ReadWriteWeb

This week, 37Signals started to preview the upcoming update to their Backpack service, which received its last major update in July. Though most of the new features seem very useful, they also seem to transform the app from a simple organizational tool into something else entirely. We can't help but wonder, considering the company wrote the book on keeping things simple in software development, has 37Signals lost focus with Backpack?

We've already revealed our picks for the "Best Web BigCo" and "Best Web LittleCo" of the past 12 months. But not everything was so rosy for some companies on the web this year. Below we've gathered our list of the top flubs in the web technology sector in 2007. In fact, one of the companies we named as our year's best is on the list. Feel free to add your picks in the comments.

Tomorrow, 2 March 2005, marks the 10-year anniversary of Yahoo. According to a recent AP article:

Yahoo is mostly a new media company and their entertainment hub strategy is essentially an extension of their portal strategy - which was so successful during the 90's.

Enter Search Web Services

Now, almost exactly on the 10-year anniversary, Yahoo is inviting web developers to build external applications that use Yahoo's search data via APIs and Web Services. Yes, external - outside the portal.

This is of course a move that brings them up-to-date with their main search competition, Google, which has had Web Services for a couple of years now. But it's significant also because it marks probably the final stage of Yahoo's transformation from a Web 1.0 to a Web 2.0 company. Their introduction of RSS feeds last year was one of the first indications that this was happening.

In Web 1.0, Yahoo built a 'place' on the Web that attracted millions of users. It was arguably the most popular place on the Web. In Web 2.0, content is increasingly being freed from its containers. Yahoo has recognized that trend by allowing its search data to be used outside its own web portal. With the new Yahoo web services, people can use Yahoo's search data on their own websites - or in RSS feeds, or who knows where else. Yahoo data can also now be remixed to a degree (in accordance with the restrictions on the APIs).

Yahoo Media

It'll be interesting to see how this ties in with their media strategy. Yahoo still wants to drive people to its "hub" to view and interact with their entertainment and information media. Perhaps their thinking is that the search web services will help brand Yahoo even more, because people will be building Yahoo-branded applications all over the Web (or so Yahoo hopes).

This theory is backed up by their description of the new web services on their blog:

The more external sites Yahoo can get their content and brand onto, the more recognized and used their brand becomes in media circles - and therefore the more eyeballs they can drive to their Internet entertainment hub.

That isn't to discount the angle being touted in the first lot of publicity - i.e. Yahoo is hoping developers will create new and wonderful applications using their data. That is important too, it's just that I think Yahoo is probably more interested in how the Web Services will help drive their 'media hub' strategy.

This is my early guess anyway - based on a couple of hours browsing tonight. What do you think is Yahoo's strategy with their Search Web Services? I'm sure it's more than what I've outlined above, so feel free to leave a comment.

Bob Wyman of PubSub has just written a killer post on the future of blogging (or one of them...). An excerpt:

I went looking for some info on Bloglines "functional blogging" and all I came up with was a hint from Mark Fletcher during a speech that Ross Mayfield blogged:

This is an interesting subject. I myself have been noodling away on a business idea for 'the future of blogging', but more on that in good time.

This week: AP's RSS feeds, Enterprise RSS developments (Newsgator, Nooked), professional bloggers (Kottke, Darren Rowse), Odeo (podcasting), Ajax. p.s. headers in honour of the Oscars.

Best Use of RSS Feeds by a News Collective

And the winner is: Associated Press! ...um, or Reuters. Because they both have RSS feeds. Hmm, seems the Oscars theme for this post has already broken down. Anyway, AP joined the RSS revolution this week and so now the two brandname news collectives have them. Susan Mernit broke the news and has the main details. Jeff Jarvis wonders how the RSS brand-building moves by AP and Reuters will affect their customers. Moonwatcher has an interesting take on that too: "Media brands are finding their content atomized, their brands diluted, and their content wholesalers going retail."

PaidContent.org has some quotes from an AP honcho, who says "it's really a strategy to drive traffic to member news sites as well as to AP news."

Ultimately, I think it's a strategy to raise the profile and impact of AP's brand. I'm following all this closely, because I'm intensely curious to see how Tom Curley's (President and CEO of AP) "content will be more important than its container" theories will be put into practice.

