Home / readwriteweb.com rss archive / September-04-2007


Silverlight 1.0 Launched, With Linux Support
Microsoft today released Silverlight 1.0, its cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering interactive apps on the Web. It's often compared to Adobe's Flash plug-in and is certainly a direct competitor of Flash. Also today Microsoft announced they'll work with Novell to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, in a project called Moonlight - based on the open source Mono project of the same name. As CNET reported in June, work on the Moonlight plug-in was started in May, after Microsoft's Mix conference - where Silverlight was first announced. As is usual whenever Microsoft launches a new technology, it comes with high profile content provider support. They announced today some new Silverlight apps on US broadcasters Entertainment Tonight, HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment. Microsoft also launched the Silverlight Partner Initiative, to enable third party vendors to collaborate.In the announcement, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie emphasized the cross-platform...

Bloglines vs Google Reader Update: Can Bloglines Hold On?
At the end of last week, we posted on Bloglines vs Google Reader - Who's Really Winning?. The answer was: Bloglines, but Google Reader is catching up fast. We've just received a new chart from Hitwise which also shows Netvibes and Newsgator, so it shows the context of this "two-horse race" (as Bloglines GM Eric Engleman described it). Here is the new chart: Source: HitwiseBut can Bloglines hold onto its lead? On that theme there was an interesting comment on our previous post, by Erkko, who wrote: "Even though Blogline still leads, this situation will not last for much longer. Google Reader will overpower Bloglines with the integration to the Google service portfolio (ala. iGoogle already), and especially when Google accelerates their mobile plans. Bloglines just won't have the steam to win this fight."This is a fair point - Google appears to have a lot of integration options for its Reader. Bloglines is though owned by Ask.com, which has...

Across the Read/WriteWeb Network
Not quite across the universe, as John Lennon sung it, but here are some highlights from the Read/WriteWeb Network:MySpace: Hot or Not? - Alex Iskold explores the current state of MySpace. So is MySpace still hot? As a trend Alex says the answer is no. But as a site, yes - while a lot of people are using the site to keep in touch with friends, for many it appears to be a place to trawl for dates and sex.Podcast interview with Dan Cohen, CEO of Pageflakes - Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati sites down with Pageflakes' CEO and discusses his experiences working at first MyYahoo and then Pageflakes. I discovered a new term while listening to this: "social networking above the belt". When you refer to Alex's MySpace post, the meaning of that term becomes clear!11 video download stores compared - last100 editor Steve O'Hear takes a look at eleven paid-for video download stores. He notes that while there appears to be much competition, many of the resulting services...

$10,000 Up For Grabs For College Bloggers
If you're a US citizen, a blogger, and are currently a full-time student an accredited college or university: listen up. CollegeScholarships.org, a directory of college scholarship and financial aid opportunities, today announced a $10,000 scholarship for college bloggers.The Blogging Scholarship is the largest of the six scholarships offered by the site (they also offer a $2,000 award specifically for political blogging) and is open to any US citizen, student blogger, regardless of blog topic. If you don't have a blog, site encourages students to begin now and submit your name for consideration by the deadline next month.The site is accepting nominations (in the form a 300 word essay about why the blogger -- which doesn't have to be you -- deserves the award) until October 6th. In keeping with the Internet theme of the scholarship, the winner will be chosen by an online vote during the month of October from among 10 finalists (determined by the founders of the site).Last...

MyStrands.TV Launched - It's last.fm For Video
This morning MyStrands released a personalized online video service called MyStrands.TV. Immediately it reminded me of last.fm, because you can type in an artist or tag and it creates a custom "channel" for you. In fact, let's be honest - it's a complete rip of last.fm. But that's actually good, because last.fm is my favorite online music service and so it has many excellent features.MyStrands.TV is powered by MyStrands APIs and the music videos come from YouTube. Some music data is provided by Muze, Inc. I think there's a great market for this, because in our Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time, we noted that 7 of the top 10 are music videos. So music videos are something that people want to watch online and there is a need for an easy way to organize or personalize this. MyStrands.TV adds an easier, richer and simply more fun personalization layer on top of YouTube's data.Check out the MyStrands blog for full details of the launch. MyStrands is a music discovery...

MySpace: Hot or Not?
MySpace is responsible for putting social networking on the map. Despite the site's notoriously bad designand poor navigation, millions of people flocked to it because it provided a simple, yet powerfulway to self-express and to connect with others online. It has now been more than 2 years since Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. spent over half a billion dollars to acquire the social networking darling and the buzz is quieting down.2007 has been the year of Facebook -- another social network that is now experiencing big growth and captured the attention of the media. Still other networks like Bebo, Hi5, and Google's Orkut are also on the rise. So how is MySpace holding up?It seems like MySpace is being digested.Now that we have been spoiled by the elegance and recent innovation surrounding Facebook's Platform, MySpace simply no longerseems like such a big deal. Yes, it still has a lot of eyeballs due to its mammoth user base, but is it growing? Are peoplesticking with it? And is News...

Jott Launches Jott Links: Web 2.0 By Phone
Seattle-based Jott, a mobile phone service that lets users record and send emails, text messages, and to-do lists via speech-to-text over their mobile phones, today launched a new suite of tools based around popular web 2.0 sites. The new "Jott Links" service lets users interact with websites and online services by voice over the phone.At launch, Jott Links supports posting to Twitter, Jaiku, Yahoo! Groups, blogging on LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, posting calendar items on 30Boxes, and getting housing "Zestimates" by voice from Zillow."The Jott Links feature demonstrates that there are many more applications of our speech-to-text service," said Jott CEO John Pollard in a press release, stressing that the company has been adding new features based on user feedback. "We continue to be committed to listening to our customers and incorporating their feedback into our service. Productivity, easier communication, and access to information on-line are three themes that...

Magento Open Source eCommerce Platform - Preview Version Released
Varien, a Los Angeles web development firm, has just launched a preview version of its open source eCommerce platform called Magento. Also released was a community site and a demo store. Check out the screencasts, the first of which explains how to add a new product to your e-commerce catalog using Magento.This is Version 0.6 of Magneto and so it's an early beta release. As such, the company doesn't recommend it for use in production environments. It does however come with professional and community support. Along with the usual e-commerce features (product input, shopping cart, single-page checkout, etc), some other features of note are integration with 3rd party apps and product tagging.Magento looks to be an easy to use and easily customizable open source e-commerce platform. There are sure to be many web developers and startups keen to try it out. If you've already given it a test drive, please leave a comment with your thoughts. For the others, here's some screenshots:...