Written by Jitendra Gupta of Karmaweb and edited by Richard MacManus
Bill Gates of Microsoft just
announced a deal with Jan Rain, VeriSign and Sxip to develop integration between Microsoft CardSpace
and the open source project, OpenID. This is an
interesting deal between the software giant in Redmond and a popular open source project,
which deservers a closer look. For those already familiar with OpenID and Microsoft, jump
directly to the takeaway section. For others, the next two sections will provide you with
a quick introduction to two new technologies that will likely have a significant impact
on the future of Internet.
OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It is aimed at solving the problem of Web single sign-on. How does the problem of web single sign-on affect you? Well, if you struggle with keeping track of different usernames and passwords at different websites where you have an account, OpenID can help you. With OpenID you will be assigned a standard username (typically a URL or an i-name, similar to an email address) that you can use on all sites that support OpenID.
- The Mozilla Manifesto; rather generic new manifesto. It reminds us of an old Jeff Bezos quote... when someone asked him 'What do u think about Google's moto - don't be evil?' Bezos is said to have replied: 'I assumed this was obvious'. We couldn't track down the exact quote, so please leave a comment if you have a link!
- Offline Zimbra with Firefox; kiwi Chris Double has been testing offline support for Zimbra in Firefox, as a proof of concept of new Firefox offline capabilities (which we noted earlier this week).
- Yahoo Messenger integrates with Y! Mail; originally previewed in November, the IM/mail integration is being rolled out to all Yahoo! Mail beta users over the next few months. The feature allows users to see their friends’ status and avatars, as well as exchange instant messages in within their browser inbox. Nicely done and is better integrated than Google Talk is with Gmail.
- 2008: The Year of President 2.0?; "At this early stage the techniques deployed by wannabe presidents amount to a start-up bakeoff. What politico can use the Web best to get eyeballs, money and momentum?" Hmmm, sounds like blogging these days!
- Social Networking Sites Opening Their APIs; most telling comment: "MySpace declined to comment." But Facebook, orkut, Friendster, and my old employer Marc Canter's PeopleAggregator, are all working to open up their social networking platforms.
- New Web safety institute unveiled; the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) aims to promote kids safety on the Web.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. In this post Alex tests out and explores the emergent world of Yahoo! Pipes. He sees some interesting parallels with Relational Databases in the 90's, concluding that with pipes, the Web essentially becomes a giant database that can be queried and remixed in any number of ways.
One of the central concepts
in Complex Systems is
Emergence. It is this automagical process through which elements of a
system give rise to a higher order system. Emergence is how physics becomes chemistry and
chemistry becomes biology. It is how web 1.0 evolved into web 2.0, and how that, in turn,
will become the next web.
While the exact mechanics of emergence is complicated and far from being completely understood, scientists know that a new system emerges as a combination of its elements and their interactions. In other words, complex systems are really networks - where elements interact with each other and give rise to a new system.
Perhaps today we are witnessing one of the most vivid examples of emergence - the remixing of the world wide web. The parts of the new web have crystallized - blogs, photos, video, audio, maps, RSS, social network profiles and even plain old HTML pages have formed an impressive network, that now can be mined and remixed. Mashups are really nothing new, the web has been a programmable oyster for at least a few years now.
What is new though is the recent systematic thinking about the web as a database. A few companies, including Dapper, have been working on the problem. But with the recent launch of Yahoo! pipes, we are beginning to see the real power of remixing.
Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet has
done an excellent
analysis of Microsoft's Windows Live brand. Her conclusions are quite damning of
Microsoft's marketing department:
"Problem No. 1: Live isn't a consistently applied term: Sometimes it refers to services (like Windows Live Messenger), sometimes to desktop applications (a k a Windows Live Search Preview), and sometimes to "destinations" (such as Windows Live Gallery).
Then, there's the whole branding/rebranding
messchallenge. As quickly as Microsoft fields a new Live beta, it renames it. Is it MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Mail or Windows Live Hotmail? Windows Search 4, Windows Live Search Center, OneView or Windows Live Search Preview? (Yep, those are all codenames for one thing.) There also are the ungainly names, such as "Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile."(I'm not even going to touch on the fact that the term "Live" is being applied inconsistently across Microsoft product groups. Xbox Live, Office Live, Dynamics CRM Live and Windows Live have next-to-nothing in common. Why is that?)"
Also see the LiveSide blog for a comprehensive list of Windows Live services.
What's really confusing me, is why hasn't Microsoft fixed this yet? I wrote about the brand confusion over Windows Live over a year ago. At the time the theory was that Live = services; MSN = content. But there are too many overlaps between services and content in this Web era for that to be convincing. So what is the situation one year later....
The oddly-named 1dawg is the latest of hundreds of
hopefuls to ride the online video wave. 1dawg's differentiating factor is that it
provides a free video conversion service to a variety of mobile devices. It's a seemingly
minor thing to do, but in the current era mobile devices often use incompatible media
formats - and so this really does scratch a decent itch for consumers. As 1dawg's Adam
Fichman explained in an email sent round to media folks:
"Each portable media device, like an iPod or PSP, accepts a very limited number of file extensions, if even more than just one [...] What our company does is provide the means for a video in an incompatible format to be available for whatever media device the user wants to transfer it to."
The devices supported currently include video iPod, Sony Playstation Portable, Creative Zen, Zune, Video Cell Phone and a basic Windows/Mac/Linux compatible file format. A few of those use MPEG-4, so mobile devices are not quite as incompatible as it first appears.
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus
There are now so many companies vying to be the next YouTube, it's easy to lose track of them all. So let's take a look at the entire online video industry and categorize the major players. Our thanks to Ali Dagli of Savvian, for providing us a lot of the useful data listed here.
In this post we've summarized the latest video industry innovations under the following categories:
Video sharing - and particularly YouTube - have been the poster boys of the online video industry so far. Video sharing sites allow you to upload your videos and share them with others. But even if you are not a content producer, you can watch others movies. So this is a very consumer-oriented industry that has been popularized via blog-based viral marketing.
This week's poll relates to a somewhat controversial NY Times article over the weekend, which suggested that Silicon Valley is more likely to create innovative and successful tech products than elsewhere in the world. Obviously Silicon Valley has a lot going for it - it's a hub for smart Web technologists, it's swimming in VC money right now, the universities there provide a steady supply of talent, and of course the history and 'myth' of Silicon Valley is well known. So yes, the chances for success are higher for a web startup living in Silicon Valley. But does that make Silicon Valley startups inherently more innovative? This article says yes, and what's more claims that "where you live often trumps who you are."
Om Malik has already written a good response, pointing out that Skype was a Nordic creation. And he links to a piece by Vinnie Mirchandani, who rightly says that "the Valley trails other global centers when it comes to many "next-gen" areas", such as mobile and enterprise software.
Like Vinnie, I think the real value of Silicon Valley is in commercializing innovation. Indeed this is something I mentioned recently in an interview I did with a New Zealand newspaper - I said that kiwis are known for their innovation and so there's no reason innovative web startups can't be created here. But I noted that to succeed on a large global scale, kiwis will probably need to take the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley. And it's not just for the VC money - the networking is just as important.
So to this week's poll, do you think Web innovation is dependent on location?
Later
today Mozilla is launching an upgrade to its Add-Ons website. Add-ons are extensions to the Firefox
browser and Mozilla is aiming to make them more accessible to mainstream users with this
upgrade. Last week I spoke with Mike Shaver, Mozilla's Director of Ecosystem Development and "add-ons
guru", about the new add-ons upgrade and also Mozilla's plans for the future in regards
to add-ons.
Mike told me there are 3 main focuses for the upgrade:
1) Localization - they have 8 7 localized communities at launch, with a couple
more on the way. The current languages supported are: Chinese, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish. Update: Turkish now won't be supported in the initial release.
2) Improved search and categorization - also Ajax previews for add-ons.
3) Perhaps most significant, Mozilla is enhancing the community aspects of the site - enabling users to review and "self-select" add-ons. Essentially this effects how new adds-ons join the site. Previously selection decisions were made by a small approval community, but the new site features a "sandbox" so that general users can select, review and rate add-ons. The more popular an add-on is with the community, the more coverage it gets on the site. The flip-side to this is that less add-ons will get onto the site, because only the most popular ones will make it. A full list of add-ons will still be available, but on Mozilla's developer community page. Note that this "self-select" process also enables the site to scale better (add-ons are showing a lot of growth currently).
Another benefit of the increased community participation is that it increases the testing process for add-ons - providing code review, feature testing, usability feedback for add-on developers.
- Microsoft Announces Three New Windows Live Products for Mobile Devices; along with the official release of Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft has announced 3 new Live products - Live Search for Windows Mobile, Live Search for Java, and Windows Live for Windows Mobile (a portal-type offering for mobile including e-mail, instant messaging, search and Live Spaces). Microsoft also announced Microsoft PlayReady, a technology that "powers next-generation media experiences on mobile networks". Related: Danny Sullivan's tale of usability woes for both MS and Goog mobile offerings.
- Yahoo! Go for Mobile Goes Gamma; Yahoo also announced new mobile offerings at 3GSM in Barcelona, featuring direct search from maps, sharing oneSearch results and news articles, increased device support, and display ads from major global advertisers in 19 countries. The mobile ad part of this news is probably the most significant, because it's an area Google hasn't mastered yet. Also announced was a partnership with LG. This news follows on from the initial Yahoo Go for Mobile announcements at CES last month. Also see our coverage of Yahoo Go when it was first announced a year ago.
- Nokia unveils new mobile internet video experience; sticking with the Mobile Web theme, Nokia has announced a "cooperation" with YouTube (read: Google too), in which YouTube videos will be available on Nokia Nseries "multimedia computers" (aka phones). As Engadget pointed out, this nicely routes around carriers like Vodafone! In other Nokia news, they also released a "second wave" of Nokia Eseries business devices at 3GSM.
- MySpace offers filtering software ahead of YouTube; MySpace has licensed audio fingerprinting technology developed by Audible Magic, to track unauthorized audio content. As Steve O'Hear notes, this is the kind of thing that YouTube/Google should be doing - and with Google's tech chops, there's really no excuse for it not to. Marshall Kirkpatrick has more background info.
An interesting tidbit came
out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn't able to attend).
Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine
of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about
how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because
you'll be able to use your web apps - like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google
Calendar, etc - in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google
web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google's hands.
Although Mozilla is an open source organization, some of its top workers are employed by Google. So it's a very cozy relationship. We've discussed before how Firefox 3 as information broker suits Google very nicely, because the Mountain View company has a number of best of breed web apps - and if it's not building them, it's acquiring them (YouTube, JotSpot, Writely, etc).
