paidContent is reporting that Technorati has raised $7.5 million of planned $10 million fourth round of funding. That would bring the total amount raised by the blog search engine to about $30 million. Google Blog Search has greatly eaten into Technorati's share of the blog search market, and the company changed CEOs last August. We documented the company's struggles last year, but now we'd like to ask you if Technorati is still relevant. What blog search engine do you use?
The theme for this week must be the erosion of market share for dominant technologies. Earlier, we reported on the Firefox web browser's steady march into Internet Explorer territory, and today NewTeeVee points to a recent study from Ipsos MediaCT that shows the PC continuing to encroach on the television's dominating position for eyeball time when it comes to video watching. Where are you watching video? Vote in our poll below.
Since we reported yesterday that cable and Internet provider Comcast had acquired social address book Plaxo for an estimated $150 million, we've been fielding a lot of comments and emails -- most of them not very supportive of the acquisition. Most people seem wary of Comcast -- which has a poor reputation on the web due to "bandwidth throttling" practices -- and some have told us that they'll be deleting their Plaxo accounts. How about you?
Last week was arguably a tipping point for FriendFeed, the lifestreaming app that aggregates all of your social feeds together. FriendFeed first came to our attention in early February, when Sean Ammirati interviewed the founders on our podcast show ReadWriteTalk. At the end of February FriendFeed officially launched, then at SXSW it gained momentum, and by the end of last week it was officially hot - when blogger Louis Gray noted that many "elite bloggers" were using it. So, let's run a poll to see how many RWW readers are using it.
In yesterday's post Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing, Alex Iskold wrote that Apple's announcement of iPhone support for Microsoft Exchange "makes perfect sense" - as a competitive move against Blackberry and to position the iPhone as the default consumer / enterprise phone. However, how smart was this move by Microsoft?
We've been very bullish on Twitter here at ReadWriteWeb. We named it our Best Web LittleCo of 2007, because it "has captured the imagination and become a new hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging." Twitter also received the Best mobile start-up award at the Crunchies in January. And as RWW's Josh Catone pointed out recently, Twitter has become a platform for serious media discourse. But even with all these accolades, the fact remains: Twitter is still largely used by geeks. Are your family members using it? If so, what for?
While I was flying halfway across the world, a huge story developed that I am just now catching up on: Microsoft launched a takeover bid for Yahoo valued at $44.6 Billion. In a frankly stunning move today, the Official Google Blog has published a post raising questions about "Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo!." David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer for Google, wonders whether Microsoft could "now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?"
Many of us are wondering what Apple has in store for their annual expo, Macworld, which begins this Monday. Last year it was the iPhone, two years ago it was the Intel iMac, the year before that the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini. Earlier this week Josh Catone wrote an excellent post, listing 9 specific Macworld predictions and assigning a percentage of probability to each.
In the following poll, we've included each of Josh's predictions - and also added some more from RWW commenters.
NewsGator, which offers the most complete end-to-end suite of RSS reader tools on the market and possibly the most widely used offline readers (NetNewsWire and FeedDemon), today announced that its most popular products would be set free. As in beer. According to NewsGator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker, the reason for going free is simple: "What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients [...] we want our clients to become ubiquitous."
The NY Times has another of those 'Mobile Web isn't living up to the hype' articles that have become so familiar since, oh, the late 90's when WAP came onto the scene. The NYT quotes statistics from Rethink Research, stating that data will make up only 12 percent of average mobile phone revenue per user in 2007. Further, surveys by Yankee Group show that "only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web more than once a month, while 70 percent of computer users view Web sites every day."
I have to admit I've only just become a Mobile Web convert, after purchasing an iPhone on my recent trip to the States. I now use the Mobile Web frequently, to check RWW and other sites during the day when I'm out and about -- or simply when curled up in the sofa at the end of the day, trying to relax.
So with all that in mind, it'd be interesting to survey how many RWW readers use the Mobile Web. Please participate in our poll below:
