If the initial development race of Web 2.0 centered around "building a better social network" then the next phase will certainly focus on extending the reach of existing social networks beyond their current domain. How? By using the elements of the social graph as the foundational components that will drive the social Web. Where we once focused on going to a destination - particular social network to participate - we will now begin to carry components of social networks along with us, wherever we go. In the next phase of the social Web, every site will become social.
The race to find a single sign-on and synchronization service has been on since social networking sites hit global acceptance several years ago. Today, after working under the radar for the past year, and with a member base of 5 million users, Power.com announced its global launch with a mighty claim: "Our platform will break down the boundaries between social sites and allow users to synchronize their logins, content, messages and friends."
Calling it a 'social inter-networking' service, CEO Steve Vachani today explained: "Social is about people, not about place; we're making 'where' irrelevant."
://URLFAN is an indexing service which ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. It's been around for a while, but we think it's reached the point now where it's a very useful tool to measure influence on the Internet. ://URLFAN is similar to Alexa and its measurement of popularity is reminiscent of Google's PageRank. ://URLFAN also has similarities to Technorati, except that instead of indexing just blogs - ://URLFAN indexes all websites.
Gladinet is a free Windows application that runs on your desktop and offers easy access to files stored online or across remote PCs. The company's goal is to provide a single platform from where you can manage files regardless of where they are stored.
While the company says it is like "building bridges among digital islands," we say it is an easy way to use Windows Explorer to drag and drop documents from the Web to your machine.
The word on the street this month is speech. (Which makes it the spoken word on the street.) Speech-based iPhone apps are just a throat-clearing for the stream of oratory that IBM says we can expect from computer users within the next five years.
It may finally be time I did something about that compulsive swearing issue, unless I want some seriously skewed search results. But that may only be the beginning.
Yet another report has surfaced that Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo!. Not only is a different number being reported - $20 billion - but there is a new twist: Microsoft only wants Yahoo's online search business.
Given Steve Ballmer only last month said of a deal with Yahoo!: "There are probably still opportunities around search. I think it would still make sense economically for their shareholders and ours," could there be an element of truth to today's report?
How can your mobile phone help you live a greener life? Quite easily, it turns out - if you have a G1.
Ecorio is a carbon footprint calculator developed by five guys from Ontario, and one of the ten apps awarded $275,000 by the recent Android Developer Challenge.
According to the Pyjamas website, many people, when discovering Google Web Toolkit wonder why they can't use Python instead of Java.
With Pyjamas, this is now possible.
Several months ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the Mobile Web Project in an attempt to provide up-to-date university information for its faculty, students and visitors over mobile devices.
Early next year, Information Services and Technology (IS&T), the central IT department at MIT, and the team responsible for the design, development and maintenance of the software, plans to open source the code.
It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we gave you an overview of health 2.0 and followed up with a RWW Live podcast on the topic. We also looked at the state of the art in recommendation technologies and offered some tips for the Internet bigcos as they head into 2009. On the product side, we further analyzed Google's search wiki experiment, listed the favorite mobile apps of the RWW writers and our readers, and looked at Firefox China version. We also have highlights from the Enterprise Channel and our brand new product that tracks hires in tech and new media, Jobwire.
