A while ago, Jacob Gube wrote a guest post at RWW about 5 exciting things to look forward to in HTML 5. These are:

• New "semantic" HTML elements, e.g <nav>, <article>, <header> and <footer>. This would make it unnecessary to use the generic <div> element, together with class or id attributes, to build common parts of a web page. It would also facilitate search engines to better understand the contents of a web page, e.g. which parts are more relevant.
• Improved forms handling with validation.
• APIs for <video> and <audio> elements, allowing playback, for example. In November last year I wrote about the open source Ogg Theora video codec, which is a good choice for the <video> element.
• The <canvas> element for drawing to the screen.
• User editing of web pages (wiki-style) via the contenteditable attribute.

All details can be found in the latest HTML 5 draft recommendation (currently as of January 24th, 2009). 

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How is this different from Microsoft's ActiveX technology? Security wise, ActiveX relies on trust, i.e. it's up to the user to give the ActiveX control permission to run. Native Client on the other hand relies on automated sandboxing and code analysis to make sure that the application is safe to run. Native Client also takes a more open approach, by open sourcing the technology. Native Client is portable across the x86 architecture, which includes Windows, Linux and Mac machines, but it potentially leaves important mobile platforms in the cold.

Initially, the main target for the project is resource intensive applications, like physical simulations and visualizations. The image above depicts the Mandelbrot set, as generated by a port of the fractal viewer application XaoS to Native Client. The 3D game Quake has also been successfully ported to Native Client. Generally it has proven easy to port existing C/C++ applications to run in the trusted environment, which is really promising.

If the launch of the Chrome browser was Google's first step towards making the OS desktop obsolete, Native client is yet another step in that direction. Soon we might be able to do all computer tasks, even resource intensive ones, inside the browser window.

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Google Friend Connect is about making it easy to add basic social features to a site with the help of Google Gadgets and OpenSocial apps. Login is possible via a Google account, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID.

On a Facebook Connect enabled site, users can login via their Facebook account, connect with friends on the site, invite friends and publish status updates back to Facebook.

MySpaceID offers similar services as Facebook, but builds on the open standards OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial. They have also partnered with Friend Connect, to make it easy to add OpenSocial apps to a site.

Of the three, Google and MySpace are considered more open and friendly, as they support OpenID for example, whereas Facebook is considered proprietary and evil. Sadly enough the evil side is destined to win this war, due to its exceptional growth rate and simplicity for users. Hopefully there's still a hope for OpenID and that the good guys will win in the end.

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Buzzwords still increasing in popularity according to Royal Pingdom include "Crowdsourcing", "Microblogging", "Social media" and "Social network".

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Back in November Robert Scoble wrote about the half life of conversations in the blogosphere, which in the early times of blogging (around 2000) could be as long as about a week. Nowadays, on Twitter, it can be as short as five minutes.

• PR-guru Steve Rubel outcries over Google's new experimental search service SearchWiki, which allows people to comment, vote and reorder search results, provided they are logged in with their Google account. The reordering should only be privately visible, but voting and comments are public to others. Rubel calls this a "PR nightmare", as there is no community moderation of the comments like in Wikipedia for example, and he continues:
  

  of course people are going to run amok on the world's biggest online stage! That's like turning a kid with a massive sweet tooth loose in a giant candy store. It's going to be a haven for spam.

  Tags: Google, PR

• In another piece a couple of weeks ago Steve Rubel foresaw the end of tangible media by 2014, by tangible meaning all physical media like newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games. Like Rubel, I'm already almost free of tangible media, keeping only a subscription to Dr Dobb's Journal, which I'll probably quit next year. I'm also buying a handful of books each year, but once there's a Kindle-like device available in this country, at a reasonable price, I'll probably go completely digital.
  Tags: media, trends
• Google's virtual world experiment Lively, which I wrote about at launch in July, will be discontinued at the end of the year. Apparently, the experiment never took off, though Google states that the reason is to focus more on their core search, ads and apps business.
  Tags: virtual worlds
• Adobe labs has announced Alchemy, a research project that aims to bring the wealth of existing C and C++ code to Flash. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 bytecode that runs on Flash Player 10 or AIR 1.5. Alchemy is ideally suited for computation-intensive tasks and can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0, though still 2-10 times slower than native C/C++ code.
  Tags: Flash, programming
• Josh Catone writes that Yahoo has officially launched their browser extension BrowserPlus, which back in July was suggested as part of a Web 3.0 trend. BrowserPlus offers web developers a number of services, such as drag-and-drop, file browsing, image processing and persistent storage, just to name a few.
  Tags: browser extensions
• A final note on two social media apps: SocialToo, a service that allows you to automatically follow and unfollow people on Twitter, now has a polling feature.
  Tarpipe lets you automate your social media publishing via a Yahoo Pipes-like user interface. Tarpipe supports a number of social services, comes with an API, and supports OpenID, OAuth and Microformats, writes ReadWriteWeb.
  Tags: social applications

