Daniel Staemmler » internet

Top 100 Web 2.0 Apps

Daniel Staemmler — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 15:45:15 +0000

It has been a while since I posted an entry to my blog. I have been pretty busy in the last couple of month and hope to come back more frequently.

However, here is (another) Top 100 list referring Web 2.0 Apps on the Internet. The list has been compiled by CNET Networks using votes from the community of Webware.com over the months of May and June 2007.

Goolge – Search Goliath and Ad Network

Daniel Staemmler — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:31:48 +0000

Wow, have you paid attention to the recent earnings of Google? For the first quarter of 2007 “… Google reported profit of $396.2 million” (Source: washingtonpost.com) which is almost double from the earnings last year in the same time period. This booted out Yahoo’s profit which “… dropped by nearly a third from a year” (Source: CNET News.com). That is a lot of profit for Goliath under the search engines and most of the earnings are from online advertisement not only on the Google website but also on their partners sites.

Why am I writing about this? I stumbled upon a blog entry by Jeol Downs from Answerbag.com (Referred by: We are all end users…) with the title “Why Google doesn’t care about Search“. And even though I like a lot of the services that Google offers I think he makes a very good point in naming Google an ad network. Don’t get me wrong I use a lot of Google’s services and like them and I also understand very well money has to be made somehow. The recent acquisition of Adscape for $23 million by Google (Source: TechCrunch) also sends a clear sign into the direction of building a stronger and powerful ad network.

Update 5/25/2007: I found an article from Ionut Alex Chitu with the title “What has Google done is Search lately?” that is contradicting the above mentioned article from Jeol Downs and argues that Google does a lot to improve their search functions and results.

Unlimited online storage space, interested?

Daniel Staemmler — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:30:38 +0000

John Kremer, the vice president of Yahoo, announced at the end of last month that Yahoo Mail is lifting the limit of their inbox storage space. Wow, I remember quiet well that I did search for unlimited storage space for backup copies of presentations, manuscripts, photos and the occasional music file. Right now they are scattered all over the place.

However,Â Asher Moses wrote in The Age an announcement about this and refers to comScore Media Metrix stating that Gmail “… has 51 million users worldwide, [and] offers 2.8GB of space; Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail offers 2 GB and has 228 million users.” What I personally didn’t know so far is, that Yahoo is the leader with 250 million users of their mail service. Which makes sense, since they have been around the longest, for 10 years to be precise.

The question remains, how long it takes for Gmail and Window’s Live Mail to catch up or offer features that convince users to use their services over the one from Yahoo Mail?

Social Networking – What's next?

Daniel Staemmler — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 07:22:01 +0000

Social networking has taken over and everybody is talking about it. The big players are MySpace, Facebook and on the professional networking end LinkedIn and Xing (former OpenBC), to only mention a few. Are you part of one, two or even more of these social networking? I am! Signing up is easy and mostly done in a few steps but creating your profile takes most of the time a little longer than only a mouse click here and there. However, help is on the way: OpenID. “OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.” Further information is also available at Wikipedia. However, a recent article in the New York Times discusses the idea of a standardized OpenID which is pushed by several companies. But why? Well, the question is pretty simple, there will be more and more social networks out there. My guess is, that not only classes, universities, schools, and professional networks will be the center of interest. More so private social networks like extended circle of friends, communities, neighborhoods, and families. So who wants to enter all the personal information over and over again? I do not and therefor pledge for an OpenID that will help me to sign up for those social networks I would like to be part of and those I have been invited to.

Interested in creating your own social network that you are in control off? Here is one of my earlier entries that describes one option on how to do so.

As a side note, this somehow reminds me a little bit of the idea and discussion about global ID and how Google is or can be a part of it. John Lanchester wrote a pretty comprehensive and interesting article about it that I enjoyed reading.