As noted in our coverage of Ray Ozzie's MIX keynote this morning, Microsoft has released a number of significant upgrades to its Silverlight product. Silverlight is essentially a competitor to Adobe's Flash, in that enables developers to create interactive web apps. It's officially described as "a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web." Ryan Stewart's definition puts it in context of Microsoft's other dev platforms:
"You can build desktop applications with Windows Presentation Foundation, build web-only applications with ASP.NET AJAX and now the hybrid Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight."
The enhancements announced today for Silverlight include integration with .NET and support for dynamic languages - including Python and Ruby. Microsoft also announced new tool support for building Silverlight applications, with Expression Studio and the next edition of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas".
Tell us what you think of the new-look Silverlight in this week's poll, below.
Today at Web 2.0 Expo Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly announced that Google will add a presentations product to its Web Office range of apps, thus completing a Web Office suite and ending (many) months of speculation. It was soon confirmed by the official Google blog, where the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team informed us about "the bun we've got in the oven" - meaning a presentations app. Helping the, er, procreation of the presentations app (what's with the baby pun?) was the acquisition today of Tonic - a technology for presentation creation and document conversion. There's also some debate on Techcrunch as to how far along Google was with the presentations app already (hmmm, ok baby puns are fun).
Yet, seriously now, in today's speech Eric Schmidt continued the line about Google Web Office NOT being a direct competitor of Microsoft Office. Who's he kidding? Curiously, this line of thought was continued in one of the Expo sessions I attended later in the day - where Rajen Sheth, Enterprise Product Manager, Google, also claimed they aren't competing with Microsoft. Rajen's argument was well thought out, and went as follows: competing with MS would miss the main goal for a Web-based office suite. Instead Google is starting from the ground up and building a suite of products that will leverage "the native use of the Internet". Collaboration is a killer app, and it is a different paradigm from what Microsoft Office does.
I paraphrased Rajen, but he did make a convincing case. Especially as web apps being 'web native' is a key concept we espouse here on Read/WriteWeb. So what do you think? Are Eric Schmidt and Rajen Sheth right that Google Web Office doesn't compete with Microsoft Office? Or should they fess up and admit that they have Redmond in their sights? Please tell us in the poll below:
In
observance of Friday the 13th, I've put together a 'Revenge of the Weird
Search Engines' poll. Check them out and vote for your favorite!
2) UFO Crawler
3) Ujiko
5) Tin Finger
7) Time Search
10) Quotiki
Today Central Desktop launched the Spring 2007 Release of its collaboration platform. Of most interest in this release is that Central Desktop is introducing "a turnkey Intranet" for its enterprise subscribers. Key features of the turnkey intranet include easy setup (without coding or "wikifying" it), a company directory and calendar, password protection for documents, Office 2007 document index support, workspace archiving, an auto-save feature while editing documents, and a dynamic interface that displays personalized data for each user.
Central Desktop is a web-based groupware product which currently has 30,000+ users worldwide. See our review of the product in February, at which time Central Desktop announced an online spreadsheets feature using EditGrid. At that point I compared the product to 37Signal's Basecamp - as it had features including collaborative document editing (wikis), Web and audio conferencing, discussion threads and versioned file tracking. But with the latest announcement of a turnkey intranet, it seems that Central Desktop is becoming more like Google Apps.
I'm preparing an article about "Vocal Search", a.k.a. talking search engines. Ironically just today we heard the news about Google's new Voice Local Search service - an experiment from the Google Labs. While Google's service competes with other 411 services in the US, notably Microsoft's Tellme Networks, in my research of alt search engines I've found a lot of interesting voice services out there.
Many of the other talking search engines have very innovative UIs. In fact, as usual I find the alt search engines to be superior to Google - but see for yourself... Please take a few minutes and "talk" to these search engines, then come back and vote for the one you think does the best job in the poll below.
Ms Dewey finding results for Web 3.0 (just for our editor...)
This week's poll is a companion to a thought-provoking post co-written by Emre Sokullu and Charles Knight. The post is a review of alt search engine Quintura, which differentiates itself with clustering technology. But there is a larger question: can search engines such as Quintura, that rely on UI innovation, really be competitive with Google?
Emre argues that the problem with relying on UI innovation is that the barrier to entry is too low. The big players Google (SearchMash) and Microsoft (Live) are actively experimenting with UI innovations, not to mention a number of other alt search engines (e.g. Snap). Meanwhile Charles says that "I do not believe that any of the Top 100 alternative search engines is a 'Google Killer;' but: they all are!". He cites an Aesop fable about a lion and 4 oxen to back this theory up.
So what do you think? Take part in our poll below - and don't forget to read Emre and Charles' review of Quintura.
The hot topic today is offline web apps, with Zimbra having just released an offline version of its web collaboration suite. As Dan Farber noted, Zoho and ThinkFree are two other Web Office vendors to have either released offline access or have plans to. Also Stan at franticindustries has a nice post explaining how offline capabilities can help web apps work better. So for this week's poll, we're asking: what other web apps would you like to see have offline access. I've listed some popular web 2.0 apps below in a poll, so let us know which of those you'd like to see with offline access. You can select more than one. Also feel free to note others in the comments...
Our current poll asks which 'personalized homepage' do you use? After a false start, the current results are very interesting. Google Personalized Homepage is most popular with 31%, followed by two of the innovative startups - Pageflakes 21% and Netvibes 20%. Interesting that two of the bigcos are lagging - My Yahoo 6% and Live.com with a paltry 2%. Yourminis actually has slightly more votes right now than Live.com.
It's not too late to add your vote...final results will be tallied up tomorrow.
NOTE: Please see important update about this week's R/WW Poll below, on the topic of Personalized Homepages. We had to re-set it and so are asking for you to re-submit your vote.
Today Google launched 6 new themes for its Google Personalized Homepage. The themes to choose from include: a beach, a city, a sweet dreams theme, a teahouse, a winter hills theme, and a bus stop. It seems like an attempt to re-create the PC desktop background theme experience, but for personalized homepages. Plus the 6 new themes by Google are all interactive, similar to Microsoft Vista's new desktop backgrounds. Each Google theme changes dynamically, based either on the user’s time of day or local weather conditions.
Update: Unfortunately we have had to re-set the poll, 12 hours after it went live, due to some suspicious voting behavior. We have now blocking repeat voters by Cookie and IP address (previously it was only cookie). We apologize for the inconvenience, but please cast your vote again.
With the release of Netvibes' latest version, now is a good time to poll R/WW readers on which personalized homepage, if any, you use. Let us know in the poll and comments below:
