I think the main feature web apps bring to users is “sharing”. The share button is the equivelent of copy-paste on the desktop. Copy-paste was (AFAIC) the main feature GUI brought to desktop over CLI. It created a whole culture, the “copy-paste culture” [1]
The “share” option is why I use web apps -Google Docs is a great example of this. I think that web apps will be judged more and more on how easy and intuitive they make sharing. From simple embedding into web pages and blogs, to fine-grained sharing with access rights among team members.
Of course, if it’s sharable, it should be mashable too 
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[1] any related links? Couldn’t find any!
Jason Calacanis is declaring facebook buncruptcy.
It is something I always wondered about: how much can you scale social media? How many comments can an individual follow? How many emails can an individual read and respond to? How many friend connections can you keep up on Facebook or LinkedIn before loosing control?
After a certain scale, social medial are still reciprocal but maybe not symmetrical… This could be an interesting mesure to compare social-* (media, networks, etc) platforms.
So… Apple anounced yesterday the availability of Safari 3 (beta) for Windows. Why?
Step back for a moment. We are in the begining of a “browser is the platform” war. Adobe has Apollo. Microsoft is pushing Silverlight. Mozilla has not been strong on this, but XUL is a great platform to develop applications on (see Songbird and, correct me if I’m wrong, Joost).
An now Apple with Safari. You may think that Safari is “just a browser”, but I have the impression that Safari will soon be able to control the environment outside the browser. Did you see that “web2.0 addressbook-in-safari demo”? In iPhone, you can call the number you see in the browser just by clicking on it…
IF iPhone does well, then Safari 3 will be a desirable platform to develop upon. Being able to use Safari as a cross-platform (OS X, Windows, mobile) development platform will be a great asset and considering that iPhone will be closed to third party developers it may have a strong advantage.
What could a web2.0 virul look like? Here is my guess:
- it will be written in Javascript
- it will live inside Google Documents
- when you open the infected document, the js will look up your Google contacts, create an infected document and invite all your contacts to collaborate on it.
- when one of the persons invited opens the infected document, the virus will replicate, and so on.
How could a virus like this be damaging?
- it could delete your mails, your documents, contacts, etc.
- it could do some URL rewriting to add a specific associate id to links to amazon and other on-line stores.
- it could launch a distributed DoS attack agains a site…
Replace Google with Microsoft Live above to get a more destructive effect.
I’m pretty sure this will happen sooner or later. And then we will start looking for the Open Web2.0 platform that has fewer virusses, etc…
Google has acquired Jotspot!
I don’t know if they really “needed” JotSpot (which is a great company btw), or they wanted their people, or they just wanted eliminate someone else bought a great “web office app”, but this is *very* interesting!
Google Spreadsheets may not be as powerful as Excel, but there are some things that is much better for. Take for example our little intra-company predictions about the World Cup 2006.
Originally, Achilleas created an Excel spreadsheet with all the gamess, then we entered our predictions. The spreadsheet contains formulas that calculate almost everything, except the scores so all he has to do is update the sores after each game and we know who is ahead in our predictions, how many points each team has, etc.
Sharing the Excel spreadsheet was a bit problematic. We would have to use a shfile at the company file server, howevere we have to access to it from outside the company intranet. What’s more, we would have to make sure everyone has Excel installed and check how the spreatsheet formulas work with other simmilar apps like OpenOffice that some (including me) use.
Porting (= uploading and editing by hand some of the formulas) the spreadsheet to Google Spreadsheets turned out to be the (almost) ideal solution. Everything works more or less as if we were using Excel.
Pros:
- Only Achilleas can edit, all others are invited as “view only”
- Access from everywhere and any time -we just need a browser
- Real-time updating. Changes appear in (almost) real time to everyone browsing the sheet.
- It’s free!
Cons:
- Still beta, some problems appear (as expected), ex. importing XLS with merged cells
- Still beta, no real EULA between Google and the end-user, can’t be used for “real” applications if you do not know what may happen tomorrow…
- No graphs/charts (yet?)
- “Unable to display, more that 4 users viewing this spreadsheet at the same time” error (???)
Bottom-line: I am thrilled with it! It’s still early, but I am convinced more than ever that the Web is a great platform to develop apps -even those that seemed like a natural “desktop” creatures.
If you are one of the lucky ones to receive a Google Spreadsheets invitation, you can spread the word by inviting your friends to edit one of your on-line spreadsheets. When they accept the invitation, they are automaticaly allowed to create their own spreadsheets!
It is still alpha, but uber-cool!
After I wrote my del.icio.us as feed manager post, I realized that this is not a totaly new idea. It is what Dave Winer calls (dynamic) “Reading Lists”.
Here are some interesting articles on reading lists, opml, etc:
Any other good resources/hacks on this?
Feedburner, released today the FeedFlare API. It is actually an API that allows individual develpoers to create services that “adds flare” to a feed. This extra “flare” could be either an action (like “tag this post”) or additional information or metadata (like “Alexa Ranking”). They even have 101 suggestions, you could implement.
This is great news. I did not have time to look at the details, but I’m sure some really nice ideas will come out of it.
However, I still have not seen what I would like to see. Feedburner’s scope is on “one feed at a time”. They let you do great things, but with only one feed each time. What I would like to see is some kind of multi-feed mixing. Not there -yet?
But, I have to be fair. Feedburner is doing a great job!
The Technorati Weblog has an interesting article On Blogosphere Growth. It looks like Technorati’s index is doubling in size every 5.5 months! An other interesting mesure is the number of posts: … about 50.000 per hour.
An other interesting point is that tagging is used more and more. If you ask me, we have to thank the new tools that make tagging so much easier, like Wordpress using “categories” as tags in feeds. (And I guess social bookmarking services like del.icio.us make Technorati’s life much easier).