Google has just announced a new My Yahoo-like portal page, which they are calling a Personalized Google Homepage. It will be one place for users to access their Google search, news, Gmail, weather, stocks, driving directions, movies - and more. In the Google 'Factory Tour' webcast, Product Manager Marissa Mayer said they'll offer "Universal RSS support" for the Personalized Homepage within 1-2 months, meaning users will be able to add any RSS feed onto it.
Interesting that this comes out at the same time as Microsoft confirming it will integrate RSS across its MSN online services throughout the year. eWeek reports that in 2-3 weeks time MSN will release "a third version of Start, its Web-based aggregator prototype". This is a quote from Kyle Von Haden, an MSN program manager:
"This could easily be a home page, and you would not need to touch it".
Indeed... more updates on the Google and Microsoft stories as they develop.
One thing: why are all the bigco's so intent on building portals, when users are more and more using RSS Aggregators as their central means of access to Web content ('homepages' in Web 1.0 parlance)? The answer may be that the portal products of Google, MSN and Yahoo are, over time, turning into RSS Aggregators. Certainly MSN's start.com is heading in this direction - it remains to be seen whether Google's "personalized homepage" will do the same.
This week: Greasemonkey mayhem, Ajax fever, Web Design Minimalism mojo, Blogpoly Fun!, Yahoo Music Engine rave.
What is Greasemonkey? According to the homepage, it's "a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior." In laymans terms, it's a Firefox add-on that lets users monkey around with any webpage - change its data, design, or functionality. Greasemonkey gives practical meaning to the term 'read/write web', because it literally enables users to re-write a webpage.
It's creating a stir in the developer community right now, as evidenced by Mark Pilgrim's latest book: Dive Into Greasemonkey. That's for the technical-minded. The best business-oriented introduction I've read on Greasemonkey was by a blogger called Nivi, who thinks Greasemonkey will "blow up business models". He gives examples, such as adding competitor pricing to an Amazon page.
For the Web wonks amongst us, this is an interesting quote from Nivi:
"Greasemonkey allows us to connect a page from the deep web to another page on the deep web. Deep web pages are created dynamically from database queries. So, Greasemonkey is, in a sense, hypertext for databases."
Time will tell whether that is true, but it's a tempting metaphor for Web 2.0...
Ajax is another hot technology in the Web 2.0 world, evidenced by the recent Ajax Summit hosted by O'Reilly and Adaptive Path. Ajax stands for 'Asynchronous JavaScript + XML', but you can get a better idea of what it is by using Google's Gmail and Google Maps. Derek Powazek explains:
"Ajax, and the pile of techniques and technologies that get lumped in with it, are all about breaking that page-by-page web experience into smaller chunks. If the traditional web was letter writing, Ajax is instant messaging."
This week Flickr announced they were converting from Flash to Ajax - further proof that Ajax is a defining technology of Web 2.0.
Have you noticed how many weblogs have taken to stripping away all their bells and whistles and gone all minimalist? The most recent one I've noticed is Tom Coates' excellent blog plasticbag. Jarrod Piccioni has been following this trend and notes:
"The concept [of minimalism in web design] still applies today, where the focus is shifting from the adoption and support of web standards to the adoption and spreading of Web 2.0."
His point being that the content is the most important element. Jarrod's post has some great tips for bloggers who want to ensure their content is the main attraction. Also check out Noah Brier's advice to design for your content, "rather than against it".
My Wrap-Up has been a bit techie this week, so for some light relief have a look at Blogpoly - a variation of the game Monopoly. Not only is it an accurate visual overview of the Web 2.0 world, it's also a lot of fun! For example: del.icio.us, Bloglines and Technorati occupy the coveted orange spots (where I used to try and stack all my hotels - a common strategy for every Monopoly player back in the day...); Wikipedia and Creative Commons are the two public utilities; and "Chance" and "community chest" become "comment" and "trackback".
