Web 2.0 This Week
September 18-24

We had a terrific turnout for our TechCrunch Meetup on Thursday and look forward to hosting future events regularly (at least monthly). It is wonderful to have so many smart, obsessive people in one house for an evening – the demos were absolutely fantastic and lots of cross-pollination occured throughout the evening.

Thank you again to everyone who attended and posted pictures.

Too much to fit in the summary this week. Stuff that nearly got in:

• Six Apart talks about Comet, their future blogging product (via Robert Scoble)
• People are really liking NetVibes (and so do we!)
• Less-than-Stellar Google Blogsearch Reviews are coming in.
• Richard MacManus on Mashups

And last week marked a new Google product of course, the first in…well a week.

1. Recent TechCrunch Profiles

FilmLoop, Mefeedia, Placeopedia, ObjectGraph, Google Wifi, Feedburner (stats), Truveo, TailRank, Searchfox (update), VideoEgg, Remote Control Mail, Slawesome, Findory (update), Attensa (update).

2. FeedBurner Stats Mirror General Blog Growth

FeedBurner released new operating statistics on their blog on September 20, and lots of people noticed the exponential growth. They are now managing 100,000 feeds and over 4 million people subscribe to those feeds.

Our comments are here. We congratulate Feedburner on their growth and note that the trend is likely to reflect similar exponential growth in RSS usage across the web. So, congrats to all of us!

3. Web 2.0 Meme Map

Tim O’Reilly posts his Web 2.0 Meme Map on Flickr.

Result of a “What is Web 2.0?” brainstorming session at FOO Camp 2005. Meme maps adapted from business model maps developed by Beam Inc.

As we all struggle with defining Web 2.0, visual cues always help. I’m not as excited about this as others, though. Simple is better. We’re not at simple yet.

See Richard MacManus, Dan Grossman and others on the Meme Map.

4. Ajax not Perfect?

Venture Capitalist Dan Grossman, who’s young blog is now on my must-read list, writes a comprehensive and intelligible post describing in detail some of the shortcomings of Ajax.

5. Microsoft Reorganization

Microsoft announced a massive reorganization last Tuesday. See our detailed analysis here discussing why this is important for Web 2.0 (written by TechCrunch editor Keith Teare).

6. Qumana Blogger Survey

Qumana finishes a survey of bloggers and publishes the results in two parts:

• Part 1 – http://blog.qumana.com/blog/_archives/2005/9/22/1250138.html
• Part 2 – http://blog.qumana.com/blog/_archives/2005/9/24/1255292.html

Some of the data is surprising – 34% of respondents read 30 or less feeds, and the average blogging time per week hovers around 3-5 hours. Both of these stats are far less than I would expect. Lots of additional stuff there worth noting.

7. We Had to Find a Way to Fit This In

Yes, it’s Web 2.0 and I’m not arguing with you about it. This site may save more relationships than all of the online dating sites combined manage to start.