In a ZDNet Image Gallery, I've gone through 7 products that may become part of a future Google Web Office. Right now, Google doesn't have a full web-based office suite on the market - but this year they've gradually been compiling Web Office parts. For example if you click on "all my services" in the top left corner of your Gmail, you'll go to your Google account and see a list of products that Google offers. Many of them are Web Office parts, or could easily become a part of a Web Office. Here is the current list:
Google Spreadsheet
So there are 9 current Google services listed - the 6 I've highlighted are Office candidates. You can add word processing app Writely to that, which makes 7 possible Web Office suite parts. Some of the pre-beta products from the Google Labs page are possible additions in the future, as well as Labs "graduates" like Google Desktop. But let's not worry too much about what's missing (presentations and project management aren't even Google products yet).
Writely
Indeed there's a lot of work to be done to integrate the 7 office-like products listed above. While recently Google released the oddly named Google Apps for Your Domain - which bundles together Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Page Creator - it's just the start of what could be done to integrate products into an office suite.
Even so it's worth looking at the current product mix, for clues to a future Google Office. In the Image Gallery I've compiled, I've focused on the 7 office-like products listed above. I've highlighted a few promising Web Office features from most of the products, even if there's work to be done by Google yet.
Over the next couple of months on Read/WriteWeb, I'll be profiling the main Web Office suite candidates - such as Zoho, ThinkFree, gOffice, Zimbra, JotSpot, Goowy and Morfik. Plus of course Microsoft's Office Live and Google's current jigsaw puzzle of Web Office apps. Today I'm starting with Zimbra.
Zimbra is an open source Web Office vendor. It started
off in 2005 as an email/calendar collaboration toolset, big on mashup functionality and
Web 2.0 hype. Zimbra has since added word processor and spreadsheet to its product range,
meaning it now closely resembles a Web Office suite.
Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 4.0 was launched last month, featuring Zimbra Documents - a WYSIWYG tool for creating, sharing, and publishing word and spreadsheet documents online. Other features in ZCS 4.0 include synch to mobile devices, VoIP integration, user access controls. The ZCS 4.0 Open Source Edition of Zimbra is free, and the commercially-supported Network Edition is $28/mailbox/year.
The product is made up of a browser-based Ajax client and a "collaboration server". Alternatively you can just use the Zimbra server and pair it with another email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird.
You can do a hosted demo on their website, to get the feel of the product. If you decide to go ahead with it, Zimbra is available as an open source download or a hosted edition (both are browser-based).
The email part of Zimbra uses the same kind of interface as Outlook, but its functionality is more along the lines of Gmail. For example it has a 'conversation' view that organizes emails by conversation topic rather than a folder view.
Zimbra uses AJAX extensively, to make their
web email app look and feel like a desktop one. For example it uses mouseovers to show
metadata for items and words. This seems like a nice value-add, but it would mean
changing my own usage habits with email. - because generally I don't think of it as a
browsing experience. But this is a plus in my book, because it shows Zimbra is
challenging the old Outlook-based email paradigm (which most other web email systems,
with the exception of Gmail, still follow). Drag and drop is another AJAX touch - users
can move their email messages from folder to folder this way.
Drag and Drop
The real power of Zimbra is its APIs, which together with Zimbra's open source status makes this a potentially powerful development platform. The APIs enable developers to access messaging functions inside the Zimbra application, meaning external apps can hook into Zimbra's functionality. The example used in the demo is a travel application using Zimbra's APIs to "automatically create a calendar event for the person traveling". In addition to the inward API hooks, Zimbra also has interfaces for making outbound web service requests. Here's the example used in the demo:
"…the Zimbra application could recognize a shipment tracking number such as 792806493888 [a Fedex Tracking Number] in a message, make a web service call to the shipping vendor based on that number, and then provide more details about the shipment to the recipient of the message based on information obtained from the web service call."
You can even set it up to interact with another web service, from within the Zimbra system.
Zimbra Mashup
Another example is clicking on a link within an email and up pops a Yahoo! Map, or a link when clicked opens a Skype call. Plus Zimbra has mini web apps embedded within its system, called "Zimlets" - for example an Amazon search box. The buzz phrase for all this is "enterprise mashups" and it's the kind of functionality that got the attendees of the last Web 2.0 Conference very excited back in October.
Zimbra Maps mashup
The APIs and web services possibilities that Zimbra offers seem like a potentially thriving platform. So I guess the question is: are they being used?
