Featured Stories

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!

In other news this week:

• Exclusive: Launch of Powerlabs, Plus More Powerset Screenshots
• Open Ads Receives $5 Million VC Investment
• Flickr Goes Multi-lingual
• Safari Coming to Windows; iPhone Runs AJAX Apps
• EditGrid Announces Series A Funding - Goal is to Re-define the Spreadsheet
• Adobe Apollo is now Adobe AIR

Analysis Posts

Josh Catone wrote a great Web Office post this week, showing how to Roll Your Own Online Office. As well as the many products mentioned by Josh, the comments are also full of suggestions. As someone who runs a small business virtually, this post was required reading for me!

This week Alex Iskold explored a concept called The Implicit Web. Alex explained the theory and then wrote about how companies like Last.fm, Amazon, Google, Attention Trust are putting that into practice. This is an important piece to read if you want to understand what is driving a lot of innovation on the Web today.

Jitendra Gupta wrote about how Open Source economics is driving Web 2.0 innovation. Again, must read for aspiring web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

This week we continued our coverage of Web Apps all around the world, with an excellent write-up from Mircea Goia. Check out Top Web Apps in Romania - the comments to this are nearly as feisty as the Russia post (I'm still recovering from that one!). I love running this series, because I am learning so much about Web innovation in parts of the world I know little about. Also, the high level trends to come out of this series are very valuable, no matter where you hail from.

Finally in the Analysis section, for a bit of sci-fi Web tech check out this Future of Media Video. It prophesies that Google will take over the world by 2050!

Startup Action

Startup of the Week is Todoist, which makes Task Management Simplified. Lachlan Hardy wrote an excellent review of Todoist and many of the comments and feedback to the article indicated that Todoist is a compelling offering - e.g. it can integrate with Gmail.

Here are the other startups we profiled this week:

• Tumri Advertiser Launched - Aims to be Adsense 2.0
• UrbanSeeder: Make Friends Offline, Get to Know Them Online
• Fiction Writing 2.0: Six New Ways To Write The Next Great Novel
• Do We Need Password Management Services Like Clipperz and PassPack? (check the comments on this for an intriguing discussion about where such apps are headed)
• Scouta: Expands Recommendation Model to All Media Types
• Bookmark Only What You Want: Clipmarks and Web-Chops
• Me.dium Secures $15M Series B - The Dawn of Collaborative Browsing?

Poll

Our poll this week got an awesome response, with nearly 1,600 people voting. The poll asked: Which online collaboration platform do you use?. Here are the results:

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Google Apps 47% (743 votes)
Microsoft Office Groove 2% (29 votes)
Microsoft Office Live 2% (37 votes)
Basecamp 18% (290 votes)
Zoho 10% (165 votes)
ThinkFree 8% (132 votes)
Zimbra 2% (33 votes)
Central Desktop 1% (22 votes)
Atlassian 1% (23 votes)
SocialText 0% (6 votes)
goowy 1% (16 votes)
gOFFICE 1% (10 votes)
Other (please comment below) 6% (88 votes)

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As we noted mid-week, Google Apps is far and away the most used online collaboration platform according to our poll. Basecamp and Zoho were the only other two platforms to get into double figures - with 18% and 10% respectively. ThinkFree was not far behind Zoho, with 8%. But Microsoft online office products didn't feature, with just 2% each.

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