First, it scrolls. To the left. Of that much we are sure. All sorts of news articles, pictures, stories, reviews, and other informational items appear in two rows. As you move your mouse over each item, you can choose to read more, close, strike, or star it. Or let it float on by. Anyway, if you do click on the item, a new window will open giving you a larger preview. Closing an item does just that. Clicking on the star icon will save the item for your own feed and finally, striking an item will make it (and stuff like it) go away.

Here's where the recommendation system comes in. Starring stuff promotes similar content, so you end up seeing more of it in your stream. Striking things makes them go away, and also makes them less likely to appear again. After a while, you are seeing more and more of the stuff you like. It's that simple.

Atype Studios also added a bit of social goodness to the app, not only building a feed of stuff you have starred, but also allowing you to share particular items with other Ohpan users and eventually, via email and other social networks. And they aren't stopping there - itechmo reports that plans are afoot to include your own content (if it isn't being picked up already), add your Google Reader shared items and even rate inline ads!

Oh yeah - we also promised you some access codes! Here's what to do. Go to the Ohpan site, click on the button called I have a code! and put in this code: RWWROCKS.

The man behind Atype, Simon Plashkes (@plashkes), gave us a roll of 1000 tickets, so first come, first serve!

What's Next After Web 2.0?

Over the weekend we editorialized that the world financial crisis will have a big impact on where Web Technology is headed. Has the world arrived at one of those giant inflexion points, we asked, where one Web era is usurped by another? We asked you to leave a comment in the post telling us what you think will be next. Many of you did just that and also the post was fortunate enough to get to the digg frontpage, where it received 100 additional comments. Finally, we polled our friends on Twitter this week and got many great replies. We synthesize, analyze and categorize all of the responses from RWW, digg and Twitter. What is next after Web 2.0? Read on!

The Newsfeed Now The Dominant Info-Metaphor of Our Time

The internet is really exciting. There's a whole lot of information on it - an overwhelming amount, even. Years ago we first looked at it in monochrome text, then we started looking at it through a search box on an empty white page. What's next? Is it huge War Games style multi-monitor displays? A swirling UI somewhere between Tom Cruise in Minority Report and David Bowie in Labrynth? Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now! Today one of the biggest photo sharing websites and the biggest news and email portal in the world both fell under the spell of the Newsfeed.

Hey Businesses! Social Media Users Want Your Attention

For any company that thought social media was a passing fad not worthy of their time, the numbers coming out of a recent study published by Opinion Research Corporation for Cone should come as a wake-up call. According to that study, 85% of Americans using social media think companies should have an active presence in the social media environment. What's even more interesting is that those users actually want the companies to interact with them while there.

Help Twitter Find a Revenue Model

Twitter is the poster child for the 'scale first, don't even think about revenue at launch, monetize much, much later' model of startup. In the current climate, ventures like that probably won't get funded. Which is a shame. Twitter is addictive and fun and even occasionally useful. If anybody can pull this business model off, it will be Twitter. It has scale, seem to be moving mainstream and they've even fixed their reliability issues. But Twitter won't survive if it doesn't find a great revenue model. This matters to all of us.

First New York Times API is Live - Here's Why it Matters

The much-anticipated first Application Programming Interface (API) from the New York Times went live this week. First up is a campaign finance data API and next is a movie review API. Also available is a database management program initially developed for internal use at the NY Times. We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS 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!

• FreshBooks offers professional online invoicing.
• SocialText provides an enterprise wiki platform.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Calais brings semantic functionality into your site.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• The Web 3.0 Conference is on October 16 - 17 in Santa Clara.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• SmartyPig is Simple. Smart. Savings.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Web Products

5 Early Recommendation Technologies That Could Shake Up Their Niches

International recommendation technology provider Strands has announced the five finalists in the Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-Ups. From music to video to pharmaceutical drug development recommendations, these plucky startups from all around the world will now present at the Association for Computing Machinery's Recommender Systems 2008 conference in Switzerland and one will be offered a $100k investment from Strands. Below is a quick profile of each of the five Strands finalists working to bring more of this paradigm into the present market, followed by our thoughts on which one we're most interested in.

Facebook fbFund Awards 25 Apps $25k Each

With today's technology startups, sometimes a little funding can go a long way. Today, 25 Facebook applications received word that they've got more runway ahead of them. At a time when many companies are struggling to find funding for their ideas, these Facebook app developers have found themselves with $25,000 more to spend on development. It's all thanks to the Facebook fbFund, a grant program designed to "identify talent and seed innovation on the Facebook Platform."

Restaurant Review Site Boorah Launches API

BooRah, a restaurant review site we first reviewed earlier this year, just announced the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and business to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah's data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons. BooRha also hopes that developers will implement this data in location aware applications through Mozilla's Geode and on the iPhone and Android platforms.

GoDaddy Unveils Mainstream Social Web Aggregator

GoDaddy has just unveiled an amazing new service called SmartSpace which lets anyone register a domain name and then instantly turn it into a social web site which aggregates any of the following components onto one page: a blog, a photo album, a chat application, email, RSS feeds, and even components from social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn. All you have to do is register the domain name you want and all the technical work is done for you - the site builds itself automatically.

Meebo: Web-based IM Is Bigger Than You Think

When people gather, conversations are bound to happen. And while people may be gathering and chatting in Web-based IM interfaces like GTalk, Facebook Chat, and MySpace Chat, that user base is relatively insignificant compared to the untold millions of others who live and breathe in online communities outside those walled gardens. Meebo, the leading "IM in the browser" play, realizes this. And with Community IM, they're hoping to capitalize on it, by incorporating XMPP/Jabber IM into any Web-based community. If early numbers are any indication, they're going to be wildly successful.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Report: Enterprise 2.0 Apps Will Dramatically Fall in Price

A new report by Forrester Research states that the market for collaboration and productivity web apps in the enterprise (a.k.a. enterprise 2.0) is set for a shake-up, with prices to fall in some cases by over half. Price drops will be especially sharp in blog, wikis, social networking and widgets. The only exception is mashups, which will increase in price over the next 5 years.

Forrester says the price drops will be due to "cutthroat competition, commoditization, bundling, and subsumption", with many startups and established big companies competing for the enterprise dollar.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

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

Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now!

Flickr

The new Flickr home page is dominated by a beautiful example of a news feed. The "recent activity" drop-down shows you all the comments, favorites and new friendships in your photo sharing network. You can remove certain types of updates from your news feed or you can switch over to a full page view that looks even better.

The recent activity section is joined on your home page by recent photos from friends and a rotating oversized photo from the Explore section of the site. The whole effect is really quite nice.

Yahoo Profiles

Yahoo launched a new feature today called Yahoo Profiles. It's a really simple way to have a profile page online, something that millions of people still don't have, and to watch a news feed of your contacts' activities! It does almost nothing else, in fact! There's no bulk contact import, invite or discovery - much less a secure standards based one. There's no microformat markup of your interests on your profile. It's pretty unimpressive, but it's a news feed and millions of people are liable to engage socially online using it.

Newsfeed, Newsfeed, Newsfeed

XML syndication is incredibly powerful technology, but everyone agreed that it would make a much bigger impact "under the covers" of something more user-friendly. In effect, that's what's happening with news feeds. When Facebook released its newsfeed 2 years ago this Fall there was a huge uprising against it. People said that it made it too easy for other people to see what you were doing! It was reminiscent of early bicycle-haters condemning the sexual freedom that the first two-wheelers brought to young women.

There's no putting the Newsfeed back in the bottle, though. Kids these days want their friends' status updates and they want them now. Every single major social network quickly began offering a Newsfeed after Facebook's made the value of the feature self-evident. MySpace has newsfeeds, LinkedIn has newsfeeds, everyone has newsfeeds. Yesterday we covered FriendFeed's new "real time" view, a newsfeed lover's newsfeed. Last month we wrote about the Associated Press selling software to newspapers that lets them view the wire as an online newsfeed and then publish out to newspaper websites structured very similar to newsfeeds themselves.

Newsfeeds are everywhere, they are an arguably efficient and pleasing (for some) way to relate to an unending supply of information. Some people find them overwhelming, others say they are a waste of mental energy and surely some will insist they are bad for the human brain's ability to remember anything from one day to the next.

None the less, for now we love them. If you'd like to join us in the big newsfeed in the sky, a good place to start is FriendFeed. You can take a tour of all the RWW staff's feeds here. Friend us up and we'll explore this new paradigm together.