Lucas Gonze pointed me to a beauty of a post written by Ian Rogers, one of the developers of the new Yahoo! Music Engine. OK, it's a breathless account of something he helped build, but the sheer enthusiasm in this post made me forget about the obvious bias. For example this passage:
"We want users. Not only that, we want network users so we can to tie together all the services we offer. That's our business. We're not selling you operating systems or hardware on the side. Yahoo! Music Engine is a container for network media services."
You can tell Ian really believes in this product - aren't blogs great! And oh to have a job like that, where you love what you do for a living (OK, I'm getting there...slowly).
That's a wrap for another week!™
We're nearly halfway through 2005 and there's still no heavyweight competition for Bloglines in the Web-based RSS Aggregator stakes. And I'm not talking about an Aggregation service like MyYahoo and Firefox Live Bookmarks, which aggregate feeds either on a webpage (MyYahoo) or in the browser bar (Firefox Live Bookmarks). Although they are hefty competitors of Bloglines, they have limited functionality in terms of sorting and grouping feeds.
I'm talking about a full-featured Web-based RSS Aggregator that is equal to or surpasses the functionality of most desktop Aggregators. That's what Bloglines is and that, in tandom with their 'first mover' advantage, is why they are so successful today.
There's plenty of competition in the desktop Aggregator market - FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator are a few of the established players fighting it out in that department.
But what about the Web-based side of things - is anyone seriously challenging Bloglines?
Well there is Rojo, which is getting its fair share of, er, mojo - in the blogosphere. I must give that another go, because it looks like it's improved significantly since I last tried it (in its initial beta). There's Newsgator Online, which I've tried before and had some issues with the UI. Microsoft's start.com is still a glint in the milkman's eye, so nothing to report there. One new app that's popped up recently is FeedTagger, which is an early beta built with Ajax and which uses tagging a lot.
There are many others that I've not mentioned (sorry!), but my point here is to ask: is there a Web-based RSS Aggregator out there that will be a Bloglines Killer?
I love Bloglines, don't get me wrong. My profile page even shows yours truly in a "I love Bloglines" tee-shirt! But the User Interface of Bloglines is beginning to get very creaky. It still uses frames, for crying out loud! There's not a whiff of Ajax in the Bloglines UI and narry a hint of tagging. And I've begun to notice some minor technical glitches lately - feeds not being polled (this happened to R/WW a week or so ago - and Russell Beattie too), and some odd weird moments with logins. Nothing major, but enough to make you go Hmmmmm.
So my questions to throw out to the 'Sphere:
1. If Bloglines/Jeeves staff are reading this, can you tell us when you'll re-design the UI of Bloglines and add some new information management features (such as tagging)?
2. To others who read this: do you think there's another Web-based RSS Aggregator out there that will challenge Bloglines' dominance of this market?
UPDATE, 2 days later: There've been some excellent comments made on this post (hat-tip Dave Winer for linking to it). Lots of insightful suggestions and discussion about frames and tags and features in general. Also two Rojo developers chimed in, which led to an interesting email discussion including their CEO Chris Alden. The upshot of that is I've decided to trial Rojo over the next couple of weeks, to see what all the fuss is about. Also I've added a Rojo button to my blog, in exchange for Rojo adding Read/Write Web to their pre-selected feeds (which are a bit A-Listy actually, but hey it's one way for me to muscle in on the action).
Plus today Bloglines chief Mark Fletcher left a comment, saying that "we have a number a projects underway here at Bloglines to improve the user experience". Fantastic news! Thanks Mark for letting us know. I encourage people to keep your comments coming, because they are being read and noted by all the Aggregator companies.
The BBC has launched a
new beta site called BBC Backstage, which
is their new developer network. They've put the call out for people to remix their
content, using their APIs and content RSS feeds. Although over the years the BBC has been
understandably "cautious" about "letting go of control of so much of our content", it's a
good sign they've started the unshackling process now.
I took a look at the Prototype section of the site and was impressed by the projects already published: a BBC News/Wikipedia mash-up, some del.icio.us experimentation and a search of the BBC's Today program.
