It's great to hear that Marc Canter is writing a book, called 'How to build the Open Mesh'. He's been working for years on this vision with his product PeopleAggregator. He's just posted the four Appendices that conclude the book in his blog. It's a great overview of the major web platforms: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Mesh, and Facebook/MySpace.
Here are Marc's comments, via his post, and you can click the images to see the diagrams. Disclosure: I used to do some consulting work for Marc's company, during 2005-06.
StumbleUpon is a popular service that helps millions of people find interesting sites all over the web. Everyday thousands of sites are submitted to this service. We highly recommend StumbleUpon for finding new information on the web. However, If you're looking for more specific results, here are three other "stumbling" sites to help you find what you're looking for on the web.
Just when we thought the damn things were dead and buried, I ran across another Flash intro screen the other day. And like practically every other one I've seen, it was half useless puffery about the organization behind the site, and half lookit-this-kewl-effect self-indulgence by the designer.
But they can't all be bad... can they? Has anybody seen a Flash intro that doesn't have you scanning the screen desperately for the "skip intro" link?
With blazing fast speeds, college campuses are often used by students to download all the music they'd like. For the past few years the RIAA has been lurking around college campus intranets and using college IT and Administrators to choose their next unsuspecting pool of college victims. It seems that may be about to change and college students nationwide may now be able to breathe a little easier as their universities fight back.
Woot is an awesome site that features a great deal each day. From shirts to wine, to the latest gadget, you can find great daily deals on Woot for an awfully low price. The only catch is that you have to be fast because the deals normally only go for that particular day and usually sell out fast. Now you can keep up with all the great deals from Woot from your iPhone with the 2 new Woot apps. Here's a look at both applications.
It's the weekend, so time to review the Web tech news, reviews and analysis we brought you this week on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reported on Facebook hitting 100 million users, checked out 10 great web apps for school, looked at the state of online accounting, and reviewed the latest in lifestreaming. On the trends side we did a special podcast on online music trends, investigated RSS news from Google and Friendfeed, reported on Facebook being used in the US elections, and analyzed YouTube's business.
An embargo is something that tech companies use to set a time when their product will launch and the press can publish their reviews of it. Embargoes aren't as simple as they sound and they aren't uncontroversial, either.
We believe they can be a good idea, though. Below we discuss why and share thoughts about how we think an embargo can be run well. If you've got comments to share, don't be shy, that's what the comments section of a blog is for.
We usually write about serious things here at ReadWriteWeb but it's Friday night and we've got to make an exception for Javascript Hero. Note: We're hearing reports that the site doesn't work well in IE, just so you know. It's the work of developer rock star John Resig and was brought to our attention by Chris Messina (again).
We'd tell you about it, but we'd rather you just go play it. Particularly if you're a Guitar Hero fan. Then take this opportunity to make a mental reminder to check out what Resig does and what Messina finds, too.
this February, Google released its Social Graph API, which allows developers to give users the option to easily find data on their social connections around the web. Google itself, however, hasn't really implemented any of this technology yet. Starting today, however, it seems Google is starting to surface some of this information from your Social Graph in your Google Profile, which might be a first sign that Google is planning to do more with these profiles than it has done so far. Google has also started implementing the hCard microformat there. The first person to noticed this was Chris Messina.
To complement the poll we ran this week about streaming music sites, we sourced data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. comScore's data shows that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. In contrast, our poll - the second annual time that we've run it - shows that last.fm and Pandora are the favorites of our readers.
Is this a case of geek trends being at odds with mainstream? Or is it that the mainstream hasn't yet caught onto the cool music sites? Let's check out and analyze the stats from both comScore and our poll....
