When you think of widgets you typically think of web 2.0 companies. Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us were among the first services with widgets and many more followed. Indeed, if you're a startup then it could be seen as unusual nowadays if you don't have a widget strategy.
But the older and larger companies are still trying to wrap their hands around widgets. Just recently, we profiled NBC signing up to use Clearspring. This move clearly signals that NBC is serious about their widgets strategy.
In this post we look at an unlikely widget company, Random House Publishing. A quick look at their web service and the widget is enough to realize that the company "gets it". But a deeper look reveals that Random House not only has gotten the widget bug, it also has a broad and solid strategy around widgets. The publishing giant is using widgets to build its presence and brand awareness everywhere online.
Firefox is a browser that can be extended and enhanced in many ways - chief among those being Add-ons, which give you more functionality or perhaps just a new theme. In fact sometimes they give you a full-blown web app, like Yoono, BlogRovr or Trailfire. We've written about Firefox add-ons a number of times on Read/WriteWeb, so in this post we'll review some of the neat things you can do with Firefox add-ons.
Last August we gave you our top 10 Add-ons. Here were our picks then (minus Browster, which is no more), but we encourage you to leave a comment saying what your favorite add-ons are now.
Fred Wilson has a slightly provocative post this weekend addressing The Age Question, suggesting that it is "harder for anyone older than 30 to get funded in the web services market". Dave Winer and others vigorously disagree. But I didn't take offense at Fred's central premise, even though I'm 35 (the same age as Marc Andreessen), because I agree that growing up on the Web does give you a unique view on media.
However the one thing I did take a little offense at was this statement:
"They grew up in AOL chatrooms, IMing with their friends for hours after dinner, and went to school with a Facebook login."
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email:
This week was dominated, at least on the Read/WriteWeb Network, by the Day Without Google - and its results. The idea was to last a whole day without using Google search; to experiment with alternative search engines and perhaps find something better than the default Big 5 search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, AOL). AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight launched the Day Without Google (inspired by Larry Dignan from Between The Lines). Charles' wrapup of the day is great reading - basically he breaks the results down into 5 groups. Also see Josh Catone's results. Unfortunately some of us were, ahem, not masters of our domains!
Ever since Facebook announced its open platform at the end of May, I have been receiving a flurry of emails from friends and blog buddies wanting to connect on Facebook. It could be just the 'in thing' with early adopter blogger types, but maybe it's more than that. It could be the tipping point for Facebook going mainstream.
Max Kalehoff from Nielsen BuzzMetrics has a good analysis of Facebook today. And next week Read/WriteWeb will explore just how open Facebook really is (as Sam Sethi twittered today, "It's a proprietary silo, no RDFa/mf's , no RSS and no Atom Publishing Protocol"). But for now, I want to do a quick poll of R/WW readers, to see how many are now members of Facebook. Up until a month or so ago, I wasn't. Indeed, today I was "poked" for the first time - by Joshua Porter (does this mean I have to buy him a drink next time I'm in the US?). Anyway here is the poll:
Last week we profiled eyeOS, which had just launched its 1.0 version. This week the eyeOS team contacted me to claim that a new competitor, MyBooo, has broken the Open Source license of eyeOS 0.9.x and is using it as a base for their project.
The WebOS space is made up of a number of small startups, many of them in Europe, and it seems to be prone to flare ups and disagreements between developers. In May 2006 I blogged that eyeOS claimed Orca was vaporware - and a heated discussion took place. Part of the issue there was confusion about whether Orca is open source, which is the bone of contention with MyBooo too.
If you ever wanted to know what I look and sound like, here I am courtesy of Ross Dawson and One Minute World, a neat new service that specializes in one minute video content for streaming and mobile devices. And to preempt the comments - yes I do sometimes smile; and no, I don't know what was happening with my eyes and the head nods (hey, it was a lot more close up than I expected!). :-) Of course I managed to plug Read/WriteWeb's two new network blogs!
Also check out other Aussie 2.0 heads in close-up on Ross Dawson's blog.
UrbanSeeder is a start up from Israel whose goal is to "incite some love, friendship and mutual growth" by enabling real world connections to continue online in a safe and anonymous environment. The idea is simple plant a "seed" (a private collaboration space for two people), and either invite someone you know to participate via email, or use the seed's unique URL to invite someone you've just met.
UrbanSeeder has a utility for creating attractive, printable seed cards with the URL to a private seed. If you meet someone at a party or bar, but don't want to give out your phone number, you can give them an invitation to an UrbanSeeder seed where you can continue your conversation safely and relatively anonymously. But just what is a seed?
Lately there's been a swirl of buzz about Powerset, a stealth natural language processing search engine. Last week they released their first "Query of the week". Today we discovered that Powerset is launching Powerlabs (screenshot below), plus we got our hands on a second query. Here are the screenshots, neither of which has been seen before elsewhere:
A screenshot of the Powerlabs interface [Ed: does that dashboard really have the P-word in its menu?!]
Written by Mircea Goia
Romania is a country of 21 million people and is the biggest from the Balkans (Eastern Europe). The total Internet penetration rate is about 23% (5 million) and it's the lowest in European Union. However the growth rate is one of the biggest (517% since 2000). Out of the 3.5 million Internet connections, more than half are broadband (cable or DSL is 8.2%, the same as Greece). Broadband and DSL connectivity is localized to cities, while in smaller towns and villages dial-up is many times the only option.
