Over at Quora, Tripline founder and CEO Byron Dumbrill answers the question, "Why did Delicious fail?" Dumbrill joined Yahoo in 2006, about nine months after it acquired the bookmarking service, and his explanation corresponds with what we've been hearing for several years about its fate. Delicious was back-burnered while the company focused on Yahoo Bookmarks. It was a second class citizen, a fact that Yahoo tacitly acknowledged in its statement earlier today when it said that Delicious needs a home where "it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive." Dumbrill talks about that internal competition in his full answer after the jump.
Yahoo! is going to shutter its social bookmarking service Delicious, the web learned today, and with it will sink an incredibly valuable source of collectively curated knowledge. You can easily export your own bookmarks (no verdict yet where we should all meet up to import them to) but what if you want to export other peoples'? That's at least half the value of the service, socially curated discovery.
Tonight I thought I'd go loot a little from a burning building owned by a company not interested in putting out the fire. Specifically, I went to extract the top 50 links to pages that had been tagged by users with both the words "Twitter" and "International". Where else are you going to find a reading list of the best collected written works and other multimedia about almost any given topic? Unfortunately, automated extraction is blocked by the site and the rickety, antiquated API appears focused on returning you little more than your own bookmarks. If there's a clear way to accomplish export of not just my bookmarks, but all bookmarks with one or more tags, from all users - I haven't been able to find it yet.
Update: 24 hours later, Yahoo! has issued a statement saying they would like to sell, not close, Delicious.
Shortly after WikiLeaks began its release of more than 250,000 diplomatic documents, its domain name service (DNS) provider pulled the plug on its long-time name, WikiLeaks.org. Two days later, the name was re-registered and the other day it was set to redirect users to another site - mirror.wikileaks.info - which hosts an old version of the WikiLeaks homepage. It's unclear, however, exactly who's behind it and one Internet security site is saying that the site exists in "a very dangerous 'neighborhood'" of the Internet and is warning people not to visit it.
We have to wonder, though: Does guilt by association warrant a warning against the site? And does WikiLeaks have anything to do with it?
Internet of Things (IoT) is a term for when everyday ordinary objects are connected to the Internet via microchips. The technologies include sensors, RFID and smartphone standards like NFC. The use cases are still evolving, but over 2010 we saw large organizations like HP and IBM build out impressive platforms for the Internet of Things. We also saw companies as diverse as Nike and Pachube enjoying success with consumer applications based on these technologies.
Here are our picks for the top 10 Internet of Things developments of 2010. On Page 1 of this post we detail 5 large scale developments (3 specific trends and 2 IoT platforms). On Page 2, we select the 5 best consumer products for IoT. These include a product that connects your car to the Internet, an internet-connected shoe and a self-described "Cisco for small things."
Twitter has raised an additional $200 million in venture capital, primarily from famous VC firm Kleiner Perkins, Kara Swisher reports in a big AllThingsD scoop today.
125% more than all previous rounds of investment in Twitter combined, this brings company's total financing to $360 million. What on earth will it do with all that money? It will attempt to become the communications platform it has always wanted to be. That will probably mean acquisitions, it will probably mean a lot more sales people and advertising and it definitely means that if anyone is going to acquire Twitter, it will need to be for multiple billions of dollars. More likely the company will file to go public on the stock market.
With more than 550 million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets posted on Twitter each day, and 2 billion video views each day on YouTube, social media has become an integral part of our connected lives. But this is just the beginning.
For the past two years, I have been forecasting the evolution social media will undergo. Key trends for 2010 included social media integration across applications and devices, lowered technological barriers, mobile pervasiveness and social media ROI as a focus. It is safe to say that these trends indeed became reality and I expect these to continue and materialize in new solutions, applications and case studies in the year ahead.
Despite the fact that Wikileaks front man Julian Assange won TIME's reader poll for the magazine's Person of the Year 2010 feature, the editors ultimately picked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckberberg as the overall winner.
Zuckberberg was chosen "for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them ... and for changing how we all live our lives."
But was Assange robbed?
As you sit down for another glorious day of tech news and analysis from ReadWriteWeb, you may have noticed that we've given our homepage and other aspects of the site a spiffy new upgrade. For many weeks we've been thinking of (and coding) better ways to deliver our content to you, as well as a better way to engage and discuss that content. We're please to officially debut those improvements today! We've written this handy overview of what you see.
Today, Apple has released its annual "iTunes Rewind" feature, a listing of the most popular content in music, movies, TV shows and mobile applications in its iTunes marketplace. This year, Apple has placed a large focus on mobile apps, providing lists like the top free and top paid iPhone and iPad apps as well as lists of the top grossing apps on both platforms.
But the mobile world is bigger than Apple these days, so a year-end app list can't focus solely on iPhone and iPad. To get a handle on other application popularity trends, we reached out to a number of other companies, like GetJar, the world's second-largest mobile app store, plus other app recommendation and search services like Chomp, AppStoreHQ and Appolicious.
One of the more subtle trends of 2010 has been the way that our reading habits have changed, due to a convergence of other Web trends: mobile apps, real-time Web (mostly Twitter), and social networking as a way to track news (mostly Facebook). In the previous era of the Web, the so-called Web 2.0, RSS Readers and start pages were all the rage. Over 2010, though, more people used tools like Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Flipboard, LazyWeb, Feedly and TweetDeck, to track news.
Nowadays I'm more likely to find stories to read via a vertical aggregator (the media-focused Mediagazer is my current favorite) and save them to Instapaper for later reading via my iPhone or iPad. I still use Google Reader, but in all honesty I now use it more to scan than to read.
