That's one way to explain the degrees of separation between two people. Another way would be to click through the photos, videos, links, and descriptions on ThisIsLike.com or watch our screencast of that process.

The site is intended to be "a great recommendation system based on free associations rather than encyclopedic knowledge," according to site representative Dmitry Paranyushkin, who emailed us earlier today.

Already, the site has a slew of music, art, and philosophy entries and links. Paranyushin also sees ThisIsLike as a great tool for travelers in need of dining and entertainment advice. "When you come to a new city," he wrote, "you want to find a restaurant or a club that you like... Through ThisIsLike.Com, you can find some restaurant you already know and like and see what places are like that restaurant in the city you're visiting. If it's not yet in the system, you can add it, and other users might associate it with something they know."

Paranyushin further envisions the site becoming a great resource for those in the education and entertainment fields.

ThisIsLike allows users to add items and import information from Wikipedia, Last.fm, Flickr, and YouTube, thus drawing on the huge body of knowledge readily available online and decreasing the data entry needed from users to build the site into a viable resource. Users can explore items through tag clouds, cities, topic guides, and specific events. They can also search between verticals to find, for example, venues related to their favorite musicians.

The site is handsomely designed, user-friendly, and based on an interesting, Linked Data-esque concept. On the other hand, it's still very young, full of bugs, and in need of a diverse body of beta-testing users to flesh out the corpus. With enough time and a dedicated volunteer community, ThisIsLike could be an excellent, informative, and interesting resource.

The change will apply to all text and multimedia content, including video, images, and audio now licensed under GFDL 1.2 or later versions and will increase "the compatibility and availability of free content," according to the WMF site.

The change in licensing was made possible in November 2008 when the Free Software Foundation updated its most recent of the GFDL, adding language specifically to accomodate the WMF's desire to switch to Creative Commons licensing.

As we reported last month, in the event that the WMF board approves the proposal, existing content will be dual-licensed and new content will be CC-BY-SA licensed only. "This will ensure that any content shared from Wikipedia in the future can be done under the now broadly-used terms of Creative Commons licensing and without the additional restrictions required by the GFDL, which was created more for application code documentation and is slightly more stringent, for example requiring anyone using the content to include the full license code with each use," wrote RWW blogger Phil Glockner.

"When I started Wikipedia, Creative Commons did not exist," wrote Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on the site's Q&A page regarding the licensing changes. "The CC-BY-SA license is a more generic license that meets the needs of Wikipedia today, and I'm very grateful that the FSF has allowed this change to happen... It's a critically necessary change for the future of Wikimedia."

Why, then, has one of the most high profile RIA providers in recent years, Joost, moved to ditch their desktop video player?

RIAs are Good for Background Use

We like using desktop Twitter clients like Tweetdeck or Twhirl or other RIAs like Fluid and Snackr. Those are all apps that work well in the background of our workflows. We spend most of our focused time in the browser. Apps that require extended focus, like video viewing, may as well go on in the browser. That way they don't require separate downloads, potentially suspect software, etc.

One advantage to an RIA is that it can sit on your computer and wait until you're in between doing other things. If your browser crashes, while you load page after page from different sources, that RIA is still there keeping up in the background - waiting until you're ready for it.

RIAs Are Best When You Need Responsiveness

Rich Internet Apps combine the responsiveness of a desktop app with the connectivity of the web. If you don't need a lot of responsiveness, though, then you may as well just stay in the browser. Despite its social features, video viewing apps like Joost are mostly consumed passively. You find something you like and then you sit there and stare at it for awhile. Responsiveness to quickly entered commands? Pretty much irrelevant.

RIAs Are Good When Storage and Offline Access Are Important

Desktop RSS readers are nice because you've got a local copy of your feeds. You can see changes to the text and you can read in a plane. It's useful to view videos when offline, but how many of them do you want to keep on your computer after you've watched them? Better to let them stream in through that part of your computer's memory and then be gone.

Amazon may have hit the sweet spot in its move yesterday to ditch Amazon Unbox and rename the service Amazon Video on Demand. Users (now including Mac owners, by the way!) can either stream video or download it locally - it's up to you.

Maybe Video Works Best in the Browser - So How About iTunes?

That's all well and good, but watching video in the browser is so convenient it's hard to beat. As Adobe's Stewart points out, even watching full screen is now trivial with the upgrades to Flash and Silverlight that weren't available when Joost first hit the scene.

