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The online calendar startup Kiko has been sold on eBay for $258K. The bidding story is here. Following the successful sale of the meta-search engine Jux2 for $101K, eBay is really becoming a plausible way to cash out.

Kiko was seed-funded by Paul Graham’s YCombinator, for the price of one programmer’s 6 month salary. Paul sums up Kiko’s failure in two words: Google Calendar. Supposedly it was the integration with Gmail that made Google Calendar more useful. This is the same office-effect Microsoft has used in the past to combat rival office products: integrating products together.

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Defining Search Engines

The primary purpose of a search engine is to direct users to data relevant to their query. This is done by returning a set of pointers to data - “links” along with a preview (small subset) of the data. A search engine can obtain such links in any way, including:

- crawling the web autonomously
- structured XML feeds (eg sitemaps)
- manual user submission

The distributed and hyperlinked nature of the web allows users to publish data at a single location, allowing it to be discovered by other users and search engines. In contrast to pushing data to users by publishing it in various locations, this approach eliminates management and versioning problems if data needs to be updated. In other words, allowing search engines to discover your data is better than publishing it in various centralized databases (web applications such as classified listings sites, Google Base, etc).

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After reading this article about Web Operating Systems I couldn’t help but making my view on the subject public: the only Web OS there will ever be already exists - its the browser.

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Here is an overview of recent web 2.0 announcements. I’ll try to make this a weekly post.

- Facebook turns dows $750M offer, hoping to fetch $2 billion [1]
- Zopa - a person-to-person lending company based in London raises $15M [1]
- Jobby Launches - job hunting web 2.0 style
- Riya Launches - photo search with facial recognition, long rumored to be acquired by Google
- PayPal Mobile Launches - not too late to beat TextPayMe [1]
- Beyond AJAX: HTTP Streaming [1]

The World Wide Web was not designed for Web Applications, and is a dead end for application developers. Let’s put things into perspective.

After TCP/IP has been standardized as the protocol of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee invented its first great application - the World Wide Web: a simple collection of hyperlinked documents. Each document is identified by a fixed URL address, and written in a mark-up language called HTML. The documents are meant to be viewed in a web browser, which in turn uses a protocol for publishing and receiving HTML documents known as HTTP which works over TCP/IP.
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