web

Webware 100 stats: Too many social nets

Thanks to Webware's readers, there are now nearly 1,000 Web 2.0 services lined up for the Webware 100. That's enough to spot a few trends.

For instance: we have too many community-based startups. A full 23% of our nominations are in the Community category. There's a big takeaway from this for people building Web 2.0 companies: if you're thinking of launching yet another social network, please think again.

Of the 10 awards categories, the most underrepresented is Mobile. While it is true that it's much harder to create a winning business based … Read more

What's YoName?

Is googling your best friend from preschool going nowhere? If you suspect that he might be lurking on a social-networking site, you can try to find him with YoName, a people-search engine that looks across MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, Friendster, Match, and Xanga.

There are other social-site crawlers, such as Upscoop beta, which shows who in your Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL address book uses MySpace, LinkedIn, or other sites. There's a lot of buzz already around the unreleased Spock people finder. Loopster and ProfileLinker beta sift through various networks and let you see when friends update their pages. … Read more

Google Web History is taking over my life

First it was the Google Toolbar, then it was an integrated search box in the corner of my browser. It's no secret Google's been slowly attempting to take control of our computers for years. The desktop search is a testament to that. What's really creepy is the new Web History tracking service Google quietly rolled out last week. This new service doesn't go after items on your computer, rather what you're looking at online.

Google Web History archives everything you've searched for (while signed in to your Google account), and gives you a bookmarklet to bookmark sites you like. The whole idea is to make the browsing experience something you can search through and access from any computer, anywhere. Search history has items listed by time of search, with the most recent ones on a front page.

Searches are broken down by Google category like Web, Images, Maps, and (the now misnamed) Froogle. Users can also see how many searches they've done by month, day, and hour. Drilling down deeper, you can also go in and click on the number of searches and see the top sites and results. It's a total analytic overload.

The real creepy part in all this is the integration you get if you have the Google Toolbar installed on your browser. This will track every single site you're visiting, and apply the same aforementioned analytics so you can keep track of which sites or services you're using the most. Sure, we've had browsing history for years, but it's always been localized. It's a little alarming to see it online, regardless of the fact it can't be shared with others.

The good news is that users can opt-out of Google's Web History program, along with the capability to delete any item that's been archived. The bad news is that if you have a Google account, all your search activity has been tracked since last week.

For more shots of the service, keep reading.… Read more

Yoono jumps into group-annotation fray

Yoono is soon to release a new annotation tool for their recommendation-and-bookmarking service. Called Buzz It, the new functionality will be part of Yoono's installable toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Buzz It closely rivals the usefulness and functionality of Clipmarks, and Grouptivity--giving users a way to archive and share content they find on the Web. The company was showing it off in the exhibition floor at this week's Web 2.0 Expo.

Clicking the new Buzz It button displays a dialogue box that lets you pull in various pieces of media, from whichever page you're viewing, into what Yoono calls a "memo." You can share each memo with others either by posting the memo to your blog or by sending it via e-mail. If you don't already have a blog, Yoono provides all its users with their own pages, complete with an RSS feed, to keep track of all bookmarked and noted items

Users also get a contextual menu option on any Web page to add a link or entire story to one of their memos. This eliminates the need to use bookmarkets or the Yoono toolbar itself.

This new feature reminds me a lot of Grouptivity, which I looked at yesterday. What Yoono has done very well, however, is to give people the option to bookmark several items at once and send those all in a single e-mail. I was pleased to find that instead of having to dig up e-mail addresses, Yoono had integrated Plaxo-like functionality to let you grab your contact lists from a number of e-mail providers. There's also a neat "save to my computer" option, which will export your selections into an HTML file you can open in any browser.

There are a ton of these personal annotation and recommendation tools cropping up, including del.icio.us', StumbleUpon,, and share2me, to name a few. While it's unfair to say there can only be one, Yoono's effort is very user friendly. To get notified of the public launch of the Buzz It-enabled Yoono, there's a sign-up on Yoono's blog.

More shots after the jump.

… Read more

The scary math behind Web 2.0

How many pages does a Web 2.0 company have to flip a month to get on track one day hold an initial public offering?

A billion or more, says Opus Capital partner Ken Elefant, which is why his firm doesn't invest in them.

"Most of them are features," he said in an interview. "Most of them can't be long-term sustainable businesses."

Here's how Elefant comes up with his math. A web 2.0 company needs to be pulling in around $5 million in revenue a month to become an independent, viable publishing … Read more

Top 5 from Web 2.0 Expo

The first Web 2.0 Expo is behind us, and it was a good show. In addition to dozens of interesting panels (including, if I do say so, mine), there were about 115 companies presenting on a crowded expo show floor, and six interesting company presentations during the "Launchpad" sessions that ran on Monday and Tuesday.

With Webware.com's Josh Lowensohn and News.com's Erica Ogg, we picked our Top 5 Web 2.0 services from the conference. They are:

Tellme, which has a new downloadable app for getting useful 411-like info on your mobile phone. ( … Read more

Grouptivity pulls social bookmarking card

Grouptivity launched an updated version of its content-sharing tool on Monday. Blog posters can now add a "discuss this" button on the bottom of any post, which will pull up the Grouptivity sharing dialogue to send off the post or article to others. This dialogue allows you to pick from various pieces of media (photos and videos) that you want to share, along with a full text copy of the content. There's also the option to send it off to multiple e-mail addresses, set up read confirmations, and author explanatory messages to your recipients.

If you've … Read more

MapLight.org shines light on intersection of donations and votes

It's not exactly news that interest group lobbying affects lawmaking, but MapLight.org is showing us how by doing the math down to dollar figures. The non-profit MapLight.org had one of the least ostentatious booths in the Web 2.0 Expo hall, but brought an incredibly informative, practical service regarding the influence of money on California politics.

It's a mashup of voting records pulled from the Official California Legislative Information Web site (up to the 2003-2004 session right now, with 2005-2006 on the way), and campaign contributions kept by the Institute on Money in State Politics.

The … Read more

Google launching presentation app [VIDEO UPDATE]

Google CEO Eric Schmidt went on stage yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo and announced that the slides running on the four giant projection screens were actually Docs and Spreadsheet's newest app: a presentation service.

In an interview with John Batelle, he was asked, "Is this a competitor to Microsoft Office [and PowerPoint]?"

Schmidt: "I don't work at Microsoft."

Batelle: "Come on!"

Schmidt: "Microsoft does have a collection of Web-based products. But for people who need presentation apps on the Web, they're going to use this. This is a testament to the strength of Web 2.0."

See Previous coverage of Google's presentation app.

Schmidt then went on to talk about the DoubleClick acquisition, previously reported about on News.com.

Update: We've got some hasty digital camera footage from the announcement which we've embedded after the break. To see it, click the 'read more' link below. See also the News.com story. … Read more