web

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Harrison Hoffman, a co-founder and writer for the Windows Live news site LiveSide.net and a current student at the University of Miami. I decided to take on this new project because I wanted to write about a wider variety of web services and talk about the whole picture instead of just a small part of it.

My goal with The Web Services Report is to provide news, opinion, and analysis on what's going on in the world of web services. I may be writing about the big players like Microsoft, Yahoo, … Read more

Steve Jobs's final "One Last Thing" announcement at the WWDC keynote today had to do with the iPhone. Instead of announcing a third-party developer kit like many thought he would, he encouraged the use of Web 2.0 and AJAX applications to be run entirely from the Safari browser (Which coincides nicely with the other announcement of a Windows version of Safari). Apple even demonstrated something called Apple Directory, a Safari Web application that lets you look up business contact cards. There's also a Google application that pulls up map and satellite imagery when a street … Read more

When Power Downloader recently sat down to check his e-mail, he quickly noticed a message from his niece, Kitty Kilobyte. In the message, Kitty explained that she would soon be attending a summer English class, which would mean she would probably be writing a lot of papers. She went on to explain that though she was embarrassed to admit it, spelling wasn't her greatest skill, and any software he could recommend would be a big help.… Read more

eBay next week will host a developer conference in Boston where the ecommerce heavyweight is expected to outline its Web services strategy.

The company is also expected to release a beta of the San Dimas project, a desktop version of the eBay application written using Adobe's Apollo platform. In true eBay style, the application was posted on eBay for others to bid on.

In a survey published this week, eBay got the highest marks among developers who write applications on top of Web site platforms using published application programming interfaces (APIs). Other Web companies in the survey included Amazon, … Read more

ZDNet's David Berlind got some time with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Topics covered include the Semantic Web (see also: Microformats), mashups, and the benefits of open standards versus proprietary development environments such as Flash and Silverlight.

"We wouldn't have had the Web," Berners-Lee says, had it started as bunch of competing solutions. And as the mobile Web gains momentum, with its closed access devices (mobile phones), we're in danger of a platform fragmentation that could put a damper on innovation. "We must keep an open interface platform. The … Read more

eBay gets the highest overall marks from developers as a Web platform provider followed by Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, according to a new survey by Evans Data.

Amazon.com, which is trying to develop a large Web services business, scored near the bottom while Google gets good marks for its tools--even better than Microsoft.

Although simmering for a while, the idea of building Web applications on top of large-scale commercial sites like Yahoo or Google has picked up steam significantly in the past two years.

This is an important transition in the application development area--and the Internet overall. As … Read more

There's the temptation to start talking about the Democracy Player with a Lord of the Rings-esque, "One Player to Rule Them All" joke, but that wouldn't be very democratic, would it?

The latest version of the open-source Democracy Player contains some serious upgrades that make it worth a second look, if you haven't liked it in the past. The most important improvement is that the publisher, the Participatory Culture Foundation, seems to have worked through most of program's early stability issues. After tooling around with the player for hours on Windows Vista, it neither crushed my system's memory usage nor crashed. Memory usage and stability have been major issues for the plucky little player, and I suspect they will continue to be. But at least it wasn't gathering piles of RAM like a YouTube-obsessed squirrel fearing the approaching winter.… Read more

Guy Kawasaki's start-up Truemors debuted last month to mixed reviews. The site, designed to combine gossip with social networking, was beset by spam, and many doubted whether there was a viable business model.

Now Kawasaki, who came to fame as an "evangelist" for Apple has broken down exactly how much time, effort and money it took to set the site up. As it turns out, he says, for $12,107 and 7.5 weeks of labor, you too can have a Web 2.0 business.

Kawasaki says the point is that new technologies have made it that … Read more

Criminal hackers are flying well below the radar these days with a new technique that, according to security vendor Finjan, marks a new level of sophistication among criminal hackers. Documenting this trend in its latest Web Security Trends Report, Finjan calls these "evasive attacks" because of their stealth-like quality. First, criminal hackers use a cross-site scripting attack to place an IFrame that calls down malicious code on a popular Web site. That part is not new. What is new is the fact that the end-user is hit with the malicious code only once, making it hard for network … Read more