The addition of documents and spreadsheets to Zimbra's arsenal made them a worthy contender among the small 'Web Office' startups. Another exciting aspect of Zimbra Documents is that it uses ALE (AJAX Linking and Embedding), which provides the ability to embed rich content into an editable document that users can share, publish, and edit - within a Web browser.
There have been question marks about the performance of Zimbra in the browser, in particular that the UI could be very slow. In May I asked CEO Satish Dharmaraj about this. He acknowledged there have been issues with IE browsers, in particular IE6. But Satish said that Zimbra performs significantly better in Firefox and a lot of its UI problems in IE6 were due to Zimbra "pushing the envelope of Ajax". Apparently IE7 will address these issues, so Satish was confident (when I last spoke to him) that Zimbra will not run into such problems in the new Microsoft browser.
Zimbra is packed full of features, such as the mashups and things like "Search Builder" and an RSS reader. It's an all-round impressive product. I'm not sure how much it's being used by external partners as a mashup platform though. But when I spoke to Satish, he told me they have enterprise clients that are happily using Zimbra to completely manage their communications online and collaborate. Zimbra is a small (20 people), well funded startup ($31 million) - so it's still young and growing. One to watch in the Enterprise space.
Note: this post is adapted from my previous reviews of Zimbra, and interview, on ZDNet.
Google has an upcoming Personalized Start Page for Enterprise, according to some sleuthing done by Garrett Rogers and Scott Smith at Google Blogoscoped. Here's an example Dell start page and the official help page.
The Personalized Start Page will be one of the options available in the beta Apps For Your Domain service. Currently email, IM, calendar and website creator is included in the package. In the Google Blogoscoped forum, there's further speculation about Writely integration and the ability to add Adsense to it.
I think Google sees Personalized Start Page for Enterprise as a kind of 'instant Intranet' option for small-medium businesses. While the example above is from Dell, it's unlikely a big corporation would ditch their (often hugely expensive) custom-made Intranet. It could also be used as a customer-facing website, which the Dell example seems to be. But I don't think that's all that appealing from a branding point of view.
You'll note that the Dell page includes some special Dell gadgets (see image below). This is where it starts to get interesting, as we morph into a world of componentized web apps. That kind of functionality would be very useful on a company Intranet.
According to stats compiled by vnunet.com, China will overtake the US next year to become the world's largest broadband internet market:
"The number of broadband subscribers in China is growing at a staggering 79 per cent annually, and will reach 79 million in 2007, consulting firm Ovum predicted in research released today.
Recent estimates from Leichtman Research suggest that the number of broadband connections in the US, currently the world's largest market, is around 51 million."
Like John Dowdell, I believe this will provide many opportunities to developers all over the world. The globalisation of web apps is a trend that I've been monitoring closely, particularly in my ongoing series on International Web Apps.
In my post Top Web Apps in China, I discussed how China's mobile sector currently has more innovation than the general Web sector - because of the high penetration rate of mobile handsets and highly developed short message, ringtone and ringback tone services. However the risks for non-Chinese people in this market include tough government regulations, plus the language and cultural barriers. I also noted in that post that China already has some very big Internet companies - Baidu, Sina, Sohu among them. Check out my China web app overview for more details.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
In this post we profile the red hot photo sharing space, where the blogosphere darling Flickr is actually trailing in the mass market. Back in June, Hitwise posted their online photo market statistics - which showed Photobucket with a huge market lead at #1 and Flickr at #6. A lot of Photobucket's lead is due to its high usage in MySpace pages - 56% of Photobucket's traffic is from MySpace, according to Hitwise. So marketing and being part of a large ecosystem are crucial. But also important is having simple and easy to use features. So we present here a feature-by-feature comparison and also highlight areas where particular services stand out from the pack.
In the table below (which incidentally we did using Zoho Sheet, Zoho's online spreadsheet) we list companies from the Hitwise article as well as some additional 'web 2.0' photo sharing players.
