Written on 10th February 2009
6 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
“…We are developing tools to make “any app, any site, any friends” a reality.”
The Social Web Blog is focused on readers who “interested or involved” in making the web more social. It is Google’s 80th official blog and with it, they aim to capture the interest of individuals, founders, website owners and anyone who is interested in developing a community online.
They aim to keep readers better informed about Google’s social initiatives such as Google Friend Connect as well as keep their eyes open to readers ideas of how to make the web a more social place.
Visit the blog here to have a nosy round and join Google Friend Connect for the blog or simply subscribe to their RSS feed here.
The UK mobile social media platform Next2Friends launched the world’s first ‘Live’ mobile video broadcasting application for the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl today.
The Blackberries aren’t the only one devices supported. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Motorola, Samsung are also fully supported by the Next2Friends social mobile network.
This move tappes a segment of industry which nobody has entered so far. To start streaming from your Pearl or Curve, all you need to do is head over to Next2Friends, complete the 60 second free signup, and install the application. You can see a demo in the video below:
Next2Friends Live enables people to share their lives from anywhere, from broadcasting the little things that make up the day, to capturing a must-see-moment, to bringing happenings across the world closer to home.
Some of the new features that have recently been incorporated are one click streaming, the ability to zoom, pause or re-start live streams and automatic quality selection that guarantees the best streaming experience independent of location, carrier or connection speeds.
Right after this launch Next2Friends also announced the Live embeddable Flash widget which allows you to display live videos on your website or anywhere you can use HTML code. Check out an example on Dotlizard.com.
Whatever Company is about to launch an Enterprise 2.0 search tool called knowledgeplaza.net. Right now they are showing a teaser site with some interesting content until they launch. What is different about the search engine is that it will index all employee information within a company and use that to deliver everybody within that company useful search results. The goal is to captivate the companies hidden information and knowledge and making it accessible.
There have been many more or less successful attempts to do similar things in the past including solutions from Google and Microsoft that promise similar results. It wasn’t exactly clear to me (by just reading the information on the teaser site) how this will be different from current offerings but this is what they explained to me via email:
“Imagine a large bank customer using Knowledge Plaza; (internal) experts bookmark websites of relevance, tag them according to sector, etc. (so far, it bears some resemblance to del.icio.us or Cogenz.com in the enterprise space) Knowledge Plaza allows to instantaneously build a custom *search engine* on those very sites, a perfect exemple of “less is more”: information is more relevant than a similar Google search, because your search is run through only a few hundred of pages, out of a few dozen sites hand-picked by your (expert) colleagues, not through billions of pages, with a global PageRank.
Knowledge Plaza really puts the ’social’ into “enterprise search”, and it’s something that may allow it to jump past larger players in the enterprise search field.”
The company was founded by Olivier Verbeke and has raised close to a million euros in funding so far. The enterprisesocialsearch.com site is meant as a ‘teasing’ campaign only with the actual service launching soon on knowledgeplaza.net.
The slideshow explaining this new service is currently very popular on SlideShare (‘Slideshow of the Day’) which is understandable because it is fun to watch: (more…)
When we started this blog we quickly decided that we wanted to do more than just blog posts. One thing we came up with was the concept of VideoFridays. Every Friday we are going to post a video interview with someone where we talk, informally, about the next web. This week I invited Deborah Schultz who also spoke at The Next Web Conference 2007.
In theory this sounds great and if you have ever watched a keynote with Steve Jobs demonstrating iChat you would think that this couldn’t go wrong. In reality however iChat stinks. It works, sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t. You need a broadband connection that works flawlessly and you can just forget about using Wi-Fi. And then you both have to have the exact same settings and then sometimes it sort of works.
Anyway, enough excuses. After working with Deborah for about 2 hours we finally got to do the interview I wanted to do. Only to be interupted by an uninvited extra guest. Enjoy the interview.
Written on 10th February 2009
6 COMMENTS 
The Social Web Blog is focused on readers who “interested or involved” in making the web more social. It is Google’s 80th official blog and with it, they aim to capture the interest of individuals, founders, website owners and anyone who is interested in developing a community online.
Written on 17th October 2008
Written on 23rd April 2008
When we started 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
