Paul Lomax - Two Point Oh

In late 2005/early 2006, the web industry got exciting as it went through this whole ‘2.0′ thing - a revolution of sorts. At it’s height so many fantastically unique applications and websites were emerging, based on truly new techniques and technologies.

Then earlier this year, frankly, it got boring.

More sites than ever were being launched, but they were all so samey - nothing new, nothing interesting - just variations on a theme: local stuff, event planning, a social network for yet another niche, digg clones, sharing opinions, map mashups, and more bloody widgets than you could shake a stick at.

But in the last couple of days two things have really grabbed my attention.

They’re technologies really, but ones with really clear applications that I think will have a profound effect on the way web companies conduct their business, probably on a par with AJAX. I’m serious - this is really exciting stuff.

1. Google Gears - take your application offline (in a good way).
2. Facebook Platform - reach the social masses - the network is now a commodity.

I’ll post a some more in depth information soon, but in the meantime take a look and have a think about they could apply to your business. If you’re not a techie yourself but you have developers working for you, then get them to have a nosey for you.

If you’re not interested, then you’ve probably only just woken up to social networking - sorry, you missed the boat!

For help on web technology and business strategy, or just for somebody to bounce ideas off, do give me a call.

PS: Fairly unrelated to the web, but Microsoft Surface got me quite excited too…

Google have announced the launch of their latest beta product, the oddly named Google Gears (what happened to clear beats clever?), which seems to be a direct competitor to Adobe’s Apollo and to the recently announced plans for Firefox 3.

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript APIs.  These will allow web-based applications to store data locally using a fully-searchable relational database (powered by SQLite), with full use of AJAX.

The first Google app to get the offline treatment will be their RSS feed reader.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Facebook is the new Google.

BrandRepublic have some good coverage of the new Facebook Platform launch. Their API has been around a while and lets third parties develop applications that interact with facebook data and functions, but the Platform goes beyond this. Facebook Platform lets you build applications that live within facebook. Facebook is the platform. And with the site growing very fast now, it will be the platform if you want to build an application that lets people interact with the friends. Otherwise you’re just re-inventing the wheel and forcing users to re-create their friend networks all over again.

On second thoughts, forget Facebook being the new Google. Perhaps it’s the new Internet? (Albeit a privately owned Internet…)

Mashable have very kindly created a list of 30+ Facebook Platform applications available now, which include some of the usual web 2.0 suspects such as iLike and Magnolia, but some old schoolers are playing too, such as Forbes.com.

For many of us, the thought of not having to create new usernames and passwords evokes images of the heavens parting and angels trumpeting.

One of the major talking points at last week’s Future of Web Apps Conference was OpenID - in fact Kevin Rose of digg.com announced at the conference that they are planning to adopt it.  Microsoft and AOL have both already announced their support.

I was going to do a write up to explain why OpenID gaining traction could herald the next semi-revolution, but over at the AOL developer network they’ve written an excellent article called OpenID and the Value of Connected Identity. In summary:

• OpenID allows you to securely log in to a website without having to create a new username or password.
• You can keep your identity information in the place you choose without trusting the next random start-up with your password - you can even run your own server.
• There’s no need to worry about your preferred login name not being available - it’s a URL so it is always uniquely your identity - eg http://claimID.com/paullomax.

And just to prove it’s going to go mainstream, The Times Online also has a write-up - although their strap includes a word that is almost the antithesis of OpenID [my emphasis] :

Companies are competing to introduce a single, secure login that would work for all bank accounts, shopping sites and other web activities.

I think OpenID really does have a future, particularly once it goes to 2.0 which promises to solve a few of the potential issues such as phishing and generally making the whole system a bit easier from a user perspective.

Below is a selection of websites considered by many to be part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Believe it or not, it’s a relatively small selection. Some have been around five or six years, and others make up a few of the dozens of start-up sites that launch each day and have been around about five minutes – but all do something quite different to the ‘old school’ websites you have probably come to know and love. And almost all of them have silly names.

Social Networking
Connecting with friends and whatnot

• www.myspace.com – music geeks, teens and wannabe models

• www.bebo.com – kids and teens

• www.vox.com – a bit of culture – travel, photography, books, art and music

• www.friendster.com – actually owns the patent for social networks

• www.orcut.com – a Google project, full of Brazilians for some reason

• www.facebook.com – student central

• www.faceparty.com – thinly veiled ‘pick up’ site

• www.linkedin.com – social networking for business contacts

• www.boompa.com – social networking for petrol heads

• www.mybloglog.com – adds a community to your blog

• www.deviantart.com - photography and all kinds of art

• www.minti.com, www.parentsconnect.com, www.mothersclick.com, www.momjunction.com, www.parentography.com, www.mommybuzz.com, www.famundo.com, www.mayasmom.com - parenting is a popular subject!

• www.fygo.com, www.zopa.com, www.prosper.com  – social lending, borrow from people, not banks

Social News
News by the people for the people 

• www.digg.com  – the biggest, full of geeks but covers many subjects
• www.slashdot.com – web1.0 survivor and the original article – but only tech
• www.inform.com - world affairs and politics specialist
• www.newsvine.com – also a serious slant – the pitch is you create your own ‘column’ 

Social Bookmarking / Search
Not only can you keep your bookmarks in one place, you can see other people’s fave sites 

• del.icio.us – market leader despite the name, now part of Yahoo. Simple but limited.
• ma.gnolia.com – similar to delicious but arguably easier to use
• www.searchles.com – blend of delicious and dig
• www.lijit.com - search people’s blogs
• www.ozmozr.com – share RSS feeds (I think, it doesn’t explain itself too well!)
• www.stumbleupon.com – been around a surprisingly long time, useful toolbar 

Media Sharing
Searching for ‘funny cats’ on youtube is an hour’s entertainment 

• www.emokoo.com – merges your youtube videos and flickr photos in one place
• www.dailymotion.com – an alternative to youtube
• www.youtube.com - video sharing market leader
• www.brightcove.com – another youtube alternative
• www.flickr.com – one of the most well known photo sharing sites
• www.piczo.com – make your own web pages and rate other people’s – aimed squarely at kids 

Localisation
Making the global village local 

• www.craigslist.com – the bane of regional newspapers, free local classifieds online
• www.backfence.com – run your own online “hyperlocal” newspaper 

Knowledge Sharing
Share your experiences, expertise, thoughts, or anything really 

• www.tripadvisor.com – review your hotel, destination and holiday
• www.corkd.com, labels.winelibrary.com, www.bottletalk.com  – wine reviews
• answers.yahoo.com – ask questions, get answers from people - useful when their search engine gives you crap results
• www.squidoo.com – apparently you share your specialist info through “lenses”. I had to go to the New York Times to understand what it was…
• www.iqons.com, www.shareyourlook.com, www.shoutfit.com, www.stylehive.com, www.stylespy.net  - share your look / celeb looks/ fashion tips 

Blogging
Blogging is one of the web2.0 cornerstones – making the Internet a truly read/write medium 

• www.travbuddy.com – travel blogging
• www.wordpress.com – blogging application
• www.blogger.com  – blogging app from Google
• www.moveabletype.com – blogging application
• www.livejournal.com – the original social blog
• www.vox.com – kind of social networking too, but does have photo galleries etc
• www.xanga.com  –another blogging community site
• www.gather.com  – incentivised  blogging, ‘for adults’  

Start pages
Make these your homepage and you’re one click from all your favourite content 

• www.google.com/ig - Google Homepage
• www.netvibes.com   – overwhelming
• www.protopage.com – ugly!
• www.schmedley.com – influenced by Mac OS X Widgets
• www.pageflakes.com -  v pretty but didn’t actually work for me 

Widgets & Symbiotic sites
Making stuff to stick on other sites 

• www.stickam.com – add a live webcam to your blog etc
• www.zingfu.com , www.ibubble.com – add frames, speech bubbles, etc to photos
• www.photobucket.com – image hosting for myspace etc
• www.coolmyspacecomments.com – lets you embed really annoying crap in comments
• www.kwiz.biz – bloody awful looking quiz generator for myspace etc
• www.meebo.com, www.ebuddy.com  – instant messenger on your site
• www.slide.com, www.rockyou.com  – put photo slideshows on your myspace profile
• www.feedburner.com – track your RSS feeds and more
• www.musestorm.com – make widgets from your RSS feeds
• www.zwinky.com, www.weemee.com, www.meez.com  – avatar creators 

Web Based Applications
Stuff that might put Bill Gates out of a job? 

• docs.google.com – Google takes on Word, Excel and Outlook Calendar
• www.basecamphq.com – online collaboration tool
• www.stikkit.com - web based sticky notes
• www.8apps.com – more collaboration tools, with built in social networking
• www.famundo.com – get your family organised
• www.singshot.com – online karaoke

Social Music
Share your music, and your tastes - legally!

• last.fm - simply amazing - free radio and it learns what you like!

John Musser (of Programmable Web) in association with O’Reilly Radar and Tim O’Reilly has written a 100 page report on Web 2.0 principles & best Practices. The report claims to explain why Web 2.0 matters and how you can make the most of it.

In 2004, we realized that the Web was on the cusp of a new era, one that would finally let loose the power of network effects, setting off a surge of innovation and opportunity. When O’Reilly’s Dale Dougherty came up with the term “Web 2.0” during a brainstorming session, we knew we had the name our conference. What we didn’t know was that the industry would embrace the Web 2.0 meme and that it would come to represent the new Web.

This report is for those who are ready to respond to that shift. It digs beneath the hype and buzzwords, and teaches the underlying rules of Web 2.0—what they are, how successful Web 2.0 companies are applying them, and how to apply them to your own business. It’s a practical resource that provides essential tools for competing and thriving in today’s emerging business world. I hope it inspires you to embrace the Web 2.0 opportunity.

- Tim O’Reilly

There report is available to buy from $395, or you can download the free excerpt which includes a rather good executive summary.

The subject of designing for screen resolutions has always been a point of contention, but the trend these days does seem to be designing web sites for 1024×768 and above, even with fluid layout sites. It’s almost de-facto and rarely questioned. But is it right?

Here at IPC we’ve always gone with a compromise - go wider, but still design for 800×600 in a way. The trick is to keep the core content within about 780px and have a few ‘non essential’ elements hanging off on the right - see NME.com as an example. It’s a balance between getting more space (and more ads!) above the fold, and catering for the lowest common denominator - my gut feeling has always been they’re not such a minority.

So I thought i’d test my gut feeling and look at the stats for a range of our sites (Horse and Hound, Web User, NME, Wallpaper, Whats On TV, and Nuts),  and here are the results:

Only 12.5% of visitors have an 800×600 screen resolution - BUT 21.5% of visitors have an actual browser width of 800px or less.

My theory has been that a surprisingly large number of people surf with their sidebars open - eg their bookmarks or history - my Dad included. I would guesstimate this to be as high as 50% across the board.

So despite the vast majority now having a decent resolutionof 1024px and above (640×480 is practically zero these days, thank God), a size-able proportion - higher than FireFox’s market share - won’t appreciate any content being out wider than 800px. For example, the redesigned telegraph.co.uk homepage:

As with most things on t’interweb, it all comes down to graceful degradation, or even better progressive enhancement. Bare it in mind please!

I’ve just signed up for The Future of Web Apps , Carson Workshops‘ conference which is now in its second year. The line-up looks excellent with a few things definitely relevant to my new project, particularly Bradley Horowitz talking about social interaction, Tara Hunt on building online communities and Kevin Rose on the future of crowd generated media. Tara’s also doing a workshop on community building which should be interesting.

Ryan (Carson) always manages to get a fantastic speaker list at his events such as Mike Arrington from TechCrunch, Rasmus Lardorf (creator of PHP) and Kevin Rose of Digg fame. Ryan’s LinkedIn connections profile reads like a who’s who of web 2.0 - including Tim O’Reilly. Running the Vitamin website must help - they have some fantastic contributors.

After you register they have quite a neat ’social app’ which lets you connect view and with other attendees, so you can do a bit of networking at the event. People attending include the founders of crowdstorm.com, firebox.com, wordtracker.com and putplace.com to name a few.

See you there on Jan 20th!

Amazon have announced the (public beta) launch of Alexa Web Search Platform - a service which lets developers pretty much create their own search engines using Alexa’s computing and storage resources.

The quick tour gives more information.

It works by you defining the pages you want to access from Alexa’s archive (”100 Terabytes of Web content spanning 4 billion pages and 8 million sites”), developing an application to run queries on that data and then downloading or publishing the results via a web service.

The pricing structure is quite interesting and probably quite difficult to predict for any given application:
- $1 per cpu hour
- $1 per GB/year of user storage (up to 13 TB…)
- $1 per 50 GB processed
- $1 per GB uploaded/downloaded
- $1 for every 4,000 user-published web service requests

Find our more from their user guide or try their sample application

It looks like the start point is always Alexa’s web archive - you can’t influence what they’re actually crawling/archiving or how often. If they allowed you to direct their crawler as well, then it could well take on the Google Search Appliance solution - which personally I think is prohibitively expensive.

When I’m not doing my Sys Admin “thing” at IPC, I’m part of the open source Blastwave project, packaging up various products for Solaris. One of the packages I maintain (the Nessus security scanner) recently had a new release - offering a whole host of enhancements including a very funky looking RSS feed for plugin updating, and major performance improvements to name just two. Except this time, I’m not doing my usual w00t-dance, and I won’t be packaging it, or even running it, for that matter.

The reason being that the developers, Tenable solutions, chose to make this version closed source. Now, that’s all well and good and they’re obviously well within their rights to do so. But as with so many closed source products (Zend, I’m looking at you), it’s released for Linux/x86 first (although FreeBSD packages are also available), and everything else takes a back seat until some unspecified time in the future. It it is this ramification of the license change that I find most infuriating. It wouldn’t perhaps be so bad if Tenable could guarantee that all platforms would have binaries available for them - but this means they’re leaving a large section of their userbase out in the cold. And woe betide you if you’re running anything they consider really obscure or not worth supporting. Even something like Solaris/x86 is frequently ignored, and I can’t begin to imagine what people running something like NetBSD on Alpha must have to contend with…

With the open source model (take MySQL as an example), you can get the source code, and can be pretty sure that you can build it on pretty much any platform you want. MySQL runs on most platforms - from Unix to Windows, OpenVMS to Linux/S390. If it doesn’t run on your chosen platform, or the developers don’t have access to the relevant development environment, you can hack it yourself and contribute patches back to the community.

Once the source is closed, that option is gone forever. You’re then totally dependant on the developer to continue supporting your platform. You also, by extension, you have to hope they never go out of business, especially if their product incorporates some sort of time-locked licensing! If they wake up one morning and decide that it’s no longer economically viable to continue building their product for your platform, you’re screwed. Never mind that you may have built your entire infrastructure around a certain technology, and it’s not economically viable for you to jump ship to whatever the flavour of the month is; if you want to continue running closed source product X, you have to dance to the beat of the developers’ drum.

It’s for precisely this reason that I was so glad to see Sun open up Solaris (SPARC has been an open architecture for a long while now, so that’s never been an issue). Yeah, the community Sun has built up around it is fantastic, as is the ability to get a sneak preview of all the latest features and browse the code yourself. But it now means that whatever happens to Sun (although I seriously doubt they’re going anywhere anytime soon), our investment is secure.

So, I’m sorry that Tenable felt they had no other option than to close the source of Nessus - but I for one look forward to the continued development of the forked GPL version…