In the BBC/Wikipedia and BBC/del.icio.us prototype apps, the additonal information and links are integrated very tightly using the existing BBC News design. In fact it took my eyes a while to pick up the changes! While using the same design may be the point, personally I'd prefer a little more differentiation - if only so the Wikipedia and del.icio.us services have their fair share of branding on those pages.
Other highlights for me in the Prototype section were an RSS feed of BBC complaints and Mint, "a video bloggers friend". I can't wait to see what else pops up! You don't necessarily need to develop the apps yourself either, you can simply note down an idea and who knows who'll pick it up and run with it. For example, Rael Dornfest has put in a request for "an app that'll find, bundle, and download all parts of a four part radio play".
So whether you're a developer or a normal user with a request, the BBC Backstage has something for you. Congrats to the BBC for fully embracing the Remix Culture!
MBAs got top billing in my latest Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up - and there have been some interesting follow-ups. In the comments to yesterday's post, Bud Gibson pointed to "The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp" that his company is doing for MBA students at the University of Michigan, starting this Saturday. More details here. Interestingly, they're using products of ThePortNetwork, who sponsor my Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up. I hadn't known about that - it's a small world!
In regards to how MBA students are grokking Web 2.0, Bud made this observation:
"My experience with MBA students is that about 1-5% are really in it to get deeply into the underlying technology or theory. The rest you have to sell on business benefits."
That doesn't surprise me and I think you'll find the same ratio of Techies are deeply interested in business administration! :-) But it's all about bringing Web techies and business folk together, so that each has an appreciation of the other - and we can build partnerships. For MBA and business people, there are opportunities to launch businesses in the Web 2.0 'space'. Likewise for Web techies, we need people with business nous to get our ideas and products off the ground.
So I think Bud's program is a fantastic way to introduce business people to Web 2.0 technologies and I'll be watching with interest to see how it turns out.
Poweryogi (real name please?) also replied to my post - he's the MBA student who is thinking about launching a Web 2.0 venture. In a post today, he said he's a bit pessimistic about how MBAs can "make an impact" on Web 2.0. He wrote about a conversation he had with two other MBA students - "one a McKinsey-bound consultant, and the other a UBS-bound banker." When poweryogi steered the conversation towards Web2.0 and blogs, he noted that the banker "seemed disinterested" and the consultant wanted to know how blogs differed from IM.
I thought poweryogi's last comment was the most revealing: he noted that MBA students have "little time to experiment". That's entirely justified and actually I see no reason why MBA students should experiment. There has to be a business reason behind most things they do, so it's our job as technologists and Web people to show them where the business value is.
Bud Gibson posted a similar comment on poweryogi's blog: "...when you are on the cutting edge, you have a lot of selling to do". Exactly and in fact that's part of my job(s). Just recently I was complimented by someone in my day job on my "translation skills" - meaning from Geek to Business and vice versa! That's kind of what I do here on Read/Write Web too.
Poweryogi is one of those 1-5% MBA people I think, so hopefully he continues to explore Web 2.0 and helps explain the business value to his classmates. And who knows, maybe one day I'll be approaching him to lend me some venture capital ;-)
If had to use one word to explain how I see the relationship between Technologists and Businesspeople, it's symbiosis. We're two different species and each group has its own specialities. But together we can develop a relationship of mutual benefit.
ahhhh, what a nice way to end a post - with a biological metaphor!
This week: business folk getting interested in Web 2.0, Adam Curry podcasting from 2.0 perspective, cool Web 2.0 'mini-apps', wrap-up of the adverts in RSS debate, Bosworth's Web of Data.
I get accused of being too geeky sometimes on Read/Write Web (no argument there!). So I'm on the hunt for more business-related Web 2.0 stories. I do believe that Web 2.0 is starting to permeate into mainstream business culture - perhaps from the bottom up, i.e. from business schools. For example this MBA student is looking "to mesh the classroom teaching of proven theories with the rapidly evolving wild west of what's being referred to as Web 2.0." He or she (no real name provided, so I couldn't tell) goes on to say:
"I would like to explore areas that interest me, and are not really stuff that schools care to touch, such as the Long Tail, Corporate blogging vis-a-vis developing relationships with customers, printing-on-demand technologies, Wikis, etcetera while also trying to build a business from scratch."
