In September of this year, Automattic - the company that manages the development of the popular WordPress blogging platform - acquired IntenseDebate, a plug-in designed to provide a more feature rich system for blog comments. As a result of the acquisition, IntenseDebate was immediately placed into invite-only status for new installations as they began to rework their software for higher volumes of users.
At the time, it wasn't clear when the new version of the IntenseDebate product would be publicly available. But assumptions were that it would remain under wraps until the release of WordPress 2.7. Now, IntenseDebate has returned from its post-acquisition secrecy with some "hi-octane conversational mojo."
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, one of the keynote speakers at the NewTeeVee Live event today in San Francisco, believes that the only way to reach "video nirvana" is to put the Internet on television by building browsers into TVs and getting rid of remotes.
And according to Hastings, to get there we only have two options: fix the current TV model, or reinvent television via the Web.
Web Office vendor Etelos announced recently that it is enabling enterprise customers to white-label the Etelos platform, via a multi-product offering called the Etelos Platform Suite (detailed below). Up till now, Etelos has been a company that offers a wide range of apps and services to developers and vendors - it took care of everything from billing to customer management. Most of that service offering was done via a proprietary platform. Essentially, now Etelos is letting other companies use that platform to do the very same thing.
Hearst Magazines Digital Media Web sites, including Seventeen.com and PopularMechanics.com, are rolling out Instant Messaging functionality for their readers to communicate with. Can group chat keep fickle web readers on this publisher's web pages? We suspect that it could work well, but the first implementation we've seen left a lot to be desired.
Powered by fast-growing web IM platform Meebo, these new chat widgets can be accompanied by multimedia that chat users can view together. In a world where the magazine industry has to be feeling some pain from sites like MySpace and Facebook, maybe magazines have to put a little MySpace on their own websites.
Mozilla has cultivated one of the most interesting and healthiest ecosystems for extension developers around its popular Firefox browser. The problems with this, of course, is that whenever Mozilla releases a new version of Firefox, developers have to make sure that their software is compatible. For the next release of its browser, Mozilla aims to make sure that 90% of those add-ons that make up the top 95% of add-on usage will be compatible with the latest version of Firefox. The release of Firefox 3.1 is still a while off, but currently only 28% of the top extensions are ready for the transition.
How easy is it to launch a new web application these days? Easy enough that we see scads of new ones every day, in our tips inbox, on other blogs, raining out of the sky like cats and dogs. We love many of them, we really do, but after that short period of excitement - how many of these apps do we keep using for the long haul?
We asked seven members of the ReadWriteWeb team to list apps they discovered about a month ago and that they still find useful today. The resulting list was 22 services long, with consensus around a few in particular. Whether you're a long-time early adopter or just discovering many of the apps that the new web has to offer, we think you'll find some things on this list that you'll really appreciate well into the future too.
In an attempt to capitalize on traffic that happens off the main site, YouTube today announced a monetization program for embedded videos at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco.
With an audience of 280 million viewers worldwide every month, and 44 percent of viewers watching videos on sites other than YouTube, a new revenue channel makes a lot of sense - for Google as well as its partners.
As you may have realized by now, we are big fans of screencasts here at ReadWriteWeb, and every time a new tool comes along that makes screencasting easier and more accessible, we can't help but give it a try. The latest screencasting tool to come across our desks is ScreenToaster, which, unlike most of its competitors, runs directly from your browser. While its functionality is limited compared to fully featured screencasting suites like Camtasia Studio or ScreenFlow, ScreenToaster turns out to be a great little tool if you want to create a short demo video or tutorial.
Web 2.0 applications like delicious, diigo, Ma.gnolia, and others changed bookmarking forever. What used to be a private activity isolated to your computer became a social experience where friends could easily share, search, blog, and tag each other's favorite links. But personal, private bookmarking never really went away because, face it, there are some links that don't need to be shared. For those links, a service called Tidy Favorites delivers an innovative new way to work with your bookmarks using an intuitive visual search engine and dashboard.
Want to escape your email? These days, who doesn't? Email is one of the easiest technologies to use, which leads to an unfortunate side effect: we get too much of it. The information overload crisis has gotten out of hand and is now at the point where it's interfering with the way business operates. This problem is no longer just an inconvenience, it's a real financial concern. In the U.S. alone, $650 billion per year is the cost of lost productivity, according to IORG. But what can be done?
