It's time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we continued our ongoing analysis of the iPhone 3G and its accompanying App Store, we looked closely at a Gmail update to its contact management system, covered the US launch of Microsoft Live Mesh, and reported on a developer revolt with Google's Android. On the trends side we revisited the Facebook platform, asked whether startups need Community Managers, looked into mainstream usage of the browser address bar, and told you a story about how Twitter's "Fail Whale" was created.
The Blogher conference for and about women bloggers kicks off today in San Francisco and in honor of this important event, we decided to share some links to some of our favorite women bloggers here at RWW.
Gender is an important lens through which people communicate and that's still the case online. Below are links to some of our favorite women bloggers and some favorites from some web celebs you may or may not know. We hope you'll visit their sites and add more of your favorites in the comments.
I did it! I resisted the cravings all week. I did NOT buy an iPhone. It took a lot of deep Buddhist meditation to deal with my cravings. The iPhone is just gorgeous - this is user interface design at the highest level of art. Plus, the developer platform makes developers who dream in design patterns go all weak at the knees. The last time a UI and API induced equal cravings was in NeXt. No that is not a snide comment, Jobs learned from NeXt and this one is a big, big winner. But, oh yes there is a but, iPhone is still a piece of utility electronics.
Evite, the social planning service which has been around since 1998, announced a partnership with JS-Kit today. Evite will use JS-Kit's commenting and polling features to allow organizers and guests to communicate with each other. Evite is also expanding the social networking features of its site, including the ability to share photos and stories after the event has taken place.
The Canada-based live-blogging tool CoverItLive added support for live video streaming to its application this week. Users covering live events can now add streaming video from Qik, Mogulus, and Ustream.tv to their live blogs. Bloggers can simply copy and paste the embed code from one of these services into CoverItLive. Adding video to live blogging takes it to a completely different level and will allow those who are covering these events to focus more on commentary and interacting with viewers than just reporting the events.
When we first reported about the new microblogging service Identi.ca earlier this month, it looked like an interesting experiment. Since then, its community has grown rapidly and today, it implemented an API that is compatible with the Twitter API. Thanks to this, any application that connects to Twitter can now also work with Identi.ca by simply pointing to identi.ca/api instead of twitter.com.
Not everyone loves FriendFeed - its social media firehouse qualities can lead to a lot of noise which can certainly be overwhelming to newcomers. However, even those who don't participate on the service may see the value of a lifestream. By hosting your own lifestream, you can easily share your current activities from across the social web with your web site's visitors. Once set up, it's somewhat like a passive form of a Tumblr blog. You continue your usual activities - upload photos to flickr, favorite videos on YouTube, bookmark pages on del.icio.us - and your web site will reflect those changes.
Microsoft. Depending on who you are, their name alone elicits some pretty strong feelings. Some people love them, others love to hate them. Few people are neutral. However, everyone can pretty much agree that Microsoft has been fighting an image problem lately and one that has started to make them look less like a towering giant and more like the underdog. Those "I'm a Mac" ads didn't help, either. However, some recent innovations make us wonder if the tide is starting to turn for the big blue monster.
As mentioned earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb is partnering with a couple of conferences this year and one of them is DEMOfall 08, the long-running launchpad for startups. DEMOfall 08 is on September 7-9 in San Diego. They're just announced the sessions, including a "head-to-head" between tech reporters Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. The premise of their debate will be: what lies ahead for the Digital Age?
