropes, Imeem is taking off, Grooveshark relaunched today with recommendations and a long list of cool features, Blip.fm threatens...
U.S. Elections: Obama and McCain Start Sharing in Google Reader
--Google today announced that it has signed up the Obama and McCain campaigns to share blog posts and news items they read on Google Reader. This pro...
Patents: GraphOn Sues Google for Connecting Databases to the Internet
--GraphOn, which considers itself a "leading worldwide developer of server-based application publishing and Web-enabling software solutions," today a...
First Android Phone Just Approved By FCC
--Today, the news broke that the HTC Dream, the first handset to run Android (aka "the Google Phone") has been approved by the FCC. In the documents ...
The New Mint.com Launches: Site Redesigned, But Still No Data Upload
--When Mint.com launched, they were taking a big risk - would people trust a web app to manage their finances online? Web 2.0 apps don't necessarily ...
David Hasselhoff Creates His Own Myspace for Fans
--People are definitely beginning to understand just how crazy social networks are getting. Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and many more are taking off and...
Vimeo AIR App Coming Soon?
--We have to admit that we have a thing for AIR apps. Most of our most popular desktop tools include AIR apps. From Twhirl to Snackr, they help us d...
Pandora On the Verge of Closing Shop
--Pandora is an internet radio service that allows you to create your own radio station based on songs and artists that you like. While you can't ne...
How to Use Qik to Video Record With Your iPhone
--Earlier this week we announced that popular livestreaming services Qik and Flixwagon were now available for the iPhone. Unfortunately, the only wa...
4 Great iPhone App Review Sites
--The iTunes App Store is a bit of a big deal these days. Several new applications pop up in the iTunes store every day. With hundreds of apps to do...
Weekly Wrapup, 11-15 August 2008
--It's the weekend, so time to review the week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we looked at rising music...
UPDATED: Six Apart NOT Relaunching Blogs.com As Index of the Blogosphere
--Update: In the frenzy to cover this breaking story, we had high hopes for a Six Apart announcement that emerged today. After seeing the soon to b...
MobileMe Users Targeted in Phishing Scam
--The MobileMe service from Apple has been presenting its users with problems since day one. First, it snuck quietly onto computers by being bundled...
Study: Fastest Growing US Companies Rapidly Adopting Social Media
--A one year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use ...
Top 5 Streaming Music Apps for the iPhone
--The iPhone's memory might be too small to carry your complete music collection with you, but thanks to a growing number of streaming music apps, yo...
The Web Computer: Closed, Secure, and Tightly Controlled
--Lately, people have been noticing that the big shift in computing - that is, moving our apps off the desktop and into the cloud - has more ramifica...
Is Lifestreaming Going Mainstream? AOL Set to Snag SocialThing!
--While there are many popular lifestreaming services out there such as FriendFeed and Profilactic, SocialThing! can be argued to be the more mainst...
Cooliris Lets You Enable Your Web Site For 3D In Minutes
--We've been fans of Cooliris, the browser plugin formerly known as PicLens, for quite some time. This plugin transforms a normal 2D web page into an...
Cloud Failures Are Serious - Time to Revisit P2P?
--Google had a bad week in cloud computing, with serious downtime in Gmail, Blogger and Spreadsheet. Back in July it was Amazon that was embarrassed ...
Is It Finally Over? Yahoo Appoints Icahn Nominees to Board
--It looks like we can finally put the Carl Icahn vs. Yahoo fight behind us. As part of the settlement between the two, Icahn was given three seats o...
Livestreaming From Qik and Flixwagon Comes to the iPhone
--It's no secret that the iPhone lacks video recording capabilities, which has served as a huge roadblock for companies and services that would like...
How Web Technology is Boosting Productivity in Organizations
--ReadWriteWeb is a partner with Defrag, a conference about web innovation. Defrag's Eric Norlin has lately been blogging about enterprises and organ...
Innovation: Historic Intellectual Property Ruling Could Validate Open Licenses
--If I apply some wacky new type of license to my creative work, is it going to hold up in court if a conflict comes down to that? According to so...
The Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type
--Platforms like WordPress and Movable Type democratized the process of self-publishing. With these tools, everyone could be a publisher and it didn'...
Wuala Launches P2P Cloud Storage Solution
--Wuala puts a new twist on cloud storage. While typical cloud storage services move your data onto servers managed by the provider, Wuala also uses ...
12 Unit Testing Tips for Software Engineers
--Unit Testing is one of the pillars of Agile Software Development. First introduced by Kent Beck, unit testing has found its way into the hearts a...
Pageonce's New iPhone App: Now 100% Mobile and Self-Destructs When Stolen
--When Pageonce unveiled their first version of their iOnce iPhone app, it became an instant success. Within 10 days it was ranked in the top three a...
Freebase Parallax Taunts Us With Awesome Semantic Web Video
--Staff researcher David François Huynh has created an interesting tool for browsing semantic database Freebase, called Freebase Parallax. Written u...
Google Should Buy eXpresso
--Like a lot of people, I had my problems with Google Apps this week. Sure, Google "feels my pain" but they also lost my confidence. And confidence i...
Google Reader Now Lets You Share Selectively
--The Google Reader team just announced that it has implemented more granular controls for who you share items with, including the ability to manage ...