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• Adobe CTO calls for JavaScript coordination

• A couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced Azure, which is their offering in the hot cloud computing business. It's not easy to grasp what it implies, but it is a platform "in the cloud", on top of which there runs services including Live, .NET and SQL services. For now at least, you're dependent on Microsoft's development tool Visual Studio to develop for Azure. Microsoft's new offering does not depart from the usual confusion surrounding all their web-based products. Also I think that it implies some serious lock-in effects. So unless you have already invested heavily in Microsoft technologies, you are better off staying out.
  Ted Dziuba gives an alternative view of Azure, with some interesting points. Though he thinks it is a bit confusing compared to the offerings by Amazon and Google, he still thinks Microsoft could be a winner:     

  Fortunately for Microsoft, decision makers don't choose a hosted application platform based on specifications. They choose based on the number of stock photos of clouds and the amount of sans-serif blue typeface you have on your webpage. In that regard, Redmond is the clear winner. [...]
  This is all within one standard deviation of the average amount of fail in any given Microsoft product. In fact, I think it stands a better chance than Google's or Amazon's offering.

  Tags: cloud computing, Microsoft

• Microsoft's coming operating system Windows 7, might contain something called MinWin, reports Mary-Jo Foley, referring to a webcast featuring Mark Russinovich. MinWin lies at the core of the Windows OS, containing basic services and is a self-contained executable unit, independent of any outside services. Mary-Jo seems uncertain about whether MinWin will actually ship as a part of Windows 7, or if it's just a development project aimed at future Windows version like Windows 8 or even Midori. Possibly it's part of the much awaited from the ground up rewrite of the Windows code base?
  Tags: MinWin, Windows 7
• In another move to increase its customer base, Microsoft has launched BizSpark, a partner program for startups who for free (almost) get access to Microsoft's development tools via a MSDN Premium subscription, web hosting rights and access to the Azure services platform, for a three-year period. The major catch perhaps is that to join you have to connect with a Network partner, which are venture firms and other businesses and organizations focusing on services for startups and entrepreneurs. This can be a trouble if you want to stay independent. Another catch of course is that if you're still in business after three years, you have to start paying the bills from Microsoft.
  Tags: entrepreneurial, Microsoft
• Last week I wrote that Google now is an OpenID Identity Provider (IdP). Some folks argued that Google somehow had violated the specification and "forked" OpenID, something that is now denied in a post by DeWitt Clinton. A point of criticism stems from the fact that Google has used a new feature of the OpenID 2.0 specification known as Directed Identity, which is exemplified by Clinton as follows: 
  

  Directed Identity allows users to enter a generic domain name (e.g.., “example.com”), rather than a fully qualified identity (e.g., “example.com/users/bob”), so that they can use their identity provider to make an informed decision about how much personal information to expose to the RP [Relying Party]"

  Some commenter to Clinton's post argued that OpenID had forked itself by including such possibilities in version 2.0 of the specification. There is also an ongoing debate about whether it is a good idea to allow for email addresses as OpenID identifiers.
  Tags: OpenID

• OStatic writes that the open source Ogg Theora video codec now has reached version 1.0 status. The Xiph.Org Foundation stands behind the open source effort, which includes the Vorbis audio codec, the Theora video codec, and the Ogg multimedia container format, which encapsulates the codecs. Ogg Theora is a good candidate for the HTML 5 video element, though no codec is officially sanctioned by W3C.
  Tags: HTML5
• Lidija Davis writes about Small Basic, a new flavour of the original BASIC programming language from Microsoft, built on top of the .NET platform. The development environment is purely text based, in contrast to the visual environments provided by the alternatives Scratch and Alice. A commenter to Lidija's post also mentions the commercial alternative Phrogram, which I haven't checked out further.
  The help texts and introductions to Small Basic are written in a quite advanced language, hardly comprehensible to smaller kids. You probably should be at least around 12 years old and a bit nerdy inclined to enjoy Small Basic. I think Scratch, which I first wrote about in May, is better suited for smaller kids, 8 and up, whereas Alice seems to be aimed chiefly at college kids.
  Tags: kids, programming

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• How to Count to Windows 7 (and a few more) [Best of October '08 #2-3]

• Google announced last week that they will become an OpenID 2.0 compliant identity provider, letting other sites authenticate their users by a Google account. In a later post Google hinted that they are committed to working on becoming a relying party, thus allowing sign-in to Google using other OpenID providers. Possibly these moves by Google can help fight other proprietary authentication systems like Facebook Connect.
  Tags: authentication, OpenID
• Google Alerts, a useful service for brand tracking among other things, can now be delivered by RSS feeds. Though there is still the limitation that only the top 20 results of a Web search is tracked (and the top 10 results for news and blog search).
  Tags: feeds
• Platforms are everywhere, but those without a monetization model, like the Facebook platform, are doomed, argues Alex Iskold: 
  

  The platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization. [...]
  Having been burnt by Facebook, small and large companies alike will now think twice before investing in a presence on platforms.