Hulu is rocking out and it's no surprise. It's attractive, easy to use and has a whole lot of content. It could be better, but there's absolutely no reason to believe that a desktop client would help make it any better.

We like Rich Internet Apps sitting on our desktop, pulling and pushing data to and from the internet. We don't feel compelled to consume video that way, though. We expect to see other desktop video apps follow Joost's footsteps and move back into the browser. Might iTunes move toward an ad supported model and move to the browser some day for video? It would probably be a good idea for all the same reasons that it's smart for Joost to do so.

Cooliris' PicLens is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest browser add-ons currently available. When we first reviewed it in February, Josh Catone called it 'nifty' and 'gorgeous.' Both of these adjectives still fully apply to PicLens, but since then, the company has added a large number of new features. These include a stronger emphasis on displaying videos and integration with Amazon, as well as support for a few more photo sharing sites.

At its most basic level, PicLens, which is now at version 1.7, allows you to quickly browse through images from photo and video sharing sites on a full-screen 3D wall. This wall looks a lot like Apple's Cover Flow and the screen-shots here really don't do it justice.

One thing that might come as a disappointment to users is that PicLens doesn't work with every site. However, PicLens does support a wide range of photo sharing sites, social networks, and image search services, including Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, DeviantArt, Smugmug, MySpace, Facebook, and Google Images. In its newest version, PicLens now also supports searching for videos in YouTube. PicLens should also work on any other site that has a Media RSS feed enabled.

Cooliris has also made a plugin available that allows owners of self-hosted WordPress sites to enable PicLens' functionality for their blogs.

As for browsers, PicLens supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Window Shopping in 3D

One interesting function PicLens has added, is the ability to do a visual search through Amazon's online store. Scrolling through the covers of books, CDs, and videos, or even browsing the apparel section is surprisingly fast and actually turns out to be quite a lot of fun. Clicking on an item enlarges it and brings up the price and a short description. One limitation of this search is that you can't specify anything else but keywords. Items can't be organized by price or any other filter normally available on Amazon such as brand or seller. This is even more limiting because you can't do a search on Amazon and then have PicLens display the results of your search, making the feature quite a bit less useful.

It's Pretty, But Is it Useful?

Whenever a piece of software looks as good as PicLens does, the question that comes up pretty quickly is how useful it can actually be.

The Amazon integration is most useful when you are searching for a specific look or just browsing through books for the sake of it, but otherwise, it feels more like a gimmick than a useful feature.

PicLens is at its best when displaying objects from photo and video sites. Having the ability to visually browse through a large number of items gives it a clear heads-up over the functionality of these web services themselves, and, at the end of the day, it's also plain fun to use.

AMP runs on Adobe's cross browser Adobe Integrate Runtime (AIR), which saw its 1.0 release in February. AMP is available immediately as a free download for Windows and Mac from the official site.

"It's a merger of TV Guide and DVR for Internet video content," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe, in a press release.

Because Flash has native support for high res video, AMP can display videos in 1080p, 720p or 480i. Indeed, the video in the Adobe Media Player looked very nice, even when streaming. Adobe doesn't host any content, but merely facilitates the delivery from CDN to user. AMP pulls content from partners via RSS feeds -- and users can add any video RSS feed into the player.

Right now, AMP will only display content by default of partners who have a relationship with Adobe. Interested content creators can email Adobe to get their content into AMP. Anyone, however, can seed content externally via an RSS feed. Adobe pulls channel branding directly from RSS feeds as well, so even content providers who have no relationship with Adobe can create branded channels in AMP -- the downside is those channels will only be available to users who add them via an external RSS link, and not in the application's global catalog.

According to Adobe Media Player Product Manager Ashley Still, at some point in the next year or so, Adobe plans to go the user generated content route and make it easier for people to add content directly into AMP's catalog. For now, though, that requires a relationship with Adobe's biz dev team.

Only content providers who have a relationship with Adobe will also be able to utilize Adobe's adserving technology to sell ads on a rev share basis on their videos in the media player. AMP supports pre, post, and mid roll ads, as well as overlay ads and the ability to serve advertising to downloaded videos offline. Offline ads on older downloaded content can be dynamically updated anytime the user connects to the web.

Adobe is also announcing the launch of Adobe TV. Adobe TV is a web site and AMP channel dedicated to aggregating Adobe's array of video blogs and tutorials. These videos had previously been scattered all across the Adobe web universe, on numerous blogs and web sites. Adobe TV brings them under a single umbrella and makes it easier for Adobe fans and users to find those videos or subscribe to them in the new media player software.

Conclusion

Adobe sees the release of AMP as a piece of their "ecosystem for the creation and delivery of next-generation broadcast entertainment." We see it as a showcase for Flash video -- which is getting competition from Microsoft's Silverlight -- and AIR. There is no better way to show off your developers tools than to demonstrate something cool that was made with them.

It is also another piece in Adobe's growing online empire. In October, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that within the next ten years Adobe applications would all be completely in the cloud. That's an ambitious goal, but Adobe recognizes that web apps are the future. The full power of Illustrator or Premiere operating in the cloud might be more then 10 years away, but by using their web application stack (Flash, Flex, AIR, etc.) to push out less complex consumer apps, Adobe is betting that it can get the mainstream used to the idea of web applications and get developers hooked on Adobe tools in the process. That's a smart play.

With RealPlayer 11 installed, when you visit a website with embedded video (Real, Flash, QuickTime or Windows Media), a floating tab appears giving you the option to download the file or 'record' it in the case of a live stream. Once you click 'download this video' a copy is then placed into your RealPlayer library. I tested the feature on YouTube and found that videos downloaded quickly and without a glitch. Next up I tried to save a 'Real video' stream from the BBC but was greeted with the following message: 'This clip is not downloadable from this site.' That's because RealPlayer honours any online video protected by DRM, preventing a user from saving it to their hardrive.

Read the full review on last100. Steve liked what he tested, so it seems that Real Networks has borrowed well from iTunes and is ensuring it remains a viable alternative to the market leading Apple.

Have any Read/WriteWeb readers tested out Real Player 11? How do you rate it?

Why this storm of RIA and offline functionality? As long as broadband, WiFi and mobile are all on the rise, why are we even talking about Desktop applications? Surely there must be good reasons and use cases for these frameworks. In this post we take a closer look at the intended use and marketing behind these RIA frameworks.

To understand these frameworks and the use cases, we need basic definitions. We start with the definition of RIA from Wikipedia:

"Rich Internet applications (RIA) are Web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIAs typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the Web client but keep the bulk of the data (i.e., maintaining the state of the program, the data etc) back on the application server.

RIAs typically:

• run in a Web browser, or do not require software installation
• run locally in a secure environment called a sandbox
• can be "occasionally connected" wandering in and out of hot-spots or from office to office."

The takeaway is that RIA is defined as a mix of three things: desktop-like UI online, offline apps that look like online apps, and online applications that can go offline. Together, these things are a bit confusing. But perhaps if we just said: a browser app with a rich user interface that has offline mode, then things would be simpler. So, to belabor the point, an RIA is a browser app - but it works like a desktop app (e.g. a rich email browser app that works like Outlook).

What is Apollo?

Adobe defines Apollo like this:

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Adobe emphasizes that their solution as a runtime. The company is marketing it as an RIA framework because it hits all three aspects of the RIA definition. The runtime takes care of the desktop and offline mode, while existing Flash plugins support the same function in the browser. But the company does emphasize the importance of downloading the runtime, which is separate from the browser.

What is Silverlight?

Microsoft defines Silverlight like this:

Silverlight is 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.

Unlike Apollo, Silverlight is just a browser add-on and is not a separate runtime environment. Instead, it packages a .NET interpreter right inside the browser, making all .Net languages available to developers. And it achieves the same RIA goals - creating rich experiences in the browser while supporting an offline mode.

What is Google Gears?

Google defines Gears like this:

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs: Store and serve application resources locally, Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database, Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness.

Google's solution focuses primarily on offline mode. From that point of view, it is not really an RIA framework - instead it's an offline mode extension to the browser. It is not standalone, so like Silverlight it just enhances the browser capabilities.

So what are the use cases?

No doubt that these are all impressive frameworks, but what do we need them for? The companies have not gone to the trouble of doing all this just to satisfy the R in RIA. More likely, the primary target is support of applications in offline mode. A classic example is accessing email on a plane. For example, the fact that GMail is not available offline precludes corporations from dumping Outlook in favor of Gmail. Other examples where online apps could make use of offline functionality include project management applications, like Basecamp, and calendaring.

