Interesting posts recently from two people who have an important role in defining the future of the browser. Firstly, I missed it while I was in transit in the US, but Mozilla developer Alex Faaborg posted the slides of his presentation at the recent Web 2.0 Expo. They are fascinating and show clearly where Mozilla is headed with Firefox 3. The slide below is Alex's representation of the evolution so far: from the browser as book (finding information) in the 90's, to browser as radio in 2005 (subscribe to info), to a vision of the browser as switchboard in 2008 (move information around).
Alex noted in his presentation that at each stage the Web browser has been trying to keep up with the evolution of the Web - e.g. the somewhat messy transition to subscribing to RSS feeds (remember the page full of XML code you used to be confronted with every time you clicked an RSS button, or worse, clicked on a button labeled "XML"). Alex says the same thing is happening now for other types of structured data - and he gave the common example of calendaring information, which varies across Outlook, Apple iCal, Google and other formats. According to Alex, microformats are the answer to this issue - but which ones will Firefox natively support? Alex outlined 3 fundamental types: identity (hCard), geo (geo, adr), and calendar (hCalendar).
Disclosure: the writer of this article, Emre Sokullu, joined Hakia as a Search Evangelist in March 2007. The following article in no way represents Hakia's views - it is Emre's personal opinions only.
Google is like a young mammoth, already very strong but still growing. Healthy quarter results and rising expectations in the online advertising space are the biggest factors for Google to keep its pace in NASDAQ. But now let's think outside the square and try to figure out a Google killer scenario. You may know that I am obsessed with open source (e.g. my projects openhuman and simplekde), so my proposition will be open source based - and I'll call it Google@Home.
First let me define what my concept of Google@Home is. Briefly, Google@Home is an open source, distributed clone of Google. We already have many open source search engine projects - Apache Lucene (which is composed of Nutch and Hadoop distributed file system sub-projects) being the most credible one. So this Google@Home concept can be based on one of those open source search engines. Of course it will have a long way to go before reaching Google's utility and reach. But more importantly, Google@Home will be a distributed, decentralized system. What this means is that our desktop computers' idle time will become a part of this new search engine's computational power. In effect this allows it to compete with Google's beefy data centers. This is not a new concept either, SETI@Home and Folding@Home are 2 well known scientific projects that use the same grid computing idea in their cores. Indeed Google itself is the biggest supporter of Stanford University based Folding@Home, by dedicating the resources of their toolbars to this project.
The web has seen an explosion in the use of widgets over the past year or so. So let's explore what a widget is and its uses. Note that in this post, we're discussing Web-based widgets only, rather than desktop widgets such as those provided by Yahoo Widgets or Microsoft's Vista widgets.
A Web widget can be best described as a mini application that can add functionality to your web page, blog, social profile etc. If you find a widget that you like, you simply copy and paste some code and add it to the HTML of your web page. Photo galleries, news, videos, advertising, mp3 players and pregnancy countdown tickers! You name it, there is probably a widget that does it.
There have been a lot of very successful widgets to date. Here is a sample:
MyBlogLog is a widget that allows you to see other bloggers on the MyBlogLog network, as they visit your site. You can see it in action on the right hand side of this post. It has been a huge success for its creators and was acquired by Yahoo for a rumored $12 million in January.
In this post we examine how much textual information we consume in a typical day, focusing in particular on blogs, news, email, IMs, Twitter. In a follow-up post, we will explore visual information consumption.
At a high level, information is a fascinating concept. Each year we learn more and more profound facts about the seemingly simple patterns of zeros and ones that make up our daily lives. Indeed according to recent discoveries in Physics, we are made of information. Seth Lloyd, professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, popularized and explained this notion in his bestseller Programming the Universe. His theory revolves around information as a physical entity and the universe itself as a quantum computer. In his work, he poses questions like this:
Online radio station Last.fm is adding a video section to its site this week, enabling users to create their own personalised video channels - similar to how users can already create radio stations based on their music tastes. Last.fm is partnering with major and independent labels for this. The company also claims that the quality of videos on its site "will be significantly higher than that of YouTube", with audio encoded at 128kbps compared to YouTube’s 64kbps.
