Marketing firm HubSpot will publish a report tomorrow on the state of Twitter at the end of 2008, based on user data the company harvested from its controversial app TwitterGrader. Though the report's methodology is not discussed, the numbers it includes are quite interesting. We draw our own conclusions based on those numbers below.
Every year we do a review of the top Internet companies, to identify the ones that had the biggest impact. Last week we announced that Apple was our choice for Best BigCo of 2008. Today we're announcing Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company, as selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers. There were a number of small companies that were in contention for Best LittleCo: FriendFeed, Meebo, and last year's winner Twitter would all have been deserving winners. In the end, we chose a 'little company that could' in the enterprise space. Our pick for Most Promising is something you could be using a lot on your mobile phone next year...
Editor's note: this is a "Sponsor Post", by one of our long-term sponsors. These posts are clearly labeled as such, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.
API publishing is no longer the future; it has clearly arrived. Companies from Best Buy to MTV Networks have jumped into the game, and more are taking the plunge every day. But what differentiates a successful API program from one that "never leaves the station"?
Who uses cross-posting social media app Ping.fm? A lot of people do, but now you can add LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Creative Commons Foundation Chairman Joi Ito to the list. The two are among the most high profile angel investors in the startup world and they've both just put money into Ping.fm, according to a post on the company's blog this morning.
The service lets users send a message through one interface (SMS, IM, web publishing tools) and then automatically cross posts it to more than 30 other social networking sites. It's a way to broadcast your messages into more networks than you could otherwise participate in. Now with some very visible investment, the company should be able to scale and roll out even more features.
Two German researchers, Simon Bergweiler and Matthieu Deru, came up with a way to explain the heady concept of the semantic web, aka "Web 3.0," to everyday people who aren't as steeped in technology advancements and lingo as perhaps we are. To do this, the researchers set up an experimental kiosk that lets you use semantic web capabilities with only an iPhone and a swish of your finger.
Since its launch, Google's new web browser, Google Chrome, has been applauded for its lightweight look and feel and for the speed of its JavaScript engine. Although the browser still lacks support for things like RSS and browser add-ons, the company has already ripped off the beta label, a move that was probably made in preparation for Google's upcoming bundling deals with PC manufacturers.
Hires of software developers and web designers slowed last week, while tech and new media company hires for Director level positions increased substantially over the six weeks prior. Developers and designers still remained among the season's most in-demand people in tech while marketing and IT firms saw big increases in hires. A whole lot of surprising hires we've been seeing in the publishing world (new and old) finally slowed down this week.
We've tracked these and other interesting stats and stories about people still getting jobs at a time of economic downturn. Check out our chart-laden full coverage of this season's new hires in tech and new media over at our hiring news site Jobwire.
Web 2.0 Asia is reporting that Me2Day - a Korean microblogging service likened to Twitter - has been acquired by Naver - the most popular search portal in Korea - for 2.2 billion Korean Won, which equates to roughly $2 million US.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're no strangers to URL shortening services. We use them all of the time - and we're proponents of using something other than TinyURL. But with the vast array of URL shortening services out there, it generally takes something interesting to turn our heads. Now, a new URL shortener called Krunchd has done just that, by providing a feature that has less to do with shortening URLs and more to do with how we communicate with URLs on a regular basis.
BackType, the free service that aggregates all of the comments you make across the Web, launched a new feature last week called Subscriptions which lets you follow comments by blog post.
BackType Subscriptions sends you an e-mail with updates that you can choose to receive as they happen, daily or weekly. Subscriptions is also offered via RSS. While most blogging platforms already offer a similar service, BackType fills the gap for those that don't.