Best Enterprise RSS Development (of the past week)

Again the Oscars analogy breaks down, because there is more going on in the Enterprise space than the two companies I'm about to mention. But humour me... Firstly, Newsgator is an RSS Aggregator that I've not written enough about (compared to Bloglines especially). But they're doing some very interesting things in the Enterprise space. Greg Reinacker recently announced the NewsGator platform roadmap. He said: "Our general plan here is to expose nearly everything in NewsGator Online via API, and allow folks to build applications that leverage our platform in unique ways." Also Charlie Wood (aka Moonwatcher, one of my current fave blogs) has joined Newsgator as its VP, Enterprise Solutions. Charlie was hired due to his blog, something I'm still waiting (im)patiently to happen to me! :-)

Another company doing good things in the Enterprise is Nooked. They specifically target corporate comms people - their main bullet point is to "Use RSS to deliver real-time marketing information directly to journalist and clients". Nooked recently launched a directory of corporate RSS feeds, a manually-edited Yahoo-style directory. NB: Fergus Burns, the Nooked CEO, did email me with that news. But I've had my eye on Nooked for a while now, so I'm not mentioning them just because he emailed me. Although he did say he's a fan of my blog, so that always helps ;-)

Best Professional Blogger

This was a high-profile meme this week, thanks mainly to Jason Kottke announcing that he will be running kottke.org as a full-time job from now on. He's calling it a "micropatron" business model, because he's asking his many readers to chip in with micropayments. He's eschewing advertising entirely, which is a brave move but one which probably only he and a few others could pull off. Already he's gotten a lot of attention and loads of people have blogged that they've given him money. So it seems to be working.

Also a blogger from across the ditch from me, Darren Rowse from Australia, caused a lot of people to get green with envy when he revealed he's earning six figues (US money!) via his blogging activities. The small print? He has 17 blogs and posts around 25 posts per day 7 days per week. Also it's worth noting how he came up with the six figure figure: "the figure is calculated on a number of income sources including private advertising deals, affiliate programs, impression based ad programs, Adsense, BlogAds, text ads and blog consulting revenues etc."

So it includes "consulting". It also seems to be the result of a lot of daily sweat for Darren to make that kind of money - i.e. grind, work. It's not from blogging about The Dukes of Hazard, that's for sure.

Best Media Coverage Of A Podcasting Service

Hands down this award goes to Evan Williams' (of Blogger fame) Odeo, which got enviable coverage from The NY Times. It upset Dave Winer in particular, who thinks he's not being given enough credit for helping to invent podcasting. I think he's got a point, but I would be remiss if I didn't in turn point out Lucas Gonze's efforts in another 'credit where credit is due' campaign re podcasting.

btw, speaking of giving credit... it's great to see Dave Winer has resurrected the Two-Way Web blog. That sub-blog of Dave's was a key influence early in my blog career - ref my very first R/WW post.

Best New Web App Approach That Isn't Really New

Ajax is the trendy method of developing Web 2.0 apps right now. Ajax means "Asynchronous JavaScript + XML" and according to the write-up "it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web." I got a lot out of this article, however I was brought back down to earth with a thud when I emailed the article around to the programmers in my team at work. I was informed that those techniques (especially the xmlHttpRequest object) have been around for a while now and, although they're now supported by most browsers, they can be expensive for an organisation to deploy. Point humbly taken. I'll give the last word though to Jon Udell, who says: "The modern browser is an XML-aware client. Savvy Web developers have known about these features for a while, but now Google has legitimized them and pushed them squarely into the mainstream."

'Journey to the (Revolutionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy, and Possibly Self-Destructive) Center of Google'. That must go down as the silliest title for a tech article this year, nevertheless GQ's profile of Google was an interesting read. After that I happened to browse around the GQ website and saw an interview with Russell Crowe. He was named by GQ as the greatest actor of our generation. Johnny Depp and Nicholas Cage were 2 and 3 (personally I'd rate Cage number 2, based mainly on his performance in Vampire's Kiss - one of my favourite movies).

I read the long interview with Crowe and particularly enjoyed these quotes:

And a bit later...

Crowe goes on to talk about how he wanted to play Shakespeare in the movie Shakespeare in Love:

Fantastic interview...