Mozilla today announced Weave, a new web platform that will store users' browser metadata in a cloud environment for access anywhere. Weave is a "framework for services integration" that will, according to Mozilla, "focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences."
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
Highlights this week: Marshall Kirkpatrick tells us how sexy librarians and YouTube will be linked in the future. He also investigates a new leaderboard for Twitter. Josh Catone reviews the most popular Consumer Apps of 2007; and he explores the appeal of Meetup to US presidential candidates. For last100 Steve O'Hear reviews the Internet TV space in 2007; and check the latest action at AltSearchEngines and ReadWriteTalk!
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The OpenSocial team at Google today announced an updated JavaScript API. While the actual content of the update is rather technical, Google engineer Cassie Doll says that it addresses "the most immediate pain points" for developers. But the big albatross around OpenSocial's neck is the question of just what MySpace is going to do.
The finalists have now been announced for the Crunchies, the awards show we’re co-hosting with Techcrunch, GigaOm and VentureBeat. Voting will be live through to midnight PST Thursday, January 10. You can vote here, once a day.
There are bound to be startups disappointed not to have made the cut - and indeed a few of my own favorites didn’t make it. But that is the nature of awards. We received thousands of nominations and the 4 host blogs went back and forth many times to agree on our finalists. Check out the full list below and then go and start voting :-) If you’re a finalist, you may want to add a badge to your site to encourage people to vote for you.
The Internet's top two web browsers each had significant news out this week. Mozilla released the second beta version of Firefox 3. Not to be outdone, the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft announced that they had taken a major step towards standards compliance by correctly rendering the Acid2 Test face.
Sandy Pentland, a researcher at MIT whose work has received funding from Nokia, is working on processing more than 350,000 hours of data collected from peoples' cell phones. More than just who calls who, Pentland is also studying proximity, location and activity data using information like interactions recorded between Bluetooth devices.
The result is a field Pentland has given the obnoxious name "reality mining."
A five year old bet was settled last night between New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz and Web 2.0 Founding Father Dave Winer. Five years ago Winer bet Nisenholtz that blogs would top the New York Times in Google search results for the top 5 news stories of 2007.
Rogers Cadenhead has done the tabulation and found that Winer, and blogging, have indeed won. Sort of.
A new poll from Harris Interactive was released this morning, finding that US respondents are more excited about watching mainstream, commercial content like full length TV shows and movies online than are about watching User Generated Content, news or sports video.
While hardly surprising, I don't think it has to be this way forever. Who could help improve this landscape by maximizing the impact of the read/write web? Super sexy librarians, that's who!
Who is the most influential man in American news? It's not Brian Williams or Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann or Larry King. It's not Seymour Hersh or Charlie Savage or Frank Rich or Robert Novak. No, arguably the most influential man in American news is Matt Drudge. So how much is that worth?
