The emerging of Web 2.0 Technologies NetCast

The emerging of Web 2.0 Technology from Wan Harris on Vimeo.

If you can build it cheap and fast, so can the next guy…

Cameroid Logo

In relation to the topic, “If you can build it cheap and fast, so can the next guy” in my opinionI think that to build a good website for instance takes alot of time and growth and does not happen overnight. Therefore if you build it cheap and fast, it will not work, because as the topic clearly says that anyone else can achieve what you have just done and technically put you out of business.

However that being said, with the arrival of Web 2.0 technologies, it technically can be rather cheap to register yourself a new domain, grab a good hosting package and develop your idea from there. You can use content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, or blogging tools like PHPBB, or fully develop the website yourself using technologies like PHP, ASP.NET and Adobe’s Flash for instance. Then add RSS Feeds to the mix and you think you might have yourself a winner. Nope… you can forget that!

Cameroid Smurf

There is nothing wrong with using any of these, but in my opinion it really lies with the idea. I think that you should research the area of industry and intended target audience that you are wanting to attract for this. As I said earlier, if the idea is right and as time goes on growth will happen. Therefore you may have achieved this relatively cheaply, depending on how many of you there are, but you have taken a substantial amount of time to get too where you are.

In saying all that, the application for this week is Cameroid. They allow you to use your computers webcam to take photos online and share it through blogs or popular social networking sites, or you can email it to friends and family. Cameroid gives you a default templates that you can apply around your photos or add some special effects like distort and twist to really spice up your photo experience.

Cameroid actually reminds me of Apple’s PhotoBooth program, however that is part of the Mac OSX and runs off the users computer. PhotoBooth also utilises the computers webcam (which all Macs come with nowadays called the iSight) and allows users to add special effects to the image.

In wrapping up, why I believe that Cameroid will survive is that it’s entirely free and all done through the users internet browser. The only plugin needed is the Adobe Flash browser plugin which is most likely already installed on most computers anyway. Therefore you aren’t going out of your way to install a plugin that you may only use for Cameroid. Who hasn’t had fun with manipulating images or adding special effects to them? Thats why I firmly believe Cameroid is here to stay.

Share it. Email it.

References:

Cameroid. 2007. Use your webcam to take photos online! http://www.cameroid.com/ (accessed May 9, 2010)

Apple PhotoBooth. 2010. What is Mac OSX – PhotoBooth. http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/photo-booth.html (accessed May 9, 2010)

Killer Startups. 2010. Get Snap Happy with your webcam. http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/cameroid-com-get-snap-happy-with-your-webcam (accessed May 9, 2010)

The Long Tail

A website by the name of Bokardo explains best at what “The Long Tail” is. The Long Tail is about focusing on the less popular content that previously couldn’t be accessed because of some physical limitation: most often shelf space. The classic examples that Chris Anderson uses are music and books. Book and CD stores can only hold so many albums and books, so the constraint of shelf space hinders their ability to provide an exhaustive selection.

At first this was hard to comprehend as this strategy is about selling more of something that isn’t popular or hasn’t reached public widespread. However, being a bit of a designer myself, I found something I can relate this strategy to and for this weeks Web 2.0 Application.

Zazzle Logo

Therefore this weeks application is Zazzle.com.au. According to Wikipedia, Zazzle is an online retailer that allows users to upload images and create their own merchandise (clothing, posters, etc), or buy merchandise created by other users, similar to CafePress.com or Propell.com, as well as use images from participating companies such as The Walt Disney Company. Users are allowed to open their own shop for free and set the profit they wish to make on each item.

Zazzle Shirts

Twilight Merchandise

But allowing users to upload images and create their own merchandise does come at a risk as Zazzle is currentlybeing sued by Summit Entertainment who own the rights to the Twilight movies. “Apparently, all those excited tweens have been making their own Twilight merchandise. Now, basic common sense would tell you that Zazzle is the tool provider, and not the actual infringer here. But, Summit is claiming trademark violations, and the official safe harbors cover things like copyright and defamation, but not trademark (hurray for legal loopholes). The only ones doing the actual infringement are the users, not Zazzle itself.” [Techdirt, 2009]

References:

The Long Tail and Web 2.0. 2005. Bokardo social web design. http://bokardo.com/archives/long-tail-web2/ (accessed May 2, 2010)

Zazzle. 2010. Custom T-Shirts, Personalised Gifts, Posters, Art and more. http://www.zazzle.com.au/ (accessed May 2, 2010)

Zazzle sued because Twilight Fans like making their own Merchandise. 2009. Zazzle. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091030/0426236733.shtml (accessed May 2, 2010)

The Long Tail. 2010. Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tail (accessed May 2, 2010)

Zazzle. 2010. Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zazzle (accessed May 2, 2010)

Perpetual Beta

According to Wikipedia, “Perpetual Beta is a term used to describe software or a system which remains at the beta development stage for an extended or even indefinite period of time. It is often used by developers in order to allow them to constantly release new features that might not be fully tested. As a result, perpetual beta software is not recommended for mission critical machines. However, many operational systems find this to be a much more rapid & agile approach to development, staging, and deployment” [Wikipedia, 2010]

This week, my Web 2.0 Application is IMVU. It actually took me quite some time to find another Web 2.0 Application that uses Perpetual Beta to review apart from Google’s Gmail, and I wanted to do something different as I have already seen quite a few Gmail reviews from other classmates.

