Category: Software

Dare Obasanjo writes:

It consists of three components

* LocalServer: Allows you to cache and serve application resources such as HTML pages, scripts, stylesheets and images from a local web server.
* Database: A relational database where the application can store data locally. The database supports both full-text and SQL queries.
* WorkerPool: Allows applications to perform I/O expensive tasks in the background and thus not lock up the browser. A necessary evil.

At first, this seemed like a lot to functionality being offered by Google Gears until I started trying to design how I’d take some of my favorite Web applications offline.

The New York Times writes:

In the last year, growth has slowed sharply in major sectors like books, tickets and office supplies.

Growth in online sales has also dropped dramatically in diverse categories like health and beauty products, computer peripherals and pet supplies. Analysts say it is a turning point and growth will continue to slow through the decade.

Michael Parekh writes:

Facebook today feels like a web-based AOL.

You log in to do anything.

You keep logging in because you get logged out if there are big periods of inactivity.

You log in to keep in touch with your friends, just like today’s net natives did in AOL’s chat rooms and IM sessions.

You exchange emails back and forth with them using Facebook’s walled, proprietary, email system.
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There are a lot of differences of course is a vis AOL, key among them being that one’s identity is crystal clear in Facebook, while on AOL, one could be interacting with anybody and their dog.
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While the net natives may not be yearning to re-create a newspaper, TV or magazine in this new “Web 2.0” realm, they may be sub-consciously trying to re-create an AOL of sorts.

A series of articles on the WSJ conference that took place recently.

Newsweek writes about Major League Baseball Advanced Media and how it is transforming the economics of ths sport:

Growing at a rate of roughly 30 percent a year, BAM now takes in about $400 million in revenue. Going by its logs, it entertains more than 50 million visitors a month, putting it close to the top 100 sites of any kind. By the end of the season, more than a million subscribers will pay for its media offerings, including video content of all out-of-market games at $99 to $120 a season and audio broadcasts for $20 a season. More than a billion minutes of baseball will flow from its servers. It sells more than $80 million in merchandise, ranging from hats and jerseys to authenticated relics like signed baseballs and bases. (In the 24 hours after Boston became champs in 2004, the site sold $5 million worth of Red Sox gear.) BAM processes a third of the 75 million tickets sold for major-league parks, and resells at premium prices the ducats that season-ticket holders want to offload. It also employs a team of journalists who cover each team”we had to make sure our reporters were independent,” says BAM’s content czar Dinn Mannand hosts hundreds of blogs written by players, celebrities and fans. One of the fastest-growing revenue streams is advertising, now bringing in 15 percent of the total. And more than a million wireless subscribers get mobile updates, ringtones and cell-phone wallpaper.

BAM’s successas well as the egalitarian structure of its ownership schemehas deep implications for the sport’s future.

Think of what can be done with cricket.

Dave Winer writes:

Closed systems are fine in the early stages of a new technology. They’re the training wheels for a new layer of users and uses. But, as we always see, the training wheels eventually come off, explosively, creating new systems that throw out the assumptions of the old. Oddly, I think this is what’s really behind the Fred Wilson thread, it has little to do with the age of the people, and has more to do with the age of the technology. (The personal computer was “invented” by a group of people, with wide ranging ages. Bill Gates was a teen, but many of the other people were adults. How old were Chuck Geschke, John Warnock and Paul Brainerd when Desktop Publishing came online? Tim Berners-Lee was in his 30s when he created the web.) Permalink to this paragraph

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself. How exactly it will happen is something the historians can argue about 25 years from now. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will, unless the rules of technology evolution have been repealed (and they haven’t, trust me).

Mashable compares the two.

BBC features an article by Dave Winer on technologies he would like to see in existence one day. Among them:

Improving podcasting

I love podcasting, both listening to podcasts and creating them. But today’s podcast players are too awkward, they weren’t designed to subscribe to shows, instead they were designed to listen to collections of music (which is great too).
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In order to really work for podcasting, I think a new kind of player needs to have built-in wi-fi, and when you come within range of a signal, a light comes on and you can press a button to have it automatically connect to the internet and download the latest episodes of shows you’re subscribed to.

It would work much the way a Blackberry gets e-mail, without you having to do anything.

Ramesh Jain writes:

In this trip, however, I got a chance to hear some young people (three 19 year old girls) talk about what they like and dislike on Internet. Their excitement about Facebook was something to be experienced. It appears that Facebook has become the most important medium for social communication among them. They love everything about Facebook and they are ecstatic about the new application environment. They think now they have everything that they need to remain in touch with all their friends. They repeatedly mentioned that they are on Facebook all the time. When asked what is missing on Facebook, the only thing they mentioned was that it would be great if it were available on mobile phones.

Of course, these people are not your average Indian young people; they are from upper socio-economic tier of Mumbai. But one thing is clear, there is a revolution brewing in the Internet space. Environments like Facebook and Myspace offer easy publishing tools, powerful communication mechanisms using multimedia experience, and automatically created personal activity reports that are of interest to people in their social life. By putting these things in an environment that allows people to know interesting happenings (yes, I am avoiding the term event intentionally) in their friend-circle, these systems are becoming the most dominant software used by young people around the globe. And by opening their system and becoming platform, Facebook has indeed brought in a major revolution in social networking.

Guy Kawasaki writes how he created a Web 2.0 sites for just over $12,000.

$4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasnt a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

$4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something.

$399. I paid LogoWorks $399 to design the logo. Of course, this was before HP bought the company. Not sure what it would charge now. 🙂

$1,115.05. I spent $1,115.05 registering domains. I could have used GoDaddy and done it a lot cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy.