Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com's smartphone application, users won't just have access to their files on the go - they can also scan in new documents with their phone's camera.

The one major new feature in this release of Acrobat.com is the file organizer. Before, files could live in three different places on the service. Now all files are accessible through one main interface.

The file organizer itself includes some handy features, too. Instead of using a traditional folder structure like you have on your computer's hard drive, the service introduces something called "collections." These are more like iTunes playlists than file folders (or even labels in Gmail) because files can be assigned to multiple collections instead of having to sit in just one folder.

Another key component to the organizer is a file search tool. Believe it or not, the online service had no way of helping you find your files until now. Although the current search capabilities don't yet offer full text search of your documents, Adobe says that may come further down the road.

Also new is the organizer's "import and edit" feature which lets you open external files directly into the appropriate program so you can begin to work on them online. In the past, you had to first launch the program, then import the file. This time-saving step is more akin to what rival Google Docs offers via their upload feature except that in Acrobat.com, you don't have to click a link to open the uploaded file - it happens automatically.

Other New Features

The various online office programs themselves have seen improvements as well in this new release. Buzzword is leaving beta and now it, along with Presentations, lets you import images from online services like Flickr and Google Images in addition to the images found on your computer. One drawback to this feature, though, is that the online image searches don't offer filtering by license type, so a user could easily get into trouble by adding a copyrighted or otherwise licensed photo into their document if they neglect to check permissions first.

The Tables app, still in beta, now has the ability to do more data sorting and filtering. It also adds new views including a print layout view that shows what the document will look like on the printed page.

Acrobat.com Comes to iPhone, Blackberry

One of the more exciting developments is the new Acrobat.com mobile application which will be made available to Blackberry and iPhone users shortly. Built in conjunction with a company called scanR, the mobile application lets users take advantage of their mobile phone's camera to add new files to the service. After taking the photo, the app uses OCR technology to convert the image to text. How well this works is unknown at this time because the app has not yet arrived in the respective app stores.

The app also lets users view their files in a read-only mode, convert them to PDFs, and share them with others via fax or email. There will be two versions of the app made available - a free version and a premium offering which will allow for more PDF conversions and faxes.

According to Adobe, the Acrobat.com service is faring well. They already have 6 million users and add around 100,000 more each week. While a lot of users are students and SMB owners looking for a free alternative to more expensive Microsoft Office software, the company says they're also seeing the service picked up and used in small workgroups at larger companies. However, Adobe admits that they're not an enterprise play yet and they also won't reveal how many people use the premium version of the service - only that they're "happy" with the number thus far.

If you want to try the upgraded online suite, you can do so at www.acrobat.com as of tomorrow (Saturday, November 21st) at 6 AM EST.

However, out of the two updates, it's Adobe AIR 2 that received the biggest overhaul. The new runtime allows developers to create entirely new types of applications that simply weren't possible using AIR 1. What sort of apps are those? Adobe's gallery of sample apps should give you some ideas of what's to come.

In Adobe AIR 2, apps can now detect when a mass storage device has been inserted into the computer. That means the app can "see" your USB flash drives, external drives, and even some digital cameras. For example, developers could build an app that recognizes when your Flip camera is plugged in and lets you automatically upload videos to YouTube.

To demo this capability, Adobe has released FileTile, a sample app that does just this (minus the video uploading). FileTile recognizes external devices and lets you see the files and open them with their default application.

Download Installer | Source

2. Native Process API

The native process API allows developers to better integrate their AIR apps with existing code libraries or extend their apps using native code. With the new native process API, this can now be done without compromising the cross-platform capabilities of AIR which allows it to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Developers using this new functionality can now deploy their apps with operating-specific installers like .exe, .dmg, .rpm, and .deb instead of an .air installer file.

To demonstrate the native process API, Adobe released SearchCentral, an application that taps into Mac OS X's Spotlight feature for desktop searches. It also lets you do web searches on Google and Wikipedia.

Installer | Source | How to

Here's a video explaining in more detail how the native API works:

3. Microphone Data Access

Like it sounds, the microphone data access feature lets you acquire the sound data from a computer's microphone without the need of a server. For example, a developer could build a note-taking application that lets users record audio clips even when they're offline.

To get started, a simple app called Microphone is now available which does recording and playback with variable playback speeds supported.

Download Installer | Source | How to

4. Drag-and-Drop Support for Remote Files

The new "file promises" feature of AIR 2 lets you drag remote files out of an AIR application. A file promise, as described by Adobe's Christian Cantrell, is "what you put on the clipboard when you want the user to be able to drag and drop files that do not yet exist, or that exist elsewhere (not locally on your machine)." It's a promise to deliver a file at some point, but not an actual file.

For example, an app could generate a CSV file but only when a user tries to drag and drop the file. It could also refer to files on a remote server, like an FTP server. When a user grabs that remote file and pulls it into the AIR app, the app could then download the data. It even supports files accessible via a URL like those hosted on Google Sites.

Unfortunately, this feature is Windows and Mac only.

A sample app called S3E provides a graphical front-end to your Amazon S3 account to demonstrate this feature.

Download Installer | Source | How to

5. Peer-to-Peer Networking Capabilities

Adobe AIR 2 also adds support for new networking capabilities including UDP, secure sockets and peer-to-peer. To demonstrate the possibilities, Adobe released KeePIPE, a javascript app that lets users on the same network share files using peer-to-peer technology. It also lets VMWare users transfer files between a virtual machine and a host computer.

Download Installer | Source | Read me

6. Multi-Touch

Perhaps the most exciting enhancement in AIR 2 and in Flash Player 10.1 are the new multi-touch APIs. In Windows 7, AIR apps can respond to multi-touch and in both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, they can respond to gestures.

In this video (below), Adobe's Kevin Lynch demos a multi-touch app on an HP TouchSmart computer:

Obviously, Adobe is excited about this new feature, too, because they've released not one but four sample applications that demonstrate multi-touch in action:

• GeoTest: Lets you move images around the screen using a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source
• PhotoPhysics: A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source
• SpriteFract: A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine that demonstrates a mouse-compatible, direct-manipulation interface. It also uses PixelBender to asynchronously process a large amount of geometry data. Download Installer | Source
• TouchTest: Lets you drag, scale, and rotate images on the screen. Download Installer | Source

Other Features

Other features in Adobe AIR 2 include the following (courtesy of Rob Christensen):

• A new API lets you open documents with its default application
• Global error handling
• Enhanced printing support, including vector printing support on Mac and new APIs to query the local machine for a list of printers or print without a dialog box.
• WebKit in AIR 2 is now based on the version shipped with Safari 4.0.3 which includes support for JavaScript profiling, SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine performs 50% faster using SunSpider tests, CSS3 Module support (2D transformations, transitions, animations, gradients, zoom and WebKit CSS selectors), styling scrollbars via CSS and Canvas enhancements.
• IPv6 format addresses can now be used with all APIs that accept an IP string as input.
• Increased maximum size of NativeWindow: AIR 2 apps can have a window size of 4095 x 4095 where before the maximum was 2880 x 2880.
• DNS lookup
• Network interface enumeration
• Database transaction savepoints
• Screen reader support in Windows
• IME API and IME text input enhancement
• Smaller runtime installer sizes
• More efficient CPU usage and reduced memory size

This new organization within Adobe will bring together the e-book business groups that worked on the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, as well as the group that worked with the New York Times on the Times Reader 2.0. The new group will focus on developing products and business opportunities for digital publishers. These will include support for business models like subscription, advertising and retail.

Sony, for example, currently uses Adobe's Content Server to power its DRM solution for e-books. While Sony offers its e-books in the ePub format, it also uses Adobe's Content Server to wrap a proprietary DRM solution around the open ePub format.

Bill McCoy is Leaving Adobe

Bill McCoy drove Adobe's push towards making ePub the default format for eBooks. McCoy, however, is leaving Adobe as part of the restructuring. We can only hope that the company will continue to push for open standards in McCoy's absence. More details about McCoy's role at Adobe can be found at TeleRead.

Version 2.0 of AIR will hit Adobe Labs later this year and be available for everyone in the first half of 2010, the company said this week. A good list of new features were blogged about by Adobe's Christian Cantrell yesterday and below are a few of our favorites.

Here's what we can look forward to for AIR 2.0.

Multitouch and Gestures

Mac users with multitouch hardware can already perform multitouch actions in AIR apps today, but this feature will be available for Windows users in the next version of AIR. Both Windows 7 and Mac users will get new support for gestures like press and tap, pan, zoom, swipe and rotate.

Think the design-savvy developers of the AIR world can come up with some awesome things to do with these new gestures? We suspect they will.

Local Audio Encoding

"Access audio data directly from the microphone," Cantrell writes, "You used to have to send the data to a server and access it from there, but now you can do it entirely on the client." With this increase in efficiency, we expect to see more AIR apps utilize audio. An AIR podcast recording app? That's an obvious idea, we'll see what else people come up with.

Improved Memory Use

AIR apps are memory expensive, that's probably the single biggest complaint about them. Cantrell says that AIR 2.0 will have lower CPU utilization when idle and lower memory consumption in general. That's great news. If Adobe can really pull this off and make dramatic cuts to AIR's memory requirement then AIR apps are going to see a big increase in adoption.

The New York Times for example, one of the most new-media capable old-school institutions in the US, recently asked its staff to stop using the AIR app Tweetdeck because it's such a memory hog. That's probably one of the reasons why Times staff appears to be posting to Twitter less these days.

AIR apps can offer a compelling user experience outside the browser but across computing platforms. We've had high hopes for AIR for a long time. These and other improvements could help AIR deliver on more of that promise.

Hopefully 2.0 won't be too long in coming.

See Also: 10 Adobe AIR Apps Bloggers Will Love

High-traffic Flash-based gaming communities like Lumosity, Newgrounds and PopCap Games will be some of the first groups to utilize Flash's Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure. If these groups really do find the Flash customization as easy as it sounds, Adobe will be opening the floodgates to casual gaming. PopCap's titles alone have been downloaded more than 1 billion times by consumers worldwide. With reduced development time, it will be interesting to see the fortunes amassed by gaming houses. Some of the light games that have already been created using CS5 include Chroma Circuit, Fickleblox and Just Letters.

RIM, the company behind BlackBerry's wireless platform, including email and touchscreen technologies, is joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, a 50-organization-members-strong organization that aims to promote better apps for richer mobile, television, and desktop browsing experiences for users.

Also at MAX, Adobe and Nokia are jointly announcing the funding of more than 35 multi-screen applications as part of the Open Screen Project Fund. Several apps will be demonstrated at the show, including Twitter client Twittle, interactive map MyFestivalGuide, entertainment app SmartGrooves, frequent flyer app MileBlaster, real-time audience feedback app Live TalkBack, and many more.

Adobe is also announcing support for HTTP streaming and several new mobile-ready features, including multi-touch, gestures, accelerometer, and screen orientation.

Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent browser-based runtime from the Open Screen Project that offers browsing of Flash-based web apps, HD video, and other content on smartphones, netbooks, other Internet-enabled devices.

Flash support is also expected for several other mobile platforms, including Google Android, Symbian, Palm webOS, and Windows Mobile. A public developer beta will be available for Windows Mobile, webOS, and desktop operating systems before the end of the year. A public developer beta for Android and Symbian should be announces early in 2010, with general availability and publicly available devices coming in the first half of 2010.

Flash-based P2P Video

For TinyChat, the ability to route these videos around its servers means reduced bandwidth costs. Once this feature becomes part of the default TinyChat setup, only calls with more than 2 participants will have to go through the company's servers and as TinyChat's founder Dan Blake told us earlier today, the experience of switching between the P2P chat and the server-based version should be completely seamless.

Unlike other P2P solutions, TinyChat is able to leverage a plugin that virtually all users already have on their machines and users don't have to download another plugin. All a user needs is a webcam and a microphone. Currently, when you are chatting on the P2P server, your privacy is also protected, as the service simply won't allow a third user to listen in or join the call.

Sharing Flash Apps on Mobile Devices

On the mobile side, Adobe and Gigya will give users the ability to share content on a wide variety of phones, including Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. Users who want to install a sharable application on their mobile phones will simply receive an SMS message with a link to the application. The service will automatically detect the type of device and deliver the right version to the user. Developers can also give their users the ability to share iPhone versions of their applications - though obviously those have to be native iPhone applications, as the iPhone doesn't support Flash.

Developers will be able to track the success of their applications through and Adobe AIR app that will allow them to measure distribution and customer usage. In partnership with Gigya, Adobe will also give developers the ability to assure installs through paid promotions and to monetize apps through cross-promotions.

Coming Soon: Easier Integration with Social Networks

Adobe also announced that it will launch another Flash Platform Service later this year that will allow developers to easily connect Flash applications written on top of Adobe's platforms with a number of social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Developers won't have to worry about the idiosyncrasies of a service's API, but will be able to write their applications on top of Adobe's social platform instead.

Ted Patrick, Adobe's Senior Manager of Developer Communities, put it like this: "I think we will see Flash on different devices support the soul of the device in capabilities and APIs" - including GPS. That's an exciting trajectory and more than we've heard before. Full Flash on phones by the end of this year is more or less on schedule, but the integration of these physical features certainly revs up the imagination.

"As Apple has shown," Governor told us by phone, "the User Experience elements are really important - it's not just how you draw screens. Adobe has understood this and will be offering APIs accordingly. What's most important is that they support a new interaction model because that's what developers want. Augmented reality apps, being more gestural about how you interact with applications - that's a big deal."

Governor, whose analyst firm counts Adobe among its clients, says that things will get really interesting when the Flash developer tool Flash Builder (formerly known as Flex Builder) integrates mobile and mobile features like accelerometer and multi-touch into its development environment. That's not currently on the public road map, but seems like the next logical step. "There's all these really cool phones beyond the iPhone, like Nokia phones, that have APIs for things like accelerometers, but the functionality hasn't been taken advantage of," Governor said. "If Adobe can simplify access to this functionality for new interaction models then it can, through tools, democratize sophisticated development on these platforms."

We've had only initial contact about this with Adobe at press time but will update coverage if we get more information.

While we tend to focus here on non-gaming mobile apps, it's not hard to see that multi-touch, accelerometer and GPS use by Flash apps will probably have the biggest impact on games.

The mobile Flash demonstrations shown today by Adobe were all on Android devices, still no world on Flash for the iPhone. ("It's up to Apple," was the line again today.) A bevy of beautiful, touchable, turnable, location-aware Flash apps on Android could create a pretty compelling competitor to the contents of the iPhone app store.

1. Streaming Support: Silverlight changes and adapts the video quality of a media file based on available bandwidth and CPU conditions in order to deliver an optimized viewing experience. This provides support for live and on-demand true HD (720p+) streaming. Video giant Netflix first employed the platform in 2007 to power its instant viewing service. With the new streaming support, the only thing holding back HD video sites is their own limited catalogues.

2. Sketchflow: Expression Studio's SketchFlow allows for rapid user interface prototyping. This means that concepts and projects can evolve seamlessly without the need for lengthy redesigns. Developers are also able to apply their sketches to a 3D plane and add animation and annotations to them. Designers and developers are reporting that Sketchflow cuts down mock up times significantly.

3. Out-of-browser Capabilities: Similar to Adobe's AIR and Mozilla's Prism, Silverlight enables applications to be placed in a restricted store on a users machine. Users are then provided a direct link to the application from their desktop or start menu. Silverlight also tests for a network connection and automatically syncs and stores files depending on that connection. This ensures point back up.

One of Silverlight 3's early projects is French-based Eeple's Board. The project was started by a 19-year-old computer science student and is a virtual cork board with pictures, posters and articles. As with a real cork board, messages and notes can be layered to produce a media collage. In this case, the media includes videos, blog posts and music files.

A year ago, Silverlight's penetration was 17%, today it's at a third of all users. Compared to the 99% market penetration of Flash 9 and 86% penetration of Flash 10, this is extremely low. It will be interesting to see if Silverlight 3's features will increase the rate of adoption. Partnerships will certainly play a key role in how the market is carved out in the years to come.

Adobe worked closely with the company to create what it believes is an app that pushes the envelope with regard to what can be done with Adobe technology. We believe there are a number of trends in play here that go beyond Adobe as well and are likely to be key features for many apps in the future.

Matrix lets users combine their own uploaded data in CSV format with historical data compiled by Morgan Stanley. Sharp looking data visualization options are baked in to help with decision making. Real time data is fed into a dashboard type environment as well.

Rich Internet Applications

Rich Internet Apps (RIA's) are particularly well suited to data-intensive operations if they are constructed well. Users get the responsiveness of a desktop app combined with live updates from the cloud. The most popular consumer-level RIAs are Adobe AIR Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic - but imagine these kinds of apps built by the powerful development teams working in financial services firms.

Mixed Human and Machine Communication

The Matrix product combines human-curated content chosen by Morgan Stanley's employees with algorithmically filtered content from the raging river of news and financial information that threatens to overwhelm users.

That content is delivered in a "news feed" type interface that looks a little like Facebook or Twitter, but where message headlines can be expanded with a click for reading and viewing multimedia.

Additionally, all of those pieces of content are accompanied by an IM-like presence status for the person who added the content to the system. That's hot stuff - like the human component of the real time web, augmented by data. We're very curious to see how well this can scale, but generally speaking - presence information online is something we really wish more apps supported.

The Matrix microsite is over the top with Flash and audio, but it's definitely worth a look. The product is is a fascinating look into the future. We hope that institutional investors don't get to have all the fun.

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Calais

Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application. Calais 4.0 was released in January, for the first time allowing publishers to connect to the Linked Data Web standard. Calais 4.0 goes beyond meta-tagging and enables publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com, and others. Calais 4.0 also lets publishers share semantic meta-data about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services, and more.

Check out the incredible work being done at Calais and let us know what you think.

Socialtext

Socialtext provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.

Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled "5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration." It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."

Download Socialtext's free white paper at http://socialtext.com.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

You can sign up to get demographic data by clicking here.

Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

TaxACT

TaxACT is an efficient way to file your taxes online, in either desktop or web-based versions. It offers two ways to enter data: the interview format, or the forms-based entry method. TaxACT also provides its users a highly reliable and robust alerts system to prevent costly mistakes generally caused by omissions or missed opportunities to maximize deductions. Regardless of the TaxACT version, all forms are IRS and State approved. The software was developed by professional accountants and CPAs.

You can see a tour of TaxACT online by clicking here.

Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 offers powerful streaming with a flexible environment for creating and delivering rich, interactive, multi-way social media experiences to a broad audience. You'll find a superior video experience, with new features such as Dynamic Streaming, DVR functionality, HTTP delivery support, and H.264 enhancements.

Check out the Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 to add interactivity and media streaming to your social media applications.

Wistia

Wistia is a provider of secure video sharing and collaboration tools for business. The company says that "the use of video in business has grown immensely as cameras and video production have become significantly more accessible. However, sharing and collaborating on this content with your team still has many challenges, including large file sizes, numerous video formats, privacy and security, and lack of collaboration environment." Wistia aims to solve those challenges.

You can get a free 15-day trial of Wistia by clicking here.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Eurekster

Eurekster is developer of the swicki that we use on ReadWriteWeb, a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice (in our case, Web tech), powered by the community.

People build swickis on all kinds of topics, some people build a lot of them. Alex Holmes, for example, builds really nice looking swickis on topics like the 2008 Election, Ocean Animals and Home Buying.

Smub

Smub is the first truly mobile bookmarking, link-sharing tool. Smub lets you share and save any link easily from your iPhone, Mac, or PC without a plugin or application.

Type smub.it/ to the left of http:// on any link to save or share, and Smub will automatically take you through the process. Make the link public to share with others, or keep it private just for yourself. Smub has built-in sharing to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more.

Our Gracious Hosts and Blogging Software

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Adobe, of course, isn't alone in trying to make a push for the living room. Microsoft is also trying to aim for the same market with its Silverlight platform. Although Silverlight has been used to power some high-profile events lately, including NBC's Olympics site, it is still only a minor player in the overall market.

Last August, Intel and Yahoo also announced an initiative to bring Yahoo widgets to TVs. Even though other vendors like Verizon already offer some widgets on their set-top boxes, these solutions are often too clunky to be really useful.

Similar to Silverlight, the new Adobe platform will not just focus on widgets, however. Adobe also plans to give content creators the ability to stream HD video directly to these devices.

Interestingly, Netflix, which currently uses Silverlight to power its browser-based players, is also among Adobe's launch partners.

Can Flash Succeed Where Others Have Failed?

Interactive TV has long held a lot of promise, but the idea never really caught on with consumers. Flash, however, may be able to change this. Adobe can rely on a dedicated group of third-party developers who will only have to make minor changes to their programs to make them run on these Flash-enabled devices.

Hopefully, Adobe will create an App Store-like experience that will allow developers to promote their apps and allow consumers the ability to pick and choose widgets for their TVs.

OPML for eBooks

One way to think about this standard is as a kind of 'OPML for eBooks' - only instead of RSS feeds, OPDS features a catalog of eBooks, including optional links to book covers and short summaries. Instead of making users jump through all kinds of hoops, eBook applications could simply allow users to 'subscribe' to and search through these catalogs from within the application - and users could then download them right to their eBook readers without having to go to a browser or another application first.

In a perfect world, where every eBook vendor adopted this standard, users would be able to find and acquire books from any device, whether it be a Kindle, a Sony Reader, a Windows Mobile phone, or a Windows desktop. The Stanza reader, for example, already features support for various stores, and if Amazon adopted this standard, it could easily enable its users to access any other OPDS enabled store. The experience would probably not be as rich as on a dedicated app or website, but it would allow users to access eBooks from a wider range of vendors (which, of course, might not necessarily be in every vendor's interest).

Just a draft for now

The OPDS standard is currently in draft form, but the core elements of the standard are support for the EPUB standard and the Atom XML based catalog format. The exact specifications are available on the project's wiki, where you can also participate in the project.

In his post about this announcement, Adobe's Bill McCoy argues that he hopes that this standard will give consumers a seamless mechanism to get eBooks from various sources, with the ability to read the texts on multiple devices, "without lock-in to 'One Store to Rule Them All'" - which we take as a reference to Amazon's Kindle and Kindle Store (though thanks to this hack, reading ePub books on the Kindle has now become a bit easier).

McCoy also rightly argues that having a standard for eBook distribution and acquisition will allow vendors to reach more consumers across a wider range of platforms, which, in the end, can only be a good thing for the emerging eBook market.

The way that Nomee's CEO Kevin Mokarow describes his new Adobe AIR application is that it lets you follow "people, not web sites." This is accomplished through the creation and exchange of "Nomee cards." In your card, you enter in your contact information and your social networking profiles from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and hundreds more - anything with an RSS feed is supported. By creating Nomee cards for select groups, you can specify who gets to see what information. For example, if you want to share your card by posting it to your blog, you may want to include your Twitter, FriendFeed, and MySpace information, but not your Facebook profile. For your close friends, however, you could share a separate Nomee card which contains your Facebook profile info, too.

Nomee also provides pre-built cards for certain high-profile persons including celebrities, sports players, and the occasional politician (yes, it's Barack Obama). Anyone can subscribe to these cards just as anyone can subscribe to yours - and you don't have to reciprocate by accepting their card in return. It's entirely a one way experience.

Within the Nomee application the cards can be organized into groups and clicking on any user's information will display the number of updates per service in a very iPhone-esque fashion. You can also view a stream of that person's most recent updates across all their networks.

Some Issues

Obviously, keeping track of all your friends and colleagues in Nomee could be very inefficient since you have to click on users one-by-one to see their respective streams. The only other option for seeing friends' updates is turning on the desktop alerts - a feature you'll either love or hate. If you only have a few contacts, it may be nice to get the occasional pop-up, but most of us would be overrun with alerts.

The company intended this application to be a way to stay tuned into what your friends and other contacts are up to, but outside of those pop-ups, its interface makes this relatively time-consuming and inefficient. However, in playing with the application ourselves, we saw the potential for it to become a social address book. Of course, transforming the app from a stream-based aggregator to an address book would require some additional work on the company's part.

Still, the idea is intriguing - an address book that's filled not only with traditional contact info, but also with the status updates and other social data produced by that contact across the social networking arena. That could actually be a useful desktop application. Add a mobile sync feature and there could really be something there.

In order for this to come to pass, though, Nomee would have to add a lot more features. For example, it would have to allow you to build contacts on your own and it should let you accept vCards from others which you could then customize by entering in things like their Twitter username, etc. Supporting a standard like vCard is important because you can't assume that everyone is going to be creating these "Nomee cards."

At the moment, Nomee is somewhere in between web-based aggregation portals like FriendFeed (or, these days, Facebook's stream) and desktop-based AIR apps like TweetDeck's Twitter-tracking tool. The company needs to decide how committed they are to being an aggregation tool versus a social contact organizer. If it's the former, the current iteration somewhat fails for anyone with a decent amount of contacts to follow because it's just inefficient to track updates with this app. But if it's the latter, after some work Nomee could become a useful way to pull up contact information while also seeing a person's latest social activity.

We suppose that, to a point, you can use Nomee in this way right now. However, you're restricted to those who already have Nomee cards - which includes very few "real" people at the moment. (All you have are celebrity "news makers.") And without real people to follow, there isn't much you can do with a social application.