As part of Facebook Week here on Read/WriteWeb, I am going to be taking a look at the top applications on the Facebook platform. With nearly 1800 apps, the platform has been a runaway success for Facebook, and the most popular ten applications reach over 46 million users. I'm going to be breaking those 1800 apps down to the top 50 across 5 categories (10 in each). This is a completely subjective list, so not everyone will agree with our picks and I encourage you to debate them in the comments.
There are a lot of duplicates on the Facebook platform (i.e., there are at least 10 apps for cataloging books!), and some duplicates even share the same name. In that case, as with the rest of this list, I just chose the one that stood out to me as the best. Today's list deals with apps for work.
This week is Facebook Week on Read/WriteWeb. Over the next 5 days we're going to focus on the most impressive Web Company of 2007 - analyzing it and reporting on its top third party apps. To 'launch' Facebook Week, let's review how this company turned itself into the leading web app platform on the Internet, in a matter of months.
To celebrate Facebook Week, we've set up a Facebook Group for Read/WriteWeb readers. It's open to anyone... even Australians :-) We're running a poll too, at the end of this post, asking how many 'friends' you have on Facebook currently. We'll run other Facebook-related polls over the course of the week.
One aspect of Web 2.0 that continues to entertain is the strange, sometimes awful, names that startups come up with to promote themselves. Some of them turn out to be successful - e.g. del.icio.us - but others prove to be ineffective. Some web 2.0 names have been compared to Star Wars characters and there's even a Web 2.0 Name Generator, in case you need inspiration.
The R/WW authors had a pow-wow on Basecamp and we've come up with a (fun) list of the worst 10 names in Web 2.0. But you're bound to disagree with some of them, or we've missed some obvious ones, so please jump into the comments to add others. In no particular order...
Getting to the crux of Streamy, a very new beta startup, has proven to be
more difficult than several prominent bloggers originally thought. I have been testing
the development since Friday and awoke today to the news that Streamy is everything from
a Digg competitor to a doomed social networking site. I was working late Friday, when the
founders of Streamy Jonathan Gray and Donald Mosites messaged me to demo their
innovation. Streamy is a beautifully designed site with an intuitive Web 2.0 interface.
Streamy users can share, view, filter and drag-and-drop news stories, while communicating
via a very slick chat module. On the surface, Streamy appears to be a "next generation"
news networking site - but is it?
4 years ago today, 15 July 2003, AOL Time Warner disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation - the company that sparked the Dot Com Internet boom in the mid-90's with its 1995 IPO. Also 4 years ago today, The Mozilla Foundation was established. mozillaZine reported at the time:
"It has been learned through public and private sources that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they've even pulled the logos off the buildings). Some will remain working on Mozilla during the transition, and will move to other jobs within AOL.
The news isn't all doom and gloom, folks. I've been informed that the number of volunteer Mozilla hackers started eclipsing the number of Netscape hackers last month, and that a number of folks have already been snatched up by other organizations. "
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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.
After all the iphone buzz of the last couple of weeks, it was a relatively
quiet week of web tech news. However there was another big Google acquisition -
this time they
acquired Postini, a hosted security and compliance provider. The move is about Google
wanting to entice more enterprises to use its Web Office products. It's an uphill battle
though, because as R/WW commenter Simon Leyland noted:
"Unless there is an industry wide reavaluation on network and app security I don't see
many large/medium businesses taking a hosted solution."
Mike Arrington wrote about it. Rafe Needleman did too. It was, as Rafe said, "inevitable" so I'm going to write about Invite Share as well. With Pownce invites for sale on eBay a full-on invite exchange was likely.
Invite Share launched just 5 days ago on July 8 and already has nearly 6,500 users (there appear to be are a lot of people waiting for invitations, however, since they've only distributed just over 5,000 of them so far). The site got so popular, so fast, that the owners put it up for sale after TechCrunch featured it last night, and have thus far attracted a high bid of $7,500.
With potentially devastating royalty rates looming this weekend, a deal was brokered last night that will allow some US Internet radio stations to stay online at least a little while longer. SoundExchange, the group charged with collecting royalty payments, agreed not to enforce the new rates temporarily while a deal is worked out, according to WIRED.
"[WIRED] just spoke with Pandora founder Tim Westergren, who expressed relief that Pandora wouldn't have to shut down on Sunday in response to the new rates. He said, "It was getting pretty close. I always had underlying optimism that sanity was going to prevail, but I was beginning to wonder.""
(source)
In the young but growing world of user-generated news, sites like
digg and slashdot dominate in the tech sphere. In the political arena, it is mostly
editorial-driven sites that do well - such as DrudgeReport, HuffingtonPost and RawStory.
Those sites get a lot of attention, but there are also a lot of so-called "Citizen
Journalism" sites out there trying very hard to break through to the mainstream. We're
going to run a series here on Read/WriteWeb exploring some of those sites. In this first
post we'll provide a brief intro to Citizen Journalism (but with a product focus, not
theory), and profile a leading practitioner: Newsvine.
The International Herald Tribune had a good article recently
about the search
market in South Korea. It points out that local search company Naver.com has more than 77 percent of all Web searches
originating in South Korea, according to Internet market research company KoreanClick.
This is largely due to user-generated content - specifically Naver's "Knowledge iN"
real-time question-and-answer platform, which gets "an average of 44,000 questions a
day". Second in the South Korean search market is another local product, Daum.net, with
10.8 percent share, followed by Yahoo's Korean-language service with 4.4 percent. Google
has only 1.7 percent of Korean Web searches.
