freenigma is a Firefox plug-in that offers e-mail
encryption to a whole range of Web email systems - including Gmail, Yahoo!Mail and
Hotmail/MSN. It is a product of Germany-based freiheit.com. freenigma came out of public
beta at the end of September and is now open to all - but you still have to enter your
name and email address to receive "an invitation" (which sounds quite 'beta' to me).
Interestingly, freenigma has also just announced a Professional Edition for corporate
customers as well as a Microsoft Outlook plug-in - both to be released by the end of the
year. So looks like they're expanding beyond just web email and into the enterprise
space.
It is a compelling product, as privacy and security are among the two biggest concerns related to using the Web as a platform. Although I am an avid user of Gmail, I wonder sometimes about sending private information across the ether on a web-based email service. I'm sure they're the usual slightly paranoid concerns of every single Web user, but a product like freenigma is positioned well to take advantage of those common concerns for privacy. See also my recent post on Web 2.0 security issues, from a report by Finjan.
Written by Bjorn Fant and edited by Richard MacManus
Sweden is
a nation determined to be an international competitor in the IT arena. IT budgets in the
private and public sector add up to 5% of Sweden's total National Growth Product; IT and
entrepreneurship are a huge part of the cultural agenda; and Swedish success stories like
Skype and The
Pirate Bay get a lot of attention in international media and on blogs. Despite all of
this, there are relatively few Swedish Web 2.0 apps that stand out from the crowd.
A point of interest for all of non-swedes is that Swedish web apps generally use two domain extensions. The .se extension is the most common and used by serious enterprises. The .nu means “now” in Swedish and is used in various concept sites and hip companies. The extension was purchased from the small island kingdom of Nieu in the Pacific ocean.
Disclaimer: I am testing out Trailfire as part of a consulting agreement. Full details below.
At the
beginning of September I posted
about Trailfire, a unique social bookmarking
service that reminded me at the time of Vannevar Bush's 1945 pre-hypertext
concept The Memex. Essentially what Trailfire does is enable you to place annotations on
any web page and link related web pages to form a trail, or navigation path.
About a month after my initial post, the Trailfire team contacted me with a consulting proposal to try out a custom trail mark on my blog - one designed specifically for Read/WriteWeb. The idea was that this would enable me to provide branded navigation trails on my blog. I thought this sounded like a nice 'value add' feature, that readers might find interesting. Also trails / hypertextual navigation is a concept that I am very interested in experimenting with - so I agreed. But to be perfectly clear and transparent, I am being paid my regular consulting fee to try out Trailfire and report back to them.
As part of the experiment I will be using Trailfire on this blog, to provide related information via trails. Basically this is a totally optional feature for you, the reader. If you don't download the Trailfire product, then you will notice absolutely no difference to Read/WriteWeb. Of course if you do download Trailfire to follow my "trails", then I hope you will discover more relevant content - and what's more, contribute your own trails if you feel so inclined. Look for the little red pin (see screenshot below) - every time you see it roll your mouse over it to view the note.
This past week we had some excellent posts and discussions on Read/WriteWeb. In fact I was literally exhausted by the end of the week and it's taken me a couple of days to recover from all the goings on :-) It's Monday morning where I am, but before we head full throttle into the new week - let's review the past 7 days...
The two main browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer, are both releasing major upgrades very soon. Firefox 2.0 is due to go live this coming Tuesday afternoon and IE7 is not far away from go-live also. Both browsers have near-final versions available for download currently, so there's been no shortage of discussions about their relative merits. Read/WriteWeb's browser expert Alex Iskold reviewed both FF2 and IE7 this week.
In our Firefox 2.0 Review, Alex noted that it is "a solid release" - but wondered if it will be enough to gain significant market share on IE. Check out the extensive comments for discussion on this. See also How Firefox 2.0 Will Be Marketed, in which I responded to Chris Messina's excellent post about the challenges of marketing Firefox to the masses. Included in the post is an excerpt of an interview I did with Chris Beard, Mozilla's vice president of products. The rest of that interview will be published early this week.
I recently signed up to MyBlogLog, which is a kind of instant social
networking system for bloggers. It enables you to set up a community around your blog and
- optionally - add statistics. More details of MyBlogLog can be found
at Techcrunch and A
VC.
I've added a 'Recent Readers' widget to R/WW (see sidebar) and I encourage you to add yourself to the Read/WriteWeb community - click here for more details. Let me know in the comments to this post what you think of the idea. Over the past couple of months there have been many active and enjoyable discussions on R/WW, so it'd be great to extend that community a little more using MyBlogLog. Let's see how it goes anyway.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. Disclaimer: Alex's company AdaptiveBlue has a product called The blueorganizer, which is a Firefox extension.
It is ironic, but the laws of
physics apply to technology. Since Internet Explorer won the browser battle 10 years ago,
it had little incentive to change. So obeying Newton's law of inertia, Internet Explorer
did not bother to innovate. But they got a kick 2 years ago when Mozilla launched a
browser that threatens to dethrone IE. After about five years of silence, Internet
Explorer 7 has made its long awaited debut.
With the bar raised high and the crowd cheering for Firefox, the IE team came out with a solid product. It is not fantastic and does not have a lot of new things that we have not seen before. But it is a good effort and a worthy response to Firefox. In this post, we look at the IE7 feature set and talk about both the good and bad of this market-leading browser.
The first thing that stands out in the new Internet Explorer is its completely redesigned navigation bar. Besides the URL entry box, everything else is new and it is an interesting design.
The major theme here is to have buttons as short cuts and pulldowns for more detail. For example, the History button is accessible as a pulldown right next to the Back and Forward buttons. The Home button does the usual, but the pulldown next to it allows the user to add more Home pages as well as perform additional customizations. The Print and Tools menus also have detail pulldowns that have a lot of options. This redesign makes sense, as it establishes groupings and also allows the user to quickly switch between using the function and customizing it.
This post may
ring a bell for all the non-Silicon Valley readers. Firstly an admission: I hardly ever
write about my home country, New Zealand. The reason for that is mostly down to
demographics: just 1% of Read/WriteWeb's page views come from my own country. The US, UK
and Canada are where the bulk of R/WW's readers come from - but I'm also pleased with the
growth in readers from Europe, Asia and other parts of the world.
So 1% would indicate that NZers are just a tiny slice of the R/WW target audience - and that's true. But recently I've noticed an increase in web 2.0 excitement in New Zealand. And I think people from other countries may have a similar feeling - that this current era of the Web is creating opportunities and innovation far outside Silicon Valley (even though the Valley still is the spiritual and monetary home of the Web).
This week I
spoke to Chris Beard, Mozilla's vice president of products. Among other things we
discussed how Firefox
2.0 is going to be marketed. I was going to save this for the full write-up of my
interview with Chris Beard, but reading
Chris Messina's post today about IE7 made me want to address it now. Chris Messina,
an ex-Flock architect, wrote:
"So here we are now, on the precipice looking out on the mere beginnings of Web 2.0. With Internet Explorer caught up and inching ahead, there is a critical question for Firefox advocates: do we stay the course and continue promoting Firefox as a product competing with Internet Explorer? Or, do we focus on the wider, more gradual fight to spread and improve open source principles and practices — in effect, to “win the hearts and minds” of those who employ us by day but leave us hacking at night, struggling to make a decent living at it should we choose to pursue it as our primary occupation? Personally, I prefer to chase the latter… for, after all, what really comes next, well, shall be determined by our combined intentions being realized."
Note that the 'competing' line was linked to Read/WriteWeb's review of Firefox 2.0, in which we positioned FF2 as a product that may take market share from Microsoft's IE. I really enjoyed this post from Chris Messina, although I'm surprised he brought up the web 2.0 meme (does he really want to go there again? I know I don't). His core point though is that Firefox should promote itself as an Open Source super hero in Web 2.0 City, fighting off its evil nemesis Dr Proprietary (I'm paraphrasing). This sounds great, but it doesn't seem fully rooted in the real world.
Disclaimer: SocialText is a competitor of Atlassian, one of our sponsors.
This week I spoke to Ross Mayfield, CEO of wiki company SocialText, about "Enterprise 2.0". To put it very
crudely, Enterprise 2.0 means blogs and wikis in the enterprise. According to Ross and
others, Enterprise 2.0 is slightly different to the "Office 2.0" or Web Office meme also
doing the rounds. In our discussion Ross defined Enterprise 2.0 as "free form social
software adapted for enterprises". Rod Boothby says it means "Emergence
Software", while M.R. Rangaswami of Sand Hill Group wrote an in-depth article to try
and explain the concept.
I have to admit I'm less concerned with how the term is defined (or even what term we use), than where the market for web-based software is heading and what products are out there right now. So let's get to the nitty gritty...
Written by Guest Blogger Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus.
Personalized Content is one of the two most popular approaches in next generation news sites - the other is Power of Masses, which we will cover in a future post. The leading examples of these approaches are reddit for Personalized Content and digg for Power of Masses. In this article, we will cover the personalized content approach and in particular reddit. We will describe the technical details and compare existing personalized content solutions.
First a brief technical explanation: the Personalized Content approach uses a very similar technique to spam detection software. The idea is that everyone has their own pattern of reading. To recognize your pattern, Personalized Content services omit stopwords and extract keywords from the news you read - then use Bayesian Statistical analysis to predict what kind of news you will like or dislike in future.
