If you're a business who has been ignoring the Web 2.0 trend and the spread of social media: look out, the tide is shifting and you're about to be left behind. The rise of social media didn't happen overnight, the power of the internet to unite people, the ubiquity of broadband, the rise of Gen Y, the development of new technologies for socializing on the web - all of these things and more have led to the rise of social media. And this new force is affecting change in the way that companies do business - now and for many years to come.
On Monday, June 2, RWW network blog AltSearchEngines will be celebrating its one year anniversary with a post-a-thon! There will be one post every hour for 24 hours announcing...
NEW relaunch of our forums!
NEW AltSearchEngines conference!
NEW Top 100 Alts list for June 2008! [more after the fold]
Last.fm is a great music service that keeps track of your listening habits. Though you can view stats such as last played tracks, top artists, or most played songs with just words and numbers, it can be limiting in so many ways. We're huge fans of visualization tools, so wouldn't it be cool if you could grab a visual history of your Last.fm stats? LastGraph is just the service for the job.
Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we covered announcements by Google about Gears and App Engine, we looked at some compelling Yahoo! Pipes apps, we checked out Strands Lifestreaming, and we reviewed promising Semantic Apps Faviki and Freebase. On the trends side we analyzed the contentious Semantic Search market, we looked at Google's Android vs iPhone, we put the Social Networking battle between Google and Facebook in context, and we explored more social media trends.
Outsourcing research and development to customers via Digg-style voting is a hot trend for tech-savvy companies right now. Dell did it with IdeaStorm (our coverage), Starbucks did it with My Starbucks Idea (our coverage), and Salesforce did it with IdeaExchange. The concept has now made the leap to politics with Oh Boy Obama, an unofficial "online think tank" in which supporters can vote on ideas that they think Barack Obama should pursue in his presidential campaign.
"Constraints drive innovation and force focus," according to 37Signals in their popular "Getting Real" book. If that's true, then Copyblogger's Twitter Writing Contest, announced a couple of weeks ago, should have had writers brimming with creativity. The task? Write a short story in 140 characters. Not less than 140 characters, exactly 140 characters. That's no easy task, but the contest still fielded over 300 entries. Today, Copyblogger revealed the winners.
Forget taking a class in social media, how about taking a class in social media? Specifically, virtual worlds. No, not taking a class about virtual worlds, but actually donning an avatar and going to see your professor (who very well could be dressed as a unicorn) inside Second Life. That's a reality for some students of San Jose State University, which has a 16 "acre" virtual campus for their Library Sciences department. In tough economic times, universities and companies are starting to return to the virtual world as a cost-cutting measure.
Wednesday, at Google's I/O Event, the company demonstrated their Android prototype phone, a device which has been greatly improved since its last public outing at this year's CES and Mobile World conferences. Today, Android looks classy enough that you half-expected them to pull a Steve Jobs and announce that you could run out and buy it right now. During the demo, the company showed off some of the applications that will run on Android - like a Google Maps Street View app that drew cheers from the crowd. From the buzz surrounding the Google Phone at this event, it's clear that Android has a shot at knocking that other touchscreen phone off its pedestal.
Today I gave a presentation at the XMediaLab event in Wellington New Zealand, entitled: What's Next on the Web? Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It was an update of a presentation I gave in Sydney in March. It covers some of the top trends we track on ReadWriteWeb; such as Websites becoming web services, Semantic Apps, Open Data, Mobile Web, Recommendation Engines.
Today I attended the XMediaLab event in Wellington New Zealand (my hometown). Tom Duterme, who is in the New Business Development group at Google in Mountain View, was here talking about innovation. Tom's job is to travel around the world looking for acquisitions for Google, so it was interesting to hear what things he looks for in startups.
