24 Hour Laundry, the secretive start-up of Marc Andresson, has just released their new product - Ning. It's a free online service for "building and using social applications". Basically it's a Web 2.0 development tool aimed at non-developers. Developers too will benefit from it, because it sounds like a Ruby on Rails for mash-ups - i.e. an easy-to-use development framework.
So what does Ning do? Users can take parts from various web apps and build something unique and personalized. The Ning FAQ explains: "Our goal with Ning is to see what happens when you open things up and make it easy to create, share, and discover new social apps."
Fred over at TechCrunch has profiled it and he wrote:
"It means anyone can now get their ideas out there and build a project (some people would call it a mash-up) in a few clicks, with no developer experience. And if you are a developer, you can pop under the hood and change it to your liking, no questions asked."
It sounds absolutely amazing, so I can't wait to have a play. The Ning team is excited on their blog. This is just the start of the big announcements this week, btw...
Yahoo! is teaming up with The Internet Archive to help build a digital archive of "globally sourced digital collections, including multimedia content". I understand this means books, academic material, audio and video media. Question: does this crossover with OurMedia.org - or will there be arbitary boundaries between 'professional' and amateur media content?
Called the Open Content Alliance, hopefully one of the main byproducts of this effort will be to make available a huge amount of media for people to remix and create new content from. I say hopefully, because it'll be up to the contributers to decide what (if any) copyright will apply. But the OCA is encouraging "the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive", while respecting copyright.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, thinks this may become the 21st century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. Current contributers include Yahoo!, O'Reilly Media, Adobe and others. It's worth noting that this probably ties in very well with Yahoo!'s media plans, which I wrote about in a recent ZDNet post.
PaidContent.org is tracking the story, as is of course tech.memeorandum.
This week: Defining Web 2.0, Web-based office, Yahoo media/tv, Google Wifi, Techie Post of the Week: Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0.
A lot of online trees were felled this week to write about what Web 2.0 means. Tim O'Reilly's definition is a very comprehensive one and is more satisfying than his valiant attempt at a compact definition. Barb Dybwad wrote an impressive social software-based definition, which is a good companion piece to Danah Boyd's two posts so far. Dion Hinchcliffe and Ken Yarmosh are doing sterling work rounding up the wide variety of Web 2.0 definitions going on. TechCrunch as always is right on top of the latest Web 2.0 developments. Then you have Josh Porter and yours truly doing our analysis thing, as well as smart people like Cristian Vidmar and Alex Barnett. There's a lot of great Web 2.0 explanations out there...OK there are a lot of posts questioning the Web 2.0 meme too. I don't mind that at all, as long as they're constructive posts like Jay Fienberg's.
My post entitled The Web-based Office will have its day on ZDNet got a lot of attention this week, thanks to a Slashdotting. In the post I listed down a group of the latest Web-based Office apps (most of them AJAX-based) and summarized:
"The time for the web-based office will come, mark my words. When broadband is ubiquitous, web functionality is richer, issues of security and reliability have been put to rest, and most importantly of all - when Corporates are ready to make the jump. It may be 5-10 years down the track, it may be longer."
I must stress that I don't see web-based apps eating Microsoft's lunch anytime soon - 5-10 years is a minimum. Also as Phil Wainewright pointed out, web-based apps are most suited to be "collaborative, virtual workspaces" rather than personal productivity apps like Microsoft Office. That's a good point, although I still think web-based apps will in the long-run usurp PC-based apps. But then I'm one of those people who thinks everything will be handled in "the cloud" in future - even identity. It's not a particularly mainstream view, I admit that.
Also in ZDNet this week I wrote about Yahoo's media plans and in particular the work they're doing to converge the Web and television. There are four pillars to their strategy: Search, Community (content contributed by "everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers"), Professionally created content, and Personalization technology.
I think there's a lot of potential for interactivity and creativity to surface from outside traditional quarters (Hollywood in particular) with Yahoo's Web television. Already we're seeing users take control of their television experience with TiVo and Media Center. It sounds like Yahoo! has plans to take that up another level, with even more Web added to the TV (re)mix.
Google's plans to cover San Francisco with free wireless high-speed Internet access was big news in the blogosphere this week. The AP thinks this will create "a springboard for the online search engine leader to leap into the telecommunications industry" and will be "a testing ground for a national WiFi service." That view was denied by the Google spokesman in the AP article. Google does admit though that San Francisco will be a test-ground for "new location-based applications and services". Note that there are also potential privacy issues.
