A new report released today by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.
Over the past couple of months, Jason Goldberg, who previously founded job search engine Jobster and vacated the CEO role last December to "pursue other early stage ventures," has quietly relaunched his personal blog social|median and transformed it into a collaborative news filtering service. The service is still very rough around the edges and is just weeks into a private alpha test. 1000 ReadWriteWeb readers can gain access to the invite only alpha by going to the sign up page and using "RWW" (without the quotes) as the invite code.
On 20 April, 2003, ReadWriteWeb was born. My first post here was appropriately entitled The Read/Write Web and it began: "The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it." At the time I started ReadWriteWeb, web 2.0 hadn't yet been invented, Google Adsense hadn't launched (it would do so in June '03), Internet Explorer had 94% of the browser market share (followed by Netscape with 2%), the top blogs of the day according to Technorati were Slashdot (listed as number 1) and Where is Raed ? (a weblog from Baghdad; it closed in 2004). And 5 years ago, there was no money in blogging.
Here are the highlights from the week's stories on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side, we analyzed the increasing mainstreaming of social news site digg; and we reviewed some awesome new web apps (Grooveshark, SixApart's BlogIt, Twhirl, Alert Thingy, and others). On web trends, there was a meme this week that declared the Mobile Web dead - we begged to differ. We also looked into two 'real world' issues for Web tech this week - the impact of social media on "real people"; and real world data portability.
Newsgator Online, the company's web-based feed reader and until now a relatively weak product, rolled out a feature today that makes the service worth another look.
One of our favorite filtering services, AideRSS, is now ranking by popularity the individual items in feeds you subscribe to. Newsgator users can now read the most commented on, linked-to, Dugg and saved in del.icio.us posts in either a single feed or across the bulk of their subscriptions.
On Tuesday, the RSS aggregator service, ReadBurner, relaunched (our coverage) and brought with it a new look and many new features that improved upon the previous version of the site. Today, there comes even more news from the service: a launch of a mobilized version of the ReadBurner web site.
We've all heard of the elevator pitch: the brief overview of a product, service, or project that can be delivered in the time it takes to ride an elevator, usually around 30 seconds or so. Now here comes a new idea: the Twitpitch, and yes, it's just what you think - the same pitch narrowed down to 140 characters or less.
Here at ReadWriteWeb we get piles and piles of pitches for coverage from companies all day long and they almost always come in by email. You'll notice that only a tiny percentage of those pitches result in write-ups here. How can you increase your chances of getting written about here or on other tech blogs? In this post we'll discuss five ways that companies often try and fail to get our attention and one way that almost always works.
A few weeks ago we wrote about a rumored Microsoft Office Live product codenamed "Albany" that was supposedly entering a private beta and wondered if this could be their latest jab at Google Docs. According to various reports Albany was anything from an online version of Microsoft's Works suite to a discounted software bundle of various Office and Live components. Yesterday we spoke with Bryson Gordon, the Group Product Manager for Microsoft's Office Consumer and Small Business Team to get the facts about Albany and set the record straight.
AJAX start page provider Pageflakes officially announced today that it has been acquired by LiveUniverse. The deal is a combination of cash and stock, but the size of the acquisition was not disclosed. LiveUniverse, which was founded by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, owns a number of social networking and video destinations, most notably LiveVideo. Rumors of this deal surfaced earlier this week, and it was officially announced today.
