This week's poll complements our feature, Non-Profits and the Web. We're asking about your online donation habits. We're not interested in how much you donate, but the frequency. Although having said that, there is an option for those who donate irregularly but give large amounts. Because it may be easier for some people to do that than to donate every week online. In any case please participate in the poll and let us know:
This week's feature series on Read/WriteWeb is non-profits and the Web. We'll be exploring how non-profit organizations use the Web and the tools available for them.
By non-profits, we mean charities, clubs and any "organization whose primary objective is something other than the generation of profit" (Wikipedia's definition). Non-profit organizations cover a wide range of areas - from the environment to politics and much more. The Web is often utilized by such organizations, because of the need to reach out to people - e.g. calls to action, fund-raising or just general awareness.
A Wired article back in 2004, entitled For Nonprofits, Web Is a Windfall, stated that there is big money to be made over the Web for non-profit organizations:
Lately I've been getting invites to a new social network called Quechup. I'm already a member of too many social networks, so to be honest I've ignored these requests. But it seems Quechup has been automatically sending out invites, without the knowledge or consent of the people signing up. I got this email today from someone I know:
Title: Please ignore any Quechup.com Invites - It's a spam engine
Message: I am writing this with profound embarrassment.
I was recently tricked by a spam engine posing as a new social network. I got an invite from someone I knew and trusted, signed up to see what was about. Two days later, Quechup sent out SPAM to my entire address book.
Please ignore or delete all emails claiming to be from me that mention a site called Quechup.com.
Please also accept my apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
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 we focused on the future of the Web and here were our top posts:
What then can we expect from the next 10 or so years on the Web? In this post we looked at 10 trends to watch. There are a lot of excellent comments and we'll do a follow-up post next week in response to those. The top trend on our list was Semantic Web:
Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision for a Semantic Web has been The Next Big Thing for a long time now. Indeed it's become almost mythical, like Moby Dick. In a nutshell, the Semantic Web is about machines talking to machines. It's about making the Web more 'intelligent', or as Berners-Lee himself described it: computers "analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers." At other times, Berners-Lee has described it as "the application of weblike design to data" - for example designing for re-use of information.
So when will the Semantic Web arrive? The building blocks are here already: RDF, OWL, microformats are a few of them. But it will take some time to annotate the world's information and then to capture personal information in the right way.
The extremely popular Where I've Been Facebook app is today launching a MySpace widget, making it perhaps the first application developed specifically for Facebook that has made the jump to another platform. The app's creator, Craig Ulliot, also recently formed Where I’ve Been, LLC to manage the application and its growing networking of users.
According to Where I've Been, the application is the most popular travel networking app on Facebook with 2.6 million users (though as of today, it was ranked second in the travel category using Facebook's newer active users metric behind TripAdvisor's "City's I've Been To" app). Where I've Been is adding 30,000 new users every day -- not bad for a company launched in June.
TipBin is a recently launched web site that developer Christian Cantrell touts as "Yahoo! Answers, but without the questions." The idea behind TipBin is that people will share, recommend, and discuss tips on any topic without prompts. That could include things like how to find better airline deals to how to refill printer ink cartridges to how to cook a better bundt cake.
The site is organized by tags and members can bookmark their favorite tips. Tips can be sorted by most recent, most recommended, most bookmarked, or most discussed, and they can be searched.
URL Split is a new service that allows web developers to create a single short URL that forwards to more than one destination -- seven destinations, actually. For example, http://www.urlsplit.com/UbbWn4Uh forwards to any one of the Read/WriteWeb network blogs. Why would anywone want to forward to multiple sites from a single URL?
As developer Dan Grossman explains on his blog, the service grew out of a frequent request from customers of his popunder traffic resale business. "Every few weeks one of my advertising customers asks if they can split the hits from their ad campaign among multiple URLs without buying multiple campaigns," Grossman said.
A new version of Delicious (sans dots) was released as a private preview today. I got an invite and have been poking around. Techcrunch got the exclusive on the story, so they have a full review up. But in my initial quick tests, a couple of features immediately stood out for me. We've written a number of times before on Read/WriteWeb about how del.icio.us, sorry Delicious, can be used as a very effective search engine. Likewise, Alex Iskold has also written before about Delicious as a recommendation system:
"...the del.icio.us approach holds intriguing possibilities of self-organizing classification and recommendation systems. With enough users and more tweaking, social tagging can result in a system that works equally well for books, wine and music."
ShareMethods is announcing two new apps to its open standards Web Office suite, ShareOffice, at the Office 2.0 conference today. We reviewed ShareOffice back in May when it launched, noting that it's the world's first open standards online office suite. The two new apps are an online calendar from Jotlet and real-time meeting from Persony. They join the existing ShareOffice apps - online word processing from iNetWord, spreadsheet from EditGrid, and presentation app from Preezo.
ShareMethods is also announcing today iPhone support for its on-demand document management service. This will target business users with a need for mobile access to their documents.
Micro-blogging is a term described by Wikipedia as "a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user". Several startups have witnessed phenomenal growth with micro-blogging services, most notably Twitter. In addition, numerous social networks - including Facebook and Bebo - have integrated similar status update services. The space is hot and it's still heating up. So let's take a look at 10 of the key players.
Twitter is the key player in space and the company name is used synonymously with micro-blogging. The free service allows users to post status updates via SMS, e-mail, or web browser. What's more, Twitter has an open platform allowing third party developers to build on top of it.
