Google always has good April Fools jokes and this year is no exception....
More info here. Classic. Who needs a Web Office after all...
Like many other web 2.0 geeks, today I woke up to Mike Arrington's elaborate April Fools joke that Techcrunch has acquired infamous dot com site F**kedCompany.com. It actually is 1 April where I live, but it wasn't until I had finished reading the article that I realised it was probably an April Fools joke (thanks to a timely IM from Steve O'Hear!). There were some clues in the Techcrunch article, but subtle ones. Particularly the statement: "its clear that we are at the tail end of the current boom". As in all good April Fools jokes, there is a strong element of truth in that statement - but when you think about it, it makes no sense for Techcrunch to be the one stating it. The following bit is probably the biggest clue though:
"While plenty of startups are launching, we aren‚Äôt seeing any actual innovation any more. There just isn‚Äôt the ‚Äúwow‚Ä? factor around new startups like in 2004/2005. That does not bode well for the future - there just isn‚Äôt anything left to invent."
I would be one of the first to call bullshit on that statement! But even the comments in the TC post are great, e.g. this one from a "Michelle Carrington" (heh):
"This isn‚Äôt an april fool‚Äôs joke, idiots if there is a bubble, TC is just covering or diversifying its assets by buying the ‚Äúbear‚Ä? while still holding on to the bull."
Funnily enough, there is actually some serious commentary out there which echoes the Techcrunch post. Wired is currently running a story, dated 29 March, with the headline: Tim O'Reilly on ETech: "It feels like the end of this idea". It is referring specifically to ETech, which as a conference seems to be nearing the end of its run. In the Wired piece Tim is quoted as saying:
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb.
This week Charles Knight released the March edition of his Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. As usual the list provoked a flurry of comments, with the Search Engine of the Month KoolTorch coming under a bit of scrutiny (mostly for being IE-only). But I think everyone agrees that Charles is doing an outstanding job with the list, which is now a benchmark for small search engines to aspire to.
In a Point/Counterpoint post this week, John Milan and I argued opposite sides of the coin for: Which is better, an offline Web App or an online Desktop App?. Again, check out the comments for a great discussion. I'm not sure either of us won the argument. Perhaps, as Ash Maurya suggested, it was a draw:
"Great arguments on both sides but I agree with John that the web and desktop communities are on a path of convergence towards a model that offers the best of both worlds:
- Browser access for remote use and sharing with others as it is the lowest common denominator and
- Desktop experience when local for offline access, richer experience, privacy/confidentiality, integration, user control etc."
In another post new R/WW author Phill Midwinter posed this intriguing question: Is Google a Semantic Search Engine? If you've been following our recent coverage of semantic technologies, such as Hakia and Segala, you will enjoy the robust discussion in the comments to Phill's post.
Desktop On Demand (DOD) is the latest WebOS to come onto the market. It is a free "online desktop service" that lets you access your desktop remotely. DOD comes with 1GB of free disk space, with extra space available for a fee. DOD is aiming to go beyond simply being a virtual desktop - it wants to be "a wide ranging and powerful remote computing platform". We'll explore what that means in a minute, but first some context...
The WebOS, in its literal sense as a web-based virtual desktop, has been a pet topic of the Read/WriteWeb team for some time. For context, check out my overview of the WebOS market in April 2006 along with a case study of EyeOS in August. Ebrahim Ezzy covered the territory for Read/WriteWeb in September last year, then Emre Sokullu wrote about the mythical GoogleOS in November. A WebOS is also known as a Webtop, and Ebrahim's definition probably explains it best:
Continuing Read/WriteWeb's series on international web apps, I bring you a sample of all that the emerald isle has to offer. 20 years ago Ireland was a sleepy backwater with high unemployment and mass emigration. Jobs were rare and the only new startups were farms. But all of that changed when the 'celtic tiger' came along. No one can agree what kick started it - low corporate tax rates or our involvement in the EU. I reckon it was Ray Houghton's goal against England in the 1988 European championships. Either way, things have changed forever.
Today Google, Microsoft, Intel, Dell and IBM all have various european head quarters in Ireland. With a population of over 5 million north and south, we are considered in some circles to be the largest exporter of software in the world. We have no shortage of bigco investment and job creation in Ireland, but what's happening in the indigenous startup scene?
Pigsback.com has been running since 2000 and is endeared to the hearts of a large number of internet users in Ireland (and the UK as of last year). In their own words, it's an 'online club of consumers and brands'. You sign up for an account and then receive targeted offers, competitions and surveys from the Pigsback network of advertisers. As you interact with these events you build up 'piggy points', which you can exchange for goods and services.
