Web 2.0

By Sebastian Rupley On the heels of delivery of Mac and Linux beta versions of the open-source Chrome browser, Google is out with its Chrome Extensions Gallery. For now, the gallery houses only extensions that work with the Windows version of the browser, but support in the Mac and Linux versions will happen. U...

By Liz Gannes Please see the disclosure regarding Facebook on my bio page. As Facebook updates its privacy settings today, the site won't be any more private. Unless users have ever changed their settings or do so now, most everything for those 18 and up is now set to be visible by everyone on the Internet.

By Colin Gibbs Mozilla’s success on the desktop is well documented. Firefox is closing in on a 25 percent market share in the computer browser space, according to the web measurement firm Net Applications, and continues to chisel away at the dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. But as the browse...

By Liz Gannes In the video above (also viewable here), Gil tells GigaOM his theory of the four core types of location services: broadcast, context, geo-tagging and search. He said GeoAPI thinks the first two are the most interesting. As for the location of the video? It’s from the beautiful (but on Monda...

By Liz Gannes Cascaad starts out by logging in a new user via Twitter and picking up the list of who he follows there to judge their relevance and authority and build a “personalized sphere of influence.” Lumer himself follows only four people on Twitter, so I can’t imagine he’s terrifically overwhelme...

By Stacey Higginbotham Startup Gear6 today launched the availability of its memcached appliance on Amazon’s Web Services platform, bringing a widely used distributed memory caching system for web companies to the cloud. Gear6 will soon offer its beefed-up version of memcached to other cloud environments a...

By Liz Gannes Real-time: Like just about every real-time search engine, Google (for now) depends on Twitter updates as its main source of data. Impacted: OneRiot, Topsy, Wowd, Collecta. Perhaps the most significantly affected may be Twitter itself, which should probably establish itself as the bes...

By Om Malik She thinks a lot of different trends are coming together for Hunch as well, such as how people have gotten comfortable with the idea of sharing their personal information online, thanks to Facebook. (Remember the “25 Things About Me” craze on Facebook?). There is more trust in the collecti...

By Om Malik More on Social Networks Google CEO Gets a Twitter Handle on @ericschmidt Tech Insider Google, Twitter Woo Small Businesses Tech Insider $100M for Friendster After All These Years? Tech Insider Google & Twitter Friend Connect, Facebook Yawns Tech Insider Twitter: 2009 was pr...

By Liz Gannes Google’s most significant announcement today is that the search engine will bring real-time results, including public updates from Twitter, Facebook Pages, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and identi.ca directly onto its Google.com results pages. (The product, set to roll out over the nex...

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By Om Malik Yesterday, the blogosphere was abuzz that Google CEO Eric Schmidt had started tweeting. He posted a tweet promoting his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and an appearance on CNN’s GPS using his Twitter handle @EricSchmidt0. Apparently, the guys from Twitter noticed and gave him his [...]

By Colin Gibbs Visiting Yahoo’s Ad Interest Manager can be disconcerting at first: In addition to informing users just how much interest they have in specific topics on Yahoo pages, it discloses information such as a consumer’s age range, gender and location, as well the person’s OS, browser and IP ad...

By Liz Gannes Twitter enlisted Citysearch as the first user of its Sign-Up API, which helps new users create Twitter accounts from other people’s web sites. Citysearch gets a sprinkle of social media goodness from the arrangement, fostering real-time interaction between consumers and companies,...

By Allan Leinwand While some could argue that a free and open Internet means less regulation and oversight, my experience leads me to believe that an Internet that encourages innovation and startups is one that supports net neutrality. Unless it's enforced, capitalism on the Internet is in serious jeopa...

By Colin Gibbs The nation's largest wireless carrier has blocked a major offering from one of the nation's largest text-alert services. Verizon Wireless Friday night informed customers via SMS that they would no longer be allowed to use some ad-supported services from 4INFO.

By Kevin Kelleher Schmidt’s op-ed also ignores the reality that search engines are by design very helpful at finding ways past news paywalls. Most everyone knows that Journal stories have long been available for free by typing the headline in Google (although Google appears willing to close that loophol...

By James Kendrick More on Mobile Apps IDC 2010 Forecast: Apple’s iPad Arrives & Frenetic Tech M&A Tech Insider SugarSync Rolls Out Android App, Cloud API Tech Insider Why Google Is Killing Gears & Pushing HTML5 Tech Insider Video Calling Comes to the iPhone Tech Insider When I ask most An...

By Liz Gannes Google said today it's acquired AppJet, a web collaboration startup, for an undisclosed amount that we hear is less than $20 million. AppJet's EtherPad product will be shutting down in March and the team will join the Google Wave group.

