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Category: Web 2.0

By Posted on Posted in London, mobile 2.0, Web 2.0 3 Comments

photo credit: Charlotte Gilhooly I’m an early adopter, or possibly a serial alpha tester. I’m always willing to give something new a go, especially when it comes to new ways to get around my city, London. I was first off the block to get an Oyster card – a fantastic innovation that has transformed Tube and Bus travel, in my opinion. I was an early customer of the “OnePulse” combined Oyster-Visa-contactless payment card – less than fantastic, but that’s the subject of another post. So it should come as no surprise that I was one of the first to sign up for the new “Cycle Hire” scheme in London – cheerily called “Boris’s Bikes” by the press. (Us Londoners know they’re really Ken’s bikes but “Ken’s Bikes” suffers from a lack of aliteration so “Boris’s Bikes” it is.) They probably had enough work to do just launching the service and getting basic e-commerce systems up and running to worry about mobile app development and I’m aso guessing they didn’t have the expertise in house (though that’s just a guess). Many companies and organizations launching new services, particularly in government, might be in similar situations. They could have decided to bag mobile all together, but that would have been shortsighted. Clearly, this is a service that needed a mobile component.  So, as reported in the Guardian, TFL decided not to roll their own mobile app associated with the service but rather opened the field up budding mobile developers. They did so by releasing their data as an API to the …

Boris’s Bikes and Open Data Read more »

By Posted on Posted in W3C, Web 2.0 2 Comments Tagged with ,

Interesting post over at Mashable today about the failure of many social network sites to take down personal images even after the user has explicitly “deleted” them. The issue of data take-down is one we’ve started discussing in the W3C Social Web Incubator Group. The example of deleting images you’ve placed online is a simple one, but what about all the other digital traces we leave on the Web? In a world where more and more of our identity is expressed online, should data take-down be a universal human right? We’re collecting user stories that illustrate concepts like this in order to provoke some thought, both about what the future of a more social Web should look like and what technical underpinnings need to be in place to make this happen.

By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0 No Comments Tagged with

So unfortunately I wasn’t able to get out a timely blog post on Le Web 3 last week. Others have said a lot already but I just thought I’d write a brief post on it. It was a really great event and Loic and team deserve massive kudos for putting it together so well. First I have to rave about the near-flawless execution. The food deserves special mention because it was fantastic. Of course – what did I expect? This is Paris, after all. The production of the event itself, especially on the main stage, was fantastic, with a camera crew and staff that kept scurrying around keeping everything running smoothly. There was a fleet of BMW cars, sponsored by BMW, taking speakers back and forth from the conference site to the hotel. Very nice touch. The conference site itself was laid out very nicely with a chill-out “networking” lounge (where local artists were also working to add a bit of color). There were the usual sponsor booths but lots of space. There were a lot of people at this event but it never felt crowded. It was well produced but also managed to maintain a good community feel – no mean feat. The speaker line-up was really an all-star cast. I won’t go into too much detail here. I was lucky to be asked to participate on a panel on Mobile-Web convergence (chaired by Ouriel Ohayon) which was notable not only because I was on it, but because it was really well attended. I was …

Notes on Le Web 3 Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0 6 Comments Tagged with

I have a confession. I have been a user of “My Yahoo!” since its original release. I was one of the early beta users when beta really meant beta. For some reason that I cannot comprehend, as more sophisticated personalized Web portals and more recently RSS aggregators have developed, I have stayed with the tried and true My Yahoo! – a site that has essentially not changed its look and feel since the last century. Well watch out. My Yahoo! is back in beta, and it’s about time. What’s new? First of all, there are some outrageous new styles on offer, like this Leopard-print (incongruously named “faux fur” – as a colleague pointed out, why do they have to call it “faux fur” when it’s on a computer?). Unfortunately, many of the styles on offer are not very readable, and readability of text is pretty important in an application like this. It also offers a reader pane built into the application so you can read full blog entries (for those that publish a full feed) right in My Yahoo! This, and the UI tweaks are probably the nicest features. The other bits, such as a page-dominating animated ad (see upper-left-hand-corner) I am finding a little hard to swallow. Even as a long time, user I was about to give up and move to Google Reader, Netvibes or Pageflakes. The new release is keeping my attention. I’ll definitely give it a spin around the block, but I’m thinking that what they’ve delivered, feature-wise, may be too little …

Pimp My Yahoo? Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0 1 Comment Tagged with ,

The Web 2.0 Summit had an awful lot of content that didn’t really have much to do with … well … the Web. Besides the whole 700mhz spectrum issue, there was an awful lot of empasis on green tech. Now – I know green is cool. I have no issues with green stuff. However, it doesn’t seem to me there is much overlap between green tech and Web 2.0 — or rather if there is it wasn’t being explored at the Web 2.0 Summit. Was this tendency towards scope creep because there wasn’t enough to talk about at Web 2.0? I don’t think so. For example, the program could have tried to tackle the thorny issues around privacy and social networks, made even more accute by the proliferation of location-aware systems. There are about a hundred topics like this that should have been delved into in more detail. Instead what we got was a very uneven program with some really good bits and some material that frankly seemed more like advertorial. For example, the panel on the future of TV featured a very long presentation and demo by the CEO of Current.tv. Mike Volpi from Joost seemed a bit bemused by the whole thing and as much as said “well – I’m here to talk, not to demo Joost.” The conversation that ensued was quite interesting but could have gone more in-depth and featured more players as well (how about Daniel Graf from Kyte.tv)? In short, I wanted more debate, less pitch.