Initially it will be mainly independent labels featured on the video Last.fm - such as Ninja Tune, Nettwerk Music Group, Domino, Warp, Atlantic and Mute. However among the rosters of those independents are brand name artists like the Arctic Monkeys, Moby and Aphex Twin. Last.fm has also made partnerships with big labels like EMI and Warner, along with "over 20,000 independent labels". Presumably videos from those labels will be added soon. All of this seems to be basically an extension of their existing radio music agreements - from which Last.fm has access to more than three million music tracks. Last.fm is hopeful of adding other big labels, particularly Universal and Sony Music Group. Negotiations are in progress now on that front.
Interesting reaction over at The Guardian blog to our post yesterday about the StartUp2.0 competition for European web 2.0 sites. Guardian blogger Jack Schofield said that he only recognized 1 out of the 15 finalists. Jack wrote:
"What I find amusing is that I've only actually used -- or even heard of -- one of them: SlideBurner.
Can you do better?"
Hmmm, well I'm never one to pass up a challenge (particularly if it involves testing my web 2.0 knowledge!). So how many of the 15 Euro startup finalists did I recognize? Er.... [cough] 2. I guess I can console myself by saying that I'm not European! For the record the two I knew were Properazzi (property search engine) and Menéame (Spanish digg clone). Both of which we've posted about before on Read/WriteWeb.
RateItAll, a social network based around online reviews and opinions, has released a new distributed rating widget. It enables users to not only view (read) a widget, but to interact with it and enter data (write). The initial application for RateItAll's read/write widget is a blog feedback badge, which is the first of many distributed rating applications coming from RateItAll.
I spoke to RateItAll founder Lawrence Coburn about the release. He described the new widgets as "sort of like a cross between Power Reviews and MyBlogLog." He told me that the initial use case is blogs, but "soon we hope to hook it into our local business directory (like a distributed Yelp)." He told me there are lots of potential applications - e.g. for politicians, bands, movies, and things like MySpace profiles. With the widgets, RateItAll is aiming to be the de facto ratings infrastructure provider "for a significant chunk of the Web".
Here is an example, a ratings widget for this blog. You'll note Lawrence's rave review of Read/WriteWeb, which I should point out he actually wrote well before my review :-) As an aside, I actually met Lawrence in person at last year's Web 2.0 Summit, hence the reference in his review to drinking beer with me at the famous House of Shields bar!
NewsGator announces user base milestones; Newsgator is something of a quiet revolution these days. It isn't announcing flashy features like Google Reader or Yahoo Pipes, but today it announced that more than one million people use NewsGator’s consumer RSS solutions, and its RSS platform is accessed over 10 million times per day by users of NewsGator’s desktop client products. The company also remarked that NewsGator has archived more than 1.5 billion articles from RSS feeds in NewsGator Online. Newsgator has always been known for the range of products it has, but I hadn't realized it includes a browser toolbar, desktop notifier and a screen saver!
Sun to announce Flash, Silverlight competitor; According to InfoWorld, today at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, "Sun will roll out a Java-based product family called JavaFX, which covers Java development from the desktop to the Web to mobile devices." It's going to be a competitor to the recent Microsoft Silverlight, although at this point Sun appears to be positioning it mainly as an alternative to AJAX. Ryan Stewart has more details.
At the Software 2007 conference on Tuesday in San Jose CA, on-demand document management provider ShareMethods will announce the launch of an open standards Web Office suite called ShareOffice. The company says it is the world's first open standards online office suite. What's more, ShareOffice is an excellent example of using best-of-breed Web Office apps to create a suite - a theme we've been hammering for some time on Read/WriteWeb. It was also in evidence in yesterday's announcement of Comcast's suite (powered by Zimbra and others). In the case of ShareOffice, it was built using iNetOffice, EditGrid, ShareMethods, and salesforce.com. We've covered EditGrid before, and note they also partnered with Central Desktop (another budding Web Office suite).
StartUp2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 sites and they've just announced the 15 final nominees. There is an event in Madrid on May 10, where the nominees will be officially presented and 5 finalists will be selected by a jury and the crowd. These 5 finalists will then present again at an event in Bilbao on May 24. At that point the jury will select the 3 winners. It sounds like a great event and the 15 projects listed below are worthy representatives of web 2.0 in Europe. The judging panel is a who's who of Eurpoean web 2.0 experts, including Loic Le Meur of SixApart, Martín Varsavsky of Fon, Irish consultant Tom Raftery (who I met last week), and more.
Here is the list of the top 15 European Web 2.0 projects, which will be presented next Thursday in Madrid. The information below was provided to Read/WriteWeb by the organizers:
