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Weekly Wrapup, 17-21 September 2007
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.Web NewsYahoo! Drops $350m on Zimbra; an Open Source, Enterprise RIAThe big news this week was Yahoo! buying open-source enterprise office vendor Zimbra for $350 million in cash. The company's alternative to Microsoft's Exchange server includes: webmail, a desktop client, contact management, calendaring, word processing, spreadsheets, Salesforce integration and a reportedly strong mobile component. Look out Google and Microsoft! We reviewed Zimbra in detail last year. Zimbra was an early force in bringing AJAX to the enterprise and adoped an RIA model in March, including both online and offline modes.See also Richard MacManus' analysis of the news: Zimbra: Why Did Yahoo Buy Them?Confirmed: Google PresentationsThe other big web tech news of the week was Google announcing its much anticipated Powerpoint competitor....

Is It Time To Retire the 'Social Graph?'
Yesterday, when talking with Richard and Marshall about Google's plans to open up many of their services that deal with personal and social information, I made this remark: "Also, as an aside, I'd like to express my severe dislike for the term 'social graph.'"I first remember hearing about the term "social graph" in May while Mark Zuckerberg was on stage announcing the Facebook Platform. That almost certainly wasn't the first time the term was used, but it seems to be the time it entered our collective conscience and started being used with more regularity. At the time, I remember thinking to myself, "wait, what's a social graph?" It seems I wasn't alone in my confusion. The social graph is a reference to graph theory, which in general, if I understand correctly, models connections between things. There's really nothing wrong with this term, but it's math or computer science phraseology and doesn't do very well as a marketing term, in my opinion.As Dave Winer points out...