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0, Web 2.0 No Comments Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

I started the week with Mobile 2.0. Rudy De Waele and Mike Rowehl posted great summaries of that event with lots of links to coverage all over the Web which I won’t replicate here. Suffice to say: it was a great day. My one complaint was that I don’t think we served the developer community very well. Next time, we may need to expand the event into multiple tracks and get some real developer interest topics going. As for the Web 2.0 conference which is just closing down today, it has been a mixed bag, but on balance I actually think it was better than last year. Lots of the conference has been focusing on APIs and the whole “Web as a platform” concept, which I think is a key area of innovation in the Web. We’re already seeing how efforts like Amazon Web Services and Facebook’s APIs are creating waves of innovation and that’s only accelerating. I found Facebook’s announcement on allowing users to export their data particularly interesting. Openness like this will be the trend for social networks moving forward and Facebook has clearly decided to be a part of this disruption. Devil is in the details, of course. Of course, the mobile content at the summit has been very superficial and disappointing. The panel on mobile social media could have been interesting but it was a little too much Nokia-focused (how could it not be as it was sponsored and organized by Nokia and featured Anssi as a panelist). It still could have …

[Mobile|Web] 2.0 Week: From Mobility to Semantics Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Mobile Web, Web 2.0 1 Comment Tagged with , ,

From this picture, the turn-out for my talk might look pretty small. And it was. But I was actually impressed that this many people managed to find the room which was tucked up away from the main conference. In general, this feels like an event that should be a lot bigger than it is. I can’t help but feel that this is due to the extremely high ticket price. On the positive side, there are some real developers here and real exciting stuff being presented, such as the Laszlo presentation on the use of their toolkit to build mobile Web apps. The participants that are here are here to learn and are asking good questions as well. One delegate commented that many of the presentations were little more than sales pitches. After sitting through some of them (especially from Adobe and Microsoft) I have to agree. So I was in the “iPhone” track of this conference. However, my message was “it’s not all about the iPhone – develop for one Web.” This message was well received. I was expecting the room to be filled with iPhone devotees. On the contrary. People seemed very receptive to this message.

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0, Web 2.0 No Comments Tagged with ,

So while I was kicking around in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island last week, I was delighted to have been able to meet up with my good friend (and Mobile Monday London Irregular) Margaret Gold. Turns out Margaret was in town for the weekend for her parents’ anniversary. It was a true “Jaiku moment” – a completely unplanned meet-up that only happened because I had written about my itinerary on Jaiku. Now, social networking services can often result in serendipitous events in the real world, but the mobile-focused nature of Jaiku (the fact, in this case, that I could keep a continuous Jaiku thread going through my trip using only my Nokia N73) and the tendency of mobile social services to focus on location and proximity tend to accentuate this feature. There’s also a lesson to learn about privacy here. In the past, it’s been quite taboo to reval publicly that you’re going to be away from home (someone might break into your house!) But social media like Jaiku (or Facebook or whatever) changes our perception of what information should be private and public. In this case, disclosing private information into the public sphere led to a meeting with a good friend and some good discussion. Was that worth the potential risk of disclosing this private information? I think it was.

By Posted on Posted in Identity, Web 2.0 6 Comments Tagged with , ,

I just got a message from a contact on LinkedIn informing me that they would no longer be using LinkedIn and if I wanted to “network” with them then I would have to move over to Facebook. The reasons given were that Facebook allows you to expose more “personality” and that it also allows you to integrate applications (such as Twitter). Now. I have been using LinkedIn for a while now and I have had some very good experiences with it. I have also spent a great deal of time building up my network there and taking great pains to do so in a meaningful way. I like LinkedIn. One of the reasons I like it is because it’s built for professionals. I never get asked by LinkedIn if I “hooked up” with someone or whether I met someone on a “study abroad program.”  The second reason I like LinkedIn is that it doesn’t have pictures. This encourages people to behave professionally there and not treat their profile page like a graffiti wall. Both these factors are to Facebook’s detriment, in my opinion. Why do we all suddenly feel the need to bahave like college students again? Am I the only one out there who frankly didn’t like college that much and was glad to be done with it? On the point of openness, though, my friend definitely has a point. LinkedIn really needs APIs, including the ability to get at your data using FOAF or other open protocols. In fact, if Facebook and LinkedIn both …

LinkedIn vs. Facebook Read more »

By Posted on Posted in London, Web 2.0 No Comments Tagged with

Just came across this news item this morning. Very interesting news, I think. I saw these guys present at Future of Web Apps and I have to say it’s a great application of “user generated content” — in this case, user generated metadata – and “leveraging collective intelligence.” It’s also a good news for the UK startup scene.