Friday, May 25, 2007

Weekly Wrapup, 21-25 May 2007

The R/WW Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by:

Another busy week of Web Tech, including big news from Facebook and rumors of a Feedburner acquisition. last100This week also marked the launch of the first Read/WriteWeb Network blog, last100 - which will provide news, reviews and analysis on the digital lifestyle. last100 is edited by Steve O'Hear, a London-based Internet consultant and journalist. Highlights from the first week of last100 include posts on AppleTV Hacks and Pandora for Mobile and Living Room.

Here now 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 (see form in the sidebar on the website).

Top Web News

The big news of the week was the launch of the Facebook Platform, which enables 3rd party companies to integrate their services inside of Facebook user pages. In my analysis of the news, I wrote that Facebook's relatively open platform marks the next step in the young company's ambitious growth plans. It is certainly a challenge to the closed platform of MySpace, and the other big company portals (Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL) will also sit up and take notice. Could we eventually see the biggest IPO since Google, from Facebook? Alex Iskold thinks so and explains why in his analysis. Josh Catone has two excellent posts on the Facebook news: firstly (pre-launch) discussing how it compares to MySpace, then (on Friday) discussing how personalized start pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes fit into the big picture.

The other interesting news of the week was the persistent rumors of Google acquiring feed management king Feedburner. The purchase price is said to be around $100 million, in a mostly cash deal that locks the founders in for a couple of years. Josh noted that it would be a great deal for both Feedburner and Google - for Google it gives them access to over 720,000 feeds, many of which can be added into the Adsense network; while for Feedburner it gives them access to Google's muscle and resources. Most commenters seemed to agree with that, but some thought the $100M price tag is on the low side for Feedburner. As yet, no official confirmation of this deal - maybe next week?

Other news we reported on this week:

Analysis Posts

The Read/WriteWeb authors were still mulling over the Google Universal Search news from last week. Nitin Karandikar explored it more in a post entitled How Alt Search Engines Implemented Universal Search...Well Before Google Did.

David Lenehan took a look at an emerging trend in Europe, which is fast becoming popular all over the world amongst geeks and VCs: The OpenCoffee Club Movement. It started only in February and was the idea of Saul Klein, a venture partner at Index Ventures and a VP of Skype who is based in London. Basically it is a meet-up at a local coffee house, where people can discuss all things startup and entrepreneurs can pitch their ideas to VCs. Check out the comments on this post, lots of great feedback. For example Irishman Conor O'Neill commented: "The biggest obstacle we are finding in trying to bootstrap a sustainable start-up culture in Cork is simply that people do not know that each other exists. We see OCC as one way of overcoming that."

Note: in the comments there was also some negative feedback about OCC using Starbucks, a big brand corporation not known for its quality coffee or local flavor. I have to agree with that; and if we ran an OCC in NZ, we'd chose a nice kiwi coffee establishment :-) I can assure you the best coffees here are the ones brewed in NZ!

Sean Ammirati was at the Internet Identity Workshop this week and came back with two posts: Overview of the Identity Landscape and Vendor Relationship Management. Both have a lot of insights for people looking to build web products that utilize emerging digital identity trends.

Sramana Mitra was busy reviewing photo sharing sites this week. Two that featured on R/WW were Photobucket and Flickr. In both cases content and community were judged by Sramana to be strong - but with Flickr she sees commerce as something to improve, while for Photobucket it is personalization and search that needs more work.

Other Read/WriteWeb analysis posts to perhaps print out and read over weekend brunch...(at a place that serves local coffee):

Startup Action

Here are some of the startups we reviewed this week. Also please send your new startups or product pitches to tips@readwriteweb.com and we will check them out. On that note: due to information overload in the editor's inbox, all product pitches sent to my personal email address are getting forwarded on to the Tips address. So you can cut out the middleman by using the Tips address ;-) Unfortunately I no longer have time to reply to all the emails I get, but rest assured that the R/WW team is regularly reading emails sent to tips@readwriteweb.com.

Poll

Our poll this week asked: will Google Universal Search Kill Vertical Search Engines?. Here are the results:

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They're all dead meat 19% (41 votes)

Many are goneburgers, but the best will survive 28% (60 votes)

It will have some impact on vertical search engines, but let's not get carried away 36% (75 votes)

It will have no impact at all - vertical search engines are a different beast 17% (35 votes)

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A small majority (36%) think that there will be some impact, but nothing to get too excited about. However, a good 28% think many vertical search engines are in danger - but that the best will make it. Roughly an equal amount of people (19% and 17% respectively) voted for the extreme positions: that all verticals are dead meat, or that there will be no impact. It's safe to say those two extreme views cancelled each other out. The prevailing view is that there will be some impact and some casualties - but that vertical search engines will survive and the best will prosper.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

[via] Read/WriteWeb
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