The
Yahoo Mail news is coming thick and fast this week. Yesterday they announced
that Yahoo Mail now has free unlimited email storage space, and today Yahoo has
announced an API for Yahoo Mail.
Earlier today I spoke with Chad Dickerson, Head of Yahoo! Developer Network, and
John Kremer, VP Yahoo! Mail, to find out more.
The Yahoo! Mail Web Service is, in technical terms, a SOAP web service that allows developers to connect to and utilize the Yahoo Mail platform and data. It was previewed to Yahoo! Hack Day attendees last September. There are restrictions on its use. But basically for premium Yahoo Mail users, the API allows access to perform typical mailbox tasks such as list messages and folders, compose and send messages. For free users, developers can build mail preview tools with limited Web Service functionality.
The high level nutshell is that third party developers can, using the the API, build mail tools or applications on the same platform that Yahoo uses to serve 249 million Yahoo! Mail users. Which opens up the potential for a huge user base, if you manage to create a popular mashup using the mail API.
Well, it's that time again! Time for the monthly update of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines.
Before we get into it, allow me to back up just a bit. First of all, the "Alternative" in the title refers to "alternatives to Google." That is, one criteria for making it onto the list is to exhibit superiority to Google in one particular feature. For example, TheFind.com is better than Google's Froogle, in my opinion. And that brings me to my second point: the ultimate criteria for inclusion is not empirical, it is subjective. I liken myself to a movie critic - here are 100 movies/search engines that I think you should see. If you go to one and are disappointed, that's okay.
The Top 100 List first appeared in Read/WriteWeb in January 2007. A month later, the Top 100 list was updated - at that point 32 search engines were dropped from the List and 32 new ones debuted. In February we also introduced a 'Search Engine of the Month', a new regular feature (no reading ahead!) of the List. In February I chose GoshMe for this honor. The feedback we received was that categories would be useful, and so this month Categories (I call them "Scattergories" after the old board game of the same name) have been added to the Names and URLs in the attached spreadsheet.
This is a point/counterpoint argument, with John Milan taking the position that online desktop apps are better, while Richard MacManus argues for offline web apps. Let us know what you think, in the comments.
John Milan: ReadWriteWeb is currently running a poll asking which web apps should also work offline. Shouldn't we be asking the equally valid corollary as well: which desktop applications would you like to see work online?
Fundamentally, what is the difference between a web app that works offline and a desktop app that works online? Could it be that the web and desktop application communities have accidentally merged and are violently agreeing what the next version of productivity applications will look like? Or are there still intrinsic differences between web and desktop, regardless of how well they work offline or on?
The obvious differentiators are the Web's simple delivery and the desktop's rich UI experience. Online/Offline has been the elephant in the room and Zimbra's announcement means that the elephant has finally been recognized. In fact, while they framed it as a web app that works offline, a more accurate portrayal is a basic desktop app that works very well online - an acknowledgement that this architecture is better able to meet users needs. For example, by introducing a desktop component, Zimbra will now be able to attach more than 1 email at a time to an 'online' email message.
Alex Iskold is reporting live from ETech 2007
The
Apollo team from Adobe is here at ETech, presenting the Alpha version of their new
runtime environment - which is aimed at empowering web developers to create desktop applications.
Apollo is a lightweight virtual machine that runs on the desktop and acts as an interpreter
of HTML, JavaScript and Flash - much like the browser does today. The difference is that applications
that run on Apollo can work in an offline mode, while you are not connected to the internet.
The browser can't yet do this, however Firefox
3 is slated to have offline functionality and IE surely won't be far behind.
Adobe has rolled out this solution for a few reasons. Firstly, so that users can access web applications for both reading and writing in an offline mode. For example, accessing a Google map to find directions to your friend's house while you are in the car; or reading The New York Times on a plane. The 'reading' part works simply by caching the data locally. Examples of useful applications for writing data would be editing your Basecamp to-do's, or editing Google online docs while vacationing in the high mountains.
I
wrote a piece back in January called IBM’s
Entry Into Social Networking, where I discussed the potential for applying
web 2.0 techniques in the enterprise. Subsequently, I have written extensively
about Enterprise 3.0 and the
Extended Enterprise trends. A company from England contacted me after
reading the IBM piece. This company, Trampoline
Systems, is the subject of our discussion today. Its tagline is
"Enterprise software that harnesses social behavior". The value
proposition is Expertise Location within the enterprise, which
encompasses relationships in the Extended Enterprise. I find the product a great
combination of NLP (Natural language processing), Knowledge Management, and Web
2.0.
