Editor: For those of you wondering why you haven't seen a Twitter post on ReadWriteWeb for, oh, a couple of days now -- here is one! And you'll be pleased to know it's very easy to digest this post, because it's in cartoon form. This is courtesy of the wonderful Rob Cottingham of Social Signal. Rob runs a regular cartoon blog called Noise to Signal, in which he puts in graphical form some of the big questions of the social web. We thought we'd trial some of his cartoons here on RWW, especially in the weekend when you may not be in the mood to read long text posts. Let us know what you think.
Zimbra is looking to expand its platform to the iPhone. Recently they announced Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 will allow iPhone users over-the-air two-way synchronization of e-mails, calendar, contacts, and photos between user mailboxes and mobile devices, and seamless "push" e-mail service for all Zimbra Collaboration Suite users.
The iPhone App Store is here and if you have an iPhone like most of us at ReadWriteWeb, the App Store is the one place you'll probably be for the majority of the weekend. There are a ton of great social network apps available in the iPhone's App Store. From to Twitter to Facebook we've got quite the list to keep you connected to your friends with your iPhone.
It's time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. It was a very busy week on the product side, and not surprisingly it was dominated by the release of Apple's 3G iPhone and the accompanying App Store. Also this week Google launched a virtual world, Yahoo opened up its index and search engine to outside developers, and there was a (unconfirmed) rumor that Twitter had bought Summize. On the trends side: we analyzed the problem of spam in social networks, and investigated why 'old school' bloggers dominate in new apps like FriendFeed and Twitter.
When Yahoo announced Search Monkey, its developer platform for search, it also announced the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge, which was going to reward the best search extensions based on SearchMonkey. Today, Yahoo announced the winners: StumbleUpon, BooRah, computer scientist Greg Schechter, and David Hickley from GEDview.com. The grand prize of $10,000 went to Marco Vitanza, for his Blogspot Infobar.
This week we announced a new feature for our community: ReadWriteWeb Predictions, a Predictions Center that we hope will enable you to tap into the collective intelligence of RWW readers. The first prediction is about the battle for users and mind-share that has emerged this year between Twitter and FriendFeed. Here are the results, along with results for our two polls this week...
While yours truly didn't run into any problems buying his new iPhone (besides the local AT&T store only having a ridiculously small number of them in stock), many prospective iPhone shoppers today had a far less pleasant experience. In the course of the morning, AT&T's activation service, which Apple uses to activate the new phones in their stores ran into major problems. Also, there are issues around the iPhone 2.0 software update, which has been bricking numerous phones during the install process because the iTunes Store is currently down.
A new report from Forrester Research, a company that has been closely following the adoption of web 2.0 and social technologies by businesses, now says that their earlier predications about Web 2.0 in the enterprise may have been too timid. Last year, they said that in 2008 I.T. shops would start to take a leadership role in Web 2.0 adoption by business, but this latest report is now debunking the conventional wisdom that I.T. is as skeptical as once thought.
Microsoft's failure to close the Yahoo deal, despite all kinds of loud talk and machinations, makes the Beast of Redmond look increasingly weaker. They may still pull it off, but even then the question is why do they need Yahoo so badly? The answer is that their dramatic failure with Vista took away their normal playbook.
Last month, we told you about Iceberg, an application that allows anyone to be a developer by simplifying programming into a process that can be done via easy-to-use DIY tools. More recently, another company called Cascada Mobile launched a platform that does the same for the mobile world. With their new platform, Cascada Breeze, anyone can program mobile apps. This makes us wonder - is democratizing programming the next big trend for the future of the web?