IMVU Logo

IMVU, or “I Envy You”, is a 3D graphical instant messageing client that allows you to virtually Dress Up, Shop in Style, Meet new friends and Create your own Designs. They have posted a YouTube video on there front page which is worth watching. It is infact a Perpetual Beta, as it clearly states this in the top left corner of there website near the logo and has been running since 2004. I have found a very interesting blog from Timothy Fitz about the Continuous Development Cycle that IMVU are using. They are supposably running 50 new code deployments a day. I presume he is employed with IMVU, but I’m not fully sure myself.

IMVU Chat

“IMVU currently hosts over 100 million registered users, 6 million unique monthly visitors and a $25 million revenue run rate, as of October 4, 2009. Currently, it is in public beta, and has been available since April 2, 2004. IMVU was founded by Will Harvey, a video game developer and founder of There and has the world’s largest catalog of virtual goods with over 4 million items, produced by over 100,000 content creators, and now run by CEO Cary Rosenzweig, who took the position in November 2007. It is estimated that IMVU currently generates approximately $2 million in revenue per month, 90% of which comes directly from the sale of virtual goods.” [Wikipedia, 2010]

References:

Perpetual Beta. 2010. Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_beta. (accessed April 25, 2010)

IMVU. 2010. 3D Chat and Dress Up. http://www.imvu.com/. (accessed April 25, 2010)

IMVU. 2010. Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMVU. (accessed April 25, 2010)

Fitz, T. 2010. Continuous Development at IMVU. http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/. (accessed April 25, 2010)

Bolton, M. 2010. 50 Deployments a Day and The Perpetual Beta. http://www.developsense.com/blog/2009/03/50-deployments-day-and-perpetual-beta/. (accessed April 25, 2010)

Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management, or commonly known as DRM, is a type of content protection that limits the use of the copyrighted piece on digital media or a device. According to Wikipedia, DRM is used by big international companies such as Sony, Apple, Microsoft, AOL and the BBC [Wikipedia, 2010]. However, the use of Digital Rights Management is of course controversial.

Ubisoft, a very large computer games publisher, uses such a DRM that requires a full internet connection and online authentication to their servers to play any part of there new games. This includes Assassins Creed 2, Settlers 7, Silent Hunter 5 and soon to be Splinter Cell Conviction. According to Wikipedia, in early March, 2010, Uplay servers suffered a period of inaccessibility due to a large scale DDoS Attack, causing around 5% of game owners to become locked out of playing their game. The company later credited owners of the affected games with a free download, and there has been no further downtime. [Wikipedia, 2010].

CertiVox Logo

Therefore my Web 2.0 Application for this week is the world’s first Web 2.0 Security Service to Protect, Track and Distribute Valuable Documents and Media called CertiVox, a start-up founded by former executives of RSA Security, McAfee and DAT Group PLC. It is an extremely new service as it was only launched 1st of March this year.

According to a recent global survey by RSA Security, the Security Division of EMC, nearly two in three people who use social networking indicated they are less likely to interact or share information due to growing security concerns. Additionally, four out of five people using social networking websites were concerned for the safety of their personal information. “CertiVox is disruptive technology. For sharing information across boundaries, it does what expensive and complex products like DLP, DRM, encryption and managed file transfer do at a fraction of the cost, and none of the hassle.” [CertiVox, 2010]

CertiVox Program

Marketwire add to this by saying, CertiVox adds much needed data protection controls so that all information is kept confidential using innovative and advanced encryption technologies. Additionally, post-delivery control, branding, tracking and audit capabilities allow users to know what is happening to their documents and media after it is sent, and even control access to the content after it is delivered. CertiVox also enables targeted branding campaigns to be run on top of the distributed protected content, thereby enabling additional revenue streams for digital media publishers.

References:

Digital Rights Management. 2010. Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management. (accessed April 18, 2010)

CertiVox. 2010. Create Secure Content Apps. http://www.certivox.com/. (accessed April 17, 2010)

MarketWire. 2010. Press Release Distribution. http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/CertiVox-Launches-Worlds-First-Web-20-Security-Service-Protect-Track-Distribute-Valuable-1124174.htm. (accessed April 17, 2010)

CertiVox Content App Creator. 2010. Yearly Subscription | CertiVox Limited. http://techwriterbuzz.vox.com/library/post/certivox-content-app-creator-yearly-subscription-certivox-limitedhttppingfmynt3k.html. (accessed April 17, 2010)

Rich User Experiences

A Rich User Experience (RUE) is a web based application where users are granted special functionality either done through a web browser, or right from their operating systems desktop. The web browser will generally need a plugin installed for this functionality and application to work properly. There are 3 main frameworks at the moment that allow for this functionality to be produced and they are Adobe Flash, Java and Microsofts Silverlight. However, there are some others starting to pop there heads up, like Adobe AIR which uses the Adobe Flex Framework, and allows the developer to publish there web application right to the desktop. [Wikipedia, 2010]

A great example of a RUE is the Spectra Visual Newsreader which was launched in October 2008. This application is made be MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.msn.com) and uses the ever so popular Adobe Flash Technology, which has phenomenal growth of reaching up to 95% of households nowadays. Spectra is still currently in beta as well.

MSNBC describes the Spectra Newsreader as, “Spectra merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience. With comprehensive live news coverage, striking design, complete customization, dynamic browsing, human body interaction and many other unique features, Spectra brings A Fuller Spectrum of News to life in our most immersive extension yet.” [MSNBC, 2008]

Its because of the functionality as to why I class it as an Rich User Application, or RIA. It allows for a very visually, eye-candy user experience based on the web to view the latest news, all to the user through a web browser. As they say above dynamic browsing of content and human body interaction can be done through your computers web-cam. It could be classed as a web-based Mashup as it uses feeds to pull in the latest news content from msnbc.msn.com, however I see it as more than this. It has a great user interface and a good functionality set for the users to view the news. Near the end of 2008, it won a Mashup Award on mashupawards.com

Spectra Visual Newsreader. 2008. http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/components/spectra/index.html. Online. Mar 28, 2010

Rich Internet Application. 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application. Online. Mar 28, 2010

News Tools Apps. 2008. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24207533. Online. Mar 28, 2010

Mashup Awards. 2008. http://mashupawards.com/spectra-visual-newsreader/. Online. Mar 28, 2010

Innovation in Assembly

Innovation in assembly is where an application is turned into a platform or platform components. One of the key components to this is an API. API, or Application Programming Interface is “an interface implemented by a software program to enable interaction with other software, similar to the way a user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.” [Wikipedia, 2010]

A great example to this is the bookmarking giant Delicious: http://delicious.com/. Delicious’s API offers methods for adding, reading, querying, and editing bookmarks. These bookmarks then can be added into your own application. Webmonkey has an article how to simply add a bookmark to your account externally. You can read it via this link.

Delicious do provide complete documentation on their developer API. The documentation provides all acceptable methods for the API to interface with Delicious.

Delicious’ power all comes down to tagging. For instance, typing Web 2.0 into Delicious (http://delicious.com/search?p=web+2.0) and I get 249 771 results from currents users that have bookmarked a website and placed the Web 2.0 tag onto it. Also articles displayed can be multi-tagged, like seeing Web 2.0 is web design, place a web design tag upon the article or add the tags API, Programming and Mashup to a developer article.

Delicious also has the Web 2.0 Cloud Tagging at http://delicious.com/tag/, which clearly shows that the tags Design, Blog and Video as the most popular tags currently used through the website. This is a very powerful feature for users of the site as all information is a click away!

Delicious is a relatively new site, launched in September 2003 by a fellow named Joshua Schachter. He actually quit his normal day time job in March 2005 to work on Delicious full-time. Then the following month he “recieved approximately $2 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures and Amazon.com”[Wikipedia, 2010]

In December 2005, Yahoo acquired Delicious where sources suggest it was sold for somewhere between US$15 million and US$30 million. [Wikipedia, 2010]

I personally see Delicious as a great example of Innovation in Assembly, as firstly its a Web 2.0 Platform that allows users to add and delete bookmarks, but also allows users to export there bookmarks back to a browser like Mozilla Firefox which is becoming the most popular browser. Secondly, it allows developers to interace with Delicious through their powerful API as previously mentioned.

References:

Application Programming Interface. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API. Online. Mar 21, 2010

Using the Delicious API. 2010. http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/using_the_delicious_api/. Online. Mar 21, 2010.

Delicious Help API. 2010. http://delicious.com/help/api. Online. Mar 21, 2010.

Delicious (website). 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us. Online. Mar 21, 2010.

Data is the next ‘Intel Inside’

My next Web 2.0 Technology features Google. The search engine giant is a Web 2.0 Technology and data is the most important asset because, and Tim O’Reilly states, “Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed: database management. Google isn’t just a collection of software tools, it’s a specialized database. Without the data, the tools are useless; without the software, the data is unmanageable.”