Zapproved: A Lightweight Decision Making App
--Want to go to fewer meetings at work? By making group decision making faster, easier and more accountable, new app Zapproved may help you avoid ho...
WonderHowTo: How-To Videos in Your Sidebar
--WonderHowTo aggregates and curates a large database of instructional videos from all over the Internet. It employs a number of editors who search t...
Data Portability Working Group Elects New Leadership
--The high profile but heretofore loosely organized Data Portability Working Group announced last night that it has elected its first group of Steeri...
How To Lifestream From Your iPhone
--Recently, we took a look at the growing trend involving lifestreaming and how more people are choosing to go this route instead of establishing a m...
Online Office Suites: Zoho Adds Macro Recording
--Zoho's online office suite is getting closer and closer to becoming a real rival to Microsoft Office. One important update Zoho recently released w...
The Semantic Desktop? SDS Brings Semantics To Excel
--When you hear the word "semantic" you likely think of the semantic web - the supposed next iteration of the World Wide Web that features structured...
Does Good Tech Need PR?
--Behind the scenes of many tech blogs these days, there's a rat race for attention, with PR agents struggling to overcome the noise of feeds, news s...
The Fire Eagle Has Landed: Yahoo Opens Its Location Platform to All
--Yahoo just announced that the close beta period for its location platform Fire Eagle has ended and that the service is now open for everybody. We w...
Widgenie Graph Maker is Fast, Free and Easy
--Making charts and graphs might not seem like an exciting way to spend your time, but new service Widgenie manages to make this common task relative...
Disqus Revamps its Look and Improves Integration
--We've mentioned Disqus here on ReadWriteWeb numerous times. You can even preview Disqus' popular commenting system across numerous personal and ma...
Lijit Closes $7.1 Million Series C Round - Readies Advertising Network
--Lijit, which provides search services to bloggers and blog networks, announced today that it has closed a $7.1 Million series C round led by Foundr...
Mainstreaming Web 2.0: Shutterfly Share Sites
--Shutterfly, the photo sharing and printing company today launched Share Sites, which will allow users to create photo albums centered around events...
Wiki Editing Just Got Easier: Atlassian Confluence Releases Office Connector
--Atlassian Confluence, makers of one of the most popular enterprise wiki solutions, has just announced Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration i...
Feedly Launches a River of News
--At the beginning of this month, we told you about Feedly, a Firefox extension for Google Reader users that provides an alternative UI for reading t...
Startup, Inc - What You Need to Know Before Starting a Company
--Often people start a company without any clear idea of what a company is. Entrepreneurs closet themselves in the garage and start writing code. Wh...
Gmail Goes Down - Twitter Survives
--Today, Google's Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of t...
RWW Live: Future of Blogging
--The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, is set to begin in less than an hour at 3.30pm PST (6.30pm EST). We've changed the format a ...
Obama to Announce VP By SMS, Email
--You know it's a new era when a US Presidential candidate plans to make a major announcement using a new technology. The campaign of Barack Obama ...
Olympics: Only 0.2% of Viewers Exclusively Watch Online
--According to the Wall Street Journal, the Olympics are off to a good, but not amazing start on the Internet. Over the first three days, NBC's onlin...
Open Salon: If You Tippem, Will They Come?
--Online magazine Salon.com today opened up its new hosted blog network, Open Salon, which not only allows its readers (or anybody else for that matt...
Is Facebook the Most Popular Social Bookmarking Service on the Web?
--ShareThis reports that it is now. How do website readers prefer to share stories they find with friends? According to the company behind the wi...
Forget Push Email, Here Comes Push Facebook For Your Mobile
--From a company called Blue Whale Systems Ltd., makers of a free mobile push application called BlueWhaleMail, there now comes a new push applicatio...
The App Store: Soon To Be A Billion Dollar Marketplace?
--Anyone who has the iPhone or iPod Touch can tell you that one of the best things about owning the device is the ability to add apps from iTunes App...
Imeem Taking Off - Before MySpace Music Has Even Launched
--Music-based social networking site Imeem is getting a lot of the right kind of press currently, based on strong traffic growth and key deals with r...
last100's Smartphone Parade: One Size Doesn't Fit All
--At last100 [a ReadWriteWeb Network blog], we love the iPhone as much as anyone. Yet we remain convinced that for all of Apple's innovation - especi...
last100's Smartphone Parade: One Size Doesn't Fit All
--At last100 [a ReadWriteWeb Network blog], we love the iPhone as much as anyone. Yet we remain convinced that for all of Apple's innovation - especi...
Online China Overview
--The TrendsSpotting blog has produced a thorough overview of Online China, collected from a variety of sources such as Universal McCann, CNNIC, Pew ...
Online China Overview
--The TrendsSpotting blog has produced a thorough overview of Online China, collected from a variety of sources such as Universal McCann, CNNIC, Pew ...
There Must Be Something Between Viral & Obscure...
--You've probably been in those meetings too: someone mentions a cool, "edgy" (uh-oh) youth-oriented campaign, and someone else says "video", and the...
There Must Be Something Between Viral & Obscure...
