As noted in our coverage of Ray Ozzie's MIX keynote this morning, Microsoft has released a number of significant upgrades to its Silverlight product. Silverlight is essentially a competitor to Adobe's Flash, in that enables developers to create interactive web apps. It's officially described as "a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web." Ryan Stewart's definition puts it in context of Microsoft's other dev platforms:
"You can build desktop applications with Windows Presentation Foundation, build web-only applications with ASP.NET AJAX and now the hybrid Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight."
The enhancements announced today for Silverlight include integration with .NET and support for dynamic languages - including Python and Ruby. Microsoft also announced new tool support for building Silverlight applications, with Expression Studio and the next edition of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas".
Tell us what you think of the new-look Silverlight in this week's poll, below.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to a blogger lunch with Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and General Manager of Client and Web Platform & Tools Scott Guthrie. The discussion was mostly developer focused, but right at the end I managed to get a question in about Microsoft's strategy for IE and live.com. I asked Ray what is Microsoft's vision for Live.com and more generally, their IE browser, given that Firefox, Maxthon and other browsers are on the road to becoming "information brokers" - which is the term used by Mozilla to describe the upcoming Firefox 3. The background to this question is that widgets, web services and RSS feeds are now key components of the Web ecosystem, so the browser has a lot of potential to broker all of these services (note: unfortunately I didn't ask the question as elegantly as I just wrote it!).
Ray's answer was that Microsoft is creating a platform for developers to build componentized things like widgets and other web services, but he wasn't able to elaborate on IE's future role in this growing ecosystem - because IE's development plans in that respect are still under wraps. He acknowledged that Firefox is becoming an information broker, saying that this is part of a continued trend in browsers where they are becoming more interactive and writeable. He noted that initially browsers were read-only, but browsers nowadays are able to be written to as well. He also discussed the general trend of componentization, which is basically what is happening with widgets and web services. He said that IE4 was a componentized browser, so this has been a trend for a while in browsers.
I'm
at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, courtesy of Microsoft New Zealand. Ray Ozzie
has just completed his keynote speech, in which he delivered a more refined
version of his 'integrated Web/Desktop' vision. He talked about how the best
solutions are "integrated solutions", meaning integrated Web, desktop
and mobile. He talked about RIAs and devices, and noted that in this era SAAS now
means "software *and* a service". He went on to say that web apps
today and tomorrow are complicated, fragmented. He also noted the richness of
all the possible delivery platforms in this era.
Next Ray Ozzie outlined two types of web apps - what he calls "Universal Web" apps, meaning ajax, html, browser based apps. Then he discussed "Experience First" apps - xbox, mobile, pc desktop apps. He pointed out that "the most sucessful solutions have an element each of universal web and experience first".
Ray said that a common design pattern has emerged for this new era of desktop/web/mobile apps - desktop for richness, browser for tagging and other collaboration/community features, mobile for location-specific information.
Ray said that this "brings together the best of the web, best of the desktop and best of the device - using the service as a hub". He also noted that to build these apps, developers and designers can use all kinds of platforms - some of them not Microsoft's. He may've been referring to Adobe Apollo, for example. (Incidentally, I visited Adobe's HQ last week and there is a post on that coming soon).
Next up, Ray Ozzie announced some major upgrades to the Silverlight product, which was first announced a couple of weeks ago. There are 3 main parts to Silverlight now, said Ozzie.
Two days after wowing Wall Street with earnings handily beating all estimates, Amazon held an
event wooing local (Seattle area) web developers and venture capital firms alike. Perhaps its just a coincidence
after adding US$7 billion in market capitalization the last two days, but money definitely seems to
be following Amazon's investment in Web Services (AWS). Madrona Venture Group, a VC firm in Seattle, helped sponsor the event, with a long list of VCs working the room.
Regardless of whether you use Amazon services, if you are a Web 2.0 company, it makes sense to keep these firms to keep in mind for funding. And if you are using Amazon web services and are looking for money, you might want prepare your elevator pitch and contact one of the below:
When the people at BlueGrind say they're in beta, they mean it. The website nearly doesn't work at all. Even the 'About' and 'Contact' pages don't yet exist, so this post is going to be full of a lot of speculation. That said, however, BlueGrind is too compelling for me to pass up.
