TechCrunch and Search Engine Land are reporting this morning that Yahoo! will now be indexing Semantic Web and Microformats markup from around the web and will use that information to display more structured search results. Here is the Yahoo! post about the news.
We asked last month how vulnerable Google is in search and the leveraging of standards-based structured data may be the most obvious approach to improving on the search industry's current best practices. As Tim Berners-Lee said just weeks ago the time for the semantic web is now.
Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best:
With the new iPhone SDK, it's just a matter of
time before we see a wave of new applications. We expect a lot of popular web 2.0 apps to offer an iPhone version.
Native Twitter, Facebook and Flickr clients for iPhone will run faster than their in-browser
versions and will take advantage of the impressive Apple UI libraries. But there is an entirely new breed of applications also coming to iPhone.
These apps simply would not be possible without a device like iPhone.
People who in the next few years solve big problems in Information Overload are going to be very important, and some of them are going to be UI and UX (user experience) designers.
German ISP T-Online demonstrated a big multi-touch screen right out of Minority Report at the CeBIT conference in Hannover this week (see this and other videos below). Many other designers are working on variations on that theme. Other designers still are aiming to bring game-like interfaces to other data-centric experiences. What would you like to see in interface design?
Today's winning comment goes to Kamyar, from our post The Beast of Redmond is Roaring (& Thinking) Again. Kamyar's comment was a super-geeky reference to the classic sci-fi novel and movie, Dune. I'm not sure I can picture Sting as Ray Ozzie, but still it was a nicely gratuitous sci-fi reference. We're fans of that at RWW.
Last week Microsoft seemed to wake up from a long hibernation and announced:
* No, we are not ceding the browser game to Firefox
* Hey, we are cool again
* No, we won’t let Amazon AWS be the de facto choice for start-up hosting
Maybe Sergey Brin was right to be unnerved.
Denver, Colorado based Superhero.es has built crgslst, a very slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist. Craigslist itself doesn't offer a multi-search service. By combining the publicly available RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX, crgslst fills this need "so fast, we left the vowels behind."
Unfortunately, crgslst may be in violation of the Craigslist terms of use and could face the same shutdown that other similar projects have in the past. This situation brings up a number of questions about intellectual property, RSS and mashups.
MyStrands is an ambitious start-up. It has so far raised $55 Million dollars in its quest to "lead the social recommendation industry" (the words the company used in its last funding announcement in December). We at ReadWriteWeb are following the trend of recommendations closely - it was one of the 5 major trends we outlined in our toolkit for 2008 and was featured in my Media08 presentation Web Tech Trends for 2008 and Beyond. Today MyStrands has announced a $100,000 prize for the best recommender start-up.
The video uploading platform announced by YouTube last night may not have been what many pundits expected but it could mark a major turning point for both YouTube and thousands of other sites around the web.
By allowing website owners to combine an on-site video publishing option for their users with the huge number of people looking to discover new content on YouTube, the platform will create a mutually beneficial feedback loop that will breathe new life into both YouTube and the web at large. It's also got potential to show up all the other big platform plays we've seen to date.
HiveLive, a B2B social software platform provider, brings the social web to businesses by providing them with customizable tools like user profiles, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and RSS which they can skin, edit, and secure easily, and without any coding. The platform is based on a building block called a "Hive," whcihc can be configured to support a range of community activities, like concept brainstorms, product feedback, design reviews, voting centers, and much more.
Recently, HiveLive announced a new partnership with Responsys, a marketing firm whose client list includes some big-name brands like Apple and Salesforce.com. Enterprise 2.0 is sure to follow.
