Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup

You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapup by RSS or by email (form below).

RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form:

Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

This week we released our first premium report: The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. It's been in the works for more than four months and we believe it's unlike anything else you've seen. Businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web will find the guide invaluable in getting up to speed on the state of the art and making sure their employees have the foundation they need to be effective.

The end product is in two parts. Part one is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. Part two is a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. The Guide is available for purchase at a price of $299. (You won't be charged until you complete a few simple steps on that page.) You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Products

Twitter Puts a Muzzle on Your Friends: Goodbye People I Never Knew

It's not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter's settings this week greatly reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer saw public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) This isn't a small change at all; it's big, and it's bad. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery. Fortunately in less than 24 hours, Twitter changed this policy. Read our coverage to see what all the fuss was about.

Google Search Evolves: Adds Search Options and Rich Snippets

At this week's Google's Searchology event, which we live-blogged, the search market leader announced two significant features to its search product: Search Options and Rich Snippets. It also previewed a new fact-finding search product called Google Squared. The first two features are already live on google.com and they've notably extended Google's core search product. As we sit back and reflect on the meaning of this, one thing is starkly clear: the core Google search experience is now much more than a simple search box on a plain white background, which it was for so long.

ReadWriteWeb had an opportunity to talk with Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience at Google, about the new products the company announced this week. We've embedded Mayer's video below, it runs about three minutes.

Amazon Opens a Kindle Store for the iPhone

This week, Amazon finally released an iPhone-specific version of its Kindle eBook store, which makes it a lot easier to browse and buy books while on the go. Sadly, though, Amazon did not release a new version of the Kindle app with a built-in browser (yet). So users are still being kicked out of the iPhone app and taken to Safari in order to browse the store and complete transactions. A button that takes users back to the Kindle app only appears after a purchase in Safari has been completed.

OneRiot: Web-Wide, Real-Time Social Search

OneRiot, a social search engine, announced this week that its search results pages now update in real time with content from Twitter, Digg and the wider social web. Results are prioritized based on an algorithm of about 26 factors, filtered for spam, and unduplicated if links are shared through multiple URL-shortening services. There are two search modes: Users can browse real-time results or (in "pulse" mode) see links ranked by social relevance. We spoke with a caffeinated and exuberant Tobias Peggs, general manager at OneRiot, about 20 minutes before the new release went live at 9 a.m. "We're trying to get a sense of current social relevance; what are people talking about right now," he said. And more than any competing product currently available, OneRiot succeeds.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• Smub, a bookmarking and link posting tool for the iPhone.
• Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
• Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• hakia is a semantic search engine.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
• Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
• Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

Our new channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

VC Cash Is April Showers on Web Startup Flowers

Do you remember the headlines about VC investment "falling off cliff" after some data was reported by NVCA in early April? We took a contrarian view, saying the trend was down, but challenging the doom and gloom that was jumping from the headlines. This was based on our own online research and some anecdotal data from interviews. Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures also dug a bit deeper. The more we looked into this, the more we saw that the underlying data was not as authoritative as one might imagine. Many people popped up in the comments offering additional data. One was a New York City-based startup research firm (founded as recently as February 2009) called ChubbyBrain (great name!), which tracks this kind of data for a living. So this month, we relied on ChubbyBrain to help us dig deeper and get you the facts.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web

We've been following a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent "Web 3.0" concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web. Greg's series is probably the best explanation we've read all year about the way these trends are converging. In this post we highlight some of Greg's thoughts and add some of our own.

Introduction to the Real-Time Web

Real-time information delivery is fast emerging as one of the most important elements of our online experience. This week alone: Google declared real-time search to be one of the biggest unsolved challenges it faces; the NYTimes put a link to a new real-time view of all its news stories on the front page of its site; Facebook announced a new feature that will let users be notified instantly when their friends interact with media related to themselves on the site. This is big stuff, but what does it all mean? We offer a collection of readings on the real-time web. Give these articles some time and you'll have a solid foundation to understand, discuss and act on this emerging paradigm.

Hulu Keeps on Growing, But the Big Winner in April was MTV

According to the latest data from Nielsen Online (PDF), overall online video usage in April declined slightly compared to March (-2.3%), and all the major players, except for Youtube (+0.2%) and Hulu (+7.1%) saw the number of video streams on their sites decline. The real winner here, though, is MTV, which streamed 15.7% more videos in April than in March, and which has grown 359.6% year-over-year. Interestingly, Disney-owned ABC.com, which just struck a deal to syndicate its videos on Hulu, saw the largest decline in streams since March, with a 15.9% drop in total streams.

BIGOmaha: The Little Conference That Could

Recently in the gorgeous Nebraska sunshine, about 300 techies, entrepreneurs, and creatives from all over the country gathered in a large but simple room to learn, listen, and make connections. The one-day, one-track show was just a hashtag to some and entirely unknown to others; still, the pre-show buzz on Twitter and in various blogs had resonated with freshness, immediacy, and inspiration. A week before it opened, the first-ever BIGOmaha conference was sold out. Our own Jolie O'Dell was there to check it out...

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Google Apps Continues Push Into Enterprise: 30,000 New Users at Valeo

This week marked another step forward for Google in pushing its web office suite Google Apps into large enterprises. Valeo, a leading automotive supplier company, is deploying Google Apps to 30,000 of its employees.

Overall, business is good for Google Apps. Google noted in the annoucement that "more than a million businesses" are now using the Google Apps suite - which includes Gmail, shared calendaring, collaborative word processing and spreadheets, and private video sharing and websites (internal and external). As Google continues to tap into the enterprise market - competing against the desktop office software monolith Microsoft - deals like the Valeo one show that its web office suite can scale for large businesses.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

The features announced today, and in particular 'Search Options', build on Google's Universal Search announcements of two years ago at the same event. Universal Search integrated search results from across Google's properties into the main search. It began with images, maps, books, news, and video - and over the past two years it has added products and blog search.

Then last November, Google introduced SearchWiki: the ability to add, annotate, and remove your search results.

So with those two sets of changes alone, Google search added more types of content (including multimedia like video and maps) and some read/write functionality (which Google termed a "wiki", to the bemusement of the inventor of the wiki).

Today's announcements are centered around some of the themes in the current era of the Web that we at ReadWriteWeb have been exploring recently: real-time information, adding more meaning to the data (aka Semantic Search), and filtering results. The new features show that Google is adapting to this environment.

Rich Snippets and Google Squared: Google Getting Clever With Data

According to Google, rich snippets "extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing." Significantly, Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. It is inviting publishers to mark up their HTML and webmasters can find more details here.

Image from Matt Cutts

At Searchology Google showed a preview of a new tool called Google Squared. This as yet unreleased product has already been compared to Wolfram Alpha, a "computational knowledge engine" that we reviewed in detail recently. Google Squared doesn't find webpages, like the normal Google search. Instead it "automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet." The product will be added to Google Labs later this month.

Our take: Both Rich Snippets and Google Squared show that Google is getting smarter about data, adding more context (Rich Snippets) and new ways of searching and organizing (Squared).

Search Options: More Options, More Clutter?

Now let's look at Search Options, because it is the most immediately useful of the announcements today. And more than the other two, it shows how much the core Google search experience has evolved. The 2-minute video from Google below is a good introduction to the feature.

The screenshot below shows Search Options in action. The highlighted part shows the new link.

When the user clicks on 'Show options...', a sidebar pops out on the left with a variety of options including multimedia, reviews and time-based views:

Our take: When you ponder the above screenshots, bear in mind the Google experience of 10 years ago. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that there are now significantly more options, links, on the Google results page. The ramifications of that are pretty clear: Google has evolved far beyond the simple 1-feature product it once was. Simplicity and focus on the core search experience were the principle reasons for Google's success. It's why Google usurped the bulky search-portals of the Web 1.0 era - Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, and their ilk.

Nevertheless, Google has been careful to gradually and relatively slowly introduce these new features to its core search experience. And the actual webpage search links still dominate most of the page real estate in the above screenshots.

The big question is: will making the core search experience more complex make Google more vulnerable to competitors that actually want to compete on features? Microsoft for instance is constantly trumpeting its next generation search plans. Google search got so popular precisely because of its laser focus on solid, simple good search results.

Or is it that the world of information and data has gotten more complex and so Google is just sensibly adapting to the environment?

There is certainly more media and interaction on the Web in 2009; and users are demanding real-time updates. So we're inclined to believe the latter view - that Google is cautiously adapting to the environment, without losing its core focus. If it didn't evolve that way, up and comers like Twitter would become more of a danger; moreso than relative dinosaurs like Microsoft and Yahoo.

Let us know whether you agree, or not, in the comments.

Google.com, circa May 1999