Top Web News

Much of the discussion in the blogosphere this week revolved around two pieces of big news. Firstly Google announced that it is beta testing a new CPA (Cost Per Action) online advertising service. Our take is here, in which we posed the question: will Microsoft and Yahoo have to buy their way into the CPA game? This generated some interesting comments. Adam noted:

"Google's key advantage with CPA could be the integration with Google Checkout. If Checkout takes off, then Yahoo's in trouble with trying to catch up on CPA because it can't just buy into the race and be as effective as Goog."

SEO Mash wrote:

"CPC will still be king and there is no need for Yahoo or MSN to be that worried. CPA/PPA only make sense when there is a well defined "purchase" action that can be directly related back to the original click-thru and for many/most Adwords advertisers that is not the case."

"....an interesting post would be to examine why the hell Microsoft and Yahoo are so slow to take the initiative on this, and everything else that Google has won on in the past few years."

The second big news of the week was the News Corp/NBC Online Video Deal, in which News Corporation and NBC Universal partnered with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! - in an attempt to compete with Google/YouTube. 

In other bigco news, Adobe launched Apollo, Alpha Version this week and Yahoo launched oneSearch to the US Mobile Web. The latter essentially means that Yahoo's new mobile search service is now available to millions more people. In our post, we had an interview with Yahoo's Director of Mobile Web Lee Ott and explored what the news means exactly.

Analysis Posts

Once again we had some outstanding (if we do say so ourselves) analysis posts this week, with our writers going super-in-depth into the latest Web trends and products.

Alex Iskold wrote two excellent posts: Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services and Current Mashup and API Trends. The first one was notable for almost causing a Web 2.0 crisis of confidence! Well, it at least proved some inspiration for Peter Rip's controversial post this week entitled Web 2.0 - Over and Out and Valleywag's follow-up post. Both cited Alex's "Web 3.0" post as evidence that the tide is turning. In any case, our post is well worth reading for anyone interested in what's next in the Web's evolution. FWIW, we only used the term 'web 3.0' to signify something between what has come to be known as 'web 2.0' and the Semantic Web. 

Josh Catone wrote a comprehensive overview of the growing crowdsourcing market. And to emphasize the point, there is some excellent "crowdsourcing" going on in the comments - where many people listed other crowdsourcing projects worth checking out.

There were two great posts this week on the topic of building and marketing your startup. Check out Jitendra Gupta's How to Build a Profitable Startup by Knowing Your Users Better and then Emre Sokullu's How To Market Your Web App.

Sramana Mitra's latest post analyzed MSN Money, concluding that it is a stronger offering than Yahoo Personal Finance.

Finally, for those of you interested in the enterprise space, check out CIOs Spurn Web 2.0 Startups - Enterprises Want Suites and Large, Incumbent Software Vendors.

Startup Action

We profiled the following startups this week:

• Hakia Takes On Google With Semantic Technologies
• Dekoh Challenges Apollo As Desktop/Web Platform
• Allth.at Launches Innovative Search Agents App
• P2P Lender Zopa Gets $13M Funding - Expands into US
• Userplane Releases Userlist - IM for Websites a Trend to Watch

Poll

Our poll this week asked Which Personalized Homepage Do You Use?. It was a hot topic, as at the start of the week Netvibes launched its "Coriander Edition" and later in the week Google launched new themes. Here are the final results of the poll:

Google Personalized Homepage          27% (409 votes)
Pageflakes                                        27% (397 votes)
Netvibes                                           22% (326 votes)
I don't use a personalized homepage  12% (174 votes)
My Yahoo                                         5% (76 votes)
Yourminis                                         2% (36 votes)
Live.com                                          2% (31 votes)
Webwag                                          0% (7 votes)
Other (please note in comments)       2% (34 votes)

There was a late flurry of votes for Pageflakes, bringing it to second place just behind Google Personalized Homepage. Netvibes was also very popular. Those 3 'start pages' have a clear lead in innovation and are favorites of the web 2.0-savvy crowd.

While it was perhaps to be expected that market leader My Yahoo isn't well used by Read/WriteWeb's early adopter readership (although now that My Yahoo is innovating again, that may begin to change), it did surprise me that Microsoft's live.com rated so poorly. Only 31 out of nearly 1,500 poll respondents said that live.com is their favorite personalized homepage, perhaps reflecting the confused branding of live.com and its barebones look n' feel. However it does actually have some nifty gadgets, so I was a little surprised it only got 2% of votes. It also seems that relative newcomer Webwag is struggling to make an impression.

The other noteworthy piece of data was that 12% of respondents don't use a personalized homepage at all, which suggests the market is still growing.

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