At the end of last week, we posted on Bloglines vs Google Reader - Who's Really Winning?. The answer was: Bloglines, but Google Reader is catching up fast. We've just received a new chart from Hitwise, which also shows Netvibes and Newsgator. So it shows the context of this "two-horse race", as Bloglines GM Eric Engleman described it. Here is the new chart:
Source: Hitwise
But can Bloglines hold onto its lead? On that theme there was an interesting comment on our previous post, by Erkko, who wrote:
Not quite across the universe, as John Lennon sung it, but here are some highlights from the Read/WriteWeb Network:
MySpace: Hot or Not? - Alex Iskold explores the current state of MySpace. So is MySpace still hot? As a trend Alex says the answer is no. But as a site, yes - while a lot of people are using the site to keep in touch with friends, for many it appears to be a place to trawl for dates and sex.
Podcast interview with Dan Cohen, CEO of Pageflakes - Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati sits down with Dan Cohen and discusses his experiences working at first MyYahoo and then Pageflakes. I discovered a new term while listening to this: "social networking above the belt". When you refer to Alex's MySpace post, the meaning of that term becomes clear!
11 video download stores compared - last100 editor Steve O'Hear takes a look at eleven paid-for video download stores. He notes that while there appears to be much competition, many of the resulting services lack innovation - in terms of their technology choices and how they approach copy-protection.
Sony to challenge Apple, others in TV and movie download market - Sony is to challenge Apple in TV and movie downloads. On one hand, writes last100's Daniel Langendorf, that makes sense. Sony is carefully positioning its PlayStation 3 game console as the entertainment hub in people’s homes.
The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines - AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight has released the latest Top 100 list. The Search Engine of the month is Answers.com.
If you're a US citizen, a blogger, and are currently a full-time student an accredited college or university: listen up. CollegeScholarships.org, a directory of college scholarship and financial aid opportunities, today announced a $10,000 scholarship for college bloggers.
The Blogging Scholarship is the largest of the six scholarships offered by the site (they also offer a $2,000 award specifically for political blogging) and is open to any US citizen, student blogger, regardless of blog topic. If you don't have a blog, site encourages students to begin now and submit your name for consideration by the deadline next month.
This morning MyStrands released a personalized online video service called MyStrands.TV. Immediately it reminded me of last.fm, because you can type in an artist or tag and it creates a custom "channel" for you. In fact, let's be honest - it's a complete rip of last.fm. But that's actually good, because last.fm is my favorite online music service and so it has many excellent features.
MyStrands.TV is powered by MyStrands APIs and the music videos come from YouTube. Some music data is provided by Muze, Inc. I think there's a great market for this, because in our Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time, we noted that 7 of the top 10 are music videos. So music videos are something that people want to watch online and there is a need for an easy way to organize or personalize this. MyStrands.TV adds an easier, richer and simply more fun personalization layer on top of YouTube's data.
MySpace is responsible for putting social networking on the map. Despite the site's notoriously bad design
and poor navigation, millions of people flocked to it because it provided a simple, yet powerful
way to self-express and to connect with others online. It has now been more than 2 years since Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. spent over half a billion dollars to acquire the social networking darling and the buzz is quieting down.
2007 has been the year of Facebook -- another social network that is now
experiencing big growth and captured the attention of the media. Still other networks like Bebo, Hi5, and Google's Orkut are also on the rise. So how is MySpace holding up?
It seems like MySpace is being digested. Now that we have been spoiled by the elegance and recent innovation surrounding Facebook's Platform, MySpace simply no longer seems like such a big deal. Yes, it still has a lot of eyeballs due to its mammoth user base, but is it growing? Are people sticking with it? And is News Corp. on the way toward recovering the money it spent to acquire the site? In this post we look at MySpace through the prism of the digestion phase to find out what's going on and where it might be headed.
Seattle-based Jott, a mobile phone service that lets users record and send emails, text messages, and to-do lists via speech-to-text over their mobile phones, today launched a new suite of tools based around popular web 2.0 sites. The new "Jott Links" service lets users interact with websites and online services by voice over the phone.
At launch, Jott Links supports posting to Twitter, Jaiku, Yahoo! Groups, blogging on LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, posting calendar items on 30Boxes, and getting housing "Zestimates" by voice from Zillow.
Varien, a Los Angeles web development firm, has just launched a preview version of its open source eCommerce platform called Magento. Also released was a community site and a demo store. Check out the screencasts, the first of which explains how to add a new product to your e-commerce catalog using Magento - see screenshots below.
This is Version 0.6 of Magneto and so it's an early beta release. As such, the company doesn't recommend it for use in production environments. Magento does however come with professional and community support. Along with the usual e-commerce features (product input, shopping cart, single-page checkout, etc), some other features of note are integration with 3rd party apps and product tagging.
The first era of the Web moved from B2C to B2B. However the bubble burst just as the B2B phase was getting into full gear. As we enter the "digestion phase" of Web 2.0, many startups may want to re-focus their efforts on B2B markets. If Chasm models are still relevant (I think they are, but so accelerated that it looks quite different), then B2B niche markets enable the classic strategy of knocking down “bowling pins”.
Note that I am not talking about Enterprise 2.0. That is behind the firewall stuff that is mostly catered to by classic enterprise players such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, HP, SAP; as well as open source.
What is much more interesting is how porous enterprises have become. The corporate gatekeepers in purchasing and IT have lost power, as millions of cubicle dwellers vote with their mouse. This leaves a lot of room for startups to break in without investing in sales guys to knock on CIO doors. Increasingly IT will bless and reinforce services that already have traction within their firms, as opposed to bringing them in themselves. That is a dramatic shift.
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Wine Library TV is one of my favorite video blogs. In the latest episode Gary Vaynerchuk checks out some California Chardonnay.
Zoho is a leading Web Office suite, with probably the most comprehensive product range of all the online office suites. Last week they introduced a Start Page and look for more releases at Office 2.0 this week.
ADS-Click enables you to earn money from your Tag Cloud Widget. You select your keywords and then add it to your blog. The company is based in Switzerland, so great to see international startups doing well!
Pageflakes is a personalized start page that features "Pagecasts" - allowing users to share their Pageflakes page with the public or a specific group of users. They also recently introduced a social networking component.
Wild Apricot offers Web-based Membership Software for clubs, associations and other non-profits. Probably the most popular area of functionality in Wild Apricot is the online member database.
Userplane is a provider of communication software for online communities. Recently they've released both Webchat2 and Webmessenger2, plus they now offer a revenue share program.
Compete is more than just a statistics service to rival Alexa; Compete also provides search, analytics, shopping deals, and a personalized homepage.
Eurekster is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.
Also check out the Read/WriteWeb Job Board, where you'll find job opportunities for Web Technology and New Media professionals, at startups and tech firms all over the world.
Recent jobs include:
If you would like to enquire about sponsoring Read/WriteWeb and/or our network blogs last100, AltSearchEngines and Read/WriteTalk, please email the editor for a Media Kit.
Living about 3,000 miles from the Valley in a small east coast college town, as I do, I rarely get a chance to score any fun schwag from the web sites I love to use and write about. Many geeks across the world are in a similar situation: we want our share of schwag, but we just don't have access. It was with that in mind that last year saw the launch of ValleySchwag, a company that collected free stuff from companies (t-shirts, stickers, pens, buttons, and some stuff I have yet to identify), packaged it all up, and sent it out to web 2.0-heads worldwide for $15/month.
