Mark Zuckerberg at a developer happy hour event at Facebook HQ, August 2007. Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. 2007 is often thought of as the year of the smartphone, with both the iPhone and Android launching that year. But for much of the year it was still a desktop-driven web, with emerging social media...

In July 2009, we began planning our first RWW event. It would be in the “unconference” format, which had been suggested to us by Kaliya Hamlin, an expert on digital identity. The key aspect of an unconference was that it wasn’t based around presenters with PowerPoints talking to a mute audience; instead, a...

My FriendFeed account, August 2009. In July 2009, RWW had 2,650,000 page views, of which nearly 1.3 million were unique visitors. Nearly half (49 percent) of visits were from Firefox users, with 25 percent using IE. Safari (12.5 percent) and Chrome (8.5 percent) were the next most popular. That Firefox dominated our...

In June 2009, I interviewed the man who had made my entire career possible: Tim Berners-Lee. Another of my passion projects as a tech reporter was the Semantic Web (it was always capitalized at the time). In May I’d done a presentation to a Wellington tech gathering about web trends. I’d made the case that open,...

No smartphones, fat laptops. Welcome to the 2006 internet! 2006 was a pivotal year in the rise of the social web. In July, Twitter launched; in September, Facebook debuted its “news feed” and opened registrations for all people (not just US college students); and in October, Google acquired YouTube, which resulted...

Due largely to the SUL, RWW's Twitter a/c went from 13,300 followers in May 2009 to 256,000 by the end of June. By year's end, we'd matched Ashton Kutcher with over 1 million followers. After I returned from my latest Silicon Valley trip in March 2009, my wife and I separated. Unlike our separation at the end of...

In 2009, ReadWriteWeb was featured in the ia.net Web Trend Map, which "plots the Internet’s leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map." Via Internet Archive. As the new year dawned, I wrote up some goals for 2009 in the red 3B1 Warwick notebook I habitually carried with me. As a business goal I wrote,...

Team ReadWriteWeb during the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit; Sean Ammirati, Bernard Lunn, me, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Alex Iskold. In late October 2008, my wife and I traveled over to the United States again on my annual pilgrimage to the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Before that, however, I had a few days in Los Angeles...

The first big influx of people signed up to Twitter in March 2007, after it became a breakout app at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. But even web geeks didn't quite know what to make of Twitter. Was it an “IM/blogging hybrid," as I described it in June 2007, a month or so after I'd joined. Was it a...

One of the first things I did after pulling out of the ZDE deal was to tell Marshall what had happened. I had penciled in a closing bonus and incentives over two years for him and the other writers, so he wouldn’t have been left out financially had the ZDE deal closed. But I apologized for not telling him about the...

By 2005, Web 2.0 — the Web as platform — was the driving trend of Silicon Valley. It was a new tech bubble, and that meant startup launches galore. YouTube and Reddit were just a couple of the future all-star web products launched in 2005. There were also plenty of acquisitions that year, including the leading...

A frustrated looking blogger on 7 July 2008, a week before RWW withdraws from the ZDE deal. Also pictured: Puggy the pug dog. The day I left New York, I saw on Techmeme that Condé Nast had acquired the technology blog Ars Technica for an estimated $25 million. At the time (May 2008), Condé Nast also owned Wired.com...