--You've probably been in those meetings too: someone mentions a cool, "edgy" (uh-oh) youth-oriented campaign, and someone else says "video", and the...
Are App Stores Coming to a Carrier Near You?
--There's an interesting discussion going around about the possibility of T-Mobile taking some cues from Apple with an app store of their own. Inste...
Are App Stores Coming to a Carrier Near You?
--There's an interesting discussion going around about the possibility of T-Mobile taking some cues from Apple with an app store of their own. Inste...
Keep Track of Your Favorite Blogs in Gmail
--If you've ever wondered what the headlines at the top of your Gmail inbox are, they're called "web clips", not ads. Gmail has a preselected amount...
Keep Track of Your Favorite Blogs in Gmail
--If you've ever wondered what the headlines at the top of your Gmail inbox are, they're called "web clips", not ads. Gmail has a preselected amount...
Weekly Wrapup, 4-8 August 2008
--It's the weekend, so time for our review the past week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we showed you ho...
Weekly Wrapup, 4-8 August 2008
--It's the weekend, so time for our review the past week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we showed you ho...
Do You Want Incoming-Call Ads on Your Mobile?
--Your mother's calling - and there are shoes on sale. A new study released this week in the UK found that 80% of respondents said they were "happy ...
Bloglines: Now With Advertising
--Today, Bloglines has unveiled a new skin for its public beta site and has announced that it will start displaying ads on its start page. The new sk...
Yahoo Gives You More Options to Opt Out of Personalized Advertising
--Yahoo today announced that it will allow its customers to opt out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com. Yahoo made this announcement in a respons...
Use Twitter for Work With Twellow
--Does Twitter Have a Role in the Workplace? A Directory Project Thinks it Can Help Did you know that there are more than 100 people who work in th...
Facebook Didn't Want to Sue StudiVZ
--According to a report in the International Herald Tribune, Facebook tried to acquire the popular German social network StudiVZ. When those negotiat...
Poll: What Should Be Done About The "I Am Rich" App?
--By now you've surely heard the story about the "I Am Rich" app that sold in Apple's iTunes store for the ridiculous price of $999.99 (U.S.). What y...
Three New AIR Apps To Bring Facebook To Your Desktop
--If you love both Facebook and Adobe AIR, then you're going to love these three new AIR apps for your desktop: Facedesk, Zebr, and Flair. Facedesk i...
A First Look at Mozilla's Snowl
--Yesterday, Mozilla announced Snowl, a prototype of a universal messaging/content aggregation plugin for Firefox. In its current incarnation, Snowl ...
Winners: Web 2.0 Expo NY Competition
--Earlier this week we ran a competition for 2 full tickets to the New York Web 2.0 Expo conference 16-19 Sept. The tickets are valued at over $1000 ...
#080808 Twitter Campaign For Beijing Olympics
--This week we've discussed how Social Media Marketing and Online Video is being used in the Beijing Olympics. It's now 8.08am on Friday 8th Au...
New Translation Services Come to MS Office and JaJah
--Automated translation services seem to be getting more and more traction these days. Today, we saw announcements about new translation related prod...
Offer Personal Content Recommendations for Free with New MyBlogLog Plug-in
--Personal recommendations of targeted content are something almost every publisher would like to offer their site visitors. It's hard though, to kn...
Garfield Minus Garfield: From Web Sensation To Book In Less Than A Year
--If you have not yet checked out the online sensation Garfield Minus Garfield, you have been missing out. Launched in February of 2008, this comic i...
Mainstreaming RSS: Regator is Now in Public Beta
--We first wrote about the mainstream RSS reader and blog directory Regator in early July. At that time, Regator was still in private testing, but to...
See What Facebook Connect Looks Like
--On Monday, Facebook released a sample site that demonstrates how Facebook Connect (previous coverage), their new authentication methodology for log...
Will The Semantic Web Have a Gender?
--One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it. As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective wil...
Mashups: Firefox May Go OAuth, Twitter Apps To Stop Asking for Your Password
--You can do a lot with new software if you tell it a little bit about yourself - but who wants to give the new kid on the block the password to thei...
Say Goodbye To Phone Menus, Fonolo Does The Deep Dialing For You (+Invites!)
--RWW Readers, Please Check The Bottom of This Post For Invite Info! Do you hate calling customer service at a large company? It's safe to say we al...
Rejaw: Combining Microblogging + Chat
--We just got word of an interesting new microblogging service: Rejaw. Rejaw is an interesting combination of microblogging with real-time chat. In s...
Mloovi: Translate Any RSS Feed Into 24 Languages
--Mloovi is a new app that runs any RSS feed through Google Translate. This may not be perfect, but there's is a clear need for such a service so we...
Google Sells Performics Search Marketing Business to Publicis Groupe
--Google has just announced that it will sell its Performics search marketing business to Paris-based Publicis Groupe. The deal is expected to close ...
Slow March to AOL's Funeral Continues: Split in Two
--According to a statement by Time Warner, AOL will be split into two separate businesses: advertising and access. Overall, revenues from its AOL div...
3 Cool Sites to Bookmark Your Favorite Images on the Web
--When browsing through websites we see hundreds of images a day that we think are cool. Some of us may download these images to our desktop. Others...
Keep Your Profiles in Sync with Atomkeep
--There's a new social network that pops up everyday. Most of us can't count on one hand how many social networks that we are currently apart of. Ev...
Microsoft Relaunches Windowslive.com as a Community Site
--Until now, Microsoft had used WindowsLive.com as the main hub for getting information about its Live branded services like Messenger, Hotmail, Spac...
'Web Meets World' Competition: Win Tickets to NYC Web 2.0 Expo
--This year the Web 2.0 Summit conference (5-7 Nov) is hosting an auction to benefit a few innovative organizations that are solving big problems. ...
ESME: Is This What an Enterprise Twitter Could Look Like?
--ESME, the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment, is an experimental communication project developed for SAP's 'Demo Jam' by a group of 24 collabor...
TeachStreet Expands: Helps You Find Local Teachers and Classes
--Teachstreet today announced that it has expanded the reach of its network from Seattle, WA, to Portland, OR. TeachStreet is a marketplace where tea...
GreasePocket: Greasemonkey for the iPhone
--We love us some Greasemonkey, the Firefox plug-in that lets users run simple scripts on top of their favorite web pages to add new functionality or...
The Future of Blogging Revealed
--There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its re...
Social.fm Shuts Down: Doomed by Its Client?
--Mercora, which last year renamed itself to Social.fm, was one of the earliest entrants into the music discovery market and launched to generally fa...
Songbird 0.7: Big Improvements for the Little Music Player
--Songbird, the desktop music player powered at its core by Mozilla technology, has recently released a new version: Songbird 0.7 (RC). This release ...
Congress Gets Their Hands on Social Media
--While companies may struggle to catch on with social media, the government seems to be taking steps to do the same. We're surprised they waited th...
"Operation Aborted" in IE7 Because of Sitemeter
--Imagine waking up and your site is inaccessible for no apparent reason. If this happens, site owners could spend a ridiculous amount of time tryin...
Tag Clouds R.I.P.?
--I loved tag clouds from the moment I saw them, and I still do. Two years ago, they roamed the social web like buffalo on the pre-Columbian plains o...
Mainstream Web Watch: The Olympics & Online Video
--The Beijing Olympics starts in a few days and what better test of the mainstream web is there than the world's biggest sports event. This is the fi...
Thanks RWW Sponsors; Email Us For Media Kit
--Thank you to our sponsors, for supporting ReadWriteWeb's mission to provide in-depth coverage of Web apps and trends. To enquire about sponsor slot...
According to Study, Half of U.S. Adults Use Social Media
--Half of U.S. adults use social media. That is, they do according to the latest findings from Universal McCann's "Media in Mind" study, an ongoing r...
The Olympics & Social Media Marketing
--This week we're looking at how Web technology is being used in the Beijing Olympics. In today's post we check out how some of the world's leading b...
Monitter: A Different Take on Twitter Search
--Monitter is a browser based Twitter search engine that is a bit reminiscent of TweetDeck, the popular desktop Twitter client. One of Tweetdeck's mo...
Five Lightweight Apps for Web Trainers and Consultants
--Teaching people how to use new tools on the internet is hard. Learning through experience is the most effective method, but it's slow. More and m...
Censorship: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google Agree on Code of Conduct
--With the start of the Olympics in Beijing being only a few days away, a lot of focus in the technology blogosphere has been on the restrictions put...
Build A Custom Search Engine Using Your Social Bookmarks
--Last week, Yahoo finally unveiled the long-awaited new version of the social bookmarking site Delicious. Along with the new URL, simply delicious.c...
What's Your Vision of the Future of the Web? Mozilla Wants to Know
--Everything's changing on the internet these days, so it's as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the way we interact with it too. M...
Last.fm Wants to be Bigger in Japan
--The popular UK-based music streaming and discovery service Last.fm announced that it has expanded its on-demand listening and streaming radio servi...
Photoshop Express Adds New Features, AIR App
--Photoshop Express, Adobe's online photo-editing and storage platform, was temporarily closed late last week as they performed maintenance and added...
Practice Fusion: 'Google Apps For Doctors' Ramps Up
--Practice Fusion is a startup making waves in the health 2.0 market. The product is a free, web-based EMR (electronic medical record) system for phy...
Five Amazing Color Palette Generators
--Do you need to pick out a new color scheme, but don't know where to begin? If you're designing a web site or blog theme, finding just the right col...
Location-Based Social Networking to Generate $3.3 Billion by 2013?
--According to a rather speculative report by research firm ABI Research, location-based social networks like Brightkite, GyPSii, Pelago and Loopt co...
FCC Says BitTorrent Throttling Illegal, EFF Releases Tool for You To Test Your ISP For It
--The Federal Communications Commission ruled this morning by a 3 to 2 vote that Comcast's arbitrary throttling of customers' use of BitTorrent was i...
Amazon Remembers Its Origins: Buys Abebooks
--Amazon today announced that it will acquire AbeBooks, the online marketplace for used and rare books. Given the breadth of Amazon's product line, i...
Feedly Now Integrates With Google Search
--...And Continues To Be Awesome! If you're a Firefox and Google Reader user and you haven't yet installed the Feedly plugin, you're going to want t...
