Apple once again had to accept defeat and has announced that it will extend all subscriptions to its bug-ridden MobileMe service for yet another 60 days. This move comes after the company already gave every subscriber an extra 30 days after the botched launch of the product in July. MobileMe is quickly becoming Apple's most public failure in recent years - when the service first opened, it was basically rendered non-functional for the first couple of days, after that, a good number of users stopped receiving email, calendars disappeared or didn't sync, and the service often simply didn't work.
NewsCred garnered quite a bit of attention in its initial private beta launch where ReadWriteWeb was considered by its users to be one of the most credible news sources to read. With less than 20% of readers really believing what their news sources are saying, NewsCred aims to be the solution to this particular problem. With plenty of sources to choose from, we're taking a look at what's new with NewsCred and why it may be the best news aggregator yet.
Google Sites, the Google platform for document sharing and collaboration, has been dubbed "SharePoint Light" by many members of the tech community. However, the platform might be getting a new name soon, and one that won't be so nice. Apparently, spammers have adopted Sites as a tool to host spam and malware, and, thanks to the google.com domain name, some spam filters are having trouble blocking the messages.
The conference agenda for DEMOfall 08 has been announced. ReadWriteWeb is one of the media partners for DEMOfall 08, which is on September 7-9 in San Diego. There are 70 companies presenting and they fall into the following broad categories: Moving the Chains ("smart incrementation" of innovation); Television Meets the Web; Web Meets the Television; Words, Pictures and Music; Your Mobile, Your Life; Open Studios ("seamless cooperation"); Protecting What's Yours (security); Getting Embedded with Social Networks; It's Easy Being Green; Managing Green; Activism; Web 2.0 Gets to Work; Defining the Next Web.
One of our favorite Australians, Lachlan Hardy, twittered an interesting question today: What are the three things online that are exciting you most? Lachlan was asked this question as part of a newspaper article in the Sydney Morning Herald. His own answers were interesting, but he also got a great response from commentors on his blog. So we thought we'd ask the same question (well, slightly re-worded) here on ReadWriteWeb.
Yahoo! Buzz, the social news service that launched in February and delivered giant piles of traffic to the lucky few websites that were indexed by the site, is tonight opening up to submissions from any site across the web. We warned that Buzz could eat Digg's lunch and that's never felt as true as it does tonight. The roll out of new open functionality will extend throughout the evening.
All the excitement aside, the most logical question to ask is this: will links that get rewarded by prominent placement on Buzz or even on the Yahoo.com front page be selected democratically by the votes of Buzz users? We don't think there's any reason to believe they will.
Popular playlist sharing site Muxtape is down and says that it's because of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It might have been inevitable but the news will run chills down the spines of countless music sharers. It's a tragedy, really, and one we hope to see reversed quickly.
Cynics will say they got what they deserved, others will ask why they didn't monetize as quickly as possible and pay internet radio licensing fees. The company says only that "Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA."
Sharing web pages in a conversation shouldn't be as tricky as it is. Sometimes you're on the phone, or speaking to a group of people and there isn't a handy way to bring people along with you from page to page and then let them have easy access to those pages after the conversation is through.
Enter Agglom, a simple little service built by Italian developer Enrico Foschi. It's a Firefox plug-in that will make sharing a list of links far easier than it's been before.
Everything is moving to the cloud. As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from native desktop applications towards Web-hosted clones that run in browsers. For example, a range of products such as Microsoft Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, DabbleDB, Basecamp, and many others now provide Web-based alternatives to the full range of familiar desktop office productivity apps. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications, led by companies such as Salesforce.com, and this process seems to be accelerating. In addition, hosted remote storage for individuals and enterprises of all sizes is now widely available and inexpensive. As these trends continue, what will happen to the desktop and where will it live?
Pandora's on the ropes, Imeem is taking off, Grooveshark relaunched today with recommendations and a long list of cool features, Blip.fm threatens to make Muxtape look like old news - the streaming music market online is expanding and contracting faster than a stadium rocker's pupils.
What if the perfect service rose from the noise and gave you exactly the user experience you wanted? What would such a service look like?