That's encouraging to hear and I wish that MBA student the best of luck.
Of course the other way business folk can be introduced to Web 2.0 is to use the tools. For example Boris Mann recently talked about weblogs and wikis to a local MBA class.
News this week that Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. is launching a podcasting show, to be hosted by ex-MTV star Adam Curry. It'll be a four-hour weekday show, featuring a selection of amateur podcasts handpicked by Curry.
Although it could be argued this is more about broadcasting than podcasting, given Curry's background with MTV, I think this has huge implications for Web 2.0. It's a chance for enthusiastic podcasters to get their material heard by a much wider audience. Indeed it's not far-fetched to suggest that a small percentage of talented podcasters will bootstrap their way to their own professional radio/podcasting shows - perhaps even becoming stars.
I'm sure Curry will unearth some real podcasting gems, over time. Although I suggested he may be the Casey Kasem of Podcasting in my ionrss.com piece, it's probably fairer to say he could be the John Peel of Podcasting. Peel was a music-lover who discovered and recorded some amazing new bands, who probably wouldn't have made it but for Peel. There's an opportunity for Curry to do the same for Podcasters all over the Web.
I'm doing my best to avoid writing about The Big 3 Internet companies this week, so to extend that theme I thought I'd list out some neat new Web 2.0 things developed by individuals or small companies. Here are some I discovered this week:
- RSS Mix: a feed remixer
- Foundcity: "allows everyone in a city to map the
interesting things they discover throughout the day to a dynamic online map"
- Adactio: uses APIs to collect scattered
pieces of Web content into one place (see my review here)
- Backpack: amongst other things, transforms
emails into functional web pages. Got a lot of blog buzz this week, including from me.
- airWRX: a content-creation workspace
that runs from a USB flash drive
- hReview:
an open standard for reviews (see Phil Pearson's
implementation at the NZ Coffee Review site).
Feel free to email me (see my site's menu) if you have a new Web 2.0 app or service you want me to take a look at.
I've been covering this issue on ION RSS. In terms of the Web as platform, I concluded that RSS is essentially equal to HTML as a publishing format. That is, RSS is a first-class citizen of Web publishing. People can and will put anything they want into an RSS feed, just as they do with webpages.
But, as always, each 'end-user' will decide for him or herself whether ads in feeds are acceptable. It's easy to unsubscribe from feeds and that's part of the beauty of Web 2.0 - users have control over their Web experience.
Adam Bosworth recently gave a speech to the MySQL Users Conference 2005. Bosworth is a former Microsoft web wizard, but nowadays he casts his RESTian spells as a Google employee. He's known for his evangelism of simplicity and 'sloppiness' in designing for the Web. For example, here's his view of RSS:
"Bosworth predicts that RSS 2.0 and Atom will be the lingua franca that will be used to consume all data from everywhere. These are simple formats that are sloppily extensible. Anyone who wants to can use these formats to consume content or to author content."
For a design and business-oriented take on the 'Web of Data' theme, check out Web 2.0 for Designers, the Digital Web Magazine article that Joshua Porter and I wrote. If you're geekily inclined, I also recommend you check out Bill de hÓra's and Dare Obasanjo's posts in response to Bosworth's speech. Also David Megginson has a very techie post on this theme.
That's a wrap for another week! Hey, I should make that my catch phrase... I hope you're still enjoying these posts and as always, I value any feedback. Feel free to email or leave a comment.
You know how Jude Law seemed to be in just about every movie released in Hollywood last year? Well on a smaller scale, my writing is being published on various sites across the Web currently. And no I'm not talking about those people who copy and paste my posts into their blogs!
