ReadWriteWeb

Once upon a time, whenever anyone asked, "But are there any big applications built on Rails?" The answer was usually, 43Things, anything from 37Signals, or Odeo. But over the past year, there's no doubt that if there is a poster child for Rails, it is now Twitter. With such notorious bouts of downtime, a worse poster child Rails could not possibly hope for. But is Twitter even the largest application out there running on Rails? Does it even matter?

Slideshare is growing and may even have become the leading pure play online presentations app [Update: Zoli Erdos points out in the comments that Slideshare doesn't allow you to create online presentations, only share them - which is a key point that I forgot to mention initially]. Two years ago I lamented the shortage of 'online powerpoint' services and noted that it was a product category "up for grabs" in the Web Office market. But now it is flourishing - Web Office leaders Google and Zoho both have good online slideshow offerings and there is no shortage of other startups doing it. But Slideshare is the service that is grabbing attention, perhaps due to its focus on sharing and community.

Scribd, the online document sharing site, announced today the creation of a new document format built for the web, dubbed iPaper. This web-based viewer lets you view documents in a browser using a Flash-based widget, with no need for software downloads. Also launched today is the Scribd platform, a set of tools that lets anyone use iPaper on their own internal web site.