So being able to access some web apps in offline mode is useful. But is it also useful to build desktop applications that look and act like online ones? The answer to this question is far less clear. Why would we do this? the reason must be to leverage desktop functions such as access to local storage and the network. But this is also possible with Silverlight and Gears, right from the browser. So the use case of a full desktop application that looks like an online one, but does not run inside the browser, does not seem to be compelling.

Are all these RIA frameworks overkill?

So the major use case is offline support. While it is true that we still spend time offline, increasingly many of us are almost always online. With broadband, WiFi and mobile devices experiencing rapid growth, being offline is less of an issue. The major gap happens when you fly, although it appears that the solution to this problem is also on the way (i.e. on-board wireless internet access). When the internet reaches the skies, we will run out of reasons to be offline. So where does this put all of these RIA frameworks?

Conclusion

While there is an explosion of activity amongst major players delivering RIA frameworks, there seems to be just a single major use case - support of the offline mode. From this point of view, Apollo is a miss, but Silverlight and Gears are on the right track. Looking at the development side of this, Microsoft's solution is superior because it allows developers to build .Net applications. This means more robust (compared to JavaScript) programming languages and tools. But beyond this, if we are increasingly more and more online, why do we care about the offline mode?

Perhaps it is optimistic to think that offline mode will disappear that quickly - time will tell. But even today, it seems to me that we have already proven that web applications are better than desktop apps at juggling our information.

What do you think about this? What real RIA use cases do see out there? And what platform makes the most sense to you?

In this post, I summarize that meeting - but also I aim to give a kind of 'Apollo for Dummies' overview (because until that meeting I was one of those dummies!). Much of the media and blog coverage of Apollo so far has been focused on what it means for developers, but I have yet to see a cogent explanation of Apollo for end users. So this post is an attempt at that.

Mike started off by explaining to me that Apollo aims to bring web apps to the desktop, in contrast to Microsoft's WPF which comes from the desktop to the Web (it's worth noting though that Mike doesn't believe Apollo competes with WPF). He also told me that an oft-quoted benefit of Apollo, offline access for web apps, is not the main reason Adobe created Apollo. He said the main reason is to break out of the restrictions of the browser, with a richer UI. Essentially Adobe is aiming to create a new type of runtime, one that allows end users to run web apps on the desktop - as an alternative or complement to the browser.

Apollo is still in the alpha phase - and indeed Apollo won't be the final brand name for the product (the new name hasn't yet been decided, or at least is being kept under wraps for now). The public beta will be early summer US, with the official 1.0 release slated for late fall / early winter 2007.

Let's back up for a minute and pin down exactly what Apollo is, because if you're not a developer then the official definition can be difficult to grok. Here is that definition:

"Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop."

Firstly, the word "rich" simply means web apps that are interactive and graphically sophisticated. The word "runtime" is probably the biggest sticking point for non-developers in understanding Apollo, but essentially a runtime is a platform where software applications can be deployed. The Web browser (e.g. Firefox, IE) is probably the best example of a runtime - certainly it is the most widely used runtime on the Web. It doesn't just run web apps of course, but more commonly it is used to host HTML web pages.

So why create a new runtime, if the browser is 'good enough' for most web apps - including RIAs (most rich Ajax apps run very well in the browser)? Well the reason for Apollo's existence is essentially to create a richer, more interactive environment for web apps. To achieve this, Adobe has created a platform for web apps that in some cases is an alternative to the browser, in other cases complements it. This is because Apollo web apps run on the desktop, using the Apollo runtime. Note that developers can also deploy Ajax applications to the desktop via Apollo.

Adobe Media Player

From a developer perspective, the benefit is that developers can use their web app building skills to develop web-based apps that run on the desktop - e.g. they might build an Ajax app that runs on the desktop, to complement an existing app that is browser-based. Indeed that is the main 'design pattern' emerging in the first lot of Apollo apps to emerge - see examples below.

What's more, Adobe is aiming for a much lighter 'footprint' on the desktop than previous runtimes - e.g. Sun's Java runtime (popular on the Web in the 90's) and Microsoft's DotNet. A footprint is essentially how many megabytes you need to download to install a runtime on your desktop. It's important to remember that, as with any software running on your desktop, you need to install it onto your computer. With Java you need to download 12-13 MB, and with DotNet it requires a 50+ MB download. Mike Chambers told me that Adobe is aiming for a footprint of around 6 MB, significantly lower than its two competitors. He also said that Apollo won't have problems with conflicting versions of the runtime, which has been an issue for Java in the past.

