Royal Pingdom reports that the buzzwords "Web 2.0" and "Web 3.0" among others have peaked and are declining. This is consistent with my findings last spring that Web 3.0 peaked in October 2007. Josh Catone even argues that Web 2.0 has died altogether. Read more »
Web 2.0, Web 3.0 Losing Interest as Buzzwords
Extending the Half Life of Conversations
Resuming blogging in the new year. I'll try to replace last year's weekly highlights, which I managed to put out until November, with short individual highlight posts, one per topic, on a more or less regular basis. On average, fingers crossed, I should manage at least a post a week.
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. Personally, I think this is a shame. With a longer half life of the conversations, more voices could be heard, not just those able to respond instantaneously to the most current buzz. Who's to blame for this development? News aggregators are a contributing factor. On Techmeme for example, a conversation seldom lasts for more than 24 hours. At least this blog makes a small contribution to extending the life of conversations. 
Google's SearchWiki - a "PR nightmare" [Best of November '08 #2-3]
A few tidbits from mid November blogging (Nov 10-23 2008):
- 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.
-
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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A Mix of Microsoft: Azure, MinWin, BizSpark and Small Basic [Best of November '08 #1]
Microsoft dominated the news this week (Nov 3-9 2008):
- 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. - 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Google Becomes an OpenID Provider and Possibly a Relying Party [Best of October '08 #4-5]
OpenID, Google and platforms. Three noteworthy posts from the past two weeks (Oct 20 - Nov 2 2008):
- 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.
- 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).
- 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?
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