BlueGrind is a text-to-speech technology provider. Their website, or what of it exists right now, talks a lot about "textcasting" and turning your text into a podcast. It is exciting to think that someday there might exist a website that could automatically turn your blog into a podcast for blind website visitors or simply for people to take your words with them on their iPods.
We have already discussed Yahoo! Travel and TripAdvisor from a Web 3.0 perspective. Continuing our look at the online travel industry we will evaluate Travelocity next.
Travelocity, launched in 1996, is an online travel agency, and is owned by Sabre Holdings. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Travelocity is ranked number two among the most-visited travel sites in the world with over 13 million visitors per month.
In general, most travel sites that have been around for a while offer a certain baseline set of functionality, that including Airline, Hotel, and Car Rental Bookings, as well as Vacation Packages, Cruises and Deals. I am looking at where these sites need to go in the Web 3.0 era.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to hear Chris DiBona, the Open Source Program Manager at Google, speak at a TiE Pittsburgh event. At the event, Chris provided an extremely insightful presentation on the state of the open source market. After the event, Chris and I exchanged emails and he agreed to do a interview for Read/WriteWeb.
Before joining Google, Chris was the editor of Slashdot. You can also read more of his thoughts on open source and life at Google on his personal blog and listen to his podcast with Leo Laporte, FLOSS Weekly.
I tried to cover three major themes in my questions to Chris:
I decided to provide the entire interview in this post rather than only highlight specific responses. Part of this is due to the fact that I found it all very interesting (even the questions where Chris wasn't able/willing to respond.) I do end the post with a few of my thoughts in the conclusion, but even more I'd love to leverage the Read/WriteWeb audience's collective intelligence - please leave your thoughts and observations in the comments below .
To-do lists should be simple, or so claims WorkHack, a task list web app that takes simple to a whole new level. There are very nearly no features to WorkHack. There is no sign up, no tagging, no due dates, no multi-user support. Just to-do lists, organized into three priority categories (High, Medium, and Low) and sorted by color or size.
Getting started with WorkHack is easy: just plug in the captcha text on the main page and go. Tasks are added by entering them into the large textbox on your to-do list page, and assigning a priority level. Tasks are marked by color (red for High, orange for Medium, and green for Low) or, if you turn on the option, by size (the bigger the task, the more urgent). When you are finished with a task, click "Done" and it disappears from view (though you can turn on an option to make WorkHack display completed tasks, and re-add them with a single click).
Adobe Systems announced last night that they will be open sourcing their Adobe Flex framework so developers can access their source code to enhance its ability to create Rich Internet applications. The Flex SDK and docs will be available through the Mozilla Public License. Adobe Flex, initially released in 2004 by Macromedia, and available since 2006 as a free SDK from Adobe, is a set of technologies to support the development of RIAs, web apps with the features and functionality that mimic traditional desktop applications.
By open sourcing the technology, Adobe is realizing the potential of embracing the developer community. By providing open tools they are helping to foster a developer environment that can result in the creation of cool features and functionality and further developer the framework to suit developer needs. Other open source projects from Adobe include the contribution of source code for ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation and the open source WebKit engine in the Apollo project.
Meshly is not really like Twitter; it is not really like del.icio.us; and it is not really like digg. But comparisons to all three are fair when trying to figure out just what exactly Meshly actually is. Like Twitter, Meshly is an instant blogging application, like del.icio.us it is about saving links, and it has a voting component that closely resembles digg.
The best way to describe Meshly is as an instant messenger based bookmarking tool. Using either MSN, AIM, or GTalk instant messengers, users post, tag, and describe links to Meshly. The entire sign up process is done via instant messenger, and is pretty painless. Once links are posted to the site, people vote on them digg-style so the best each day, week, and month are highlighted. Users can comment on the links via the site, or browse by tag like on del.icio.us.