Om Malik thinks this could have major implications: "The Google Talk implications on a free network are quite far reaching, if you ask me, but then that’s just me."
Ben Barren has an interesting take on this: "Is search and wifi connected to one another at google at the 'operational strategy level' ? I dont think so. Could they be connected ? Well g-duh, yes."
Well it goes without saying, but I think the What is Web 2.0 essay by Tim O'Reilly is significant. It's impossible to summarize, so I recommend you take some time and read it through. If there was one extract I had to highlight, it'd be this [talking about "Software Above the Level of a Single Device"]:
"Of course, any web application can be seen as software above the level of a single device. After all, even the simplest web application involves at least two computers: the one hosting the web server and the one hosting the browser. And as we've discussed, the development of the web as platform extends this idea to synthetic applications composed of services provided by multiple computers.
But as with many areas of Web 2.0, where the "2.0-ness" is not something new, but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web platform, this phrase gives us a key insight into how to design applications and services for the new platform."
That's a wrap for another week!
I've written a few times now about being disappointed with Bloglines this year - and their lack of progress since they got bought by Ask Jeeves. Now Russell Beattie has come out and said it too - and he got a response from Bloglines chief Mark Fletcher in the comments. Mark said (excerpted):
"You’re right in that we haven’t been rolling out new features recently. We’ve been working hard on the back-end of the system. Every metric in the system (# feeds, # articles, page views, etc) has more than doubled recently. Keeping up with that growth is challenging to anybody. I’m very happy to say that we’re actually crawling feeds more quickly and consistently now than we have in many months. Is it perfect yet? No, but we’re definitely getting there, and of course we’re not done yet. [...] As I hope you’ll agree, focusing on scaling the system instead of new features is the correct strategy. That doesn’t mean you’ll never see a new feature again. We’ll continue to out small improvements as well until we complete the scaling work; next week, for example, we’ll be adding horoscopes and lottery feeds to the system. We’re also working on improving the UI and we have a great AJAX designer on the team now."
While I have no issue with Bloglines focusing on the backend, the lack of new functionality and features does leave them vulnerable to losing a lot of their core readers and champions. They're already no longer the market darling amongst bloggers. For example I've now switched to Rojo and am pretty much championing them now, rather than Bloglines (although I still have a picture of me wearing a Bloglines tee-shirt on my About page!). And if you look at the comments in Russ' post, you'll see there are other people who have become just as frustrated with Bloglines' lack of progress.
The thing is, Mark Fletcher promised new functionality and features months ago. This is what Mark wrote in my own blog comments in May 2005:
"...we have a number a projects underway here at Bloglines to improve the user experience. It's actually our number one priority. Not just new features like package tracking, which was recently rolled out, or weather forecasts, which will be rolled out next week. But improvements to the UI and better ways of dealing with information overload."
Is it just that the UI experience is no longer number 1 priority and scaling the system has become top priority instead? I suppose you can't argue with that - the system needs to be stable and meeting demand. But I really think they need to hurry up and implement some 2005-era UI functionality. It should've been done at least 6 months ago and they're not doing themselves any favors by letting Rojo, Newsgator Online, Start.com and all the other web-based RSS Aggregators overtake them in functionality.
Bloglines still dominates the market and ease-of-use remains their trump card, but how long can they ride that wave? It's frankly amazing I care enough to even write this - so it's obvious I still have some affection for Bloglines the product. It's just sad to see a product that was first to market by a long shot, fail to keep the momentum up as soon as they get bought out.
I arrived in San Francisco yesterday, in preparation for the Web 2.0 Conference next week. I'm spending two weeks in Silicon Valley, kindly hosted by TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, Keith Teare and Frederico Oliveira. They're having a great time with my accent ("yeeeeeaa"). I'm having a great time in general and looking forward to the conference!
While I was on the plane, and after that recovering from jetlag, a whole slew of Web 2.0 articles came out. I have a lot of reading to catch up on! You can see the latest in tech.memeorandum, but here are some of the Web 2.0 posts that caught my eye...
Tim O'Reilly published a must-read article entitled What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. He also published a campact definition and got profiled in Wired magazine. Barb Dybwad has a well-thought out post entitled Approaching a definition of Web 2.0. Dion Hinchcliffe has a good round-up of recent Web 2.0 blogging activity. Chris Anderson wrote a bit on the difficulties of defining Web 2.0 (tell me about it!). Dave Winer has an interesting counterpoint to the Web 2.0 meme.
All of those posts are well worth reading and digesting before the conference. I'll be blogging a lot next week, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I'll be exploring Silicon Valley - the home of the Web.
