Review of 2006 online

Widgets

2007 is being hailed as the year of the widget, and in December Bebo launched its widgets service to critical acclaim. You can even embed instant messaging. http://www.meebome.com/learnmore.html

http://mashable.com/2006/12/28/bebo-ad-widgets/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_widget

Social Networking Aggregators

You tell ProfileLinker your site credentials and it pulls your bio, friends and other information from those sites and centralizes it. You then use ProfileLinker to manage your activity on those networks: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/profilelinker-takes-meebo-approach-to-social-networking/

Websites of the year

Time Magazine announces it’s 50 coolest websites of 2006

http://www.time.com/time/2006/50coolest/index.html

Measuring success in web 2.0

Web 2.0 means quality not quantity and people are talking about ‘the death of the page view’

http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2006/12/27/size-doesnt-matter-the-distributed-media-economy/

Meanwhile ABC Electronic settles on Unique Users as the standard metric http://www.brandrepublic.com/bulletins/digital/article/608657/abc-electronic-makes-unique-users-standard-metric/

Social networking sites’ traffic grows according to the Verhulst equation apparently, http://www.mychurch.org/blog/view/?ID=3201 – and they’re not completely overnight successes.  The curve looks very similar to the first half of the Rogers Adoption Curve, with the late majority now joining the myspace craze. http://www.12manage.com/methods_rogers_innovation_adoption_curve.html

Something for everyone and then some

ProfileHeaven is the UK’s best social network?

http://mashable.com/2006/12/11/profileheaven-uks-best-social-network/

http://profileheaven.com/

TV is dead, long live TV

The future of TV is questionable as online video comes of age. If TV is dead, then there is a potential

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/youtube.html

And Chevy dabbles in ‘crowdsourcing’ (aka user generated content) for an advertising campaign, with mixed results “It’s designed to create niche communities based around shared interests — whether that’s funny videos or knitting or cars — and letting people publish and share their content with others in an organized kind of way.”