Note that for Alexa rank we highlighted the top 5 scores - Flickr, Photobucket, Webshots, Kodakgallery, Pbase.
|
|
Pros |
Cons |
|
Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) |
innovative, tons of cool features, drag and drop, sharing, RSS, badges, clustering |
difficult to use for non tech savvy |
|
simple, limited functionality, badges |
perhaps too simple, annoying ads, no sharing and social web features |
|
|
professional interface, targeting main stream |
no sharing and social web features |
|
|
simple, has all the basic functions, each album has unique URL |
no sharing and social web features |
|
|
Pbase (not in the same space) |
stunning professional photography, gallery-based implementation, simple |
no sharing and social web features |
|
Picasa (not in the same space yet - owned by Google) |
hard to say because it is not apples to apples, but editing photos is nice |
basically not (yet) in the same space, not really web-based |
|
music associated with albums, lots of badge options |
unbearably annoying ads during sign up, clubs instead of groups, does not seem intuitive |
|
|
professional interface, targeting mainstream |
no sharing and social web features |
|
|
Slide (not in the same space) |
runs on top of Flickr, Photobucket, etc. plugs into MySpace, blogs, etc. Fills nice niche within the space. |
focused on making slideshows (it's a limitation, if you want to consider this service as a contender). |
|
professional interface, a lot of album options, well thought through |
not free |
|
|
professional interface, targeting mainstream |
no sharing and social web features |
|
|
has lots of social web photo features |
ads, somewhat clunky, no tags (at least we could not find them) |
|
|
conceptually interesting, some innovative UI, uses OpenID for login. |
confirmation image gives you instant headache; no geography-only tag cloud; the maps are cool, but not useful |
|
|
very well designed, has the most social web features |
somewhat slow, lacks printing ability |
Where's Yahoo! Photos? We excluded Yahoo! Photos from this comparison because we did not have access to the new Yahoo! Photos beta, so we felt it would be unfair to review it based on the old site.
The browser twist The social browser Flock has delivered two direct integrations with Flickr and Photobucket. What is interesting (and also somewhat confusing) is that Flock has made a special version to be distributed to Photobucket users. It is difficult to say what impact this deal has had on the photo sharing market so far, but it is likely that browser integration is going to play a major role in the future.
Firstly, we do not have a single online photo market. There is still a clear mainstream market led by KodakGallery and Yahoo! Photos. This market is basically focused on upload/album/print capabilities - and has little to none social aspects.
On the other hand, Flickr is a clear leader in the social photo sharing market. It has unmatched features, usability and community.
However the overall leader in the photo sharing market in general, and a good mix between mainstream and social web, is Photobucket. They have been able to add just enough social features, without getting too complex or fancy, to convert a lot of people from traditional photo sharing sites.
How is it all going to end up and who is going to win in this market? Time will tell, but it is likely we will end up having fewer players - and those that stick around will have a blend of features from the current mainstream and 'social web' camps. As for the bloggers' favorite, Flickr, the road to mainstream acceptance for Flickr is paved with tough competition and the need to simplify.
Brad Neuberg has announced the release of
HyperScope 1.0, a Web app based on tech legend
Douglas Engelbart's 1968 NLS/Augment (oNLine System). Engelbart and team have been
working on Hyperscope since March
this year, in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Its aim is to
rebuild portions of Douglas Engelbart's NLS system on the web, using current Web
technologies such as AJAX and DHTML.
Brad Neuberg and Doug Engelbart - photo by Niall
Kennedy
The project team members are Doug Engelbart (visionary), Brad Neuberg (software architect and implementor), Jonathan Cheyer (who knows more about Augment than anyone else under 35), Christina Engelbart (the bridge between the old and the new) and Eugene Eric Kim (project liaison and collaboration guru).
Those familiar with their Web history will know that Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse and was a pioneer in the development of hypertext, networked computers and precursors to GUIs. Indeed NLS was the system demonstrated by Engelbart in his famous 1968 Mother of All Demos.
HyperScope is described as "a high-performance thought processor that enables you to navigate, view, and link to documents in sophisticated ways." This is seen as the first (renewed) step towards Doug Engelbart's larger vision for an Open Hyperdocument System - only this time round it'll be based on Web technologies.
The goal for HyperScope is to "make
more advanced browsing capabilities available in existing tools, and to engage community
participation."
I must admit I haven't fully grokked it yet, but Brad told me to "keep in mind that this is a faithful reproduction of the earlier systems, with the original commands, so it takes a bit of training to use." He also said that one of Douglas Engelbart's goals is "to create software that makes experts more powerful", which means there is a learning curve. But once you do learn it, you have expanded capabilities. According to Brad, Doug calls this "software for adults."