Editor's Note: the rest of this post takes an in-depth look at Trampoline's features. Some of the information below is very technical, particularly the terminology. But it's a great introduction to the product, if you are interested in Enterprise software that uses web 2.0 principles. Incidentally, they are also presenting at ETech today.
Alex Iskold is reporting live from ETech 2007
Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon.com, took
the ETech stage to discuss the challenges in building a large-scale, reliable web infrastructure.
Amazon spent a decade and a whopping $2 billion dollars to build the world class technology that powers their web sites.
Today Amazon makes available their own infrastructure to the anyone, via Amazon Web
Services. We have extensively analyzed
Amazon Web Services, as well as companies that are already
leveraging
it in their businesses.
Why build on Amazon Web Services? Vogels said because there are compelling business and technical advantages:
"Server Error
We're sorry, but Gmail is temporarily unavailable. We're currently working to fix the problem -- please try logging in to your account in a few minutes."
And 1 hour later...
"Server Error
We're sorry, but Gmail is temporarily unavailable. We're currently working to fix the problem -- please try logging in to your account in a few minutes."
The worst thing is, I am so dependent on Gmail that I can't get most of the work on my checklist done until it comes back online.
Jeff
Hawkins made a name for himself in the tech industry as the founder of Palm Computing and inventor of the Palm Pilot. He later founded Handspring, where he invented the Treo. If you were a fan of his work then, you are going to love what Jeff is
up to now. He is currently pursuing his life-long passions, neuroscience and
intelligence. His latest work made quite a splash a few years ago when he published On
Intelligence. In this thin volume Jeff Hawkins elegantly summarized his
theory of how the brain gave rise to intelligence. Disputing conventional
wisdom
that the brain is complex, or that intelligence is inseparable from other human
qualities such as emotions, Jeff put forward a proof that human intelligence
is a function of the neocortex and that it is temporal in nature.
To prove his theory, Jeff founded Numenta - a company dedicated to developing algorithms and software based on the ideas put forward in the book. This spring Numenta released its first product, an experimental software aimed at researchers and advanced developers which embodies the algorithms and techniques pioneered by Jeff and his crew. Numenta is presenting here at ETech today and so it's a great opportunity to familiarize you with these exciting new developments. Has the age of Artificial Intelligence arrived? Is it what we thought it would be? Read on to find out.
Later
today Web previews product Snap is launching 8
new localized versions of their Snap Preview Anywhere
product. They will support 9 languages in all:
But whatever the language, it's up to end users the world over to decide if web previews are useful or an annoyance. Back in January Alex Iskold looked at several Web previews products, including Snap, Browster, Cooliris. Also in February I reviewed iReader, a browser extension that lets you preview the content of a link before you click on it. The general verdict for all these products was that they are potentially useful, but more often than not the implementation was an annoyance for the reader.
Since that time, Snap has released a number of upgrades to their Web previews product - specifically aimed at addressing those usability issues. Snap Preview Anywhere added a bubble icon, css themes, better and more granular control of the hover trigger, and a larger image size option. Also there is now an option to have just the icon as the preview trigger, which seems like an elegant way to let readers know that it's something in addition to a normal hyperlink - which they will soon realize is a web preview. This gets around the potential issue of people hovering their mouse cursor over links and getting unexpected preview pop-ups.
Microsoft
today announced the launch of ZenZui, an
independent Mobile Web company. ZenZui offers a patented (by Microsoft)
"Zooming User Interface" for mobile phones. The technology was
initially developed by the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, then acquired by
ZenZui - who also got venture capital funding from Microsoft IP Ventures to help
launch its company.
ZenZui‚Äôs core feature is its 'zooming' interface, which gave rise to its current marketing slogan: "Stop Surfing. Start Zooming." In technical terms, ZenZui is said to have "a high-frame rate zooming user interface [which] employs up to 36 individual ‚Äútiles‚Ä? that are selected and customized by users". On the ZenZui website, they further explain how to use this zooming interface:
"Using a single thumb, you fly in and out of your Zoomspace – two simple taps get you directly to any Tile. Through some clever engineering, we constantly refresh your Tiles in the background, so they’re always fresh, available, and ready to be Zoomed."