My new Silicon Valley Watcher blog, called ionRSS (eye on RSS, geddit?) is in beta mode right now. There are still some i's to be dotted and t's to be crossed, but it's basically primed for action. The site's tagline is The Business of RSS, which tells you all you need to know about the focus of the blog. I'll be covering RSS over on ionrss.com and continuing my focus on Web 2.0 on Read/Write Web. Where there is any crossover, I'll cross-link.
p.s. bonus points if you can figure out the other pun of "ion" in an RSS sense. Hint: alternative RSS format...
Also a new Digital Web Magazine article that I co-authored with Joshua Porter has just been published. Josh and I are going to be writing a column on Web 2.0 Design over the remainder of 2005. Our first article is entitled Web 2.0 for Designers and it introduces 6 key Web 2.0 trends that we see impacting the Web Design profession. I'd love to receive your feedback on it.
Web 2.0 is coming soon to consumer medical information services, says Gordon Gould. He
reckons the most interesting apps won't come from established Web medical players, like
WebMD, but rather from startups. Gordon thinks the
established companies are too Web 1.0 - "monolithic, closed, and mostly just about
info-retrieval".
WebMD's mission seems to be to help "navigate the complexity of the healthcare system" and so it necessarily has a broad reach - from doctors to patients to providers. So perhaps Gordon is right and innovation will come from presumably more focused and agile Healthcare startups.
Rajesh Jain from Emergic has a similar post about IT in the Healthcare system. He quotes from an article in The Economist, which says the healthcare industry must get patient information "out of paper files and into electronic databases" and make it interoperable. But more than that, decision-making should be moved to the edges of the network (i.e. "by patients in consultation with their doctors") and not centralised.
The Economist's conclusion is similar to Gordon's - the goal is ultimately "to enable individuals, at last, to have access to, and possession of, information about their own health."
Based on the great comments I received to post.icio.us a week ago, I've been doing some experimenting on R/WW. First I tried out the '5 links to a post' style (again). I don't think it worked, for me or for you. So now what I'm going to do is the "mini-analysis" style that Andrew Chen suggested. I did one earlier today, called Pulling the pieces together, and for some reason I was pleased as punch that I managed to get my point across in only 3 paragraphs! ;-)
So I'll keep doing that. I'll continue to use the '2.0 News' brand and icon, which will be 'tagged' onto any post that is short 'n sweet and Web 2.0 news.
Microsoft's new version of Xbox, code-named Xenon, will be more of a "PC hybrid" according to Bill Gates. They're aiming to be a media hub for the living room, utilising the Web as a channel for media content and to enable collaboration. As Tom Foremski notes, this will give Microsoft "a ready platform for its DRM technology and for its MSN online network".
What are the Web 2.0 ramifications of all this? Well for a start Microsoft is aiming for Xenon to be more of a social experience. Take this quote from Gates, during an interview with Engadget:
"We’re going to have games that are more sociable, more approachable, particularly by taking this idea of Xbox Live and bringing in contests and spectators and ratings and talking to your friends and various new things there we think we can make it much bigger category than it’s ever been to date."
How are they going to do that? Via the Web, presumably. But the catch is you'll need to connect via a Microsoft Media Center PC, which seems to underpin what Gates referred to as their "media vision".
So what exactly is this "Media Center PC"? In Part 2 of the Engadget interview, Gates implies that the Media Center PC can be thought of as a kind of home server or a gateway to an external Web server (via the media content provider). Gates also confirms that Media Center will be part of Longhorn, the next version of Windows.
To get a glimpse of how Microsoft's media vision might work, check out this recent Microsoft guide on how to use a Media Center PC to schedule the recording of TV shows. Note that you'll need a plethora of Microsoft software in order to do this, including the dreaded Microsoft .NET Passport.
And that's what you can expect with Microsoft's PC Hybrid and media strategy in the near future. Sure you'll be able to connect to and communicate with people all over the world, but you'll be locked in to Microsoft's software. Gee whiz, that sounds familiar...
NB: Amusingly, the tv program used as an example of something to record in the above guide is 'Napoleon: The Man Who Would Rule Europe'! A Microsoft writer with an ironic sense of humour perhaps? ;-)