There is a tutorial available and also here are some detailed notes on how to use HyperScope, courtesy of Brad:
"It's basically a clone of Engelbart's 1968 system named NLS/Augment; that's the Turbo Mode button you will see. It is also a clone of pieces of a later system of Engelbart's named VAT, written in SmallTalk, from the early 90's; those are the Jump and Viewspecs buttons and overlays you see. That's the Browser Mode and those little icons you see when you run the mouse over the rows.
What you see are the original hyperlinks brought onto the web, the ones that were invented first. They are actually much more powerful than the web's hyperlinks, allowing things like indirect linking, granular addressability, the ability to control how a remote website is displayed using something called viewspecs, transclusions of pieces of remote web documents in real time, etc. Now they are all brought onto the web, built with contemporary technology: Ajax, Dojo, DHTML, OPML."
If you want to have a play, HyperScope 1.0 can be used with both Firefox and Internet Explorer - but Brad says Firefox is faster and preferred.
HyperScope includes 'old school' features like indirect links and transclusions of remote pieces of other documents. But Brad completely built it with open source JavaScript toolkit Dojo - meaning that everything is done on the client-side with Ajax and DHTML. He says it's a great show-case application for Dojo. It also uses OPML as its base file format (Dave Winer will be pleased!). HyperScope is open source and available under the GPL.
To celebrate, the HyperScope team is having a release party this Tuesday at SRI, the birthplace of Engelbart's work. Doug will be there, as will many of the original members of the Augment programming team and the original Xerox PARC team. RSVP here. It's times like these I wish I was in Silicon Valley, but if you're in the neighborhood then it should be a great event.
As well as
being reigning world football champions, Italy has a number of world class web apps. Yes,
Italy is the 10th country to be profiled in Read/WriteWeb's Top International Web Apps
series. The others so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China and Turkey. For this
post I have Luca Conti to thank. Luca runs Pandemia, one of the most read and authoritative blogs in Italy - in which he writes about
Internet technology and media.
Luca started off by saying that Italy "is not a very healthy environment for internet start-ups and venture capital." He said that Internet adoption, especially broadband, is not at a high level. Italy has nearly 7 million broadband connections, but half of those are 'pay as you go'. The Internet population is under 20 million people (out of a total population of 57 million).
From 2Spaghi, a site in which people rate and
review restaurants in Italy - see below
The
major television networks Rai public service and Mediaset - the latter owned by Silvio
Berlusconi, ex-Prime Minister and the richest man in Italy - have the biggest advertising
market share. Internet advertising by contrast is only 3.4%. What's more, the biggest
media groups aren't spending a lot of money on the Internet - even the newspapers. The
big Internet properties are Dada, an internet media company that was acquired by RCS
Mediagroup (owner one of Italy's top daily newspapers, Corriere della Sera) and the
telecom companies like Telecom Italia (Alice), Wind (Libero) and Tiscali.
La 7 (another tv network) and MTV Italy are properties of Telecom Italia, which indicates how much control big media and telecom companies have in Italy.
In this big media environment and with low Internet investments, Italy has inevitably gotten some Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube etc clones - but this is like most of the other International markets we've profiled so far on Read/WriteWeb.
Merzia srl has developed Segnalo (a del.icio.us clone) and OKNOtizie (a Digg clone). They recently made a co-marketing deal with Alice (Telecom Italia), to be linked inside its portal - one of the most visited portals in Italy.
Read/WriteWeb is growing. Last month was a record month in traffic, by a long shot. And after over 4 years of blogging, last month was also the first month I've managed to earn enough from R/WW to 'pay' for the time I spend writing and editing it. So R/WW is now a professional publication in that sense, although I prefer to think it always has been in terms of how much work has gone into it! :-) My commitment going forward is to build R/WW into the resource for Next Generation Web Technology analysis and news.
I have two groups of people I want to provide a shout-out to. Thank you Read/WriteWeb's initial sponsors (in order of arrival here):
Thanks also to FM Publishing, who have been a great help. It's important to note that all of these sponsors allow me to devote more time to R/WW, which means I can continue to grow the site and provide even more quality content.
Also a huge thanks to the guest contributers R/WW has had over the past few months, who have all helped to make R/WW what it is today. While I don't (yet?) earn anywhere enough to pay them for their troubles, it's my aim to make sure it's a win-win for them in terms of exposure. So thank you Alex Iskold, Ebrahim Ezzy, Steve O'Hear, Ken Yarmosh, Ryan Stewart, Ajit Jaokar - who have all at some stage or another this year contributed to Read/WriteWeb.
