Tag Archive for 'google'

Your top Web 2.0 apps?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 13/11/2006
in Blogging, Photo Sharing, PodLeaders, Podcast, RSS, Web, Web 2.0, WordPress and office 2.0
. 10 Comments

If we ignore the fact that the term Web 2.0 is controversial for all kinds of reasons and concentrate on the applications themselves, which Web 2.0 apps (using the broadest possible definition) do you use most?

I use:

  1. my blog and podcast software all the time (they are run out of WordPress)
  2. my Flickr account regularly to post photos
  3. Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets frequently for collaboration or sharing of documents
  4. Google’s Calendar to synch with my laptop and mobile phone calendars
  5. Technorati, PubSub and Google’s Blogsearch to subscribe to RSS searches
  6. Flock as my main browser of choice (primarily because of the Flickr and Del.icio.us integration) - I also use Firefox, Camino, Safari and IE7
  7. Feedburner to burn and track my feeds
  8. NetNewsWire, Google Reader and iTunes to consume my feed list
  9. TechMeme, Megite and TailRank for keeping up with tech news
  10. Del.icio.us very occasionally to store URLs for items I have found interesting

What cool Web 2.0 apps am I not using that I should be using? What are your favourite Web 2.0 apps?

Can Google Reader scale the Great Firewall of China?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 6/11/2006
in Blogging, RSS, Search Engines, Web 2.0 and WordPress
. 11 Comments

Jeremiah Owyang is on a trip to China at the moment. He put up a post on his blog the other day saying he couldn’t access Robert Scoble’s blog from inside China - it seems to be blocked by the Great Firewall of China for some reason. I don’t know if this applies to all WordPress.com accounts or just Robert’s.

In any case, it occurred to me this morning that if I Shared all of Robert’s posts from within my Google Reader account and sent Jeremiah the links to my Google Reader Shared items, he should be able to read Robert’s posts within China.

Of course if Google Reader had a way to allow you to select multiple posts to share (or even allowed you to share a full feed) then this would make it easier for me to keep Jeremiah up to date!

Until China starts blocking Google Reader!

Blogs fuel internet growth

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 2/11/2006
in Blogging, Business blogging and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

Netcraft have posted their November 2006 Web Server Survey and there are a couple of interesting findings.

The main one is that the number of websites has exceeded 100m for the first time ever.

In the November 2006 survey we received responses from 101,435,253 sites, up from 97.9 million sites last month.

Of those 100m sites 27.4m were added this year alone! In fact, according to Netcraft, the Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when it reached 50m sites.

Netcraft credits blogs with helping this growth:

Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft.

Reddit acquired by Condé Nast - Another bubble?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 1/11/2006
in Technology
. 1 Comment

Following on hotly from yesterday’s big news about Google’s purchase of JotSpot, comes news today that Reddit has been bought by Condé Nast (owners of Wired Digital, Epicurious.com and Style.com, among other properties).

Reddit had been licencing its technology and allowing people to white label it but as Richard McManus notes, this deal with Condé Nast is an outright takeover. Condé Nast, in a statement have said:

CondéNet, … plans to incorporate Reddit’s personalized news aggregation and other Web 2.0 technologies into the various online destinations maintained by CondéNet and its parent company, Condé Nast Publications.

CondéNet has already used Reddit technology to launch Lipstick.com, a beta site that aggregates links to celebrity gossip news stories.

“Our aim is to grow our internet position through acquisitions and innovative partnerships,” said Steve Newhouse, chairman of the Advance.net web division of Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast.

In case you are thinking that all these acquisitions means another bubble is happening, check out Joe Kraus’ post on the differences between launching a successful site years ago and today. The key point is:

Excite.com took $3,000,000 to get from idea to launch. JotSpot took $100,000.

If sites are being built for $100,000, there’s far less to lose than there was in 2,000.

Collaborative software gets hotter!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 1/11/2006
in Search Engines, Technology and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

A lot has already been written about Jotspot’s announcement that they were acquired by Google yesterday - congratulations to Joe Kraus and the team.

JotSpot is a wiki application with builtin functions for adding calendars, spreadsheets, blogs, photos, etc.

JotSpot wiki interface

This was a predictable enough move on Google’s part as they had no wiki software in their arsenal of Live web applications.

This acquisition by Google gives Google access to wiki software for its enterprise play. The list of Google’s applications in this space is becoming unassailable and their acquisitions strategy is extremely smart - they are buying proven applications with intact and enthusiastic customers already in place.

Interestingly, I see Jeff Nolan and Zoli Erdos are pointing out that JotSpot’s two main competitors, SocialText and Atlassian, are offering free migration for JotSpot customers to their respective platforms!

This acquisition only goes to further prove that collaborative software is here to stay.

I loved Dan Farber’s throwaway:

I doubt that JotSpot will be renamed Gspot

Sometimes it pays to listen

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 29/10/2006
in Search Engines, Web 2.0 and video
. 1 Comment

I wrote, shortly after Google bought YouTube, that this purchase was a potential windfall for YouTube copyright claimants however recent happenings are proving me wrong (imagine that!).
Prof Tim Wu (Professor of Law at Columbia) wrote recently in an article in Slate that YouTube (or GooTube as people are now taking to calling it):

is in much better legal shape than anyone seems to want to accept. The site enjoys a strong legal “safe harbor,” a law largely respected by the television and film industries for the choices it gives them.

Prof Wu went on to say:

if Jon Stewart notices an infringing copy of The Daily Show on YouTube, Comedy Central can write a letter to YouTube and demand it be taken down. Then, so long as YouTube acts “expeditiously” and so long as YouTube wasn’t already aware that the material was there, YouTube is in the clear.

This comment was very prescient because Boing Boing has posted news that YouTube has taken down all copies of the Daily Show!

ComedyCentral have their own online video site where people can view the Daily Show but as the blog An Unreasonable Man said of Comedy Central:

the YouTube video player works. Your video player? Not so much… Here’s why:

1. You have tiny little videos that can’t be resized. It’s like watching TV from the next room through the keyhole of a closed door.
2. You use javascript to launch a popup window. Therefore, I can’t send a link to my friends or put a link on my blog to direct people to the video highlight I want them to see.
3. Your popup window can’t be opened in a tab or resized. Give me control of my browser back.
4. Your popup window has an obnoxious background that I’m afraid is going to give me a seizure.
5. Next to your video, there’s an ad that’s bigger than the video. Firefox blocks it, but I can’t decide which is worse: the hole that remains in the background, or the background.
6. When I open a YouTube page, the video starts to play. Isn’t that cool? On your page, I sit and think about how much you suck while the video buffers. The video plays for about 3 seconds until it over-runs and starts buffering again. …and that’s with DSL. It must be completely useless at slower connection speeds.
7. With YouTube, I can embed the videos in my own website. When I visit a site I’m more likely to watch a video if its right there and I can just push play. You’re at least five years away from developing that technology.
8. YouTube’s search feature also works, conveniently allowing me to find what I’m looking for. At your site I end up looking through a list of videos.

If ComedyCentral are no longer going to allow YouTube to distribute the Daily Show, they should at least have a credible alternative in place. If they don’t, people will go elsewhere for their entertainment. In the era of the Long Tail, it isn’t as if we are stuck for choice.

Sometimes your users know better than you - sometimes it pays to listen.

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