Over on our network podcast Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati got a chance to sit down with Google Developer Advocate, Kevin Marks. Marks is best known, at least within Google, as one of the main evangelists of the OpenSocial project.
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.
Many people argue that the social web is actually destroying offline relationships and that relationships built through online social networking sites are nothing more than "superficial acquaintances." For brothers Hank and John, however, Brotherhood 2.0 has not only strengthened their bond but it has also allowed them to affect the lives of thousands of other less fortunate people through their "Nerdfighter Power Project for Awesome."
Like it or not, there's a whole lot of conversation going on via microblogging service Twitter these days and it cannot be ignored.
Let's say you've subscribed to a search feed for your company's name (via Terraminds) and you've found someone talking smack about your employer, Perfect Angel Inc. What do you do? Well, one thing you might find useful is the new service Tweeterboard.
The annual survey of venture capitalists by National Venture Capitalists Association is out and VCs are predicting moderate growth in the worldwide venture capital market in 2008. They also forecast fewer venture capital firms, larger funds, and continued recovery of the IPO market.
The Windows Live Maps team announced today an update to their mobile browser-based map and search service, m.live.com.
The new version includes greater detail in listings, aggregated reviews and photos of restaurants and other businesses, scrollable maps and more.
The BBC's Internet presence came online ten years ago this past weekend on December 15th, 1997, and for the past few months on the new BBC Internet Blog, company executives have been reminiscing about the last 10 years and projecting into the future. Yesterday, Group Controller in Future Media and Technology Erik Huggers wrote an interesting post on why he left Microsoft for civil service at the BBC.
Starting in January, Amazon will launch a dedicated music shop for selling albums by bands discovered via Amsterdam-based Sellaband. The albums will be sold for £8.99, reports The Times Online -- or about $18, which is rather hefty given that jewel case CDs are sold for just $10 on the Sellaband site.
A new study from market researchers NPD has found that 73% of surveyed PC users have "never heard of and never tried...online, browser-based office productivity applications like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, gOffice, etc." Roughly 4 percent of respondents said they had heard of these apps and sometimes or often used them.
Blogs around the web are freaking out about how low these adoption numbers are, but I don't think there's really cause for alarm.
Many of our readers here at ReadWriteWeb are brave explorers of what's new in technology - while working inside large, often slow-changing organizations. For those of you who fit that description, there's a new organization in the works called The Working Group. More than just another niche social network, this is a serious project that I expect will be in high demand.
"Consumer apps" is a rather broad topic to tackle, so rather than try to recount everything that has happened across the entire cosmos of consumer web applications in the past year, we'll focus on two areas that have had perhaps the most impact overall in the way we conduct our day-to-day lives: social networking and personal publishing.