Pigsback works, simply because the 'piggy points' you collect are really worth something. In little time you can build up enough for a free CD or a discounted holiday, for example. Their advertiser network includes Ford, EBay, Nestle, and Betfair to name but a few.
StatCounter provides web tracking services for millions of websites around the world. Similar to Google Analytics, but around a lot longer, you can sign up for free and start tracking immediately. They also have paid accounts which include more reports and options.
StatCounter is one of the few websites around with a pagerank of 10. They have more back links to their site than anyone else on the web, apart from Google.com!
BlogRovr is an interesting new way of getting blog information, on the go while you're surfing the Web. It is a download plugin for Firefox 2.0, which works cross-platform on Windows, Mac and Linux. There's no IE plugin for now, but support for IE6 and IE7 is coming soon (a couple of weeks away). BlogRovr is basically a personalized vertical search engine for every page you visit - processed in real-time. How it works is that once you've downloaded BlogRovr, when you surf the Web BlogRovr is busy working in the background 'fetching' related blog stories for you. Keeping with the canine theme, the BlogRovr blog says that BlogRovr is "your best friend for keeping your finger on the pulse of the blogosphere."
BlogRovr is the latest product from Activeweave, the company behind online social annotation app Stickis. In fact BlogRovr uses the same backend technology as Stickis. The main use case for BlogRovr is for people to see what their favorite bloggers have to say about anything they're browsing. In their blog, CEO Marc Meyer explains that BlogRovr is complementary to RSS Readers, because "RovR tells you about content from your blogs when and where you’re most likely to be interested in it."
Written by Can Erten and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the first in a 2-part series on Read/WriteWeb, exploring the world of P2P on the Web. Part 1 (this post) is a general introduction to P2P, along with some real-world applications of P2P. Part 2 will discuss future applications.
As the connection speed of the internet has increased, the demand for web related services has also increased. After the Web revolution, peer-to-peer networks evolved and currently have a number of different usages - instant messaging, file sharing, etc. Some other revolutionary ideas are still in research. People want to use peer-to-peer in many different applications including e-commerce, education, collaborative work, search, file storage, high performance computing. In this series of posts, we will look at different peer-to-peer ideas and applications.
Earlier today Yahoo launched a Yahoo Mail API. Recently we analyzed the current API and Mashup trends on the Web and noted that Yahoo is one of the big companies most active in this area. Also not long ago we profiled Yahoo! Pipes - a new tool that, we argued, treats the web as the database. We later expanded these ideas in our post entitled When Sites become Web Services. The major theme running through all these posts is that the Web is turning into a database exposed via APIs. Web giants like Google, Amazon and Yahoo! have been tapping into the large web development community, by exposing their services via APIs.
Here at ETech, Chad Dickerson, Sr. Director of the Yahoo! Developer Network, gave a session about Yahoo's experience in engaging its own engineers to utilize Yahoo! APIs in creative ways.
Mike Shaver from the Mozilla foundation is here at ETech talking about the Mozilla Manifesto. Traditionally, a manifesto on an organization's web site says what they stands for. These declarations are not necessary or typical, but are often made to emphasize the values that an organization believes in. It is also a strong message to their users and competitors, in that they pledge to play by certain rules.
So why does Mozilla need a manifesto? As Mozilla increases its share of the browser market and gains more visibility in the public eye, it wants to to show its principles and build public trust.
Here are the principles in Mozilla's manifesto:
Microsoft Labs gave a talk today on the latest projects going on in Microsoft that focus on web innovation. The projects presented, as well as other explorations, can be found at http://labs.live.com/.
Deepfish is Microsoft's intelligent web browsing technology for mobile devices. It renders mobile web pages "in a view that is closer to the desktop experience". This kind of mobile Web navigation is very similar to the one shown by Steve Jobs in January at his demo of the iPhone. The Deepfish technology works on both cell phones and the pocket PC. But unlike the iPhone, the navigation is done via Zoom box - sort of like Google Maps, in that it allows the user to focus on a specific part of the page. [Ed: is this the same technology as ZenZui?]
Just by looking at the examples, we can tell that the scaling is not ad hoc - rather it is 'intelligent' and sensitive to phone size, colors and images on the page. Like iPhone, Deepfish also supports vertical and horizontal viewing mode, although this is probably dependent on the kind of device you are using. Deepfish works now on Windows Mobile 5 and can be downloaded from the live labs web site (also more info here). Overall it does not look as slick as iPhone, but it is certainly on a par with iPhone's technology.
