by Ryan Stewart
(Richard's Note: I'm introducing guest bloggers to Read/WriteWeb, to write about topics that I think will be of interest to R/WW readers - but which I'm not an expert in myself. Ryan Stewart is the first of my guest bloggers, writing on the topic of Flash and 'rich internet apps'. I'll be editing the guest posts to fit in with the R/WW style, but the content and 'voice' behind each post will of course be that of its author.)
In 1996,
FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia
Flash 1.0 and people all over the world were amazed by its animation capabilities.
Everyone started downloading the Flash Player and nearly every site experimented with
Flash animation. Unfortunately, the ubiquity of Flash, which is one of the major reasons
it is so powerful as a platform, led to a lot of "Skip Intro" buttons and later a way for
advertisers to take up the entire screen with annoying Flash ads. For a long time, Flash
has had to cope with a bad reputation for degrading the web. However with creativity
running wild and a renewed interest in Rich Internet Applications, Flash has grown up and
some powerful applications are now being built leveraging the full potential of
Flash.
One of the applications that is really taking advantage of this power is Goowy, which started out as an e-mail client but has since expanded into a full fledged virtual desktop suite. Goowy combines the rich interactivity of Flash along with some of the best parts of AJAX to create a great user experience.
The most important part of Goowy is the mail application. For the most part,
it's a pretty standard mail client with a couple of cool twists. One is the ability to
drag and drop e-mail messages into folders. It makes organization very intuitive and
"desktopesque" for the average user. The graphical elements of the mail application (and
the entire app for that matter) will make any MacOS user very happy and provide a nice
level of interactivity valuable for anyone new to web apps. The other great thing about
using Goowy for your e-mail is that you can send e-mail from the address you already
have. Unlike Gmail which allows you to set the Reply-To and then shows up as "yourgmail@gmail.com
on Behalf of yours@emailadress.com", Goowy will simply send the message with
yours@emailaddress.com. Importing contacts is a one click operation and you can import
contacts from a .csv file or Gmail, Hotmail, MSN and Yahoo.
Viewing HTML email is one place where the Flash/AJAX interaction provides a big boost. The spell checker, the draft view and the rich text editing are done quickly and nicely with AJAX. The mail tree, auto complete features and all the navigation is pure Flash. The interaction is slick and the result is awesome.
One of the coolest things about Goowy is the calendar application, which not a lot of people have talked about and is 100% Flash. When I was looking at web based e-mail clients, what I wanted was an Outlook replacement, and Goowy was the best one I found - due in large part to the calendar. The current calendar is in beta and hasn't been updated since it was released a few months ago. Currently, it allows you to schedule events in 5 minute intervals (hopefully they'll remove this restriction in the future). It provides an Outlook-like view, with the monthly calendars over on the left and your daily view in the main right pane. The day view is a custom flash control which allows you to view events in a single day, those spanning multiple days and events that overlap times.
What's also cool is that each individual event is a custom MovieClip that provides right-click menu options, such as canceling the event or editing it in the window. It's a very simple, easy to use interface that people can jump right in and feel comfortable with. The other reason I love Goowy's calendar is that it fully supports the iCalendar protocol. Goowy users can send and receive events from other people who are using email clients that support iCal events. This means that Goowy can receive and send calendar events to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange users. They're also planning to release recurring events, weekly and monthly views - as well as the possibility of calendar sharing in the near future.
The thing that really distinguishes Goowy from the slew of other AJAX desktop clients
are their minis. [Editor's note:
minis are little apps that run on your desktop - also known as widgets by Yahoo, modules by Google and gadgets by Microsoft.] At first, I thought the
minis were a useless throw in, but after fully embracing Goowy for my e-mail and calendar
needs, I've come to use the minis for sorting a lot of my information. You can track your
favorite RSS feeds using the newsreader or keep track of YouTube videos and listen to
podcasts right from Goowy. Flash allows it to stream multimedia seamlessly within the
application.
Goowy's minis also provide a range of functionality by tapping into external APIs. You can search for Flickr photos, tag things on del.icio.us, follow sports scores, see the weather, watch your stock portfolio, or see the top songs on iTunes. The minis also include functional applications like a personalized To-Do list, a summary of your e-mails and any calendar events you have today.
Goowy has a built in game library that allows you to play a variety of Flash games
from Tetris to Presidential Knockout. If you're getting tired of answering e-mail, you
can switch over and game a little bit. Combine this with the fact that Goowy lets you
customize your look and feel (right down to the background image) and you've got
something that can hook common users and give them some ownership over their web
client.
As a Flash proponent, I love showing people Goowy because it uses Flash to perfect the user experience, which is what Flash is really all about. The Flash/AJAX interaction is the perfect example of the two technologies working together to create a better application. Using the Flash Platform allows a smaller company like Goowy to compete with applications like Gmail and 30boxes because a well-written Flash application can deliver a better user experience and it makes the application available to anyone regardless of OS or browser.
The IM feature
showcases another example of Flash/AJAX, through the use of AJAX to perform the Jabber
communication via an AJAX XMPP API. This feature required using cross-domain Flash/AJAX
communication, because the backend is hosted on different servers than those serving the
virtual desktop. Flash is responsible for all of the window management - and all of the
sending and receiving is done through the XMPP AJAX API.
Goowy is a great application precisely because it makes the best of Flash and the best of AJAX. Flash allows the Goowy team to build an application that performs the same way across platforms. It also gives them the ability to create rich drag-and-drop functionality as well as animation and visual cues that perfect the user experience. AJAX provides the text editing functionality as well as some of the backend server communication. The new features will only make Goowy more prominent in the virtual desktop space, and Flash is what separates them from the crowd.
Despite all of these great features, Goowy isn't sitting back just waiting for users to sign up. They're aggressively moving into competitors territory in order to create a one stop shop for anything you need. They're in the process of opening up a premium account for users who need more space and some additional features. They've also partnered with Box.net to provide online storage in the near future as well as jumping into the instant messenger space.
Ryan Stewart's blog is Digital Backcountry.
Live.com, Microsoft's personalized start page, has just been upgraded with some impressive new features. Live.com program manager Sanaz Ahari sent me details of the release this evening. It was good timing, because earlier today I'd been using the old Live.com and having trouble! The new features are:
New-look Live.com - note the pages
Live.com program manager Sanaz Ahari told me the team has put a lot of effort into improving the "first run experience" of users. Live.com is being seen by Microsoft as the starting page of Windows Live as a whole, as well as being a great customizable homepage with the user at the center of their experience. Also this release sees the integration of the new Windows Live Search, which is another sign of the importance Live.com is assuming for Microsoft.
Windows Live search - with the infinite scroll bar
Sanaz noted there has been a lot of work done under the hood - on the infrastructure. live.com was built on the start.com incubation infrastructure and with this launch, said Sanaz, "we’ve deployed a scaleable, geofederatable, higher performance backend which we’re looking forward to growing in to."
New gadgets
There are also a host of new gadgets that have been introduced into Live.com. According to Sanaz they are:
All in all, this is a big improvement by Live.com. It's game on to the other personalized homepages out there!
On ZDNet I've just posted a lengthy analysis of the main Ajax homepages (aka personalized start pages):
Over the past year many new AJAX homepages, aka personalized start pages, have been introduced to the market. Microsoft and Google have offerings, as do a host of small startups. First I'll define what an AJAX homepage is, then I'll do a feature comparison between the leading services....
I've been tracking the development of all the personalized start pages that have flowered up over the past year. Live.com, Google Personalized Homepage, Netvibes, PageFlakes, et al. These are services that don't just offer a place to store all your content and links - but house your widgets, gadgets and web services too. I'll be publishing an analysis of the feature sets of the leading services on ZDNet tonight, but I want to set the scene by discussing their growing popularity - which makes for an obvious comparison to portals in the late 90's.
TechCrunch calls them AJAX homepages, because they all use AJAX in the UI. For that reason there's something uniquely 'Web 2.0' about personalized start pages. But in other ways, they harken back to the dot com era when portals were all the rage (Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, etc). For example, the main aim of the game is still getting traffic.
Looking at the 2006 class of portals/personalized pages, there are two distinct groups:
1) The big guns: Microsoft (live.com), Google (Google Personalized Homepage) and Yahoo (My Yahoo, which is still mostly an old-style portal).
2) The little companies: Netvibes, Protopage, PageFlakes and a host of other contenders which I'll mention in my ZDNet post.
In terms of traffic, it's difficult to gauge how the big guns compare to one another. But amongst the little guys Netvibes has been getting all the buzz and early traffic, as this Alexa chart shows:
To put that into perspective though, it's small potatoes compared to live.com:
Update: A source at Microsoft tells me that the Live.com figure on Alexa may include mail.live.com, which gets a lot of traffic. If that's the case, take the following paragraph with a grain of salt...
I added the top web-based RSS Reader Bloglines into the chart to show just how significant Live.com - and Personalized start pages in general - are becoming. Bloglines smokes every other web-based RSS Reader and has been no slug in traffic growth lately, yet it was overtaken in traffic by Live.com after just 1-2 months. In fact Live.com currently has double the amount of traffic of Bloglines! I would imagine Google isn't too far behind Live.com either.
It goes to show how valuable this type of service could be, in terms of traffic and being a 'start page' for users. More grist for the Portals 2.0 mill, because portals too were all about getting 'eyeballs' and traffic.
Incidentally, I have a question for you: where is Yahoo in all this? My Yahoo is more like a dot com portal than a Personalized start page. Aside from the obvious observation that My Yahoo isn't made of AJAX, it's still basically a portal for mostly static content. Yahoo owns one of the leading widget makers, konfabulator (now known as Yahoo! Widgets), but it's not integrated with My Yahoo. Why haven't they joined the 'AJAX homepages' party yet?
UPDATE: I've now posted an Ajax homepages market review on ZDNet.
Google has just announced a new My Yahoo-like portal page, which they are calling a Personalized Google Homepage. It will be one place for users to access their Google search, news, Gmail, weather, stocks, driving directions, movies - and more. In the Google 'Factory Tour' webcast, Product Manager Marissa Mayer said they'll offer "Universal RSS support" for the Personalized Homepage within 1-2 months, meaning users will be able to add any RSS feed onto it.
Interesting that this comes out at the same time as Microsoft confirming it will integrate RSS across its MSN online services throughout the year. eWeek reports that in 2-3 weeks time MSN will release "a third version of Start, its Web-based aggregator prototype". This is a quote from Kyle Von Haden, an MSN program manager:
"This could easily be a home page, and you would not need to touch it".
Indeed... more updates on the Google and Microsoft stories as they develop.
One thing: why are all the bigco's so intent on building portals, when users are more and more using RSS Aggregators as their central means of access to Web content ('homepages' in Web 1.0 parlance)? The answer may be that the portal products of Google, MSN and Yahoo are, over time, turning into RSS Aggregators. Certainly MSN's start.com is heading in this direction - it remains to be seen whether Google's "personalized homepage" will do the same.
