Web 2.0 – Page 6 – Digital-Lifestyles

Cisco Buy WebEx For $3.2Bn

Networking powerhouse Cisco is to buy the Web conference company WebEx for $3.2Bn.

Cisco Buy WebEx For $3.2Bn WebEx is listed on the NASDAQ (WEBX) and is reported to be the leader in its field. They offer a ton of different products, all based around sharing information between a number of remote parties, with the majority of them featuring shared video.

Cisco is actively spreading the number of products and business areas that it covers – they have to really as companies like China-based Huawei move on to Cisco’s previously-core network businesses.

Scientific Atlanta, the maker of TV Set Top Boxes, was a previous purchase. In November 2005, Cisco slapped down twice as much cash for that one – $9.6Bn.

Strangely enough bringing WebEx into the Cisco fold is at the opposite end of the content creation spectrum.

As Charles Giancarlo, Chief Development Officer at Cisco, concisely put it, “As collaboration in the workplace becomes increasingly important, companies are looking for rich communications tools to help them work more effectively and efficiently.”

WebEx is currently focused on business applications, but it’s highly likely that nearly everyone will be carrying out video conferences in the future as travel becomes more expensive and general restrictions come into effect.

Read Charlie Giancarlo blog piece about the deal

Flick Off AGAIN: Flickr-ites Still Don’t Want Yahoo! Accounts

That’s the response that Yahoo! (the owners of popular Web 2.0 photo sharing site Flickr) were greeted with when they announced that they would be forcing a merging of Flickr accounts with Yahoo! accounts.

Users who joined Flickr before its acquisition in March 2005 are known as ‘old skool’ users, and they use the original Flickr accounts to login, rather than the Yahoo! accounts used for those who joined after the acquisition. Old skool status is heavily valued in the community, and successive Yahoo! attempts to force migration from ‘old school’ accounts to Yahoo! accounts has attracted much controversy.

The migration of accounts is not a technical issue; Old skool members will keep their buddy name and are not forced to use any other Yahoo! services. Given that this is the case, it perhaps seems illogical that there is such a backlash. One old skool user’s view is in a post by Thomas Hawk, a keen Flickr user (and also CEO of a rival service).

Flick Off: We don't want Yahoo! accounts

Raj Parmer writes “I do not like the way Yahoo impose in this manner. I am an old skool member (which I was in a way quite proud of) but when it becomes mandatory to sign up to Yahoo, I will have to delete all my pics and close my account down and join with one of the other similar services on the net.”

The problem seems to be two fold. Firstly, Flickr users simply don’t want to be forced to give up their ‘old skool’ account; they are proud to have been part of one of the archetypal Web 2.0 products before it hit the mainstream, and do not want to see their status lost.

Secondly, there appears to be a wider problem within the Flickr community, namely concern about the direction in which Yahoo! might change the nature of Flickr. Yahoo! recently announced that it would be making use of Flickr images in its new Brand Universe program, a move which has concerned some users, and other attempts to integrate Flickr further into Yahoo! products are likely to be met with concern.

Unlike the last time Yahoo! attempted to merge old skool accounts with Yahoo! accounts (when they bowed to pressure and relented), it appears that this time they are determined. There may be a small number of old skool users who delete their photos, but there will be no major exodus.

Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz, and the co-founder of technology blog network Oratos Media. His personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!

Information Overload: How To Read The Web

It is often said that we live in the information era; the Internet is an enormous library of information (some high quality, some not so), with millions of new pieces being added every day. How to keep track of it all?

The Answer
RSS is a technology many (including me) are turning too. If you haven’t heard of it already, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is essentially a way of describing, or ‘marking up’, content in a way which allows it to be displayed in many different ways and in places other than the site which created it. Digital-lifestyles publishes an RSS feed, as do most other news sites, and I am thus able to aggregate many different sources into one system to allow me to read my news more efficiently, visiting only one site rather than many.

Unlike the process of checking websites you were interested in as and when you had time, RSS delivers the content as soon as it is published, whether you like it or not. Whilst you can still choose whether or not to read it within your reader, for many people seeing the notification ‘x new items’ is simply too tempting!

This problem of ‘information overload’ can be solved if there can be found some way of triaging the arriving information – in other words deciding what to read, and what to leave, and this is something that many different companies are working on, with two main schools of thought.

The Personalised Homepage
One option is a personalised homepage, with the more recent (and advanced efforts) coming from companies such as Google, Netvibes and YourMinis. I talked in more detail about these in December. Such a personalised homepage allows you to easily add content from RSS feeds (and other places) and drag them around your page into an arrangement which suits you. The page will typically show just the title of the item, sometimes with a short snippet, the theory being that this allows you to decide at a glance which posts you want to read, and thus click on to display the full item.

The advantage of this approach is that it is a very efficient way to display a lot of information in a relatively small space. The disadvantage is that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether or not a post is interesting based purely on its headline and a short snippet – with a personalised homepage it is impossible to quickly scan the whole article.

Information Overload: How To Read The Web The Fully-Fledged Feed Reader
A second approach, which I have found myself favouring, is the use of a full-blown feed reader, such as Google Reader or Bloglines (both online applications) or Newsgator (offline application). Google Reader will allow me to see on a left hand panel which sources have new items, and click through to see them. Alternatively, I can use the ‘river of news’ function which will display all new items in a long list, with each post expanding when I click on it. I find that I am able to get through as many as 100 new items extremely quickly by scanning the post in perhaps two seconds, and then either reading it in detail or using a hotkey to move the reader to the next post. I am able to add a star to posts I am particularly interested in, but perhaps do not have time to read in detail immediately, and come back to them later. The advantage of a feed reader is that a well designed program allows fast scanning of posts in full, rather than just relying on the titles, but the disadvantage is that it is not possible to pick at a glance which posts to read, as they are not all displayed at the same time.

Conclusions
In short, use of a personalised homepage will allow you to get through your news faster but you stand a greater chance of missing out on great content, whereas a feed reader may well take longer, but you are guaranteed to read everything of interest to you. I happen to prefer the feed reader.

Information overload is a problem the Web has been working hard to solve. RSS, because of its efficiency, created new problems, but ultimately moved internet content consumption forward for the simple reason that it allows people to display content in many different ways, allowing people to innovate, and get closer to the ultimate aim of us each reading only the news that we are interested in, and being able to find that news easily.

Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz, and the co-founder of technology blog network Oratos Media. His personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!

YourMinis Review:Ajax Homepages Explained

What are Ajax homepages?
Examples of some of the ideas behind the new spate of Internet applications, described by those in the know as Web 2.0, include Ajax, RSS, aggregation and user generated content. Most types of applications tend to choose just one or two characteristics of Web 2.0, but if there is one space which typifies the approach of the new Web, it is Ajax Homepages.

The companies behind them, want you to set them as your browser homepage, and they each provide a multitude of ‘widgets’ for you to drag-and-drop onto your homepage, updating you on incoming email, latest items in RSS feeds you are watching. These widgets can also work as mini programs, providing functionality from calculators to free sending of text messages. The early releases came from Google (who decided to go out on a limb, naming theirs the Personalised Homepage), Netvibes and Pageflakes. In this article I want to give you a quick rundown on why I think Ajax homepages are becoming increasingly important and what challenges they face if they want to become successful.
YourminisThe best way to do this is probably through a case-study of my favourite Ajax homepage, yourminis. It’s actually inaccurate to call yourminis an Ajax homepage, since it is built with Flash, a different Web technology. That doesn’t matter, because what I’m really interested in here is what one might call the ‘ideology’ of these Web 2.0 homepages rather than the underlying technology.

When you first visit yourminis, you are given a page with default ‘minis’ (their word for widgets). These include a Digg module and a YouTube module, amongst others. It is possible to add more minis from an impressive selection that includes a calendar, an email module, the iTunes chart and an MP3 player. Yourminis is aiming to become a place where you can pull in information from all round the Web from the sites that interest you, and be able to quickly see what is new since you last opened up your browser. If you’re into photo sharing site Flickr, you can see the latest photos from there. You can set it up so that the latest posts from Digital-lifestyles appear.

There are so many possibilities, and that’s the whole point. No-one uses the web in exactly the same way, and so what yourminis and the applications like them are trying to do is to allow you to create your own personal portal, far more flexible than the attempts of the last Web revolution, such as MyYahoo, which was hard to customise and offered far less content in the first place.

YourMinis Review:Ajax homepages Explained

A feature that I particularly like about yourminis is the ability to publish pages that you have produced, so that your friends can see them. You could use it for research, or a more colourful example used by Goowy’s CEO, Alex Bard, is a page dedicated to a favourite band, with the latest news about them from various fan blogs combined with album art, all with their music playing in the background.

So, now you know why you should use a product like yourminis, but what does the future hold for them? A key challenge faced by providers of these Ajax homepages is monetisation; users would undoubtedly react badly to any attempt to plaster banner ads, or even contextual text links, onto their page that they have created. This was one of the questions I asked Goowy’s CEO when I interviewed him recently, and his approach to the monetisation of yourminis involves ‘value added revenue generation’. An example of this might be the affiliate revenue earned by yourminis when a user buys something from ebay using a mini on youminis. Around the biggest players (particularly Google), an ecosystem of third party developers producing widgets for the service is developing. As this happens, and the process of developing widgets becomes easier, the flexibility of the systems can only increase.

Huw Leslie is editor of UK-based Web 2.0 and software blog Gizbuzz, and the co-founder of technology blog network Oratos Media. His personal blog is For Crying Out Loud!

BBC Signs MoU With Microsoft: Disaster For Open Media?

The BBC has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft. Areas of the potential investigation and collaboration that the non-exclusive agreement includes, covers “search and navigation, distribution, and content enablement” (what ever that means in English).

It was signed in a meeting that sounds like it was designed to massage the egos of Mark Thompson (BBC Chief) and Ashley Highfield (BBC Head of Tech), held with Bill Gates (queue trumpets) at Microsoft’s office in Seattle.

Highfield is quoted as saying “Microsoft is not just a key supplier to the BBC, it is also a key gateway to audiences that the BBC needs to reach through Web services it runs like MSN and Windows Live Messenger, and hardware such as Xbox® and the Windows Media Center.” Apparently trying to balance this, he continued “The BBC needs to work with all players in this space to make sure our programmes and content are enjoyed by the widest possible audience, without always having to come to bbc.co.uk to find it.”

It’s with horror that we read this news. It’s hard to imagine that the BBC will stay format neutral following a deal like this.

Microsoft has been creeping into the BBC’s online media for a long time now. It first came to light when we broke the story near the start of 2004 that the BBC’s interactive media player trial (as it was then) would be using the Microsoft’s media format and DRM. At that point, the story BBC spun, was that they weren’t committed to using Microsoft’s DRM, but each stage of the trial beyond that, did.

The news today doesn’t go a long way to changing our view that it won’t be a permanent feature.

Of course Gates and Highfield shared a stage at Mix06 back in March this year

Quite why the BBC is tying its colours to the Microsoft mast is beyond us, especially as the announcement focused alot on Web 2.0. It’s widely thought that Microsoft has lost the dominant position it used to hold and is struggling to catchup with the developments that have gone on in the Web 2.0 world – expect bloggers to rip this one apart.

A move like this could take the BBC from an organisation held in high regard with the high tech grass roots, to one of ridicule.

BBC Press release

Adobe NoteTag Revealed

Adobe NoteTag Revealed Adobe has made available a proof-of-concept version of their new productivity tool, NoteTag. NoteTag harnesses Web 2.0 standards (such as RSS and tags) and integrates them with social software services. It allows users to take electronic notes and share them in a multi-user, collaborative environment. NoteTag users can quickly record, assign and update tasks locally from within the Web-based system but can also access them on Blogger, Typepad and del.icio.us.

The really clever bit of NoteTag is that Blogger, TypePad and del.icio.us are the back end of the system. There are no proprietary file formats or technologies; instead, NoteTag is built on current tagging standards and so can interface with anything that supports the Atom Publishing Protocol.

NoteTag is the first release from Adobe’s Kiwi Project which aims to create rich Internet content using Flex2 technology. The software is open source and free, and the project is keen for users to feedback their experiences and comments.

Adobe NoteTag Revealed As bloggers Stowe Boyd and Steve Rubel and have noted, NoteTag is somewhat complex to get up and running and needs to be hosted on a server, but its integration with Web 2 services points to interesting new directions for Adobe.

A NoteTag demo and a Kiwi Project blog are available.

Verisign Want To Help You Trust The Internet

Interesting to see Verisgn’s Chief Security Officer, Ken Silva, spreading himself over the news warning of a new type of Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

The new twist with the DoS attacks? Requests are initially made to a DNS with a faked return address for the DNS to reply to. This false address is the site being attacked, with the effect that the DNS is sending lots of responses to the target-server, bring it down. hence the Service being Denied.

Why would Verisign be interesting in telling people about this? Well they own Network Solutions, the largest domain register, so clearly they’ve got a vested interest in DNS working well.

More interestingly, their main business is selling security certificates. These certificates are used to ‘prove’ who you are and are, in turn, verified by VeriSign (See how they came up with the name now?).

To date, certificates have generally only really been used by sites to provide potential purchasers with a level of confidence in translating with them.

I think Verisign has a vision far beyond this. I imagine they’re getting very excited about the semantic web, where machines will be forever talking to each other, swapping little nuggets of data. I imagine that when the verisign CxO’s are lying around fantasising about how life could be, a world where everyone of these machine need to have a certificate (one of theirs naturally) would pretty much be the highest state of excitement.

Look at their spate of purchases towards the end of last year; weblogs.com and moreover and see how this strengthens the argument. They want to be in a position to prove that your blog post is created by you, or that the news source that says it the Digital-Lifestyles is Digital-Lifestyles.info and not some wanna-be imitation. Positioning yourself as an owner of frequently used ping server can only help you.

So keep your eye on VeriSign, we think they think they’re going to become a large part of your online life.

Writely Grabbed By Google. Does Microsoft Quake?

Google Grabs Writely.com In what some are viewing as a challenge to Microsoft’s Office software, Google has dipped into its deep pockets and snapped up Upstartle, a small company best known for their online word-processor, Writely.

The software – still in beta – employs ‘Web 2.0’ technologies, like those used in Google Maps and GMail – to let users to create, edit and store documents online.

Crucially, the program also supports documents created in the Microsoft Word format and with Google’s proposed GDrive plan (which gives users massive storage on the Web), some pundits suspect that this could be the start of an onslaught on Microsoft’s Office 12.

Google Grabs Writely.com Blog announcements
As is now the vogue, the two companies announced the deal via their respective corporate blogs, and although details are still scarce, it’s been revealed that Upstartle’s four staff members will join Google immediately.

“Writely is now part of Google,” wrote Upstartle co-founder Claudia Carpenter on the blog, commenting that the two companies were “matched in their culture and goals.”

There have been whispers circulating for months that Google was looking to develop a direct competitor to Microsoft Office, although analyst firm Ovum think that the acquisition is more about increasing revenue streams.

Writing in a research note, Ovum analysts David Bradshaw and David Mitchell observed that buying Writely would give Google another place to push online advertising and protect its revenue streams.

Google Grabs Writely.com “That could provide enough revenues to pay for the acquisition in months and provide an interesting diversion to keep Microsoft looking over its shoulder,” said Bradshaw and Mitchell, adding that Writely’s integrated collaboration and blogging tools could also prove useful resources for Google’s hugely popular Blogger service.

Joe Wilcox at Jupiter Research was also dismissive of claims that Google were getting ready to do battle with Microsoft: “Speculation is that Google will take on Microsoft in the productivity suite market with a hosted product. I suppose Google could do this, but why?”

“Microsoft has so many other word processing competitors already, at least in the consumer market … If Google is smart, Writely technology will bolster products Blogger, GMail and Google Talk (instant messaging),” he added.

For the time being, Upstartle has cut off new registrations following the announcement while the service is scaled up and moved over to Google’s systems.

In the meantime, interested users can sign up to a waiting list.

Writely.com

Digital-Lifestyles eTech Meetup

Digital-Lifestyles, as media sponsors of eTech, will be heading over to the US on Friday in preparation of the much-hallowed event.If you’re heading over there too, do get in touch and we’ll have a Digital-Lifestyles meetup over there, to chat about all things digital. We’ll be there during the whole event, heading back late on the Thursday, but figure Tuesday/Wednesday would be best.