Tagged: web2

Academics and Web 2.0


The academic community been slow to catch up on the Web 2.0 hype. Here are some potential uses:

* RSS feeds and email subscriptions for citations. I want to know whenever someone cites my paper.
* ACM/IEEE have a rigid categorization of topics. Its time to allow readers to tag papers. Doesn’t mean the categorization is going away or anything (see [[http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/02/11/tags-and-categories-are-not-the-same/|Tags and Categories are not the same]]) — its just easier to search using tags and it will be interesting to see how tag based folksonomies emerge. [[http://citeulike.org|CiteULike]] is headed in the right direction.
* Revamped websites for ACM, IEEE, Citeseer. All these websites are //so// old-ish now. No bright colors, no large fonts, **no AJAX, omg**. Give me some live search, give me RSS feeds for search results, give me RSS feeds for conference proceedings and journals (and get rid of the archaic “Table of Contents Service”).
* [[http://maps.google.com|GMaps]] mashups with a decent conference calendar site. I should be able to locate all systems conferences for the next year on a Google map, click on each push-pin to find out hotel information, dates etc.
* //What else?// (I’ll keep updating if I come up with any other ideas)

Web based password manager

Does anyone know of a good web based password manager? I’m inclinced to hack up my own, but I wanted to dig around a little bit first.

Password management has always been an issue with me — there are just way too many passwords to remember, and even though I’m usually lazy and end up using one of 2-3 passwords in most places, I still need to remember login names (why can’t websites explicitly mention that they use email addresses as logins). And sometimes I do create new passwords, which are just impossible to remember.

I’m sure someday we will move away from text based encryption schemes and have some funky audio/visual passwords which won’t require me to remember arbitrary strings of text. But that day is not today, and so I need some solution. Traditionally I’ve been using applications on my desktop to keep track of my passwords (my own Starfish, Revelation etc) and that has scaled nicely so far.

But now its getting out of hand. With all the Web2 hype, new and interesting startups come up on a daily basis. All of them need your email address and password. I have more than 5 GMail accounts. Several bugzilla accounts. Credit cards. Insurance companies. Banks. Airlines. Portals. Passwords, passwords and more passwords. Thanks to spam, now you need some kind of authentication mechanism to get to anything useful on the web. So my list of usernames and passwords is becoming unmanageably long.

Starfish and Revelation were fine, but I would have to sync my password files across systems. But when I was travelling without my laptop, I’d be stuck — so I do need a web front end. Besides, this seems to me the kind of web-app almost everyone needs. So how come I haven’t seen a cool AJAX-ified web based password management tool yet?

Any takers?

Fluxiom


[[http://www.fluxiom.com/fluxiom.mov|The video]] is just //way// too **cool**!

But really, where is this going? Don’t we have existing products to do similar stuff? Lets see

* Flickr: I can post pictures, people can look at them, search them, tag them. But really no good way to download them. I can share them with my “contacts”, but can I create arbitrary lists with arbitrary permissions? Besides, Flickr is only for images
* A regular web browser with some passwords thrown in: you can clearly share content this way, and control access rights and so on. But you don’t get the pretty interface. Or the search. Or the tags. And password management is not easy either.
* Gmail: I can create one gmail account per group, and just dump all the content as email attachments. The text of the mail can contain tags. Searchable. Archivable. Tons of storage. Almost all the functionality is there, sans the interface. And of course, this would just be a big, ugly hack
* Strongspace: Except for the search and tags part, I think Strongspace already delivers most of these things. But I haven’t really tried it out myself, so I might be missing some fine points.

I can go on, but it does seem like Fluxiom has got something that no one else can do (fully). Which of course raises the quesion — is there even a market for such a thing? I’m not sure. I need to share content with family and friends now and then, but I typically end up emailing, SCPing or something similar. Perhaps small businesses have a greater need. My only concern is — how would this integrate with the business process? With email, the good thing is that you can track how and where the attachments are flowing and the whole things can be tightly integrated into the business. Would Fluxiom have APIs to do this kind of thing?

The Next Bubble


This whole Web2 thing seems to be headed to be the next big bubble. I suspect it //will// burst at some point, but its too early to speculate why or how or when — for that matter, it might never actually burst, or it might just be subsumed by a greater, bigger, deeper Web3.0 thats still mostly in people’s heads.

Anyhow, what //does// bother me that is how quickly people are catching onto the Web2 bandwagon. While this is good, it is useful only if each new entry adds some innovation and value to the whole. However, right now it doesn’t look like that. Many people are coming up with the same ideas, at about the same time and with about the same functionality. Let me give a few examples:

* Calendars: [[http://planzo.com/|planzo]], [[http://kiko.com]]
* Events: [[http://upcoming.org/|Upcoming]], [[http://eventful.com/|Eventful]]
* Web based email (redux): [[http://zimbra.com/|Zimbra]], [[http://roundcube.net|RoundCube]]
* Groupware (redux): [[http://joyent.com|Joyent]], [[http://renkoo.com|Renkoo]]
* Social bookmarks: [[http://furl.net|Furl]], [[http://del.icio.us]], [[http://del.irio.us]]
* Democratized News: [[http://digg.com|Digg]], [[http://reddit.com|Reddit]], [[http://shoutwire.com|Shoutwire]]

And there are many such more (feed readers, todo list managers etc)

Now it would be foolish for me to claim that having choices is bad (infact, quite a few people would abuse me for the rest of my life if I said something like that, because I often use that argument in favor of Linux). It might just be the case that since all this is so new, people are just getting started with the same kinds of things — extensions of applications we already use and love (email, bookmarks, calendars). But somehow I get the feel that while we’re all really excited about the technology, very few people really have a good idea of what its capable of and what kind of **new** and **innovative** applications can come out of it.

Nonetheless, exciting times! Every other day I think about leaving all this and starting my own :-)