Yesterday on this blog Sarah Perez wondered how important is offline access for web apps? Her conclusion was that offline access is important now, but not as important as it once was. And that with the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, it is growing less important every day. I won't dispute that, but there is an important distinction to be made between offline access to web apps (as Google Gears provides) and desktop access to web apps (as Mozilla's Prism and Adobe's AIR provide). The latter is a very important step in the evolution of web apps.
The knock on the type of representative democracy that is employed in the US is that the people aren't actually voting on the legislation that gets passed -- representatives for the people are doing it for them. And those representatives are potentially beholden to outside influences like political action committees and lobbyists who help them raise money necessary to get elected. The system is supposed to weed out the bad eggs via regular elections (if your rep isn't representing you, don't vote for he or she next time around), but maybe that's not good enough. Enter Govit, a site that lets citizens weigh in on bills currently being voted on in the US House and Senate.
It seems like everyone is on Twitter these days, but are you following everyone you should? With so many users, it can be hard to find the right people to follow - you might even miss finding some of your very own friends on the service, especially if they joined later on, after you did your initial search for friends. To help you out, we've provided five web apps that can help you locate some of the best people for you to follow on Twitter.
Google's new App Engine will let application developers outsource hosting and data storage for their applications by using key elements of Google's infrastructure.
As many people have noticed, the announcement just screams out for analysis in light of Nick Carr's new book The Big Switch.
These days when someone mentions the term "web office," you probably think of the online suites like by Zoho or Google Apps. But alternative office suite, ThinkFree, has also been plugging along since their launch of an online suite in 2005. Lately, even though ThinkFree has been losing ground to their competitors, they aren't ready for you to count them out just yet. Yesterday, ThinkFree launched a newly redesigned online suite with more features, including mobile access and online/offline synchronization previously a premium feature, now available to everyone, for free.
Blogs are abuzz this morning about HuddleChat, a real-time chat application that a team of three Google developers created to show off Google's new App Engine platform. The chat software bears a striking resemblance to the popular Campfire app from 37Signals. On blogs (here and here, too), on Twitter, and even on the HuddleChat App Engine gallery page people are ripping into Google for allegedly copying the application's design and feature set. 37Signal's founder Jason Fried told us by email that he was "disappointed" in Google. So what's going on here?
Every company is a tech company these days. From software startups to hedge funds to
pharmaceutical giants to big media, they're all increasingly in the business of software. Quality code has become
not only a necessity, but a competitive differentiator.
And as companies compete around software, the people who can make it happen - software engineers - are becoming increasingly important. But how do you spot the 'cream of the crop' programmers? In this post we outline the top ten traits of a rockstar developer.
Google has just launched Google App Engine, "a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure." This will allow startups to use Google's web servers, APIs, and other developer tools to build a web app on top of. Google clearly has the scale and smarts to provide this platform service to developers. However, it begs the question: why would a startup want to hand over that much control and dependence to a big Internet company?
Via an article in the New Scientist today, we were pointed to a Microsoft research project called MySong. MySong isn't web technology, but it is very, very cool technology, and clearly it would make one heck of a web application. The application takes user inputted voice and pairs it with machine generated musical accompaniment. Though MySong won't be spitting out any top 40 hits, the results are surprisingly good and can theoretically turn shower songsmiths into virtual virtuosos.
Traffic analysts Hitwise released new numbers today finding that Google's marketshare in US searches rose last month to an all time high of 67% of searches performed. Yahoo! Search (20%), MSN Search (5.25%) and Ask.com (4%) trail far behind but aren't insignificant either.
At this time last year Google was at 64% and MSN was at 9%. Momentum remains with Google, but is that momentum inevitable? Could things change? We've written about three ways that it could.
