OK. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. THIS WAS GOING TO BE A FRIKIN LONG POST ABOUT WEB2.0 AND MY INITIAL THOUGHTS ON LIVE.COM AND START.COM. I SPENT ABOUT AN HOUR COMPOSING THIS POST WITH A TON OF COMMENTARY AND SOME SCREENSHOTS AND THANKS TO BLOGGER AND FIREFOX, AND PROBABLY A LITTLE WINXP, MY ENTIRE POST (INCLUDING SCREENSHOTS WAS LOST DUE TO APP LOCKUP & CRASH. SO HERE GOES ONE MORE TIME. CAPS GOING OFF NOW.
#1 Requirement for a web2.0 app - save as you type. gmail does it well. everyone else should follow. gmail's spell checker also rocks. everyone should follow suit. if web2.0 is all about empowering users, then by all means, let's use best of breed across the board folks.
[gmail people - why can't I "undo" inside the gmail mail editor (e.g. when composing a message). It's really annoying]
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Here's take 2 @ what I wanted to communicate a in the post I lost [thanks 2 firefox + blogger crashing, though I suspect WinXP also contributed in some way]. These are some of my initial thoughts and reactions on live.com and start.com. hopefully vista will open up a whole new wave of innovation on live.com, because what's there right now is pretty boring. no offense to any of the folks working on live.com and start.com. the tech is way cool. just gotta build the community. show me some innovation and I'll definitely jump on board.
[Observation # 1] RSS, weather, news, stock, search = web1.o - come on people. these have been around forever. how many times are we going to use the california traffic web service and suck in a few rss feeds. The only reason why RSS is taking off, is that everyone and their brother is exposing their [a] data as RSS, and [b] apps as services/public apis. Sure - everyone is building wicked cool AJAX apps with drag and drop, expando/collapso, add/remove column, etc etc...but sucking in RSS is something that we've been doing in our product for a long long time. We also automatically index all external RSS feeds with our open source impl of Apache Lucene, so with our product you get to add RSS feeds, but you also get a built in search engine to query your RSS feeds for free. Oh - and you can also choose your "Search root" to restrict your search to certain "tags" or areas within the folksonomy.
Mini-rant - rss aggregators - enough is enough. it's becoming exceedingly recursive. feeds that consume feeds that consume feeds. feed cannabalism is spreading like wildfire. bloglines, google reader, my yahoo, we've all got em....it's not about the technology, its how you choose to use it. how many people use gmail as a news aggregator, archive, and network storage facility? I do. I have no fewer than 20 gmail accounts that I for such purposes.
[Observation # 2] Web 2.0 is about empowering users by providing them with value-added services and applications that are delivered over the web. It's not about stock news, and weather. It about kick ass web service api mashups like http://www.housingmaps.com. It's about capitalizing on the power of the collective intelligence and *real time* behavior of PEOPLE - users - not systems - look at del.icio.us/popular. tell me that you don't find any one item in the top ten list not remotely interesting. That's the power of web2.0. It's about the PEOPLE not the technology.
[Observation # 3] Bottom line - I like what I see in live.com and start.com, but they've got a long way to go. I'll provide some feature requests, but its not really about the technology that will determine the ultimate success or failure of sites like this. It's about the community. It's about the users. It's about the people. Google, Yahoo, and others are well ahead of companies like MSFT because they've been riding the open source wave and they've already captured the mindshare of the developer community. Now that we've got enough standardization in web tech, these developers are beginning to leverage each others work in new and unique ways. It's the new model for software development. If MSFT is going to be successful, then they need to open up the halls of Redmond and unleash their developers on the public developer community. PEOPLE are the only way that Microsoft will gain ground in this new phenomena.
[Observation #4] It's good to see that Scott Isaac's is involved. DHTML Dude. I worked with Scott briefly on a site for a start up that never got off the ground called contractorhub.com...ahh those were the days.
Live.com and Start.com Feature Requests:
Live.com and start.com folks - if you're listening - here are some feature requests:
- More eye candy. web2.0 needs to be more visual - empower the user - give them eye candy - not annoying popups and flash ads that take over and lockup your browser- we can handle adsense (txt ads), and no flash or annoying popups that take control of the browser - instead - how about a picture rotator gadget - point at a folder (flickr, picasa, web folder, file system, ftp server - whatever. should not matter where the pics are - just suck em in and rotate em. RSS feeds are just text and are quite boring on the eyes.
- Absolutely need the ability to restrict searches to specific domains within "my web" - if I'm sucking in feeds that might be remotely interesting to me and slapping them up on a live.com or start.com page, why not let me hone in even more by allowing me to restrict my search to whatever feeds/topics/tags I want.
- support multiple pages - take tab-based browsing to the apps. I use firefox all the time for tab-based browsing. why can't you give me tab-based browsing across my aggregated feed pages. If all you're going to give me for now is the ability to search and suck in feeds, then I need to at least be able to organize my feeds by topic, subject, person, etc etc. I've got way too many feeds to fit on one single page. but I'll glady tab between pages, especially if their served up web2.0 style.
- if you're going to compete with yahoo, then you need to get a tagging system in place ASAP. It's the new way. del.icio.us and myweb2.0 should provide enough clues.
- mobile enable everything. wap2.0 browsers are good enough. Everyone's got a GPRS enabled phone, some of us even have EDGE-enabled devices. A select few have high 3g+ wireless tech like UMTS, HSDPA, CMDA2000. Look at what Google is doing with gmail mobile, wml.froogle.com, m.google.com, etc etc. scary. msft needs to catch up in this area asap. hotmail mobile and what little things I've seen about live.com mail beta []by accessing my hotmail acct from my new Samsung T-809 are a good start, but I'm deriving huge benefits from other mobile web2.0 app providers. soonr.com is the obvious example. there are many others. show me some mobile-friendly urls with features and you might catch my attention.
- QUESTION: what is the difference between live.com and start.com? Which one should I use? I don't get it? They obviously share common core web app functionality. Just curious.
MSFTs web2.0 push...
source: live.com blog, start.com
[check out the blurbage on the start.com page - trying to lure away all them engineers from google, yahoo, and the web2.0 startups. good luck!!!]
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Source: start.com, live.com
1 comments:
just making sure comments work now. somehow disabled 'em. comments definintely encouraged.
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