If there's any doubt that Facebook is rapidly becoming the next big thing in social networks, you only need look at their recent statistics. According to new reports, in recent weeks Facebook is growing at a rate of 600,000 users each day, up from 300,000 to 400,000 users per day earlier this quarter. The company is also reporting that, as of today, they have reached 140 million active users.
Every year we do a review of the top Internet companies, to identify the ones we think had the biggest impact. Today we're announcing the Best BigCo of 2008 and next week we'll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company - all selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers.
In 2007 the Best BigCo went to Facebook, due to the launch and subsequent impact of its development platform. Google won Best BigCo of 2006 and 2004. In between, in 2005, Yahoo! won the award. This year we've chosen Apple, which almost single-handedly brought the Mobile Web to life in 2008.
If you're as addicted to RSS feeds as we here at ReadWriteWeb, then you've no doubt tried Snackr, an Adobe Air based RSS ticker that provides a scrolling readout of all the latest information from your favorite feeds. It's as riveting as it is useful.
Now, you could have the chance to help influence where Snackr goes in the future by joining the Snackr beta program.
According to the latest report from AdMob, 42% of all requests from iPhones to Admob's partners worldwide are coming in over WiFi instead of through the networks of mobile operators. This puts the iPhone in a league of its own, given that on average, AdMob is only seeing about 10-20% of all requests from Wifi capable phones actually coming in from WiFi networks. From T-Mobile's Android phone, for example, only about 10% of all requests were made on WiFi.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch said today that his site will no longer respect press embargoes, the informal system where press outfits agree to hold back publishing until an agreed upon time so that multiple sources can cover a story well. Arrington says that embargoes are broken too often, that PR people are too pushy and that the whole system is a wreck.
We disagree. We think embargoes can be very useful for all parties. This Fall we published a post about how and why embargoes work in tech blogging and we thought we'd share those thoughts now that the controversy has flared up again.
Startup aficionado Dave McClure has formally joined VC firm the Founders Fund as an angel investor, according to an update he made to his LinkedIn profile this week. The Founders Fund was created by former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel in 2005 and is described by author Sarah Lacy as having an ethos "rooted in giving founders better terms and getting out of their way."
Founders Fund has invested in some of the most high profile startups in the market, including Facebook and Slide.com. We covered the move in depth over on Jobwire, our site reporting on new hires in tech.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love to talk about the latest and greatest Web 2.0 applications. However, while a lot of these services make our life on the Internet a lot easier, another group of services on the web helps to keep our offline life organized. Here is our list of the top 'real world' apps that have made our offline lives easier in 2008. We will look at the following five six categories: finance, travel, education, health, politics, and non-profits.
According to a new report by Nielsen Online (pdf), most online videos in the U.S. are watched at work between 9am and 5pm during the work week. 65% of all online viewers use this time to watch their favorite online videos, while only 51% watch online videos during this time on the weekend. Not surprisingly, weekend nights between 11pm and 6am attract the fewest viewers.
Over the past year, we've been inundated with social media. We've seen Twitter go mainstream, lifestreaming take over blogging, and we've tried what felt like a million different applications. We've joined then abandoned new services recklessly, leaving our accounts to wither away on platforms long forgotten. What more could we possibly do in 2009?
We love Canadian startup PostRank here at ReadWriteWeb, but today the company has really outdone itself with the release of a powerful and eye catching new widget to display your blog's hottest posts.
PostRank scores every item in your (or any) RSS feed, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, mentions on Twitter, votes on Digg, etc. It then offers a filtered view or feed of the most relatively popular posts in that feed. The new top posts widget offers powerful new functionality, can be customized and installed in less than a few minutes and looks really hot.
