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!

This week the two main browsers were in the spotlight - with the release of Firefox 3 Beta 2 and the IE8 Acid2 Test. In other news: Apple shut down the blog ThinkSecret, Yahoo! agreed to adhere to 100% of the recommendations for email clients made by the Email Standards Project, Facebook finally rolled out their long awaited friend lists feature, and OpenSocial released an update.

Web Products

Consumer Apps: 2007 Year in Review

"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 focused 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.

Tweeterboard: Who Does That Person on Twitter Think They Are?

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.

Meetup: The Secret Campaign Weapon?

Web metrics firm Compete released their latest "Candidate FaceTime" metric this week, which measures how many hours people are spending across the social networking profiles of US presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, Ron Paul continues to dominate all candidates, while Barack Obama leads the pack among Democrats. The biggest surprise is the rise of Mike Huckabee -- who has also been rising in national polls -- perhaps due to the Chuck Norris bump (what can't that guy do?). Compete, however, points to Meetup as the true secret weapon. In this post we explore how Meetup is being used in US politics...

Trends

Sexy Librarians of the Future Will Help You Upload Your Videos to YouTube

A new poll from Harris Interactive was released this week, 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, we 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!

Will Web Office Apps Ever See Widespread Adoption?

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 we don't think there's really cause for alarm.

RWW Network Blogs

last100

On our Digital Lifestyle blog last100, don't miss editor Steve O'Hear's in-depth review of Internet TV in 2007. Wrote Steve: "From YouTube’s continued dominance, the television networks’ newfound willingness to experiment online, the rise of the desktop Internet TV application, and a number of new PC-to-TV devices and set-top boxes — it’s been a big year for Internet TV in all shapes and forms. In this post we look back at 2007 through the lens of last100’s coverage, highlighting some of the important stories and trends, and how they point to what we might expect for Internet TV in 2008."

Alt Search Engines

This week on AltSearchEngines, there were two excellent guest posts: The Economical Path Towards the Future Search Engine by Alex Ginsberg of the NooTag Team and The Long Tail's Impact on Search Relevance by Melek Pulatkonak, President of Hakia. Both are 'must reads' if the future of search is of interest to you.

Also, continuing ASE's new CEO spotlight series, Natalya has an extensive interview with Michael Hussey from the People Search Engine PeekYou.

ReadWriteTalk

Over on our network podcast ReadWriteTalk 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.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.