Breaking Free of Outlook
--I recently moved to a new office and found that I couldn't send mail via Microsoft Outlook. I've had this same problem in different locations. I've...
Weekly Wrapup, 28 July - 1 August 2008
--It's time to wrap up the week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reviewed a super-hyped new search engi...
What Should Exxon Do About Twitter? Absolutely Nothing
--Energy giant Exxon Mobil fell victim to a Twitter user spoofing official use of an account named ExxonMobilCorp, it was discovered yesterday, and n...
AOL is Getting Serious About Lifestreaming: Buys SocialThing
--SocialThing, a lifestreaming/social aggregation site, has been acquired by AOL, TechCrunch reports. We currently have no information about the fina...
Eight Ways to Get Users to Fill Out Their Profiles
--"Hi, my name is MrCucumber69, I have a gray blob for a face and that's all I care to share about myself - will you be my friend?" Silly as that so...
AOL Tells Angry Blogger Staff: Everything is Fantastic
--AOL Senior VP of Programming Marty Moe held a conference call for all the bloggers in the Weblogs Inc. network this afternoon, a week after cutback...
Marshall Kirkpatrick Joins RWW as VP Content Development
--I'm very pleased to announce that Marshall Kirkpatrick has joined ReadWriteWeb in a full-time capacity, as our new Vice President of Content Develo...
Delicious Finally Launches Version 2.0: Easier, Prettier, Faster
--The popular social bookmarking service Del.icio.us launched a complete redesign of its service today. Ever since it was bought by Yahoo in 2005, th...
Can New Media Be Taught in Schools?
--Tests on Twitter, wiki-style study groups, students quizzed on yesterday's most popular YouTube videos and the biggest hits on Del.icio.us/Popular ...
Social Media In The Military: Insight Into The Future of Social Networks
--iLink, a social network analytics technology from SRI International has recently been integrated into three online communities used by the military...
UK Privacy Watchdog: Google Streetview Can Go Ahead
--We reported on the controversy around Google's Street View in the UK earlier this month. At that time, a number of UK privacy activists had raised ...
Welcome To The Mobile Web, Now Here Come The Viruses?
--Ever since our cell phones started shipping with web browsers built-in, security companies have been warning us about the threat of mobile viruses...
Defrag: Fixing Foundational Information Channels
--One of the conferences we're supporting this year is Defrag. The topics that Defrag explores are very close to our hearts - OpenSocial, Attention, ...
Socialmedian Launches Open Beta: Personalize Your News Filter
--After 4 months of private, invite-only alpha testing, social news network Socialmedian is now open and available in a public beta. During the last ...
After Cuil, Blekko Will Be More Careful - But Does It Matter?
--My first post for ReadWriteWeb, just over 1 year ago, started with the premise that search was “game over”, that Google had won and the...
Twitter Versus Plurk: The UI Advantage
--When I first reviewed Plurk for ReadWriteWeb, I had only been using this new lifestreaming service for a little while. After using it for much long...
Some Web Apps Work Better Together
--How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that's what we're trying to do these days - but all these new ap...
Google Acquires Omnisio
--Maybe to counter some of the bad news around YouTube today, Google just announced the acquisition of the Y Combinator funded video annotation and m...
Italian TV Company MediaSet Sues Google, YouTube for $800 Million
--Once again, a major media company is suing Google because of alleged copyright violations by users on YouTube, Google's popular video sharing site....
Balsamiq, a Mockup Creator in AIR, is on Fire
--Balsamiq, an application mockup creation tool built on Adobe AIR, has generated more than $10,000 in revenue less than 6 weeks after the $79 tool l...
ClearStep: A Great Place to Share Knowledge About The New Online Enterprise
--Sometimes social media users inside big businesses just need to talk about their feelings. More often, they need to share valuable metrics, anecdo...
RWW Predictions: iPhone Sales in 2008
--This week's prediction is about (what else) the iPhone. We're asking: How many total units of the iPhone will Apple sell in 2008?. For background...
Apple's App Store: 10 Million Downloads Later
--Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch has been growing quickly over the weekend. Close to 250 applications have been added since Friday. ...
Geeks Make Public Presentations Fun Again
--At a time in history when Powerpoint is both ubiquitous and widely despised, when students in classrooms pay increasingly little attention to the e...
Do Facebook Users Care About Commenting On Mini-Feeds?
--Recently, Facebook changed its layout involving the commenting functionality on Mini-Feed items. Before, you had to click on the plus sign ("+") to...
Bezos Invests in Social Gaming Network
--Jeff Bezos clearly thinks there is a future in casual gaming. Just this May, he invested $3 million in Kongregate. Today, Bezos invested an undiscl...
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 laun...
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 i...
GroupSwim: SaaS-Style Collaboration
--A guest post by Ben Kepes of diversity.net.nz, a blog that focuses on SaaS, cloud-computing and Web 2.0 for the real world. GroupSwim is an innova...
Cartoon: Twitter Dating
--For those of you wondering why you haven't seen a Twitter post on ReadWriteWeb for, oh, a couple of days now -- here is one! And you'll be pleased ...
