A month ago, ReadWriteWeb writer Marshall Kirkpatrick utilized his huge network of Twitter followers to facilitate a discussion about APIs and platforms. He shared the highlights of the conversation in a post on this blog. The discussion was one that really captured our imaginations, so today we're exploring the issue further and presenting 5 dynamics that you should consider when picking a platform.
The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which allows developers to take web applications to the desktop and store data offline, is finally coming to Linux. Adobe announced today that the pre-release alpha version of AIR for Linux is available immediately on the Adobe Labs site. Adobe shipped the 1.0 version of AIR for Windows and Mac last month but was forced to delay the Linux release. According to a FAQ on the Adobe site, the reason for the delay was that the AIR team had to "wait on the core Flash Player's support for Linux to be finalized."
When it comes to keeping track of Mobile Web trends and products, Rudy De Waele has his finger constantly on the pulse. This month Rudy gave a presentation at the Plugg Conference in Brussels about Mobile 2.0. It was an update to the one we featured in September '07 and as usual it is a fantastic overview of the Mobile Web space. I've picked out some highlights below, and embedded the whole slideshow at the conclusion of this post (via Slideshow).
One of my co-presenters at this month's Media 08 event in Sydney was Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director at Asia Internet consultancy +8* and Co-Founder of MobileMonday Beijing. At Media 08 Benjamin discussed the leading social networks in Asia. In particular he compared global leader Facebook with Cyworld, Mixi and QQ. According to Benjamin, Facebook is #4 in that comparison. We thought it would be a good idea to do a Q & A with Benjamin, to find out why. Also we've embedded Benjamin's presentation below (also available here).
LiveBook is a new collaborative writing project that aims to write two separate novels via applications on two different social networks: one on Facebook, the other on Bebo. The Facebook novel, "Helen and her Facebook" chronicles a girl named Helen who has just recently signed up on the social network, while the Bebo version, "Brian from Bebo," follows the similar tale, though this time it's a boy and Bebo. The stories are written sentence by sentence by the members each network with no outside editorial influence, though co-founder Dmitry Honcharenko thinks there exists the possibility for the two books to reference each other and for Helen and Brian to meet.
VoterVoter.com is a new web site from advertising firm WideOrbit, which manages $10 billion worth of advertising on 950 TV, radio, and cable stations in the US, that brings the dirty game of campaign attacks ads directly to the people. Billing themselves as "a non-partisan political advertising service" that was founded to "further democratize the political process," what it really is is a way for any Tom, Dick, or Larry with a couple of thousand bucks to do what 527 organizations do every election cycle: play dirty politics.
Amazon's web services get a ton of press, but mostly in the context of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB or one of the company's other developer-centric offerings. One that doesn't get much coverage in the tech media these days is the Mechanical Turk service, which Amazon refers to as the "on-demand workforce." When it does get coverage, it is sometimes to level accusations that Amazon is offering workers at sweatshop wages. But are those concerns really valid? Just who are these workers?
Have you heard about Toluu yet? This new RSS-based service, currently in private beta, lets you share your OPML with others in order to discover new feeds, see what your friends are reading, and even discover new people who share your same interests. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because Toluu is very much like the reincarnation of the once-popular site, ShareYourOPML (now defunct), which used to do the same thing. But Toluu not only revives that site's spirit, it does so it a much better fashion than ShareYourOPML ever did.
It was just a couple of weeks ago that Yahoo! announced that it would begin indexing semantic markup language such as microformats in its search engine. That's a huge win for the bottom-up approach to building the Semantic Web, and provides an incentive for publishers to start adopting semantic markup like RDF and microformats. As a publisher, Yahoo! is also eating its own dogfood, so to speak, and putting microformats to use on its own sites.
Hype Machine, the much-loved MP3 blog aggregator service, has long been the place to go to find great tracks and music reviews on the net. In October of last year, the site got a big makeover, which included new social networking features like user profiles where you could list your favorite blogs, bands, searches, and friends. Now, Hype Machine has taken the social aspect a step further with their revamped Dashboard section, which introduces social scrobbling features, just like Last.FM offers, along with other new features and an updated layout.
