Joe Hewitt, one of the most important software developers in recent history, published a provocative and sad post on his personal blog today, predicting that unless the open and free Web gets someone to own and take responsibility for advancing it, it will inevitably fall into virtual obscurity in the dust of fast evolving platforms like iOS, Android and Windows. Chris White, one of the co-founders of Android, offers a compelling argument against Hewitt's perspective, though.
As one of the primary co-creators of Firefox, Hewitt single-handedly built the Facebook iPhone app. and when he left Facebook fed up with Apple's approval process for apps, he announced that his next aim was to build tools for mobile HTML5 developers. Apparently that work has led to some frustrating experiences trying to support the open web. It's not surprising, but it is pretty heartbreaking. It's hard to imagine a decentralized platform like the web evolving to make as many things possible, as quickly and at scale, as the big centralized app platforms.
California lawmakers may give Amazon.com a one-year reprieve in their contentious battle over state taxes, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
Amazon has been fighting a new law that demanded Internet retailers collect state taxes starting this past July if they had offices, workers or other connections in California. Lawmakers hoped the tax would earn the economically depressed state $200 million annually. Amazon fought the law viciously, pulling out of the state and leaving 25,000 affiliates without the online platform that extended their sales reach.
Facebook announced today that the company will launch group chat, video calling with Skype and a redesigned chat side bar to make communication on Facebook easy and powerful.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new features at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. This announcement follows up on Zuckerberg's portent of "something awesome" last week. Skype video chat will be fully embedded into the Facebook ecosystem with an extension that is designed to make it as easy to use as possible. Essentially, video chat within Facebook is two clicks away.
We were excited last month to find out about the integration of Skype and Facebook. This morning, the feature is going live for all to see with the release of Skype 5.0.
The latest version comes with some cleaned up design features, built-in Facebook integration and the group video chat we've watched develop in the beta releases. For Skype, it's improvement all around and all we can say now is that the ball is surely in Facebook's court.
Blogging platform WordPress has been working hard lately to increase a sense of community on the site. Last month, WordPress.com users got the ability to "like" each others' posts and today, the site is introducing a subscription feature.
Last month we compared the addition of the "like" feature to Facebook and this month, we can't help but notice that the subscription service brings WordPress a little bit closer to fellow self-publishing platform Tumblr.
Over-reaction is endemic to discussions of the Web. Over-enthusiastic proponents - Millennialists - seem to be convinced that every burp in online tech, every new tool, every momentary trend, every relocation of a dialog box on a popular site, hails the onset of a Brave New World. On the other side, Professional Doomsayers play the part of sweaty Cassandras, scritching manically at their bespoke hairshirts, bravely warning the hoi polloi of the certainty of their bleak oblivion.
This time around, what with the wholesale collapse of the Web on everyone's lips, let's take a look at the latter. Let us, with grave mien and bowed head, earnestly regard those things Webesque which have been proclaimed "dead" in the last few of years and shuffled, permanently, off the e-mortal coil. Harden your hearts and sharpen your stakes. We could be here a while.
Hewlett-Packard is banking on alliances as the unified communications market hits its stride and Web 2.0 technologies become ingrained into voice services and other data networks within the enterprise.
Unified communications is the convergence of voice, data, instant messaging and presence technologies. It is one of the broadest terms that we come across but it is providing context as collaboration services and mobile technologies leverage the social Web.
Flash mobs are "spontaneous" gatherings that are organized by emails and text messages. Everyone from celebrities to schools have created them. To keep it real, our Top 10 YouTube list is based only on non-commercial events.
From a giant flash mob shootout in a shopping center in Poland, to a ninja mob at U.C. Berkeley, to a light saber mob in Bristol, these events are a global phenomenon. In Australia and New York City - even a record 3,000 people all freezing in place in Paris - these mobs demonstrate how new ideas for email- and text message-based event organizing have only just begun.
Today, about 145 million Internet users in the U.S. use social web applications. In total, all of these users generate close to 500 billion online impressions on each other. According to a new report from Forrester Research, a mere 16% of online consumers generate a grand total of 80% of these peer-to-peer online impressions. Over 60% of all of these impressions come from Facebook.
Over the past 20 years the two people most prominent in the world of personal computing have been Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Sometimes they've worked as partners, mostly as the opposite. So in the end who wins?
ReadWriteWeb wants you to be the judge. After viewing these 10 videos, it's up to you to decide who gives a better graduation speech, who makes the best cartoon character, and who is better at being funny. Who's the bigger alpha in the dating game, who's better at saying nice things about their opponent, and finally, who is better at leaving their business?