Zimbra Mobile for the iPhone 2.0
--Zimbra is looking to expand its platform to the iPhone. Recently they announced Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 will al...
iPhone Apps For Social Networks
--The iPhone App Store is here and if you have an iPhone like most of us at ReadWriteWeb, the App Store is the one place you'll probably be for the m...
Weekly Wrapup, 7-11 July 2008
--It's time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. It was a very busy week on the product side, and not surprisingly it was dominated by the re...
Yahoo Announces Winners of SearchMonkey Developer Challenge
--When Yahoo announced Search Monkey, its developer platform for search, it also announced the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge, which was going to r...
Results: RWW Predictions & Polls (FriendFeed, Bigcos, Google Docs)
--This week we announced a new feature for our community: ReadWriteWeb Predictions, a Predictions Center that we hope will enable you to tap into the...
Apple and AT&T Run Into Problems During iPhone 3G Launch
--While yours truly didn't run into any problems buying his new iPhone (besides the local AT&T store only having a ridiculously small number of t...
63% Of IT Depts Say Web 2.0 Will Impact Their Business
--A new report from Forrester Research, a company that has been closely following the adoption of web 2.0 and social technologies by businesses, now ...
The Vista Disaster Back Story
--Microsoft's failure to close the Yahoo deal, despite all kinds of loud talk and machinations, makes the Beast of Redmond look increasingly weaker. ...
Cascada Mobile: Now Anyone Can Build a Mobile App
--Last month, we told you about Iceberg, an application that allows anyone to be a developer by simplifying programming into a process that can be do...
Does Yahoo Independence Matter to The Rest Of Us? Yes!
--The subject of Yahoo's independence will be decided, as it should, by Yahoo's shareholders. The battle to control Yahoo fascinates so many other pe...
Confirmed: PaidContent Bought By the Guardian - Here's How Media History is Made
--The trailblazing blog PaidContent, specializing in coverage of the business of new media, will be acquired by the Guardian Media Group, writes Kara...
iPhone 3G In The Flesh
--While the US waits agonizingly for their 3G iPhones to arrive, some of us have been playing with our new toys :-) There's been a lot of excitement ...
Meebone Brings Meebo Back to the Desktop
--Meebone is a bit of a strange piece of software, in that it is an AIR based desktop client for Meebo. Meebo itself is a great web application that ...
Priming the Pump: New Users, Meet the Old Winners
--Social media, it's all about the democratization of communication and empowering new voices - right? A few years into the new media revolution, re...
Loopt Brings Yelp Reviews to 3G iPhone
--The iPhone App Store has just gone live and one of the apps getting early attention is Loopt, a location aware mobile social network startup we pro...
Apple's App Store Launches
--As the hype around the iPhone 3G launch tomorrow is kicking into high gear, Apple has released a new version of iTunes, which includes the long-awa...
PlanetEye: A One-Stop Travel Destination
--Today, the Toronto-based travel site PlanetEye officially launched its new travel planning service, which combines extensive travel content, bookin...
PostRank Filters Your Info Overload for Popularity
--AideRSS, the marvelous service that filters items in any RSS feed for popularity with readers, has spun out its core technology PostRank as an Appl...
Kiva Launches Facebook Campaign Using New Marketing Tool, Involver
--Kiva.org is the world's first person-to-person lending web site that helps empower entrepreneurs in the developing world by connecting them with ot...
Twitter Back On Track? - Raises API Limit To 100 Requests Per Hour
--Since Twitter's introduction into the tech community at SxSW, Twitter has gone through a ton of ups and downs. Twitter's downtime has been the tal...
Search War: Yahoo! Opens Its Search Engine to Attack Google With An Army of Verticals
--Yahoo! is taking a bold step tonight: opening up its index and search engine to any outside developers who want to incorporate Yahoo! Search's cont...
Get A Less Noisy FriendFeed With Moopz
--Moopz is a new web service created by the fabulous Mark Carey, the same developer responsible for RWW's innovative FriendFeed/comment integration. ...
Last.fm Starts Paying Royalties to Unsigned Bands
--Online music service Last.fm today announced that it will start paying out royalties to unsigned and independent bands that upload their music to l...
It's Official: There Is No Bubble
--Yesterday we analyzed the financials of the 7 publicly traded Internet Big Cos. There was nothing bubbly there, with an average PEG of 1.4. So th...
Search Flickr Images by Color With the Multicolr Search Lab
--Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo!, has a ton images available for browsing through. You can search for photos in a multitude of...
After Lively, What's Next for Google?
--Yesterday, Google released Lively, a browser based virtual world somewhat reminiscent of The Palace from the mid-90s. A lot of people have been won...
Microsoft: Every Dollar of Piracy Costs Small-Fries Five Bucks
--Microsoft released a sponsored study this morning that aims to quantify the economic impact of piracy on related small businesses in the software e...
Getty to License Images from Flickr Users
--Yahoo and Getty Images announced a partnership today which will allow Getty to contact Flickr users and offer them to add their images to Getty's c...
Medialets Launches iPhone Ad Platform: Think DoubleClick for iPhone Apps
--The iPhone isn't just a mobile phone, it's truly a next-gen computing platform. Although all mobile devices run an OS and are essentially mini-comp...
DreamFactory's Collaboration Suite Now Available on Intuit's QuickBase
--DreamFactory's suite of Enterprise 2.0 applications consists of a Project Management module, a Time and Expense Module, a Document Manager, and a T...
Can Browser Add-ons Be Businesses?
--Full disclosure: Alex Iskold runs a browser add-on company called AdaptiveBlue. Also Fred Wilson, who is cited in this article, is a partner in Uni...
New: ReadWriteWeb Companies
--Here's another new feature we're launching: ReadWriteWeb Companies. It's a company index, powered by TradeVibes. Now whenever we write a review of ...
Telco Greed Overshadows iPhone 3G Launch
--Yesterday we reported on the outlandish iphone 3G pricing plans of Vodafone New Zealand, which is charging up to $250 per month for data plans and ...
Lively: Google Launches Virtual World
--While IBM and Linden Labs are cozying up to each other, Google has just released its own virtual world: Lively. Lively is available through a brows...
Internet Bigcos - How The Market Sees Them (POLL)
--In this post we provide data that shows how public market investors see 7 of the Internet bigcos we listed in our current poll (repeated below). In...
Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future
--URL shorteners like TinyURL are a wildly popular way to share long links over email, IM, microblogging and other contexts. The millions of shortc...
Exclusive: First Look At Genome, A Next-Gen Social Networking Service
--What are the number one problems facing today's social networks? According to the young developer Vladislav Chernyshov they are: privacy issues, di...
Google Teams up With eBay and PayPal to Combat Phishing
--Google today announced that it has teamed up with eBay and PayPal to fight phishing scams more effectively. Starting today, Google will authenticat...
Google Docs Goes Down - How Long is Too Long for You? (POLL)
--Google's hosted office suite Google Docs has been down for more than 30 minutes, rendering documents inaccessible and users frustrated. Short outa...
Microsoft Online Services: Subscription Web Apps for Business
--At its Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston today, Microsoft announced a roadmap and pricing for a number of online software packages for the en...
Linden Labs and IBM Break the Metaverse Barrier, Teleport Across Virtual Worlds
--Staff of Linden Labs, the creators of virtual world Second Life, and IBM announced last night that they have achieved the first recorded teleport o...
Social Networks and Spam
--According to a new report, over the past 12 months more than four-fifths of social networking site users said that they had received unwanted frien...
Vodafone NZ Charges "Like a Wounded Bull" For iPhone 3G
--New Zealand will be the first country in the world to get the Apple iPhone 3G, because of the country's position on the international dateline. Vod...
ReadWriteWeb Predictions: Twitter vs FriendFeed
--Today we're announcing a new feature for our community: ReadWriteWeb Predictions, a Predictions Center powered by Predictify. We hope it will enabl...
Rareshare: Social Network for Those With Rare Medical Disorders
--Rareshare is a social network for people coping with rare diseases like adrenomyeloneuropathy or erythromelalgia. Rareshare was created by David Is...
Summize Likely Acquired by Twitter
--Well placed rumor has it that microblogging service Twitter has acquired search engine Summize. Jason Calacanis appears to have made the first pub...
Metaweb's Freebase Now 60% Larger Than English Wikipedia
--Wikipedia is an incredible monument to human creativity and collaboration, but as one era of innovation passes into another - semantic web advocate...
How Reddit is Flirting With The Future of Social News
--In the competitive social news market, Digg has gotten a lot of attention for its recommendation engine and Mixx continues to release new features ...
Can Lifestream.fm Compete With FriendFeed?
--Lifestream.fm came onto the scene back in April of this year and was soon acquired by (once politically incorrect) social bookmarking company, Mist...
MyYahoo 2.0 Goes Live for All; Developer Platform Coming Soon
--After more than a year in private beta, the new Web 2.0 style MyYahoo is being rolled out today to all MyYahoo users, the company says. MyYahoo ...
Twitscoop Rolls Out Real-Time Tag Cloud for Twitter
--The Paris-based Twitter search engine and meme tracker Twitscoop rolled out a live tag cloud for Twitter today. While a tag cloud was always a majo...
Could a Government Mashup Contest Top McCain's Battery Project?
--Last month US Presidential hopeful John McCain announced an ambitious new proposal that would award a $300 million prize to the inventor of a bette...
Icahn/Ballmer: Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Still Possible if Yahoo Board Goes
--It wouldn't be Monday if there weren't some new saber rattling from Carl Icahn over the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. This time, in a letter to Yahoo's sha...
Ask.com's New Strategy in Search: Focus on Answers
--Ask.com isn't a bad search engine. In fact, the company has launched some innovative features over the years that have demonstrated their ambition ...
Add Some Spice to Flickr Galleries with FotoViewr
--Cover flow is one of the slickest designs ever made by Apple. There's no doubt that it gives a whole new meaning to album art and even makes users...
Poll: Best Internet Bigcos of 2008
--We've reached the halfway point of 2008, so time for a half-year assessment of the Internet bigcos. Below is a poll, asking for your picks for best...
Thanks RWW Sponsors; Email Us For Media Kit
--Thank you to our sponsors, for supporting ReadWriteWeb's mission to provide in-depth coverage of Web apps and trends. To enquire about sponsor slot...
