Google Wave – First look

Google has demonstrated Google Wave, a new mode of communication out of the team that brought Google Maps to the world. Google Wave is a combination of e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing and a lot more. Google officials demonstrated the upcoming Google Wave technology at the Google I/O developer conference on May 28. In a blog post, Lars Rasmussen, a software engineering manager at Google and half of the core team whose original ideas led to both Google Maps and the new Wave technology, said his brother Jens convinced him that the future of communication should be the next concept for the team to conquer after maps. Google acquired the company Lars and Jens co-founded, Where 2 Tech, back in 2004. And after launching and watching the success of Google Maps, the team, which Lars referred to as a “five-person ’startup,’” began work on Jens’ idea in a project they codenamed “Walkabout.” Walkabout led to Google Wave, which the company demonstrated in a preview version for developers at Google I/O. In Lars’ words, “A ‘wave’ is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

“Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use ‘playback’ to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”

Moreover, Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform and the protocol, Rasmussen said. These are:

·         The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the Web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions such as desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).

·         Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other Web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.

·         The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Meanwhile, when asked in a Google-sponsored interview running on the Google Wave site what he thought the developers will be most excited by, Adam Schuck, an engineer on the Wave team, said:

“Developers are going to see the potential of Google Wave as a platform – we hope they’ll leap on it.  It’s a very versatile platform, and in building it, we’ve tried to solve a lot of problems that developers have had historically … we store their data, we resolve their conflicts.  They’ll be able to integrate it with existing systems they use today, or produce new tools that allow people to improve and manage their communications – which is, after all, one of the most important things to people nowadays.”

To that, Casey Whitelaw, another Wave engineer added: “I agree, Google Wave has solved a bunch of the stuff that has traditionally been really hard … real time collaboration, hosted data, structured data … developers won’t have to think about all of that, they’ll be able to just build their app and go.”

Another point of interest regarding Google Wave is what excites its own creators. Asked what most excited him about Google Wave, Rob Schonberger, a third member of the Wave engineering team, said:

“For me, it’s the fact that with Google Wave, you get to make documents truly extensible.  Just the other day we wrote some code so that when you type TM it turns into the trademark sign, for example.  All these little features remind me of the change that took place with mobile phones … it used to be that new phones launched and the manufacturers told you what features they had, but today with the Apple iPhone and the G1, they say ‘we don’t know how you’re going to use this, but let’s give you the platform so you can figure it out for yourself.

“The automated translation feature that we demonstrated at Google I/O also blows my mind, because it’s potentially giving people with no common language the ability to communicate and collaborate in real time.  And best of all for developers, the translation feature took hardly any time at all to implement once the platform was in place.”

Additionally, in his blog, Lars Rasmussen said although the team was opening a developer preview for the Wave technology, they have set no specific timeframe for a public release of the technology.

Rasmussen said, “…we’re planning to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview. We’re excited to see what feedback we get from our early tinkerers, and we’ll undoubtedly make lots of changes to the Google Wave product, platform, and protocol as we go.”

Source:http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Google-Unveils-Google-Wave-143970/

Web 3.0: ‘Vague, but Exciting’

Why marketers will approach the semantic Web with different language and tools

Originally posted here

When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee first submitted his 1989 paper, “Information Management: A Proposal,” his boss, Mike Sendall, wrote “vague, but exciting” on it by way of endorsing what was the blueprint for the World Wide Web.

Two decades later, Berners-Lee and others are formulating what can be called the third generation of the Web, the “semantic Web,” or “Web 3.0.” I know, I know, most of us are still trying to deal with Web 2.0 as part of a very confusing marketing landscape.

Here’s a quick primer for marketers:

Web 1.0 (the information Web), the one we all know and love, is straightforward. It’s full of content that we can surround with ads, mainly in the form of banners. Many marketers look at this as an extension of offline media — print and television. Sadly, they tend to use it the same way.

Web 2.0 (the social Web) is a little less “ad friendly.” Social networking, live chat, folksonomies, mash-ups, virtual worlds, even mobile are part of 2.0. It’s about people communicating, contributing, collaborating. Results come from the wisdom of crowds — for better or worse. This collaboration and sharing break down the traditional media model, and marketers lose control of their brands, even while they gain powerful new ways to engage their audience. (Type your brand’s name into Topsy, the Twitter search engine, to get a little taste of market reality.)

Web 3.0 (the semantic Web) derives its “wisdom” from software that learns by looking at online content, analyzes the popularity of that content and draws conclusions. Instead of people refining information and opinion, intelligent software would do the same thing.

