ReadWriteWeb

When Steve Ballmer announced that the first public beta of Windows 7 would be available today, it was already clear that there would be a tremendous demand for the next version of Windows. The last we heard was that the beta will be available at noon PST today, even though the download link from Microsoft's TechNet site are already making the rounds on Twitter.

Amazon today announced its new web-based AWS Management Console, which makes it very easy for users of Amazon EC2 cloud computing service to set up and manage their servers. As cloud computing companies are starting to offer a relatively standard set of features and uptime guarantees, user-friendly interfaces are clearly a way for service providers like Amazon to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Today, searching through social media sites is much like the days of searching the Web before the advent of Google. Many of us are performing a series of loosely associated searches, and then aggregating them to try to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. To get a good cross-section of the conversation, we're running searches on Twitter and Ice Rocket, creating any number of Google Alerts, and building Yahoo! Pipes to sift through all the sources of information.

The perfect solution isn't there yet. And while no one has truly nailed "social media search," WhosTalkin is definitely a step in the right direction.

Web 2.0 is pretty cool - so cool in fact that it's got its own buzzwords and lingo that not everybody knows. Everybody has a lot to gain from participation in this new cultural phenomenon, though, so there's no reason why everyone shouldn't know the background on the lingo. We did a little research just to cover our own bases! We thought we'd share it with you.

Think you know where catchwords like FTW and Fail! came from? Think you know who came up with the phrase Web 2.0? Do you know what the first Rickrolled link claimed to be? We did some hunting around to find out - below are our best ideas for the history of these and other popular terms around the web these days.

The Google Chrome team keeps releasing updates to Google's browser on an almost weekly basis, but it is interesting that the latest version in the developer channel is now already being called 2.0. This comes just about four months after Google first released its browser to the public. This new version (2.0.156.1) is only available in the developer channel, but it already points at where Google is planning to go with this next version of Chrome, which, besides many new features, also includes a new version of WebKit and Google's own implementation of the HTTP protocol.

This week's RWW Live podcast show was on the topic of how startups can navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. We've already posted today on a two year old life-story repository startup called Dandelife, which is struggling - although we were able to draw some lessons from that. But it's also good to look at the startups that continue to battle away. Our podcast guests were two examples of that - BrightKite and Zoho. Both were recognized by ReadWriteWeb in our annual end of the year awards: Zoho won 'Best Little Co' and BrightKite won 'Most Promising Little Co'. In the podcast they had some excellent advice for startups, so in this post we review some of those tips; and we invite you to add your own tips in the comments.

In March 2003, Rich Kaarlgaard wrote a great article in Forbes detailing how the coming decade was all about massive reductions in costs and prices, driven by technology. We had grown accustomed to Moore's Law driving down PC costs. Kaarlgaard pointed out that this was happening across the spectrum of the economy. He was right, but many of the effects were hidden by the credit bubble. When money is so cheap, costs rise. Now we are in for an even cheaper decade, and today's headlines are showing the way.

Two year old life-story repository Dandelife seemed to have everything going for it. It launched to praise from some of the biggest tech blogs on the web, it built a wildly loyal user base and its company advisory board was stocked with some of the biggest names in social media. Apparently that hasn't been enough, though. Last night Dandelife founder Kelly Abbott announced that the software will be made open source this year, acknowledging that the company hasn't grown or made money and that he made some important mistakes from the start.

It's an interesting story that other entrepreneurs can learn from and Abbott has done a real service in opening up honestly about what's going on at Dandelife.

Like every other innovative industry before it, Web 2.0, too, has developed its own language. Our friends over at the Royal Pingdom blog took a close look at the buzzwords around Web 2.0 today and found some interesting trends. Using Google Trends as the basis for their research, Pingdom, for example, concludes that searches for term 'Web 2.0' peaked in 2007 and have been decreasing every since. Some of the main terms of the Web 2.0 world like 'RSS,' or 'cloud computing' have also been on a steady downward trajectory, while 'blogging' is still holding steady.

Microsoft today released Microsoft Tag, its own barcode technology for mobile phones. For this, Microsoft developed its own High Capacity Color Barcodes which can store a lot more information than the QRCode or Datamatrix barcodes we have become familiar with. Microsoft is specifically targeting mobile users with these tags and has released scanning applications for most types of mobile phones, including the iPhone (iTunes link), as well as Windows Mobile phones, Blackberries, and Symbian S60 phones.