Add Profiles to FriendFeed and Extend Your Twitter Profile
--Micro-blogging darling Twitter and the charming aggregation site FriendFeed are missing one huge thing that most users don't mind overlooking: pro...
Adobe Gets Sensitive About "AIR" Trademark
--Two months ago we reviewed a neat Adobe AIR app directory called FreshAirapps. FreshAIRapps looked to be the premier destination for debuting Adob...
Send Messages That Self-Destruct With Privnote
--Sending private messages through back channels is nothing new. We do it all the time with emails and direct messages on multiple services. However...
Sisense - An Analytics Dashboard for Amazon S3 - 50 Invites
--Sisense, a company that specializes in intelligence software, has launched in private beta an analytic dashboard for the Amazon S3 platform. Norma...
Get Great Tech Product Coverage With Tech NewsJunk
--There's a new aggregator in town folks. If you're a fan of Dave Winer's political NewsJunk aggregation site, Techmeme, or FriendFeed, then you're ...
Weekly Wrapup, 30 June - 4 July 2008
--It's time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we looked at Adobe's announcement of searchable Flash, checked in with o...
Iran Parliament to Debate Death Penalty for Bloggers
--The Iranian parliament is set to debate a draft bill that would add a number of crimes to the list of those that can result in execution, among the...
TweetDeck: A Different Twitter Client
--While Twitter might be going through a rather rough time right now, a lot of developers are still banking on its success. There are already a lot ...
Six Ways To Update Your Status
--As Twitter began to fail on a regular basis, many of its users turned to other micro-blogging services to continue on with their 140-character life...
Google's Street View Challenged in the UK
--Google's Street View launched in the US last May, but expanding the service to Europe is proving to be a bit more difficult for Google. The Google ...
Polymeme: Memetracker With Editors
--Polymeme is a new memetracker that bills itself as "a polymath's guide to news." Polymeme is the brainchild of Evgeny Morozov who started the proj...
Finally, A Windows Mobile Facebook App!
--For users of the Windows Mobile platform, visiting Facebook while on the go meant loading up the mobile web page in their device's browser. Meanwhi...
ReadWriteWeb Integrates FriendFeed Into Our Comments
--2008 has seen a big change in the way the blogging community communicates with each other. In a nutshell, discussions have become very fragmented. ...
Hitwise: Yahoo Would be Just Fine Without Search
--Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo's properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells o...
Swurl: Your Lifestream, Made Beautiful
--RSS is magic and the things we do online are often beautiful - so why are all the interfaces for displaying the feeds of our activities so ugly? E...
Regator: Mainstreaming RSS Aggregators - 100 Invites
--While quite a few mainstream users use RSS daily on their personalized homepages without ever knowing it, more traditional RSS aggregators are only...
Mapstraction Takes Map Mashups To A Whole New Level
--If you're a developer who loves to build mashups - especially map mashups - then you have to check out the library provided by Mapstaction. (And if...
Viacom Gets YouTube User Data
--In the ongoing copyright litigation between Google and Viacom, a judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ha...
SeeqPod Launches PodLists
--The music search engine SeeqPod has just announced a new service for music fans: "PodLists." Because of the massive amount of playable search resul...
Does Microsoft + Powerset Beat Google?
--What can the plan be with Microsoft's purchase of hot startup Powerset? The 3-year old company, founded by Dr Barney Pell, recently launched a sema...
It's Official: Firefox Downloads Set Guinness World Record
--We already knew that Mozilla had a record breaking day on June 17th when Firefox 3 was downloaded close to 8 million times, despite the download si...
Microsoft Equipt: Office and OneCare in a Subscription Package
--Microsoft today announced that it will release an all-in-one software subscription package that includes Live OneCare and Microsoft Office Home and...
Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom
--Identi.ca is a new microblogging service that launched today - but it's not just another also-ran. The service is an Open Source, CreativeCommons ...
Posterous: Minimalist Blogging
--Posterous is such a simple microblogging platform, it almost makes Tumblr look overly complicated. The Y Combinator funded startup is a bit of a mi...
WordPress Stays Hip with the Times, Adds Gears and Looks to OAuth
--Open source blogging platform WordPress may have won most peoples' hearts as the best blogging platform in town, but that doesn't mean its core dev...
Source of FriendFeed Spam Revealed - Write APIs Can Be Trouble
--An interesting note came across our inboxes just now - the source of yesterday's FriendFeed spam has been revealed. If you've been using the social...
Mobile Web To Get Standards
--A group of mobile operators have just unveiled a new initiative they're calling "BONDI" whose goal is to encourage development of new mobile web ap...
Is Email In Danger?
--Human history is one of progressive improvement in communication. From the 20th century mail was a fundamental form of communication. The invention...
Exclusive Look: Digg Recommendation Engine Private Beta
--After months of promises (and third party tools), Digg finally announced this week that their recommendation engine is to be released. Today, Digg ...
Confirmed: Microsoft Acquires Powerset
--We wrote about Microsoft possibly acquiring semantic search engine Powerset just a few days ago when it was still a rumor. Today, both Microsoft an...
Commuto: Community-Based Online Trading
--Commuto puts an interesting spin on trading real world goods on the Internet. Clearly, it would be extremely hard for any start-up to be successful...</