Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. It's been a busy week, with a RWW interview with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, iPhone analysis aplenty, a special look at Web visualization, reviews of Semantic Apps Twine and Reuters Open Calais, and much more. And don't forget to click through to our website and leave a comment on our posts, for a chance to win a daily $30 Amazon gift voucher.
In the past year there has been an explosion in social media. Where once we had only to worry about managing our Facebook or MySpace networks, we're now each creating a seemingly infinite number of feeds. The burden of this data is a lot to manage, but if social media is to remain useful, then steps must be taken to alleviate the strain of information.
One approach is to aggregate information about our and our friends' activities across all the networks we participate in at one location. Such locations are commonly called "lifestreaming applications." Two of these applications, FriendFeed and SocialThing!, have taken a particularly high profile in the past few days.
Ten years ago today Jason Kottke launched his influential blog Kottke.org. The site is a fascinating collection of...whatever Kottke cares to post there.
So prescient was his vision of the future of publishing though that today he's married to the co-founder of Blogger.com and can be counted among the earliest pioneers in the present era of online bricolage - the art of assembling diverse found objects.
This week there's been a fair bit of action in the Internet TV sector, with announcements from Hulu, Joost and TiVo. Our network blog last100 has been covering the action.
This week Hulu - the online video project from Newscorp and NBC/Universal, with participation by Sony, MGM and others (our previous coverage) - launched to the general public in the United States. It's been in private beta nearly five months, wrote Dan Langendorf at last100.
Are you into multimedia? Do you stream music over the web, share photos on Flickr and Picassa, watch videos at YouTube, share links with friends, and hang out in social networks? A new startup from Ubuket wants to help make access to your content from anywhere even easier. The service they provide will let you access all your media from your desktop, social network, blog, or even your mobile device.
P2P, or peer-to-peer, is the protocol currently used by many file sharing networks for moving large files over the internet. Now, a new protocol, P4P - aka Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P - is being introduced by Verizon. P4P's goal is to reduce backbone traffic and lower network operation costs. Will P4P bring us the bandwidth we've been waiting for?
Over the past couple of days we've had two in-depth posts on the theme of visualization. This is one of our trends to watch this year; and so these posts are well worth your time reading (and viewing!). Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload and Sarah Perez wrote The Best Tools for Visualization. The winning comment is from Sarah's post and is from Anton of twingly.com. Anton pointed to his app, a screensaver that is a visualization of the blogosphere as a world globe.
The big news today is that US portal giant AOL acquired leading social networking site Bebo for $850 million. There has been a lot of coverage about the business aspects of this deal, but from a product view I don't think this will make much headway for either company. Bebo is a distant third to MySpace and Facebook in the social network market (especially in the key US market), while AOL is a perennial also-ran nowadays when compared to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. While this deal will see innovations such as AIM integrating with Bebo (Whoa! Real-time Social Networking!), let's look at the bigger picture. Ultimately we're talking about two middle of the road Web brands.
Have you heard the latest doomsday scenario? In thirty years, the internet will stop working! Apparently, a bug similar to the millennium bug will affect Unix-based systems, like those that run the tubes, in the year 2038. The bug, being dubbed the "2038 bug," arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number.
If you've been wondering how the OpenSocial platform will look in MySpace, its biggest implementation, today's the day you can take a first look. Right on schedule the first batch of apps go live today, one month after the platform was opened to all developers democratically.
There's a Platform smarts arms-race underway between MySpace and Facebook, each implementing smarter and smarter policies on a regular basis. MySpace, and thus OpenSocial, could produce some dazzling applications.
