Flock, the Mozilla-based "social web browser," which we've profiled in the past here and here, has just announced its new Eco-edition browser just in time for Earth Day. This "green" version of the browser sports a new theme and comes pre-loaded with content that eco-minded folks will enjoy.
Semantic web company Adaptive Blue has published what it hopes will become a standard for publishers who want to signal in their header tags when a webpage is primarily about a particular book, film, wine or other type of objects. From search to trend analysis to a richer browsing experience - the developments that could come from adoption such a standard are many.
Called AB Meta, the format was developed in concert with a number of other web companies and is aimed to be part of a larger effort to pick up where existing Semantic Web and microformats markup leaves off. It's simple and extensible.
I'm at the Alternative Search Engines Day, in San Francisco, an event put on by our network blog AltSearchEngines. We started out with a keynote talk by ASE editor Charles Knight, who noted that alternative search engines only have about 1.7% market share combined. He thinks this is too small, so he wants all of the "alts" - you can see a list of them on our subsite The Search Race - to band together to make a bigger impact on the search market.
Google today made an announcement that could prove to be not only important to the evolution of OpenSocial and iGoogle, but also to the social networking sector itself. Google announced a new developer sandbox for iGoogle that includes support for their OpenSocial APIs. Essentially, Google is working toward turning their start page property into a social network, though they haven't overtly said so. Google's move makes this officially the start of a trend we're seeing in start pages to get more social, and an idea we've been pushing at RWW for the past year.
There's big news in the OpenID world; new solutions are hitting the market that aim to solve probably the biggest problem the paradigm faces - usability.
JanRain, owners of MyOpenID.com, and ConfidentTechnologies are both making announcements that could help make OpenID much friendlier. Confident is the half of Vidoop that serves enterprise and financial institutions.
The hot idea of the moment for large companies is to outsource their research and development efforts to their customers. Who knows your product better than your most loyal fans? If they can collectively agree on the best way to improve it, it must be good, right? Dell did it with IdeaStorm (our coverage), Starbucks did it with My Starbucks Idea (our coverage), and Salesforce did it with IdeaExchange. Now a new web app called IdeaScale is offering that same basic premise as a packaged service for companies of any size.
Alright, "semantify" may not be an actual word, but you can probably guess at its meaning: "add a semantic layer to." In this case, we're looking at a small plugin called Triplify that reveals the semantic structures of web applications by converting their database content into semantic formats.
BBC Radio 1 announced a major update to their music charts about a week ago. Traditionally, mainstream music popularity has been measured by album sales or radio plays -- or a combination of the two. But with albums selling fewer copies through traditional channels and radio losing ground to online music, the Beeb decided to take a look at the web to determine artist popularity. Their new Sound Index app, determines the top 1,000 artists based on buzz across some of the web's largest music, video, and social networking sites.
SproutBuilder, the drag and drop Flash authoring environment for widget building we fell in love with at the DEMO conference, released a much more sophisticated version of its service today. Authoring controls are much improved and the new Software Development Kit offers a taste of the kind of extended functionality that will now be available to users.
Sprout users can now integrate Twitter, Seesmic, Brightcove and other web services into their widgets. The SDK will be opening up slowly to support as many services as developers can imagine.
The Etelos Application Framework today launched a key new feature: the ability for applications there to run offline and sync when connectivity is available. The company requires zero code changes to be made in order for apps to go offline.
From apps developed natively for the Etelos marketplace to enterprise installs of Google Apps, MediaWiki and WordPress - the company expects a wide range of apps to make use of the offline functionality.
