For the final RWW Live show of the year today, the ReadWriteWeb writers and a couple of special guests got together to review the year in Web technology. Joining host Sean Ammirati were Marshall Kirkpatrick, Sarah Perez and Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb. We had two special guests who joined the call while we were live: Allen Stern of Center Networks and Kevin Marks of Google. Thanks to both of them for jumping in at the last minute. Here is the audio recording of the show:
Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced (on Twitter) that the service has finally launched a belated people search function. It doesn't work perfectly but logged in users will now have a much easier time finding other users by searching the name field for peoples' real names. It's quite handy.
It's pretty crazy to think that this service has become as high profile (if not popular) as it has without the ability to search for users by their names. Now that it's here there are other search functions we still find more useful, though.
Over December we've published ten top 10 lists of the top products of 2008. We intend to open these lists up for public voting in 2009, to tap into the wisdom of the intelligent crowd that reads our site. But for now, you'll have to make do with the choices of us here at ReadWriteWeb. In this post we've done a megalist, the top 100 products of 2008. Come join us on RWW Live - our live podcast show - at 3pm PST today, as we discuss these products and the big trends of 2008.
Of course there are far more than 100 great Web products out there, so there are some excellent ones not included in our megalist. Please leave a comment here and tell us what we've missed!
RSS and podcast publishing service FeedBurner has been a great friend to bloggers over the years but this morning announced that it will shut down its own blog Burning Questions. Readers will now be referred to a new blog, AdSense for Feeds. FeedBurner is so useful for so many things beyond serving up ads in feeds that there's something sad about the symbolism here.
As a part of the announcement FeedBurner offers information for publishers about how to migrate from FeedBurner to a new Google account, as in the future all feed related services will require a Google account. It's the end of an era, really.
For many people, the end of the year brings a spate of New Year's resolutions. Generally, those resolutions revolve around breaking bad habits - which isn't so easy. So how about we give you an easy one to check off the list? Your newest resolution can be to "try new things." And here are three new music services - one radio, one mixtape, and one single track - where you can start fulfilling that resolution, already.
Project Gutenberg, the longtime home of free eBooks on the web, has just introduced a mobile-ready version of their hosted content. Called PG Mobile, or Project Gutenberg's Mobile Edition, the software transforms the plain text of the files on the Project Gutenberg web site into a format that can be read easily on mobile devices with small screens.
Don't you hate it when you click a link only to discover it wasn't a web page, but a slow-loading PDF instead? Maybe it's time for publishers to find something to do with those PDFs that makes them a lot more interesting and engaging for their site's users. A new mashup tool called Adam (Beta) can help. It lets you take static files like PDFs and images and mash them up with web content like HTML and multimedia. Adam then provides you with an embed code so you can display these new remixed files on your web site.
Meebo, the leading Web-based IM service, has reached its current level of popularity by providing Web access to popular IM interfaces like AOL, MSN, and GTalk. Meanwhile, in parallel, there has been another growing segment of instant messaging taking hold in popular social networks. It was only a matter of time before Meebo extended its functionality to embrace this growing market - and now it's happened with Meebo's Facebook and MySpace IM integration.
It's the end of 2008 and everyone on the Web is hurting due to the economy. But we know that things will get better, because slow-downs eventually bury the old and give birth to new evolutionary ways of doing things.
One of these evolutions started quietly in 2008. We are witnessing the rise of a new kind of web: contextual. You might not have heard or thought about it much yet, but you are already using it today. Search remains the killer app on the web, but context is quickly become a viable contender. Why? Because context is what happens instead of search.
Amid the dark days on Wall Street and in global markets, it seems to be up to technology to step up and deliver solid analysis and rational scrutiny. The US market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), ratified a proposal on Wednesday for public companies and mutual fund companies to file their financial statements in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). The XML-based language is also known as "Interactive Data" in financial circles and promises faster analysis with wider coverage. All things being equal, it will mitigate the poor analysis and regulation that's been contributing to stupendously bad financial decisions.