  On the other hand, who really needs platform vendor lock-in when the Web is the ultimate open platform?
  Tags: platforms

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• New social media integration in popular Web 2.0 tools

• The next version of Windows will be called simply Windows 7, Microsoft's Mike Nash explains how they came up with that particular number. Interestingly, Windows XP isn't counted as a major release, just a 5.1 release, with Windows 2000 being 5.0. Windows Vista is 6.0, and Windows 7 is actually version 6.1!
  Tags: Windows 7
• Kongregate, the online Flash games site, where the boys are, according to Rafe Needleman, has put up a tutorial series aimed at beginning Flash game developers. The tutorials show how to build a basic space shooting game using Adobe Flash CS3 and ActionScript 2.0, and there is an accompanying developer competition.
  Tags: Flash, online games
• Experienced, but mainstream, Yahoo users don't get OpenID, shows a usability study released by Yahoo Developer Network. If you own a domain you can run your own OpenId server using phpMyID, as I do on the emented.com domain.
  Tags: OpenID
• If you want to use IIS on a Windows server, instead of Apache, to run popular open source PHP applications like Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress, you're in luck, as Microsoft just has released a Web Platform Installer tool, which simplifies the deployment process to almost a click of a button.
  Tags: PHP, Windows
• Opera released some Web statistics obtained by their "Metadata Analysis and Mining Application", MAMA: 
  

  MAMA is a structural Web-page search engine—it trawls Web pages and returns results detailing page structures, including what HTML, CSS, and script is used on it, as well as whether the HTML validates.

  It's a vast resource for Web nerds, with results ranging from the least and most popular HTML elements to Flash and AJAX usage per country. Some key findings: Apache is used by 68% of web servers, IIS by 26%. The ratio of HTML to XHTML usage is about 2 to 1. The "table" element is more popular than "div", 8th vs. 14th place, respectively. 33% of web pages use Flash. Only 4% of URLs pass the W3C markup validation test. When testing my site, 38 errors were reported, so nobody is perfect. I guess WordPress is to blame for a lot of those errors.
  Tags: statistics, web standards

• Yahoo continues the roll-out of their Open Strategy, dubbed Y!OS. The latest release is a new universal profile page.
  Tags: Yahoo
• Ars reports on benchmarking results for the new Flash 10 player compared to Flash 9. On Mac and Linux platforms there are substantial performance improvements up to a factor of 4. The Flash performance on those platforms are still far behind the performance on Windows though. Sporting the same hardware, Flash 10 on Vista outperformed Flash on Mac by a factor of nearly two.
  Tags: Flash
• Nonconformist blogger Ted Dziuba has relaunched his rebellious Web 2.0 blog Uncov, after recently leaving his startup Pressflip. It's mostly fun reading, as he tries to be a thorn in the side of the Web 2.0 aristocracy. Additionally, the accompanying pics of Fail and other misfortunes makes it a worthwhile read. On a somewhat related note, Christopher Beam writes here about the popularity of the word Fail.
  Tags: blogs

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• Google Blog Search launched a new home page with aggregation of top stories from the blogosphere. It seems to be more democratic than Techmeme, in that it is easier for small blogs to get listed. More stories on a wider range of subjects are also covered. What makes it less useful however is that there is no RSS feed, and blog conversations for a story are only tracked for less than a day. The latter flaw it shares with Techmeme, by the way. Probably there is no immediate SEO effect of getting aggregated on Google Blog Search, as the post listings are generated by JavaScript.
  Tags: aggregation, blog search
• Gnip, the infrastructure service for providers and consumers of social network data, which I wrote about in July, has released version 2.0 of its API. ProgrammableWeb writes: 
  

  The new version of the API adds full data delivery, XMPP support, and advanced data filtering. [...]
  The new features look like they’ll be very useful to developers, and the business model is priced to entice hobbyists, small companies, and big businesses alike.

  Tags: Gnip

• GIMP, the open source "Photoshop killer", has updated to version 2.6 writes OStatic. The new version comes with user interface changes and enhancements for plug-in developers.
  Tags: GIMP
• Widget company Clearspring acquires bookmarking and sharing service AddThis, whose widget can be found at the bottom of this post. Josh Catone interviewed Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar and writes: 
  

  The data that [AddThis] has presumably collected about how content is shared across the web has a lot of potential use for marketers. Radfar told me he hopes to eventually expose that sharing data via an API that will allow people to really dig into sharing trends.

  Tags: widgets

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