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Essentials of building a web2.0 product

Top 50 strategies for developing a good web2.0 product:

1. Start with a simple problem. All of the most successful online services start with a simple premise and execute on it well with great focus. This could be Google with it’s command-line search engine, Flickr with photo sharing, Digg with user generated news. State your problem simply: “I make it easier to do X”. Focus on solving it elegantly and simply, only add features carefully. Over time, complexity will become the enemy of both your product design and your software architecture, so start with as much focus as you can muster.

2. Create prototypes as early as possible. Get your idea into a working piece of software as quickly as possible. The longer you take to go through one entire cycle, the more unknown work you have ahead of you. Not producing software also means that you are not getting better and better at turning the work of your team into the most important measurable output: Functioning software. Throughout the life of your product, turning your ideas into software as quickly and inexpensively as possible will be one of the most important activities to get right.

3. Get people on the network to work with the product prototype rapidly and often. The online world today is fundamentally people-centric. If your product isn’t about them and how it makes their lives better, your product really doesn’t matter. And if they’re not using your Web application as soon as possible, you just don’t know if you are building the right product. Constant, direct feedback from real people is the most important input to our product design after your idea. Don’t wait months for this to happen; get a beta out to the world, achieve marketplace contact in weeks, or at most a few months, and watch carefully what happens. This approach is sometimes called Web 2.0 Development .

4. Release early and release often. Don’t get caught up in the massive release cycle approach, no matter how appealing it may be. Large releases let you push off work tomorrow that should be done today. It also creates too much change at once and often has too many dependencies, further driving an increase in the size of the release. Small releases almost always work better, are easier to manage, but can require a bit more operations overhead. Done right, your online product will iterate smoothly as well as improve faster and more regularly than your competitors. Some online products, notably Flickr, have been on record as saying they make new releases to production up to several times a day. This is a development velocity that many new startups have trouble appreciating or don’t know how to enable. Agile software development processes are a good model to start with and and these and even more extreme methods have worked well in the Web 2.0 community for years.

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Firefox 3.5 set to push the Web a step forward

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is the culmination of nearly a year-long quest to build a browser for the next version of the web. And while it’s not perfect, it comes very, very close.

The open-source browser is expected to be available for download Tuesday morning for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Originally envisioned as a quick follow-up to 2008’s release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla ended up packing in quite a few extra features into its flagship browser and spent months making sure that Firefox 3.5 was the fastest, most powerful Firefox yet

Here is aQuick look on what iti offers:

A New Browser for a New Web
Much has changed in the year since Firefox 3 first hit the scene. Most significantly, Google Chrome arrived in September 2008, bringing with it support for many of the web’s latest technologies. Things like offline data access, geo-awareness and native video and audio playback were previously only glamor features — now that Google is highlighting the importance of those features, they’re must-haves. Chrome also came out of the gate showing off some extreme speed, and it spurred some friendly competition among browser makers to boost their speed of their apps. The latest versions of Safari and Opera showed large speed gains as a result.

Another reason browsers are getting faster is because websites are growing more complex. It’s not only social networks and media sharing sites that are responsible, but also productivity applications like e-mail, calendars and other office apps. These web destinations are behaving like full-blown applications, and they’re require more powerful, more nimble browsers.

Microsoft, which still commands the lion’s share of the browser market (see chart below), released a new version of Internet Explorer earlier this year. IE8 upped the ante when it comes to privacy, safety and usability features that are easy enough for consumers to grasp. It also got a speed boost.

So, Firefox, not even a year old, has a lot of catching up to do. Version 3.5 fills in the gaps admirably.

Taskfox

Taskfox is a recently announced project at Mozilla to bring some of the experimental Ubiquity user interface and navigation paradigms to Firefox. Some of those navigation features are higher priority and will more likely find their way into Firefox.next, but if there’s time, we could actually see a lot more of Ubiquity in the next big version of Firefox.

Better Session Management – I already mentioned that the ability to create, save, and restore a group of tabs is a low priority addition for Firefox.next, but this would be such a hugely useful feature that it deserves a second mention. Firefox can currently save and restore session data when you shut down the entire program or suffer through a browser crash, but there’s not really a good way to just save a set of tabs and put them aside for later, which is something I often want to do when researching multiple posts. The best option right now is just to bookmark tabs or save them elsewhere (like in a text file or on Delicious) — those aren’t very good options.

HTML 5
Though it won’t be finalized for at least another year, the specification for HTML 5 — the next revision of the markup language used to build websites — is already being implemented by the latest browsers. This new version of Firefox brings Mozilla’s browser up to speed with most recent releases by supporting many of the capabilities afforded by HTML 5.

The HTML 5 support in Firefox 3.5 allows for video and audio embeds without the need for the Flash plug-in. Right now, most video and audio playback on the web requires Adobe’s Flash Player. Even though it’s a free download, Mozilla thinks it’s too limiting to require a plug-in to watch videos and listen to songs, so it built those capabilities right into the browser. Now, website publishers can place a video into a web page just as they would a photograph or any other graphic, and it will play smoothly in Firefox 3.5 — no plug-in required.

Privacy
Firefox 3.5 brings a much more robust private browsing mode that restricts the information your browser gathers as you visit websites. While surfing in private browsing mode, cookies are rejected, URLs are kept out of the browser history, forms are not auto-filled and pages are not cached. The result is a browser session that — from the browser’s point of view — never happened.

This is a sign that Firefox is taking a cue from the competition. Chrome, IE8 and Safari all have this feature. Although often referred to as “porn mode,” the privacy settings are actually very useful on public PCs, like those in internet cafes. As long as the PC is running a browser that has a private mode, you don’t need to worry about covering your tracks after the fact.

Identity Management – There’s not much information about what this means, but Mozilla is again talking identity management as they did before Firefox 3.0. Back then it meant things like OpenID and CardSpace — we’ll have to see what it means this time around.

New Tab Page – One of the coolest features of Google Chrome browser is their new tab page, which shows users their most frequently visited web sites when they open up a new tab. Firefox might be planning to follow suit in version 3.6 with something perhaps similar to the proposed new tab page prototype they showed off in March.

Geo-awareness
On the social web, where you are is almost as important as who you are and what you’re doing.

With Firefox 3.5, a web app that wants to know where you are can now just ask Firefox. Once you provide a web app with permission to do so (Firefox’s geolocation abilities are opt-in, as they should be), the application can use the browser to determine your location.

This means developers can provide more accurate local search results and other geo-aware functionality without the user having to install any special software or having to manually enter location data, like a ZIP code.

Google and Mozilla have partnered for Firefox’s geo-aware features — the underlying code will use Google’s Location Service as its default location provider. This is the same web service that powers all of Google’s geolocation applications, including Google Latitude and the location finder in Google Toolbar.

Search on Steroids
Firefox 3.0 introduced the world to the “Awesomebar,” the feature that turned the previously neglected URL bar into a powerful history and bookmark search tool. In fact, the idea was so compelling that Google’s Chrome browser launched with the very same feature.

The new Firefox 3.5 builds on the Awesomebar’s foundations adding sophisticated wildcard search tools for power users. For example, typing an asterisk limits results to your bookmarks and typing a pound sign (#) limits results to page titles (rather than titles and URLs).

Performance in the Awesomebar is also significantly improved, the occasional lag between when you start typing and when the first result shows up has been reduced to almost nil.

Other Small Changes
Among the most noticeable new features are the much-improved crash recovery system. Rather than a simple “restore/don’t restore” dialog, Firefox 3.5 will allow you selectively choose which windows and tabs to restore after a crash. That makes it considerably easier to isolate problem sites without losing your entire session. It isn’t as nice as Chrome’s isolated tabs feature, but Mozilla says that’s in the works for future releases of Firefox.

Another handy new feature is the ability to recover an accidentally closed window. While Firefox has long offered this feature for tabs, Firefox 3.5 builds on that to offer a way of recovering from errant mouse clicks that close an entire window.

Referals:

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Mozilla_Pushes_the_Web_Forward_With_Firefox_3DOT5

http://mashable.com/2009/06/29/firefox-next/

Opera Unite-Web3.0 Ready

Opera just unveiled their new browser, Opera 10, with a new technology named Unite.

opera unite

Opera Unite makes your computer a web server in a few clicks, with no technical skills needed. This is a true revolution, since it makes it incredibly easy for people to share their media and files directly from their computers. When I effortlessly played the music on my computer from another browser on my laptop, I realized the magnitude of this change. Anyone can share anything, privately or publicly.

If Unite (or other browsers with built in server) take off in volumes, this will cause a tidal wave of direct sharing across the internet that will have unprecedented ripple effects to multiple industries. Since anyone can password protect the content on their server with simple access code given to their friends, it is impossible to estimate, track or hunt down even a fraction of the content that will be made available directly from people to their friends, family and colleagues. In short, there will be no way to stop it, track it or do anything about it.

What Web3.0 offers

IPv6 – Though not booming yet, companies that have no presence on the IPv6 network yet, will definitely be missing out on something and -depending on how heavily she depends on the internet for promotion, showcase, webapps- will lose revenue. By investing now in IPv6 capable network equipment, training and internal IPv6 segments, companies will gain the needed knowledge and will avoid steep migrations and life production failures.

DNSSEC - Secure DNS – Already, SSL is a must for companies that depend on trust. The next danger ahead (already exploited here and there) is DNS poisoning: DNSses are infected by records that point to criminal servers, aimed to steal (account) information. Companies should arm them selves against this by stepping in to DNSSEC as soon as possible, making a) demand higher….

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On the Other side of earth

Ever Wondered where you will reach if you start digging to get to the other side of the earth?Well this is practically impossible to do but you sure would like to know what lies on the other side.Antipodr is a site that tells you the location based on some algorithms and calculations.You may never be able to challenge their result but you also can not resist yourself from checking it out!

Web2.0 Scientific calculator

http://web2.0calc.com/ is a cool web2.0 calculator that allows you to do all those calculations on which you would carry a calculator.Cool design and a fresh new look gives it an edge.

Good Bad and The Ugly of web3.0

Back in May, an intrepid interlocutor in Korea stuck a pointy stick into a semantic hornet’s nest by asking Google’s resident CEO, Eric Schmidt, an “easy question”: What is Web 3.0? After some grumbling about “marketing terms,” Schmidt obliged, saying that, to him, Web 3.0 is all about the simplification and democratization of software development, as people would begin to draw on the tools and data floating around in the Internet “cloud” to cobble together custom applications, which they would then share “virally” with friends and colleagues. Said Schmidt:

My prediction would be that Web 3.0 would ultimately be seen as applications that are pieced together [and that share] a number of characteristics: the applications are relatively small; the data is in the cloud; the applications can run on any device – PC or mobile phone; the applications are very fast and they’re very customizable; and furthermore the applications are distributed essentially virally, literally by social networks, by email. You won’t go to the store and purchase them. … That’s a very different application model than we’ve ever seen in computing … and likely to be very, very large. There’s low barriers to entry. The new generation of tools being announced today by Google and other companies make it relatively easy to do. [It] solves a lot of problems, and it works everywhere.

This is – big surprise – a vision of network computing that dovetails neatly with Google’s commercial and technological interests. Google is opposed to all proprietary applications and data stores (unless it controls them) because walled sites and applications conflict with its three overarching and interconnected goals: (1) to get people to live as much of their lives online as possible, (2) to be able to track all online activity as closely as possible, and (3) to deliver advertising connected to as much online activity as possible. (“Online” encompasses anything mediated by the Net, not just things that appear on your PC screen.) To put it a different way, all software and all data are simply complements to Google’s core business – serving advertisements – and hence Google’s interest lies in destroying all barriers, whether economic, technological, or legal, to all software and all data. Almost everything the company does, from building data centers to buying optical fiber to supporting free wi-fi to fighting copyright to supporting open source to giving software and information away free, is about removing those barriers.

In the mind of the Googleplex, the generations of the web proceed something like this:

Web 1.0: web as extension of PC hard drive

Web 2.0: web as application platform complementing PC operating system and hard drive

Web 3.0: web as universal computing grid replacing PC operating system and hard drive

Web 4.0: web as artificial intelligence complementing human race

Web 5.0: web as artificial intelligence supplanting human race

That’s fine and dandy, but there’s a little problem. Schmidt’s definition of Web 3.0 seems to conflict with the prevailing definition, which presents “Web 3.0″ as a synonym for what used to be called (and sometimes still is) “the Semantic Web.” In this definition, Web 3.0 is all about creating a richer, more meaningful language for computers to use in communicating with other computers over the Net. It’s about getting machines to do a lot of the interpretive functions that currently have to be done by people, which would ultimately take automation to a whole new level.

Here are the generations of the web from the Semanticist perspective:

Web 1.0: web as people talking to machines

Web 2.0: web as people talking to people (through machines)

Web 3.0: web as machines talking to machines

Web 4.0: web as artificial intelligence complementing human race

Web 5.0: web as artificial intelligence supplanting human race

Now, it’s true that both visions end in the same sunny place, with the universal slavesourcing – sorry, I mean crowdsourcing – of human intelligence and labor by machines, but, still, the confusion about the nature of Web 3.0 is problematic. Here we are, halfway through 2007, and we still don’t have a decent commonly-held definition of Web 2.0 and already we have competing definitions of the Web’s next generation.

Or do we? I think that the apparent conflict between the two definitions may in fact be superficial, arising from the different viewpoints taken by Schmidt (an applications viewpoint) and the Semanticists (a communications viewpoint). As a public service, therefore, I will put on my Tim O’Reilly mask and offer a definition of Web 3.0 capacious enough to encompass both the traditional Semantic Web definition and Eric Schmidt’s mashups-on-steroids definition: Web 3.0 involves the disintegration of digital data and software into modular components that, through the use of simple tools, can be reintegrated into new applications or functions on the fly by either machines or people.

Stick that in your Yahoo Pipe and smoke it.

Originally Posted here

Major Difference in web 3.0

This image is a summary of  how web3.0 differs from its previous version and what is new in it.

how web3.0 is different