| Launch | searchmash, an experimental site started by
Google Uses Ajax and some other web2.0-ish features. |
| News | Google launches "Features, Not Products"
initiative Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications." |
| Launch | Google Code Search Google now lets you do searches -- including regular expression searches -- across public source code. |
| Preview | Google testing new site design James Yu has a screenshot of a new design Google has been testing lately. |
| Launch | Democracy, the free internet TV system The Participatory Culture Foundation (formerly Downhill Battle) has finally launched their Internet television platform. Grab existing videocast feeds or make your own, all with a gorgeous interface. |
| Launch | Google
Pages, new Geocities-style site-building software Google has released a new program that gives users 100MB of web space to make simple HTML pages in. |
| Launch | Google running AdWords in newspapers Google is buying the leftover ad space in the _Chicago Sun-Times_ and filling it with AdWords ads related to the rest of the content. I wonder how they're going to charge advertisers. The domains posted are the real domains, so it can't exactly be pay-per-click. |
| Launch | TextPayMe, makes it easy to send money through
SMS Want to send someone $4? Just text "PAY 4 [phone number here]" to sms@textpayme.com. |
| Launch | Google Music, search for bands and albums |
| Purchase | CNET buys Consumating, dating site for bloggers
andgeeks Started as a hobby by Internet rockstar Ben Brown. |
| Launch | Pandora, creates a custom webcast of music you'll
like Pandora uses an exhaustive database of musical features generated by the Music Genome Project to figure out what songs you'll like. Then it creates a custom webcast station that plays those songs, learning as you tell it which songs you like and don't. |
| Story | Xooglers, Google's former Marketing Director tells
his story Some great stories about Google's early days, with more to come. |
| Launch | Click-to-Call AdWords, Google will let you call
advertisers |
| Launch | pbwiki, start your own wiki in seconds "As easy as peanut butter." Started by David Weekly. |
| Launch | Protopage, create your own personal start
page Pick a background, drag and drop some windows, etc. |
| Update | Blind test reveals Google offers best
results The Search Engine Experiment gives you the results from Yahoo, MSN, and Google without saying which is which. Currently, 41% of those who have taken the test picked Google (33% Yahoo, 26% MSN). |
| Preview | Newsvine, a community news sharing site "why did four perfectly happy Disney/ESPN employees leave their jobs to build it? ... [It will be a]ttractive not just in looks but in function as well. At Newsvine, we feel strongly that an article's life only begins the second it is published. It is only when readers interact with it that it achieves its full impact." |
| Launch | Google Analytics, see the statistics on your
website A free version of Urchin, a company Google bought. ( |
| Announce | Google to unwire Mountain View, WiFi on street
lamps You could also buy equipment to extend it into your house. (proposal) |
| Preview | Dabble DB, easily build custom online web
apps "Dabble combines the best of group spreadsheets, custom databases, and intranet web applications into a new way to manage and share your information online." |
| Launch | Google adds Creative Commons support The Google advanced search page now lets you limit your search to CC-licensed results. |
| Launch | Google
Local Mobile, get Google Maps and more on your mobile phone Satellites, drag and drop, and more. |
| Preview | BBC Annotatable Audio Project, provides a wiki for
annotating the BBC's audio content This is pretty amazing stuff. |
| Launch | Simple JavaScript Database, uses TrimQuery and
AMASS to provide a full SQL database in JavaScript This takes us another step closer to the possibility of being able to run Ajax applications like Gmail while not connected to the Internet. |
| Preview | Google on the future of advertising In a long New York Times piece, top Googlers speculate about the future of advertising, including Google selling TV ads, using more personalized information, and links to store inventory information. |
| Funding | Digg, a democratic news site, gets $2.8M in VC
from Greylock, angels Investors include Omidyar Network, the outfit led by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners. |
| Update | Flickr adds support for photo printing, books,
DVDs, posters, stamps "At the same time, we're rolling out a pilot program allowing other businesses access to our commercial APIs ... the goal is to open it up completely and give you the biggest variety of choices when it comes to doing things with your photos." |
| Launch | Seattle 911, maps 911 calls in real time Following in the footsteps of Adrian Holovaty's Chicago Crime, Seattle 911 shows you where all the latest 911 calls originated from and whether they've been responded to yet. |
| Sale | Search engine jux2.com sells for $101K on
eBay Backstory: the developer of this web app was tired of keeping it running so he sold the site -- the domain, the trademark, the software -- on eBay with the starting bid as one cent. |
| News | TypePad blogging software is having trouble
keeping up with growth "We're currently pushing about 250mbps of traffic through our multiple network pipes, and that's growing by 10-20% each month. (If you're more familiar with bandwidth stated in terms of transfer allowances, that's a transfer rate of almost 3TB (terabytes!) per day.) ... the data center we are in ran out of space and power" |
| Launch | Yahoo! Trip Planner, share trip plans including
hotels, sightseeing, and notes |
| Launch | Google Video adds 450 interviews with top
television producers |
| Update | Google "Smart Pricing" charges less for clicks
from poorly-converting sites |
| Launch | Kaboodle, collect and review pages you find on the
Internet Sort of like Amazon.com Listmania but for web pages. Also see H2O Playlist. |
| Launch | Waxmail, send voice emails from Outlook From the makers of Skylook, which saves Skype calls as MP3s. Joins vemail, Slawesome, and Springdoo. |
| Launch | Jobster, location-based job meta search
engine Also plots results on a Google map. Recently received $20M from the Mayfield Fund, joining Ignition Partners and Trinity Ventures. Competitors include Simply Hired ($3M in angel funding) and Indeed ($5M from NYT and Union Square). |
| Launch | Frappr, place photos of you and your friends on a