By Om Malik Bing, the upstart search engine nee portal nee discovery service that had been riding the crest of a goodwill wave, saw that wave come crashing down last night — both literally and figuratively. The site was down from 6:24 p.m. to 7:10 p.m. PT, according to some reports. And with that crash came th...

By Sebastian Rupley Boxee next Monday will launch a new consumer electronics device on which the open source media center platform will run: the Boxee Box. But it faces numerous challenges, including keeping its platform open and wooing content partners. And it must handle said content partners with care.

By Liz Gannes Google has launched a product called Google Public DNS that can be installed as an alternative to the DNS systems offered by network providers, the purpose of which it says is to make the web run faster, and early reports confirm a noticeable speed increase.

By Om Malik In the battle to become the ultimate identity broker on the web, Facebook with its Facebook Connect feature has a clear — and significant — lead. Google, on the other hand, is an also-ran here and its partnership with Twitter, announced last night, doesn’t really change anything, especia...

By Stacey Higginbotham More on Social Networks Google & Twitter Friend Connect, Facebook Yawns Tech Insider The Scorecard: Winners & Losers of Yahoo, Facebook Connect Deal Tech Insider As Facebook Hits 350M Mark, Growth Shows Signs of Slowing Tech Insider Jack Dorsey on Square, How It Works &...

By Liz Gannes Where the Bing model doesn’t really work is for information Microsoft is porting in from more robust and social environments like Facebook and Twitter. Demos of planned products that harness data from the two sites seemed pretty silly; for instance, you can see your connections on Faceb...

By Paul Sweeting The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, day one of its two-day workshop, How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?, gave a highly visible platform to News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and about a dozen other “old media” bigwigs from which to bash what Murdoch called “the wholesale...

By Om Malik In one swoop, Facebook has become the king of identity on the web. The company today signed an agreement that would integrate Facebook Connect across Yahoo!. In early 2010, people using both Yahoo! and Facebook will be able to share updates across both networks.

By Liz Gannes Facebook has crossed the 350 million active user mark, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced tonight. But while the site’s latest growth spurt is impressive, it took 77 days, as compared to earlier this year when Facebook had added 50 million users in as short a time as [...]

By Om Malik What’s Next? In February 2009, Jim McKelvey, who’d left the technology business and became a glass blower, lost an order because he couldn’t accept a credit card from a customer who wanted to buy his creation. He called his friend and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The two talked [...]

By Om Malik So there you have it –- why Google Gears must die in order for Google (and HTML5) to live on. Google is betting the farm on HTML5 technologies, even if it means saying goodbye to two-year-old Google Gears, its technology that gave offline access to web applications. The question is why?

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By Om Malik What this means is that if someone is placing a video call from a desktop or a laptop using Skype, for instance, then via the new version of fring that is currently available to users with iPhone/iPod touch OS 3.0, those users can watch it on their home screens. Folks using the iPhone can’t make...

By Sebastian Rupley More on The Cloud The State of Cloud: Startup Heroku Now Hosting 40,000+ Apps Tech Insider 4 Big Gambles Google Is Taking With Chrome OS Tech Insider How Much Money Did Joyent Really Raise? Tech Insider Compelling Cases for Clouds Tech Insider Android is free, and Google does not have...

By Paul Bonanos Blip.fm’s edge on other Twitter/music mashups is about to grow, as the service is set to introduce a set of features based on familiar Twitter attributes -- hashtags and trending topics -- that can be used as filters to create customizable radio stations.

By Sebastian Rupley Don’t forget about the ongoing jobs available at prominent open source companies, as well as those that make extensive use of open source. Red Hat always has many jobs available, but you can also find many open source-focused positions at big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo.

By Sebastian Rupley Return of the thin client. Take a look at this CNet news story, which reports that  “Oracle’s Larry Ellison today resurrected the company that designs a scaled-down desktop system — known generically as the network computer — and announced plans to ship new models in the first quarter of n...

By Liz Gannes Achieving the seemingly impossible task of building up more hype about Twitter’s business model, Costolo promised Twitter’s advertising will be “fascinating,” “non-traditional” and “really cool.” Some partners already pay Twitter to use certain parts of its APIs, he added, though...

By Liz Gannes Updated: Infoaxe is revealing to the world today its alter ego: a search engine. Unlike other real-time search engines such as OneRiot, Infoaxe doesn’t depend on Twitter streams and the like (Update: OneRiot emailed to note that it also uses a panel in addition to social sharing streams)....

By Liz Gannes While Boulder, Colo.-based SimpleGeo may have moved quickly in its short life, big social sites aren’t necessarily waiting for little startups to come fill their location-based needs. Today Twitter launched a geotagging API, at first only available as an opt-in feature for outside app...

