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 :-)

* [[http://www.rubyconf.org/|RubyConf]]
* [[http://osdw.org/|Open Source Desktop Workshop]]
* This is not in San Diego, but there’s a **free** concert by Indian Ocean up in LA

Unfortunately, all of these things cost too much for me to get into :( Besides, I have a paper deadline on 17th so can’t take that liberty.

While I’m on events, let me take this chance to mention [[http://upcoming.org|Upcoming]] and [[http://eventful.com|Eventful]] — two new additions to the “social” apps bandwagon — these are event calendars. Upcoming was recently acquired by Yahoo, and there’s a lot of momentum behind Eventful (EVDB) too.

[[http://zimbra.com|Zimbra]] is a desktop like web-based outlook replacement. Again, there is already a lot of competition in this arena (most notably, Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access and Yahoo’s upcoming redesign of the email interface). A more interesting news is the announced [[http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/004210.html|tie up between Google and Sun]] to develop a web based office app that would take on Microsoft Office.

A look at the list of sponsors of the Web2 con is a very good indication of the players in this field. My guess is that this entire Web2.0 thing will spawn off a whole bunch of startups that will (and are already) get consumed by the big players like Yahoo and Google.

While not the most comprehensive and the most insightful piece, it is nonetheless a very good overview. If it seems too long, just go through the 8 bullets down at the bottom for the meat of the matter.

I want to write about so many more things but this week is just crazy. Hopefully I’ll have some more time over the weekend to actually write something thats not just a link :)

I was shocked at how well it works. Almost as good as gaim, kopete or trillian. I could log in instantly, it showed me my offline messages, I could chat with one accounts signed into meebo and the other one on my desktop. It was freaky. Damn cool stuff!

The [[http://blog.meebo.com/?page_id=2|team]] looks interesting — young, vibrant and mostly female :-) (no, I’m not trying to be sexist). Do check out the [[http://blog.meebo.com/|meeblog]] and the [[http://forum.meebo.com/|forums]].

Wow.

* A [[http://writely.com|word processor]]
* An [[http://meebo.com/|instant messenger]]
* A [[http://tadalist.com|todo list]]
* A [[http://basecamphq.com|project manager]]
* A [[http://www.protopage.com/|generic scratchpad]]
* A [[http://bloglines.com/|RSS aggregator]]
* An [[http://kiko.com|online calendar]]
* Ofcourse [[http://gmail.com|email]]
* and [[http://del.icio.us|bookmarks]]
* and [[http://www.backbase.com/|many]], [[http://www.ajaxian.com/|many]], [[http://www.techcrunch.com/?cat=97|more]]

Now all we need is a good replacement for photoshop, powerpoint and excel and integrate them all together into a single portal (Yahoo? Google? M$? other takers?) and there you have — your online desktop!

Of course, easier said than done. But things are moving fast. Very fast.

* its a //fixed-width// design, so if you try to view the site in a narrow window (anything less than 600px should be enough to demonstrace, I think) you’ll see a scrollbar show up at the bottom and then you have to scroll horizontally to get at all the content. I don’t quite understand why ALA didn’t opt for a more fluid design, when they have a [[http://alistapart.com/topics/design/layout/|plethora of articles]] on creating [[http://alistapart.com/articles/negativemargins|flexible]], [[http://alistapart.com/articles/elastic|elastic]] [[http://alistapart.com/articles/flexiblelayouts|designs]]
* they don’t have a separate stylesheet for print media. That would have been perfectly fine, if the site printed ok. I just tried a simple “Print to file” from Firefox, and for some weird reason it seems that columns of text in subsequent pages increasingly keep shifting towards the right until after about the 3rd or 4rd page, no text is visible on the page. Maybe this is a problem specific to printing to file from Firefox, but I’d still say its a problem.

But otherwise, really great design. Excellent choice of fonts, and colors. I like that they don’t overuse images in their design (basically just for the logo).

In particular, I’m interested in knowing if the blog is filling up the entire width of the screen? Ideally, the width of the blog should be capped to 900px, but if it is filing your entire window, let me know.

I’m still debating what to do about font choices. Typically I avoid specifying particular fonts, and just stick to generic font families (like serif, sans-serif and monospace). However, the default font settings in IE are just horrible. Times New Roman for serif and I think Helvetica/Arial for sans-serif.

Also, now that I’m using the IE7 patch, I might play around with some rounded borders.

One word: //pathetic//.

The font rendering was horrible. Some really useful CSS properties such as ‘max-width’ aren’t even supported. Why does IE suck so much? I even tried some of the hacks I found, but even they didn’t work (most involved using the ‘expression()’ method to set the width)

Anyways, I don’t have the time and patience to fix layout right now. So if you’re using IE and you think this site looks ugly, thats fine by me. But you’ll be better off using a //real// browser.

Sheesh.