Web Week on Wednesday

Looking back over the past week (i.e. Thu to the Wednesday that finished an hour of so ago), the last few days seem to have been particularly busy. But representing the latter half of last week here is Jeremiah Owyang’s account of the many challenges facing the social media industry. Jeremiah starts with the lack of profits. He goes on to mention the cutthroat competition, and that’s one of the things driving profits down; I’d say the customer expectation that stuff on the web should be free of charge is another.

Gmail was the big story on Monday. Gmail Goes Down – Twitter Survives, as Frederic@RWW nicely put it. Many were tweeting about their lack of Gmail, but Twitter held up. The following day, Merlin Mann gave a good getting things done without Gmail (GTDWG?) tip.

As you can see, and as John at All Things Digital remarked, Apple (AAPL) has eclipsed Google (GOOG) in market value.

The blog comment service Disqus is high on many “I wish we had this at WordPress.com” lists, especially after its recent update. Mashable Adam wrote that Disqus has a shot at owning the commentsphere. But please don’t let its absence stop you from commenting on this post.

Wednesday Flashback

Once again, my review of the Wednesday-to-Wednesday week appears on a Thursday. Here goes:

Week in Review

It’s midweek, time to look back over the last seven or so days in social media. Perhaps the biggest story was the birth of the Cuil, that is, the prominent launch of the search engine of that name.

Less prominent, but more interesting to me personally, was the rebirth of BricaBox as an open source project. For context, see my earlier posts on BricaBox, and Nate’s post on the closing of BricaBox, the .com startup.

A weekly review of social media should probably include something on Facebook, iPhone, or both. I’ll go with an opinion piece from Mashable Don on why it’s time for Facebook to sell. I concur, although I might have put it less mildly: sell that Facebubble before it bursts!

This is the first of my weekly-on-Wednesday reviews. Some of its successors may actually appear on Wednesdays. Most of them will be more comprehensive, since I’ll get more systematic about noting things as I see them, rather than going back over the last week.