As we enter the digestion phase of the current wave of tech innovation, an important part of the reflection process is to figure out what we, as users, feel are our rights in the new tech economy. We need to lay down the ground rules the define how we think we should should treated by technology creators. We've already seen this with blogging, one of the four major areas that contributed to the current web technology landscape as defined by Alex Iskold, with the creation of the Bloggers Code of Conduct.
Another main area of tech innovation has been social networks, according to Iskold. Social networks collect two types of data about us: personal information and attention information. These two streams of information tell a great deal about who we are, so thinking about how we want companies to handle this data is important.
Google already dominates the web search market, with between approximately 55% and 65% of the market depending on who you ask.
The company's flagship product has been responsible for its phenomenal growth and everyone knows
that Google made its fortune by tying its genius search algorithm to advertising. It is perhaps less
known, however, that the web giant has opened its search engine for use on any web site, by any service. Dubbed Google Custom Search Engine
or CSE, the product exposes the API behind the world's most powerful search engine. Why is Google offering this API?
How can it be used? And what is the connection to vertical search? We explore the what, how, and why of Google CSE in this post.
This week at the Office 2.0 event in San Francisco, ContactOffice, an 8-year-old provider of a virtual office software, launched a new version of their web office suite. Built using AJAX and the Google Web Toolkit, the latest iteration of their virtual office and groupware application includes tools for messaging, contact management, calendars, documents, bookmarks, faxes, SMS, notes, forums, and integrates with Skype for intra-team communication.
ContactOffice initially launched their suite of online groupware tools in 1999 and has been profitable since 2003, according to the company. They have 350,000 registered users, 70% of whom are using a paid version of the software. They feel that the new version of their application provides greater speed and usability. Having only used their latest version, that's hard for me to judge, but it did nonetheless feel very fast and intuitive.
At the Office 2.0 Conference today, Web Office vendor Zoho will unveil a new Suite product called Zoho Business. It will be available in two versions - Free and Pro. Both versions will be free until Zoho has sorted out the feature set for Pro over the beta period, expected to last until Q1 2008. At that point the Pro version will have a charge - mooted to be $40/user/year.
Zoho Business is a set of online office applications, similar to Google Apps. It will probably undercut Google Apps in price - at $40/user/year, it would be $10 per user cheaper than Google Apps. Zoho Business will be available in private beta for now, then move into public beta next month. It will go 1.0 during Q1 2008.
As yet the features for the Pro version haven't been confirmed. But Zoho told Read/WriteWeb that it'll include additional storage, security, telephone support, additional apps, customization and more control, more flexibility and control in groups, and more. These features will evolve as the Web Office market evolves over the next few months, we were told.
Just yesterday some R/WW readers were bitterly complaining in our comments about Google Reader's lack of search. "I'm a loyal Google Reader user," remarked R/WW reader Stephen Glauser, "but if they don't hurry up and implement a search feature very soon, the first company who does will win my service."
Perhaps the Google Reader team noted those comments, because today they've announced that Google Reader has search. What's more, it allows search for keywords (a very useful feature) and if you subscribe to someone's shared items, it'll search across those as well. Note: I had to log out and then in again to see the new Search box in GReader.
This week on Read/WriteTalk I had the opportunity to talk to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. One of the more interesting topics in the podcast was the open platform that Twitter has developed. We also discussed how the team came up with the idea for Twitter, different catalysts over the past year for user growth, and even how they came up with the name. Click here to read a transcript or listen to the full interview.
One of the 10 Future Web Trends mentioned in Richard MacManus' post earlier today was 'Web Sites Becoming Web Services'. This theory was originally proposed on R/WW by Alex Iskold back in March. In his post Alex examined both Amazon and Delicious, as case studies of companies using open web services to create competitive advantages. He concluded: "The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage."
We're well into the current era of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Features of this phase of the Web include search, social networks, online media (music, video, etc), content aggregation and syndication (RSS), mashups (APIs), and much more. Currently the Web is still mostly accessed via a PC, but we're starting to see more Web excitement from mobile devices (e.g. iPhone) and television sets (e.g. XBox Live 360).
What then can we expect from the next 10 or so years on the Web? As NatC commented in this week's poll, the biggest impact of the Web in 10 years time won't necessarily be via a computer screen - "your online activity will be mixed with your presence, travels, objects you buy or act with." Also a lot of crossover will occur among the 10 trends below (and more) and there will be Web technologies that become enormously popular that we can't predict now.
Bearing all that in mind, here are 10 Web trends to look out for over the next 10 years...
Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision for a Semantic Web has been The Next Big Thing for a long time now. Indeed it's become almost mythical, like Moby Dick. In a nutshell, the Semantic Web is about machines talking to machines. It's about making the Web more 'intelligent', or as Berners-Lee himself described it: computers "analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers." At other times, Berners-Lee has described it as "the application of weblike design to data" - for example designing for re-use of information.
As Alex Iskold wrote in The Road to the Semantic Web, the core idea of the Semantic Web is to create the meta data describing data, which will enable computers to process the meaning of things. Once computers are equipped with semantics, they will be capable of solving complex semantical optimization problems.
When Apple released the iPhone in June there was a flurry of development from web 2.0 startups as developers worked to create iPhone-specific versions of their applications. There was some question about whether or not creating mobile sites specifically for a single handset -- one which was unlikely to have more than a couple of percentage points of the world cell phone market any time soon -- was a wise way to spend time and money. When I reviewed the iPhone-only social network iRovr, I remarked that the biggest question facing the startup was "whether an iPhone specific social network can gain critical mass."
Today it seems like a lot of developers may have made the right move. At a press even this morning in San Francisco, Apple announced the iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone.
In July, Phil Butler called the Deki Wiki enterprise wiki software from MindTouch "the most extendable Wiki tool available today." He wrote that the company was "transforming the Wiki, from the Web’s best collaborative authoring tool into an open source service platform with a Wiki heart."
While it seems that Google will imminently be joining the wiki market, Deki Wiki has been busy beefing up their already mature offering.
Microsoft today released Silverlight 1.0, its cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering interactive apps on the Web. It's often compared to Adobe's Flash plug-in and is certainly a direct competitor of Flash.
Also today Microsoft announced they'll work with Novell to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, in a project called Moonlight - based on the open source Mono project of the same name. As CNET reported in June, work on the Moonlight plug-in was started in May, after Microsoft's Mix conference - where Silverlight was first announced.