By Stacey Higginbotham Finally, Microsoft is trying to keep its own offerings separate. Instead of bundling Microsoft products with Azure, Srivastava outlined a software-as-a-services strategy that will offer customers Microsoft Exchange on Azure or SharePoint on Azure as a service. This may explain why s...

By Liz Gannes ICQ was long ago eclipsed by other instant-messaging services (AOL’s AIM among them) and the last person to prefer MapQuest over the competition was probably Andy Samberg in “Lazy Sunday,” but those services are hardly tiny. MapQuest alone accounted for more than 40 percent of AOL’s U.S. s...

By Liz Gannes Errett (a fly-fishing enthusiast, as pictured) told us that Maveron differentiates itself because it will only fund consumer-focused businesses, and it spans the range of seed to late-stage investments. With portfolio companies such as kids’ browser KidZui, language education sit...

By Sebastian Rupley Even though netbooks have already been exploring new low-priced territory for portable computers, Chrome OS-based netbooks could also take prices much lower. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in July that “we do not plan to charge for it, in an open source form,” but that “there may be other wa...

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By Sebastian Rupley “The rough argument is we do things that are strategic because they get people to ultimately use the Internet in a clever and new way. We know that if they use the Internet more, they search more, watch more on YouTube, and we then know that our advertising [will reach them]. We do not require ea...

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By Liz Gannes Employee shares of Facebook are selling for $21 on SecondMarket, valuing the social network’s common stock at $9.5 billion, Bloomberg is reporting today. That’s up 42 percent in the past four months, which SecondMarket takes to mean that an IPO is nigh, but could also just [...]

By Edit Staff What does a user cost? (OStatic) It’s not about the gadget — it’s what you do with it (jkOnTheRun) Cut the drama: private APIs, the App Store & you (TheAppleBlog) Flip cameras to get Wi-Fi (NewTeeVee) Seesmic for Windows: an AIR-less Twitter client (WebWorkerDaily) John Doerr: Had w...

By Stacey Higginbotham Cisco expects mobile data traffic to increase 63-fold over the next five years, driven in part by video. But while it’s clear that laptops and touch-based smartphones make video consumption easier, the rise may not be as steep as Cisco predicts. The report found that while the average vide...

By Derrick Harris Java scalability specialist Terracotta has acquired the intellectual property associated with Quartz, a popular open-source job scheduler, part of Terracotta’s mission to integrate common open-source Java application components into its middleware solution. Terracotta has al...

By Sebastian Rupley MindTouch, an open-source provider of enterprise collaboration software, announced today that its platform is now available in the cloud. You can find a video on how the platform, dubbed MindTouch Cloud, creates “a federated collaboration network” here.  MindTouch competes with Mic...

By Colin Gibbs There’s no question that Apple currently dominates the smartphone space among high-end, data-hungry users, and the Cupertino gang is showing no sign of slowing down. But I think there’s ample room for growth in the superphone era, and I think Verizon will help Google close that gap in a hu...

By Colin Gibbs However, as long as we take the results with a grain of salt, there are some interesting data points hidden in this month’s report.  Google proved once again that it is the destination of choice for users of the popular mobile browser. Google — or a localized version thereof — ranked in the top...

By Sebastian Rupley A Small Fox — Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile version of the open-source browser Firefox , is now out in an advanced beta that works on several platforms, and is native in Nokia’s new new N900 device. Fennec is loaded with numerous imaginative user interface implementations, and is slated to wor...

By Om Malik This should come as good news for Nokia fans –- whom I affectionately refer to as Nokheads -– who are eagerly awaiting this multitasking phone-puter. Skype launched a version of its client for the Maemo platform in 2007. The Nokia N800 was the only device that supported Skype at the time.

By Mike Speiser According to a recent Morgan Stanley research report, Google generated 11.3 billion paid leads in the first quarter of 2009; according to a recent blog post from Yahoo, that company generates 180 billion page views per month. Let’s assume that all of these pages have one display ad (exclud...

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By Om Malik Facebook Connect, which was announced in May 2008 and is being rolled out this week, allows you to use your Facebook login to access Facebook’s partner web sites, then broadcast what you are doing on those sites to everyone on Facebook. It’s like Facebook Beacon — minus the marketing sleaz...

By Om Malik I didn’t necessarily want to do a review of Dash, but it’s allowed me to point out something that is being forgotten in the mad scramble that is Web 2.0: The Internet is not just about the browser, but rather it is about data and how one can use it to build clever products. I think Dash, much like Am...

By Paul Kapustka But hopeful headlines can’t hide the fact that even in a new boom, selling telecom infrastructure gear and services is a tough business, and one that is still trying to shake off the sins of the past. Witness today’s profile of Level3 in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), whi...