ReadWriteWeb

A company called WorkLight, Inc. is hoping to bridge the gap between the ease-of-use of the social applications consumers use at home and the complexity of the enterprise applications that are used in business. To do so, WorkLight isn't just taking enterprise applications and adding web 2.0-like features, they are actually taking the social applications and tools that already exist and are adapting them for business use. Currently, the company works with fourteen of the most common social networks and social tools, including MySpace, Facebook, Netvibes, iGoogle, RSS, del.icio.us, and more to create enterprise-grade applications. The software, which was previously Linux-only, has now been made available for Windows servers, too.

Last May we asked the question, "are social bookmarking sites better at search than Google?" Though some readers questioned our specific methods, our conclusion was that "while social bookmarking and ranking sites don't make great search engines on their own, they offer a wealth of user-vetted data that could be used to augment search results in a positive way." Recently, Yahoo! began testing including del.icio.us data in search results. While it is unclear whether the del.icio.us data is affecting search rankings, the more important question is: would it even matter?

Three Firefox extensions were named winners of the Extend Firefox 2 awards this morning after being selected from a list of more than 100 submissions by a panel of tech celebrity judges . The Minimap Sidebar Extension (fast mapping), SamePlace (multiclient browser IM) and Shareaholic (multi tool bookmark submitter) were the award winners and 12 runners up were named as well.

Though basing a business on a browser extension might seem crazy, for the select few companies highlighted in Mozilla events like this it can lead to a big increase in user numbers, especially if support from Mozilla continues.