Through my eyes, Google is most certainly a Web 2.0 Technology because each user is viewing/creating websites and each website is indexed by Google. Due to the collaborative effort that a technology has to be in order for it to be called “Web 2.0″, Google’s data is coming from the users of the internet and not Google itself.

We all know that Google isn’t just a search engine for searching text and images though, its a whole suite of applications, like Google Docs, Google Web Developer Tools,  Google Maps and so on. But also Google owns another Web 2.0 Technology, now the video giant called Youtube. Back in October of 2006, Google bought Youtube for an estimated $2.2 Billion, other sources state $1.65 Billion. A quote from the report on smh.com.au says, “Google is expected to try to make money from YouTube by integrating the site with its search technology and search-based advertising program.”

Google’s history has been short, but they have done so much in that short amount of time. It all started in August of 1998 when Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100 000, registered to a company unknown at that time called “Google Inc”. In December of the same year, PC Magazine reports that “Google has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes us as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.” From then on Googles growth was massive, from moving offices the following year to Google’s Adwords launched in October 2000. Their index grows to 3 billion in December 2001, to the first Australian office in Sydney in October 2002. Google Maps goes live in February 2005 to they announce that they are developing the Google Chrome OS in July of 2009.

Now, according to msnbc.msn.com, in 2005 Google spent $130.5 million buying a total of 15 small companies, which in 2006 they bought YouTube which was by far the most expensive purchase made by Google during its eight-year history. Google is now indexing more than 1 Trillion unique URLs, and over 1.1 Billion images indexed or 1 trillion, 187 billion, 63 million to be exact.

Google is certainly an exciting and very young company at that.

References:
What is Web 2.0 – O’Reilly Media. 2005. http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1 Online. Mar. 14, 2010
Boom: Google buys Youtube for $2.2b. 2006. http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/boom-google-buys-youtube-for-22b/2006/10/10/1160246131252.html Online. Mar. 14, 2010
Google buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion. 2006. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15196982/ Online. Mar. 14, 2010
Corporate Information – Google Milestones. 2009. http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html Online. Mar. 14, 2010

Harnessing Collective Intelligence

I’m going to start my first Web 2.0 Technology blog post on BitTorrent. Tim O’Reilly’s site defines BitTorrent as a Web 2.0 Technology because, and I quote, “BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it. While Akamai must add servers to improve service, every BitTorrent consumer brings his own resources to the party.”

The BitTorrent protocol allows users to share large files through the internet. However, the user must have a BitTorrent client to share, download or distribute files through the protocol. The most popular ones are Vuze (used to be called Azureus) or uTorrent. BitTorrent is exponentially growing as more and more users and businesses are using the technology. According to TorrentFreak, in February 2009, BitTorrent is responsible for more than 45-78% of all P2P traffic, roughly 27-55% of all Internet traffic. In 2004, that number was considerably less at 35% of all internet traffic.

The BitTorrent protocol however does not allow any way to index the files users can download. This has lead to a considerable amount of websites indexing the small .bittorrent extension files for all sorts of media including movies, music, games and tv shows. One of the largest torrent sites named ‘Mininova’ were recently shut down in mid November of last year, due to copyright infringing content and were ordered to remove it or face penalty. The site is still currently up, but only indexing files that meet copyright and are legal to share through what they call their ‘content distribution platform’.

Big companies such as Asus, one of the leading computer hardware manufacturers, and Blizzard, the makers of games such of the Warcraft and Diablo series, are now utilising the BitTorrent technology. Asus use the protocol for distributing drivers and software of their products, for instance graphics cards and motherboards, to their users. Blizzards Downloader is used to download updates of their games or the full game itself.

I personally think the use of BitTorrent for companies like Asus is great and a perfect example of how to effectively use a Web 2.0 Technology. This not only helps the business in distributing their updates or services and a massive reduction in bandwidth costs but also helps the end user in receiving the downloads more quickly and efficiently.

References:
What is Web 2.0 – O’Reilly Media. 2005. http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=2 Online Mar. 7, 2010

BitTorrent Still King of P2P Traffic. 2009. http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-still-king-of-p2p-traffic-090218/ Online Mar. 7, 2010

Asus Uses BitTorrent to Boost Software Downloads. 2009. http://torrentfreak.com/asus-uses-bittorrent-to-boost-downloads-090720/ Online Mar. 7, 2010

Blizzard Downloader. 2010. http://www.wowwiki.com/Blizzard_Downloader Online Mar. 7, 2010

Mininova Deletes All Infringing Torrents and Goes ‘Legal’. 2009. http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-deletes-all-infringing-torrents-and-goes-legal-091126/ Online Mar. 7, 2010