Backpack: Web 2.0 Email?

Popular Web Design firm 37signals has announced a new email-to-web product. They're promoting it as a kind of Web 2.0 makeover to "the star of Web 1.0" - email. So what does Backpack do? Apparently it will receive an email and "turn it into something useful on the web" - in other words, it'll transform an email into a functional web page. 

I have to admit, this sounds really cool and something I can picture myself using. Practically speaking, I already use Gmail as a 'To Do List' and to keep track of projects I'm involved in. Gmail's ability to label emails and search them, together with a highly interactive interface and huge storage, has turned out to be of immense use to me. 

Hmmm. I'm not sure at this stage whether Backpack would be a competitor to Gmail, or a complimentary product?

Peak inside Longhorn

PCMag.com has screenshots of Longhorn, Microsoft's next-generation Windows (via waxy.org's fabulous linkblog). Of most interest to Web 2.0 fans will be how they've integrated the browser and search, the two core Web interfaces. The final screenshot shows Internet Explorer and to be honest the only real difference I noticed was a search bar in the top-right - presumably the same search that will be integrated into the core Longhorn OS. That's potentially a threat to Google of course (no surprises there).

Google after Quality not Quantity

NewScientist reports that Google plans to "dramatically improve the results of internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search terms." What worries me is that most of the values to be measured are suspiciously quantity-based: e.g. number of stories, average story length, number with bylines, number bureaux cited, how long they have been in business, number of staff, volume of internet traffic.

Um hello - what about niche sites and bloggers?

Were those the golden years?

Geodog gets misty-eyed about pre-Web 2.0, before the hype and money.

It's A Whole New (No It's Not) Internet

Counterpoint to the Adaptive Path article. For me, the great thing about Web 2.0 is how many great ideas are being executed. A financially healthy environment begets more of those ideas - don't you think?