This week: Macrobe/Adobemedia, sports RSS feeds, Google and Yahoo MojoWatch, Mobile Web 2.0 woes, Dan Gillmor's Web 3.0.
This was all over the Web Tech part of the blogosphere this week and the general feeling was one of surprise that two Web Design heavyweights have joined forces. Are they challenging Microsoft, trying to make up lost Web 2.0 ground, readying for a Mobile Web play? Probably all that and more. Hmmm, perhaps the biggest question is: will they give Marc his name back? :-)
From a practical perspective, I'd like the new Macrobe company to create a version of Photoshop that is as user-friendly as Fireworks! ;-)
I'm big on topic RSS feeds, so I was interested to read Rich Skrenta's analysis of the most-subscribed-to topix.net feeds in Bloglines and MyYahoo (mostly MyYahoo it seems). What stood out for me was the number of sports feeds in the top 20 list - 10 by my count. It doesn't surprise me that sports feeds are so popular with MyYahoo users, given an analysis earlier this year that suggested MyYahoo is the most popular RSS Aggregator for gridiron fans.
Also sports news is a prime candidate for RSSification, given that it's information people are passionate about and want regular updates of.
This week both Google and Yahoo announced their first quarter earnings - and Google came out the clear winner. It's fair to say that Google, with the earnings announcement and new features such as My Search History, has managed to take back a bit of the mojo that Yahoo has been busily acquiring in 2005. David Jackson summed it up well:
"Google's net income of $369 million was significantly greater than Yahoo's net income of $205 million. Terry Semel's claim that Yahoo is the best positioned Internet company is curious, particularly given that Yahoo's fastest profit growth is in search."
I still think Yahoo's media strategy will pay huge dividends in future. And don't forget that Google has PR issues that need to be addressed. So I'm not reading too much into the market glory that Google continues to bask in.
Russell Beattie isn't happy about the current state of the Mobile Web:
"Companies need to *forget* their experiences with WAP 1.0 in the early part of the decade and realize five years have passed and the public is now ready for the mobile web."
John Battelle agrees and adds:
"On the one hand you have an open platform, the web, that sports a robust ecology with all sorts of innovation and competition. On the other hand, over in the mobile world, you have this carrier-driven crap that is driven by one thing and one thing only: the carrier's desperate desire to lock you in."
My 2 cents: On the producer side, the Mobile Web is only a platform for the telecomms companies that control it. On the consumer side, there is the Digital Lifestyle Mobile Jigsaw to contend with - getting your mobile phone to connect with all the other pieces of the Web. So I'm afraid the Mobile Web has a ways to go before being truly Web 2.0.
This week it's Dan Gillmor's "Web 3.0" post. Only please don't call it Web 3.0, because I don't want to re-brand my blog ;-) But I'll forgive Dan for that, because he also liberally uses the term "read/write web" :-)
Basically Dan's theme is that version 1 of the Web was read-only and version 2 (which we're in the middle of right now) is read/write. He goes on to say:
"The emerging web is one in which the machines talk as much to each other as humans talk to machines or other humans. As the net is the rough equivalent of a computer operating system, we're learning how to program the web itself."
He references APIs, web services and the whole 'Web as Operating System' concept. While I agree with all that, to me it all comes under the Web 2.0 banner - i.e. the Web as a Platform.
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Is it just me or others, too, that see a striking similarity between Dan Gillmor's Web 3.0 definition and what Sir TBL calls the Semantic Web: "The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." :)
Buf for all seriousness, it might be when we actually reach the phase of say, web 3.0, that we'll fully have the expressive power of structured data on the Web (mostly ontologies). For now, when it comes to representing "meaning" on the web, web 2.0 is still in its infancy, because it's yet too much about "people" generating data for other "people", and for that to happen, it has to be simple, which is why I think tagging has been soaring-it offers an extremely low barrier to entry. It seems that structured blogging and attempts like attention.xml are good examples of making the web more machine-processable.
Oh, by the way, del.icio.us is playing with this thing called "bundle", which brings us a step closer to ontologies from a flat tag space.
Posted by: twdanny | April 26, 2005 4:08 AMHonestly, one can only go so far with these numerical labels until they start to seem a bit silly. I'm fine with web 2.0, simply signifying a shift in our learning curve for understanding how to use the web as a tool, but let's leave it at that. Sounds like Dan is just trying to sound as if he's ahead of the curve, but just rehashing the "web as a platform" mantra.
Posted by: Brady Joslin | April 26, 2005 6:05 AMRe the Mobile Web. The reason many of us have championed wi-fi as a medium for mobile communications is to attempt to free ourselves from the powerful backwards influence of the carriers. Too bad that mesh wi-fi has been slow to emerge. I'm sure the carriers have done everything in their power to stop it. Since there has been no progress in terms of openness on the part of the carriers, something else needs to happen. I am glad to see Steve Jobs entering that fray with the iTunes mobile phone. Curious to see if Steve can work his magic and loosen the stranglehold a bit. Something needs to happen here.
Posted by: Janet Tokerud | April 26, 2005 6:19 AM