Tagged: www

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 :-)

San Diego this week


A lot of things are going on:

* [[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.

More Web2.0 stuff


[[http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1980|This article]] on ZDNet talks about some of the //Web2.0// products that showcased at the [[http://www.web2con.com/|Web2.0 conference]] going on right now. I really like Rollyo. Flock is all over the place last 2 days — but not much is known about what exactly it looks like. Wink looked //ok//, but I think Yahoo’s [[http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/|MyWeb2]] is a much hefty competitor for them.

[[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.

What is Web 2.0?


If all the buzzwords and acronyms (Web 2, AJAX, RSS, XHTML, XSLT, tags, blogging, podcasting) are hurting your head, no fear — none other than Tim O’Reilly himself has written a nice essay titled “[[http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228|What is Web 2.0?]].

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.

Web based office


A sort of survey by ZDNet on Web2.0 [[http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/index.php?p=20|office applications]]. I had mentioned most of these applications in an [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/09/15/189/|earlier post]].

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 :)