With the messy demise of PubSub, I've been looking for a decent keyword and topic subscription service to replace it. ZapTXT could very well meet my requirements, except for the odd fact that it doesn't output in RSS (more on that below). You can currently only receive alerts as an email, IM or SMS.
Other than being sans RSS, ZapTXT's latest release does offer a range of good features. You can now create a monitoring task across multiple feeds or URLs for specific keywords - they call this "task monitoring", as opposed to per feed monitoring. It also enables you to refine your feedset for any given keyword search, there's a Zap It! bookmarklet for your browser, a publisher 'chicklet' to allow bloggers to let their users receive notifications on interesting topics, nice OPML import/export options, a tag based system around feeds, and more powerful search (for example create a ZapTask using your trusted feeds with Apple, Cisco, Microsoft AND upgrade, downgrade, merger as keywords. You'll get an alert every time any of these companies make the headlines for an upgrade, downgrade or merger).
I asked ZapTXT's Sameer Patel where is the RSS feed output option? He told me "we're in testing at the moment on that so [it] shouldn't be too long."
All in all, I really like ZapTXT's ability to set up keyword searches and modify the 'tasks' in a number of ways. It really needs to output in RSS though, because that's the lingua franca of information management. In terms of the competition, with PubSub's demise the leaders in this space are now Technorati and Feedster. I also really like Topix, which does other things besides topic searches. Others I'm keeping my eye on include FeedRinse (nb: I've been an advisor to them in the recent past), Bloglines/Ask, Google Blog Search, Findory - and all the ones I mentioned in my post from February 2005 How To Subscribe To Topic Or Tag RSS feeds.
There are a plethora of bookmarking
sites out there and only a few of them have become very successful - del.icio.us and
Stumbleupon are two that spring to mind. Trailfire is a bit different from your average
bookmarking site, because they don't just allow you to share bookmarks - they make it
easy for you to share 'trails', which are "annotated navigation paths".
Trailfire is a free service and is described as a way to let bloggers place multimedia rich comments on any Web page and automatically link related Web pages to form a trail, or navigation path. The product is a download plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Interestingly, they claim it is "more complementary than competitive" with social bookmarking sites. They reckon that a ‘trail’ is a topic and Trailfire does not support tagging - whereas social bookmarking sites are used to categorize web pages with tags, but do not support trails/topic mapping.
If this concept sounds familiar, it's because Internet pioneer Vannevar Bush used the term "trails" in his influential essay from 1945 called As We May Think. That essay described a conceptual product called the Memex, which would enable a user to build a navigation trail of links and annotations. This idea of course eventually led to hypertext, which led to the Web. Here's an example from Bush's 1945 essay, about someone searching for information on bow and arrows in the Memex:
"...Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him."
So when I received an email about Trailfire that described it as "built around the notion of an annotated navigation path" - well, I just had to find out more! I asked Trailfire founder John O'Halloran if Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson were the inspiration behind his product. He said yes they were - and that the idea behind Trailfire is "to enable the average user to create their own web."
Trailfire CTO Pat Ferrel followed up with more information:
"Yes, Vannevar Bush is an inspiration. Our hope is to make something that lets people put their slant on the web. There are others out there making it possible for you to annotate a page but that's only a small piece of what we are doing. The Web began as two inventions, HTML and URLs - an electronic format for pages and a way to link those pages together. Back then who could have imagined what would come of those two simple ideas? Trailfire is built on marks (as a way for users to put content on any page) and trails (a way to link them together). We even let users leave web applications in their marks."
He noted at the end of his message that "Vannevar would be happy I think."
I'm testing out Trailfire currently. Although I love the concept, the proof is in the product pudding. Currently I'm having trouble even loading the sidebar (a temp glitch I'm sure). And Trailfire will have the same issues that all the other 'social web' products are having - getting enough users to create network effects. Only when a decent number of people are using Trailfire will you be able to stumble across interesting 'trail's on the Web on a regular basis.
Also I should note that Trailfire does have some worthy competition in the annotation/social bookmarking space. Diigo got rave reviews in the comments of our recent Firefox addons post, plus apps like CoComment and GreaseMonkey have similar read/write functionality in browsers. To mention just a few...
So I like the concept and it is very read/write. Vannevar would approve, I think. But will it be used? That's the big question in 2006.