Google Map (sample map) It uses your zip code to figure out where to place you on the map. |
| News | MSN joins Open Content Alliance, commits to
scanning 150,000 public domain books in 2006 The Open Content Alliance is an organization that includes Yahoo!, the Internet Archive, and a number of libraries and is committed to scanning books that are out of copyright and putting them on the Web completely free for any purpose. Some sample books are also now available. One of them details the project. |
| Preview | Motherload, new broadband network from Comedy
Central Lets broadband users access video clips from popular Comedy Central shows as well as special broadband-only content. Expected to be able to view it on mobile devices soon as well. MTV has a similar system called "Overdrive". |
| News | Google donates $350,000 to open source projects at
Oregon State (Google blog post) |
| Preview | Google Base, a structured database hosted by
Google (screenshots) An official statement from Google says the site was designed to "provide content owners an easy way to give us access to their content". |
| Update | Google briefly releases Google Web Accelerator
2.0 The product that drove webmasters crazy was back...for a moment, at least. |
| Coming | stickis, post a note to yourself and friends on
any webpage Back during Bubble I, a startup called Third Voice allowed you to post a sticky note on any webpage for everyone to see. Website authors cried foul and the company eventually went bust, but stickis apparently plans to revive the feature, although the notes (annotations) are reportedly only shared with friends. |
| Launch | Google Maps Mainia, a blog covering Google Maps
apps There sure are a lot -- everything from ZipCars to urinals. |
| Launch | Socialight, location-based communication on your
mobile phone Walking around and see something cool? With socialight, you can leave a 'sticky shadow' in that locations so that if your friends head back to the same place they get your message or photo. |
| Launch | Riya, face recognition photo search You upload your photos to Riya and it recognizes the faces in them and allows you to search based on the people. They hope to analyze the photos on the entire Web soon. |
| Coming | ma.gnolia, new twist on social bookmarking "What you mark in Ma.gnolia not only stays found but keeps coming back to you as your interests change. That's our pitch, plain and simple, and it's why we say that found is the new search." Web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman lends his endorsement. Beta launch in December. |
| Launch | Healthline, web-based medical search
engine Get easy to understand, doctor-reviewed information on medical conditions. |
| Launch | upto11.net, intelligent music
recommendations Uses Wikipedia and social networking. |
| Launch | Taskable, RSS and OPML browsing in your Windows
taskbar The OPML support allows for some cool features, like quick access to the different Amazon.com stores. |
| Launch | PreviewSeek, new topic-based search engine Search for [apple] and it will ask whether you meant the fruit or the computer. Also provides previews of the resulting pages right in the search results . |
| . | |
| Launch | Pump Audio, connecting indie musicians with
TV/movie licensees Pump Audio takes music from indie musicians and provides it to people who make television shows and movies so that they can have pre-licensensed, genuine music to put in their works. |
| Update | Y Combinator's Winter Founders Program Speakers
include founders of Blogger, Excite The deadline for the Winter Founders Program is just days away, but Y Combinator has announced some of the impressive speakers that will address the founders, including Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek), Evan Williams (Blogger, Odeo), Joe Kraus (Excite, JotSpot), Chris Sacca (head of new business development at Google), and Simon London (management editor for the Financial Times) . |
| Coming | Shopify, hosted ajax online store software Touted as the new Viaweb, Shopify looks to be a Ruby on Rails based online store builder. |
| Launch | Outfoxed, web browser with built-in trust
metric Outfoxed is a Mozilla derivative that shows you whether your friends like certain web pages in things like Google search results. |
| Update | Yahoo!, MSN link instant messaging
networks Combined network has 275 million users. |
| Launch | AMASS, Flash-based Ajax local storage
system A clever hack that uses the disk storage features built into Flash to let Ajax applications store data on your local hard drive, instead of keeping it all on the server. |
| Update | Google now helps search for plane tickets Search for something like [lax nyc] and Google will help you buy plane tickets for that trip. |
| Launch | reservemy.com, displays hotels on a Google
Maps See exactly where the available hotels are on a Google Map. |
| Preview | Sphere, new blog search Google and Yahoo have joined existing startups Technorati and IceRocket in launching blog search services. Now here comes another blog search startup, with an interface designed by Adaptive Path (see below), that touts better spam filtering. (screenshot) The company apparently has ties to Oddpost, the early ajax-based email client that Yahoo! purchased and plans to roll-out as Yahoo! Mail soon. |
| Launch | Flock, new Web 2.0 browser with built-in
del.icio.us and blogging Flock (formerly round two), the well-funded San Francisco startup that is trying to include "Web 2.0" stuff right in their Mozilla Firefox-based browser, has finally launched a developer preview (reportedly because people were sharing private versions on filesharing networks). In my testing, the software is still buggy, slow, and crash-prone, but it's full of buzzwords -- tagging, blogging, Web 2.0, Ajax, and Firefox. |
| Purchase | Verisign buys Moreover for $30M Hot on the heals of buying Weblogs.com, Verisign, the company that manages the .com infrastructure, has purchased Moreover, one of the first RSS companies. Moreover provides bloggers with access to a wide variety of news stories through RSS and other methods. |
| Update | Google adds tagging support Tagging has been all over the place recently and apparently Google couldn't resist. Now you can tag sites in your search history for later retrieval. |
| Launch | Google
RSS Reader Google joins the already crowded RSS aggregator space with their new ajax RSS reader, done in the style of Gmail. Blogger project manager Jason Shellen led the project. |