Examples of early Apollo apps

Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell showed me several examples of Apollo apps and many of them were designed as desktop complements to existing browser-based apps. Bear in mind that Apollo is still in the alpha phase, so there aren't many example apps yet. Two of the more impressive Apollo apps so far are Finetune (a desktop music player similar to last.fm or Pandora) and eBay's Apollo app (code-named Project San Dimas).

Finetune is a personalized radio - mostly HTML-based, but the player itself is Flash. Originally Finetune was browser-based, but using Apollo the developers created a desktop version. While it complements the browser version, the desktop Finetune has some added functionality that is especially attractive to power users. For example it can integrate with iTunes, something that the browser can't do. Essentially this is done by the two desktop apps (iTunes and Finetune) sharing XML files. Adobe sees Finetune as a classic use case for Apollo - where developers can build a cross-platform desktop presence using web technologies.

Also aimed at power users is eBay desktop. Ryan Stewart has an excellent overview of this, but essentially eBay desktop allows eBay users to operate their auctions using an Apollo-based desktop app - which offers improved caching, real-time product availability notifications, and auction updates.

Another example Mike and Christian showed me was Adobe Media Player (nicknamed Philo, after one of the inventors of TV). It is a web TV app, and a competitor of sorts to Microsoft's Windows Media Player, but Mike said that it is essentially a video aggregator (using RSS) and player at heart. Via Apollo, content providers can brand the Adobe Media Player using special RSS code. Compare this to iTunes, which is strictly an Apple branded experience. Adobe Media Player also allows content providers to deliver ads in the RSS feed, including overlays (where ads are inserted into the video itself).

Conclusion

End users probably won't see the full potential of Apollo until it goes into public beta in US summer, which should prompt more developers to build on it.

It's clear that Adobe sees a bright future for web apps outside the browser, although with around a 95% penetration rate for Flash on worldwide computers, the browser is still going to play a key part in its plans. Adobe is also careful to emphasize that Apollo can complement the browser, as well as act as an alternative to it. Meanwhile Microsoft is also creating an extensive platform for desktop apps, but it too is still betting on the browser to be a key part of its ecosystem. In Microsoft's case, it has the dominant browser on the market (IE has 80+% market share) and Silverlight is a browser plug-in (similar to Flash). Both Adobe and Microsoft seem to want to break free of the browser, but on the other hand both have dominant browser-based technologies to leverage (Adobe with Flash, Microsoft with IE). It's worth noting also that Adobe sees itself as much more committed to web technologies and cross-platform support than Microsoft, which for obvious reasons wants to leverage its Windows dominance.

What do you think of Apollo and its chances in the near future? It is a fiercely competitive market, with Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Google and others all active - and each has a differing vision for web app deployment. Google is still very much focused inside the browser, whereas Adobe and Microsoft have made divergent moves to go outside the browser (but both with one foot still planted firmly in the browser). Let's not forget that Mozilla and the other browsers are enhancing their products at a furious rate. It's a key point in the evolution of web apps - so who do you think has the inside running at this stage?

Thanks to Mike Chambers and Ryan Stewart for their feedback on this article, prior to publishing.

UPDATE: This week's poll follows on from the conclusion in this post.

Also, as is usual when Microsoft launches a new media product these days, they have brought on board a number of high profile partners. In this case they include Akamai Technologies Inc., Brightcove Inc., Eyeblaster Inc., Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball and Netflix Inc.

What are we to make of the sudden increase in Microsoft vs Adobe competition? The world of RIAs is increasing in importance, as Internet users seek out better "experiences" - both in the browser and outside it, and both online and offline. While Google is happy to utilize Ajax in the browser as its RIA weapon of choice, Microsoft and Adobe are busy battling it out in the 'richer' products - which either extend the browser or utilize the desktop.

The Apollo team from Adobe is here at ETech, presenting the Alpha version of their new runtime environment - which is aimed at empowering web developers to create desktop applications. Apollo is a lightweight virtual machine that runs on the desktop and acts as an interpreter of HTML, JavaScript and Flash - much like the browser does today. The difference is that applications that run on Apollo can work in an offline mode, while you are not connected to the internet. The browser can't yet do this, however Firefox 3 is slated to have offline functionality and IE surely won't be far behind.

