The long-delayed but much-anticipated service from Qtrax is finally going to launch - supposedly going live this Sunday at 12:00 am Eastern. Qtrax, in case you haven't heard, is a P2P file sharing network that has been in the works for eight years. However, it's not just any P2P file-sharing network - it's the world's first free and legal P2P file-sharing network that has the support of all four major record labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group).
The latest podcast at ReadWriteTalk is an interview with Adam Taggart, the Director of Product Marketing in the Yahoo! Mobile Group. In the podcast, Taggart discusses with RWT host Sean Ammirati "an overall uber-message" that Yahoo! is currently pushing for Mobile Web. Taggart emphasized that Yahho's approach to mobile is all about scale:
"...we are now in the process of developing a mobile ecosystem that is intended to serve eventually billions of mobile consumers."
Earlier this week we reported that leading online music service Last.fm, owned by CBS, had gotten major labels on board for its new streaming music services. Users will be able to stream full-length tracks from the likes of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner, as well as "thousands of independent artists and labels."
In the following post syndicated from last100, our network blog about digital lifestyles, Daniel Langendorf analyzes how last.fm is much more than a streaming service - it is aiming to create "communities around content".
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 explores the viability of a web with decentralized, open standards-based IM at its center; Marshall also analyses the MyBlogLog API and the Future of Leveraged User Data via ReadBurner; Josh covers the latest online music news from last.fm and Songza; Alex analyses the "Work From Home" generation; Bernard comes up with a formula for the Startup Magic Quandrant.
Sometimes it's the little things that you have to love about the internet; especially when little things can help you clean up a big mess. I'm willing to bet that you've got hundreds of Facebook application invitations and requests that are sitting on your account cluttering things up. IgnoreAll.com is a simple Javascript bookmarklet that with one click selects the "ignore" option on every request except for friend requests, group invites and event notifications. It is simple and sweet.
Russian search engine Quintura (one of our sponsors) has released a private beta of a custom search service for blogs or websites. It's similar to the Eurekster swicki we use on ReadWriteWeb. The defining feature of Quintura's service is a tag cloud that moves fluidly when you click it - see it in action on our network blog AltSearchEngines.
If you'd like to check out Quintura's private beta, click here. Read on for some background on the semantic technology powering Quintura...
You can stay in control of virtually any situation as long as you know where your towel is. That's a good rule of thumb to remember for anyone planet hopping around the universe. But how do you know how to evaluate the programmer for your next project? Or know if that girl (or guy) at the end of the bar likes you? Don't panic. Terrestrial travelers can consult a new web site called Rules of Thumb that is attempting to catalogue all those nifty bits of knowledge that fall somewhere between adage and old wives tale. You know, like, when the cows are sitting down, expect rain in the near future.
At the same time as Hasbro/Mattel's well-publicized take down order of the uber-popular Facebook game Scrabulous (which is based on their Scrabble board game), they were also going after a far smaller app called "Bogglific." Bogglific, an online clone of Hasbro's Boggle game, was at the time played by over 7,000 users per day. A far cry from Scrabulous' 600,000, but certainly significant enough to warrant Hasbro's attention. After receiving the takedown order, Bogglific creator Roger Nesbitt announced his plans to shelve the game. "I'm no lawyer," he wrote. "But I have neither the time nor the money to fight this, and Facebook has given me a grace period of 48 hours to shut the application down voluntarily."
But a week after Bogglific was removed from Facebook, the application is back, sporting a new name, and some basic rule changes.
Wakerupper is a nifty light-weight text-to-speech web app with a great name that will call any phone at a preset time. The site is currently in private beta, though its basic features are publicly available now (advanced features such as scheduling and a snooze function are only available to beta testers). I tested it out earlier this week and it never missed a call.
Enterprise collaboration company Jive Software posted today about a theory it's advancing on the rise of XMPP (called Jabber in IM) for powering communication services hosted in the cloud. The company also announced that it will include what it says will be the first XMPP-powered document sharing and collaboration tool in the forthcoming 2.0 release of its product Clearspace.
If you think AJAX changed the web experience, imagine a web with decentralized, open standards-based IM at its center. That's an exciting thought. This post introduces the concepts at issue in accessible terms, discusses some of the possible impacts of such a trend on innovation and offers some counter-arguments to Jive's rosy picture of the future.
