The number of people whose work is touched by the internet these days is hard to imagine. Many of us have been working full-time online for a while, but for the vast majority of people online today that’s not the case. Here at RWW we communicate with people with a wide range of experience working online every day. We’ve noticed that many people don’t use some tools that would make their lives online much more effective and efficient. Here’s our list of some tools we’d suggest are... Read Full Story

Yesterday, we brought you news of MySpace’s surprising Data Portability partnerships with Yahoo!, Twitter, and Ebay, which will allow MySpace users to port their public profiles, photos, videos and some friend data from one site to another. Facebook, not looking to be outdone, has announced plans to launch their new Facebook Connect platform, which has similar functionality to MySpace’s Data Availability. What Is It? Facebook says they’re “committed to enabling people to communicate and stay... Read Full Story

Everyone is talking about Twitter (to the consternation of many of our readers, I’m sure), but what are people talking about on Twitter? It is really just a flood of inane status updates and fragmented chat, or are people actually talking about things that matter to them via the service? We’ve talked about Twitter as a platform for serious discussion, but is anyone really using it that way? We teamed up with Summize to take a closer look about what people are talking about in the... Read Full Story

oEmbed is a newly released spec from Cal Henderson (of Flickr), Mike Malone and Leah Culver (of Pownce), and Richard Crowley (of OpenDNS) that allows web sites to quickly and easily embed media when a user posts a link directly to that resource. oEmbed is an open format which standardizes the process of embedding photos, videos, links, or other media and circumvents the media provider’s API (or the need for screen scraping if they don’t offer one). It works by turning a link to, say, a... Read Full Story

Roofarena is basically the Million Dollar Homepage concept built as a graphical layer on top of Google Maps. The idea is that any roof in Manhattan is for sale and users can “virtually” purchase a roof and add their own design. In a post about copycat ideas last year, we advised that if you “do feel the need to borrow an idea, you should definitely make changes and try to innovate and push the concept in new directions.” Roofarena definitely does that, but we also advised that you do... Read Full Story

You’ve probably heard people talking about the new "it" book: "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies." The book discusses the current trend of people using online social technologies like blogs, social networks, and podcasts, among other things, and how enterprise must learn to embrace these tools. Along with describing how the public’s use of these technologies impacts businesses, the book also provides tools from Forrester to teach companies how to embrace... Read Full Story

The perennial debate surrounding Twitter’s revenue model continues to live on. The micro-blogging service has succeeded in building a strong, loyal following, but failed to capitalize on it. Such a scenario, which lacks a revenue model, isn’t sustainable over the long-term, especially when investors begin to question the company’s intentions. If an acquisition isn’t shaping up, monetization will be necessary to keep Twitter afloat. Having said that, leveraging context may prove to be a great... Read Full Story

Yesterday Google announced a new product aimed specifically at Google Apps’ enterprise customers. The service, powered by Google acquisition Postini with technology from ScanSafe, is called Google Web Security for Enterprise and it offers real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. Essentially, it’s a big Google firewall in the cloud. What It Does Google Web Security for Enterprise provides three main areas of protection: 1) web virus and spyware... Read Full Story

Anyone who has followed my posts on ReadWriteWeb, knows that I am interested in how innovation is going global, particularly innovation from India, and that I think P2P is the next great disruptive technology - the only one that could derail the Google steamroller. So it is no wonder that MetaASO caught my eye — via Pluggd.in, a site that tracks Indian startups. MetaASO is a self-funded, bootstrapped startup that claims north of $1 million in revenue. In fact, being self-funded, that means... Read Full Story

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped noticed today that Google announced that it will be shuttering its Hello photo sharing and chat application next week. Hello was an instant messenger-like desktop photo sharing application that made it easy to send photos to friends via an encrypted connection. The Hello.com web page has been replaced by a shut down notice and the service will cease to work on May 15th. “We originally embarked on a mission to make photo sharing easier and more fun with... Read Full Story