Adobe motivation

Adobe has rolled out this solution for a few reasons. Firstly, so that users can access web applications for both reading and writing in an offline mode. For example, accessing a Google map to find directions to your friend's house while you are in the car; or reading The New York Times on a plane. The 'reading' part works simply by caching the data locally. Examples of useful applications for writing data would be editing your Basecamp to-do's, or editing Google online docs while vacationing in the high mountains.

A somewhat related third reason is that people are writing desktop applications that access the web anyway, so why not write them using the same tools? 

Finally, a major driver for Apollo is the ability to run the same applications on mobile devices, like cell phones and PDAs.

Apollo under the hood

In a way, Adobe is much like a web browser. It has the same infrastructure as Firefox or Internet Explorer, in order to render HTML pages and Flash. In addition, Apollo comes with a set of native libraries that empower developers to determine if the application is in an offline or online mode; and to store the information to local disk. This diagram explains it well:

Technical issues with Apollo

The idea of writing a desktop application using the same tools as web applications is seemingly good, but there are issues. Firstly, in my opinion this is kind of backwards. We have had rich applications on the desktop for quite some time already. Java and .Net technologies excel at delivering sophisticated user interfaces, which we have only begun to see recently online. 

Language-wise, Java and .Net languages are richer and easier to program in than JavaScript and Flash. But beyond languages, there is a much bigger problem - [programming] libraries. Any language is only as good as its libraries. JavaScript does not have the Java-like standard and rich set of libraries needed for real desktop applications. 

The last technical issue is lack of development tools. Java and .Net have sophisticated IDEs [integrated development environments], profiling, testing tools - just to name a few things that are not going to be available for a while in Apollo.

Will users download Apollo, like they have done for Java?

But technology is not going to be the determining factor. Because if users really resonate with Apollo, download it and start running applications, the technology issues will be secondary. The big question then is: will ordinary users download a runtime? Well this is not so simple, although certainly many people have downloaded Java in order to run Java-based web apps. Arguably, there is no compelling reason right now to download - but surely Adobe has a plan for distribution. Could it be bundling it with Acrobat? 

There's another point that is going to be confusing for the user: why do they need another browser? To the end user, there is not going to be much difference between Apollo and the web browser. And certainly people are not going to be switching back and forth between Apollo and their regular web browser, so it seems like there is a barrier there.

Conclusion

It appears that, intentionally or not, Adobe is on a collision course with IE, Firefox and the rest of the Web Browsers. Firefox has already said it is looking to add support for offline applications into its next version. If this happens, it will be bad news for Apollo - because Firefox users are not going to switch. IE plans in the same space are not clear, but we can be certain that if offline mode for web applications takes off, then there will be support in IE.

Probably the biggest question that comes to mind is: with the rapid spread of wifi, why do we even need something that is offline? [Ed: I think my Gmail outage today answers that!] Increasingly we find ourselves more and more connected and in a year or so, we are likely to be online all the time - perhaps with the exception of airplanes. That alone does not warrant a separate environment for doing things. Perhaps there is more to this that I am not seeing, but it seems like the mobile use case for Apollo is much stronger than the offline desktop use case. 

It would be great to hear what our readers think about Apollo. Will it take off?

Revision3, the online TV network founded last year by Digg's Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, David Prager of TechTV, and others, has announced a new underground music show on Revision3. The show is called XLR8R TV (pronounced "accelerator" TV) and is being produced by XLR8R magazine, a San Francisco music publication since 1993. The magazine and website XLR8R covers hip-hop, indie and electronic music - as well as related trends in style, art, fashion, and technology.

Revision3 told Read/WriteWeb that the sector of Internet television is really heating up, and so they expect their new underground music show to attract a niche audience that will be attractive to online advertisers.

Revision3 told us that their competitors aren't taking the time to figure out what audiences want or expect from on-demand programming - or worse, they just expect the users to create their own content. Revision3 thinks that a show that costs very little to produce, that leverages a known brand in the underground music community, has never been done before. Their target audience is the tech-savvy, young and smart demographic – not dissimilar to digg's audience (although probably less geeky and with more females).

The show itself will be made up of three segments, anchored by a host who narrates from a location relevant to the content of the show. It will focus on emerging artists and music and will cover genres such as hip-hop, indie rock and electronic music.

The first episode will be up on Revision3's website sometime on Tue 27th PST.

UPDATE: The first edition is now live.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/revision3_xlr8r.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/revision3_xlr8r.php Startups Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:43:52 -0800 Richard MacManus Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

My wife and I were in the bookstore the other day and we were discussing the difference between shopping online versus shopping in the real world. We were not focused on ability to easily compare prices or instantly get to different stores, which makes online shopping superior. Instead, we focused on the basic qualitative experience - e.g. holding a book and flipping through its pages. We both felt that there is something special about this physical experience, that cannot be replaced with Ajax or PDF.

At least not for us people who first learned physics and then went digital. But we also agreed that with the race to squeeze everything into a computer, it won't be too long before we get a generation of people who might not crave the physical experience of buying a book as we do. In the meantime, today we see a lot of taking things and concepts familiar to us in our physical world -- and bringing them online. So in this fun Friday post, we look at some of these attempts and try to decipher what works and what does not.

[Disclaimer: The latest edition of Nine Online magazine briefly mentions Adaptive Blue and socialmeter, web properties of Alex Iskold.]

Our first stop is recently the launched Nine Online magazine from Novologic. This small publication focuses on helping PR professionals understand the new social media. The site is implemented in Flash and combines traditional magazine elements with innovative digital solutions that make it stand out. It actually looks like a magazine, due to its shape and the ability to flip through the pages. Typically, I would dismiss this kind of thing as fluff, but the way its implemented here makes it appealing and clickable.

Nine online offers an interesting blend of static and interactive content. The articles look like what you'd find in a typical magazine, but in addition they are spliced with interactive videos and online quizzes. The fact that the implementation uses elements of the physical world was nice, but what was mostly impressive is the natural and intuitive embedding of the interactive elements - only possible in the digital world.

[Editor's Note: in a similar vein, check out Avantoure. We profiled this interactive magazine back in December]

e-paper - bringing digital to physics

Way before Nine Online added a real-world feel to its digital magazine, researchers explored doing the opposite - bringing the digital feel to one of our most beloved objects, paper. Electronic Paper or e-paper was developed way back in 1970 at Xerox-Parc.

According to Wikipedia, the predicted future applications include e-paper books - capable of storing digital versions of many books, with only one book displayed on the pages at any one time. When this happens, we will flip through a digital book and also interact with it as we interact with web pages today, using gestures. That brings us to another contender in the race to blend physics and digital - the iPhone.

iPhone - bringing physics to digital

By now there are very few skeptics left who do not believe that Apple can reinvent the wheel. They have done it with iPod and it seems like they are doing it again with iPhone. Most of us have not yet had the chance to try their patent-pending multi-touch technology on iPhone, but if the click-wheel on iPod any indication, Apple has invented a truly new way of interacting with digital information.

Apple promises to redefine our digital experience, by making digital objects look, feel and behave like their physical cousins. This is not just a promise of a slick UI and a fun toy, it is a promise of a phone and digital companion that saves time - because it will be as intuitive as things are in the real world.

Conclusion

Attempting to merge and reconcile our experiences in the physical and digital worlds is no trivial matter. Many technologies are aiming to create a blend that delivers a consistent, simple, yet rich, user experience. Since objects in the real world obey the laws of physics and objects in the digital world obey, well, at best the laws of good design, the laws for hybrids are not yet settled. 

The key to success is to ensure that the mix of physical and digital does not confuse the user. When playing with Nine Online, I was never surprised by what happened when I clicked on things. Surely many of you experienced the same with iPod - it behaves as you expect it. Inventing new ways of remixing, while keeping users happy, is what these new technologies are all about. 

What are your favorite digital and physical remixes?

To read each issue of Avantoure, you need to download a web app called Zinio Reader - a 4.4 MB download. Zinio in itself is an interesting next generation Web app. The Zinio homepage provides a variety of name brand magazines to read and/or subscribe to - such as BusinessWeek, Macworld, Premiere. The latest version of Zinio Reader also features rich media, such as the following features:

• Animations and interactive content
• Music and live audio interviews
• Movie clips and TV commercials

As a recent NY Times article noted, there is a trend for magazines to go digital - so they can attract students and young people to read them. The Web is of course one of the prime delivery mechanisms, but also web technologies such as hyperlinking and rich media UI elements are key to the user experience.

I purchased the latest edition of Avantoure and found the reading experience to be very nice, although it's never that comfortable reading a magazine via a PC or laptop. With a tablet though, I could see myself using it a lot.

The hyperlinks in the article open up in your default browser, while the videos play inside the Zinio Reader and generally complement the articles well. Some pages have music on by default - e.g. the article entitled "WhenEastmetWest" greeted me with a wash of lovely music related to that theme. You can also make notes (like yellow stickies) and highlight things in the magazine. Another interesting factor is the advertising, which is as glossy and attractive as you'd expect in a lifestyle magazine.

The only usability quibble I have is that you have to magnify the text in order to read it, then de-magnify to see the whole page again. Other than that, it is a pleasure to read and interact with.

Avantoure behind the scenes

To finish, a little about the magazine itself. Avantoure is a London-based interactive digital magazine, launched in March 2006. It's now up to its fourth issue, which has the theme "Back to the Future". Themes of past issues included "Las Vegas" and "Nautical Issue". Publisher Serafima Bogolomova says that their aim is to "make people want to strive for something unusual, to experiment, and to be non judgmental…to encourage them to play with their lives a bit". The title of the magazine, Avantoure, is a combination of the French word "avan" (meaning 'forward') and the English "tour." So the title loosely translated means: "let's set on a journey". So on a personal level, the magazine's theme appeals to me.

Setting on a journey is also kind of what print publications are doing circa 2006, by transferring their business into the digital Web realm! Avantoure is doing a fine job at running with this trend - and is well worth checking out for its content too.

When I spoke to David, my ears pricked up when he mentioned that Laszlo is building a WebOS. While he wasn't able to give me many details, he did say the WebOS will be a framework as well as a set of apps. Hmmm, the WebOS space is getting crowded! More on this as it develops.

Pandora, one of my fave online radios, uses OpenLaszlo

I asked David what the difference is between OpenLaszlo and Flex - he told me that OpenLaszlo is more consumer focused than Flex, which he says is mainly for enterprise.

In our briefing, David showed me some nifty apps. Laszlo Mail is a commercial rich client email app that is used by ISPs and other "communication service providers". Building on this is Laszlo's suite of personal productivity apps, currently in development, which they call Digital Life. Again, they plan to license this to ISPs and the like. It features email, IM, photo-sharing, calendar and works on mobile devices.

Laszlo Digital Life

All in all, OpenLaszlo is a compelling platform for building rich Ajax applications - or even Flash apps. They have a hard road to hoe competing against Adobe, a comparatively huge company with many more resources at their disposal (internal developers, marketing, brand name, money, etc). But being open source gives OpenLaszlo a lot of credibility in the developer community. It would be even better if they got a couple more 'glamor' projects like the Pandora one, to raise their profile in the consumer world.

What are your thoughts on Laszlo? Has anyone here used it?

Last week I spoke to Bill McCoy, General Manager of the ePublishing Business Unit at Adobe, to talk about the new product.

Adobe Digital Editions is designed to be a lightweight, standards supporting digital reader - and is focused on the consumer market. Bill said electronic reading "is reaching a tipping point" in the market right now.

As with the NY Times Reader, the Adobe product reflows content and makes readibility of e-content easier. The product is also cross-platform - working on PCs, mobiles, PDAs and dedicated ebook devices. Also the Digital Editions beta includes integration with Adobe Acrobat 8 and Reader 8, which can install and launch Digital Editions from within their user interface.

There will also be opportunities for publishers to make money from their electronic publications, via contextual advertising in Adobe Digital Editions.

In terms of DRM, it does have it - a new one called Adobe Digital Editions Protection Service, based on Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server. It also works with Adobe Content Server eBook DRM. The DRM sounds a bit daunting, but those familiar with the ebook market (and indeed music too) will know that DRM is an almost inescapable part of the user experience.

There will be associated authoring tool support from Adobe, coming out in the first half of 2007. Other future plans include social networking (shared annotation and reading lists), browser-based operation (e.g. widgets that bring the Digital Editions reading experience to the browser), "push" delivery of content subscriptions and webcasts, mobile and device versions, and new ways to combine traditional text-based and interactive content.

Adobe Digital Editions beta is available for free download from the Adobe Labs Web site.

Here are some further screenshots of the product: