Rick seems like my posts here, why I can’t imagine, so he’d asked me to contribute a few times a week. The schedule is roughly going to be Mondays a look ahead, Wednesday, what’s hot, and Fridays a look back at the week.
Yes, I know it’s Saturday, but I got hit with a bit of flu last night …
What a week! On Friday Google and FeedBurner confirmed the purchase of FB, (see also ZDNet, TechCrunch) which makes some folks wary, and maybe others weepy, but for me–W00t! I’m looking forward to a closer integration of Google Analytics and Adwords. As a user of FeedBurner’s FAN network, I’m hoping we get both better ads and better payouts. We’ll have to see won’t we?
Also this week eBay confirmed their purchase of StumbleUpon and CBS bought Last.FM. Taken together some have reflected that this is a bubble in the making. I think, not so much. FeedBurner is a staple of Web 2.0. They have a proven business model and service many bloggers adore (I do for sure!). StumbleUpon seems to match eBay’s strategy (with the purchase of Skype and PayPal) of getting cool tools people like to use and might help sellers and buyers. Last.FM? Well it’s new media and as great CBS’ shows are, they need to make sure they stay ahead of the curve. None of these are way out there squarewheel.com kind of sites. And they weren’t just formed in January and purchased in June without a real product. They is a good space I think.
Google Gears. I wrote back in February that I wanted an offline option for GR, and while I was waiting Google was developing Gears for pulling tools like Reader down to your local machine. Oddly enough, just before Gears was announced, I switched back to FeedDemon. It seems to me with it’s offline option (pictures and such are downloaded to a cache when you go offline) and it’s new features, it gives Reader a run for its money. That and I haven’t been able to get Gears to install on my machine. Scoble isn’t so hot on Gears, which is interesting since he is a heavy user of Google Reader. But when he was a major Newsgator user he was also traveling a lot and needed an offline option. I don’t think Robert is traveling as much now …Scoble’s main point is that Dave Winer had something similar years ago. Well Dave always has been ahead of his time.
Late in the week Jason Calacanis launched the human-edited search engine Mahalo. I have to wonder how it’s going to be different than Yahoo’s directory was years ago. In my first tests, I didn’t come up with much (I was doing an ego search), but the layout is interesting. I hope they offer RSS feeds of search results soon. That will be interesting. Mahalo will be a site to watch for sure.
What else has been hot this week in your book? I haven’t really been taking notes, so next week this will be more complete. Now…let’s see what the weekend churns up to give us a clue of the week ahead.
