Network World

Web Applications Alert

Mark Gibbs shares Web site tips and provides advice on getting the most out of your apps.

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Analyzing online content with OpenAmplify: 06/30/09; Making sense of Web content is mostly easy for humans but rarely easy for computers. Part of the issue is that recognizing the "interesting" parts of online content involves what is mostly unstructured data, making the task very difficult.
Opera Unite – Missing the point: 06/23/09; The world of Web browsers is never quiet. Someone is always trying out The Next Great Browser Thing hoping to gain advantage and market share through some, theoretically, unique feature set. Over the last few months we've seen minor new features launched in both Firefox and Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome has taken some big steps forward in stability.
Facebook launches "usernames". Yawn.: 06/16/09; Last Saturday, June 13, Facebook began a new program that allows users to have "vanity" URLs for their Facebook profiles instead of the user-friendly-as-a-cornered-rat URLs that were previously the only option. This means that your profile page URL might have looked like this:
Making Internet communications channels work for you: 06/09/09; Jessica, a friend I know from a mail list, recently complained that "I've been frustrated lately by a few web sites which I wish to follow news on but which inexplicably don't publish an RSS [Really Simple Syndication] feed. I'm trying to find a good way to convince them that it is really worth their time to have a feed, that it will bring them traffic."
Today's focus: Wolfram|Alpha, brilliant but boring: 06/02/09; Last week I pondered the nature of search, what it would mean to have a "better" search, and how when people have to make choices over things like which search service to use they tend to gravitate to that which they are most familiar with unless an alternative has an undeniable edge.
Today's focus: Algorithms and Search: 05/26/09; You could, quite reasonably, argue that more than any other technological advance including microchips, nanotechnology, fiber optics, you name it; computer algorithms are what created the 21st century as we know it.
Today's focus: Google Health: 05/19/09; Google never fails to surprise. It's the scope and scale of their ambitions that impresses me ranging as they do from relatively simple applications that are just way cool such as Sky Map through their Chrome Web browser (which is now looking pretty stable).
5 things not to do in the sociosphere: 05/11/09; Over the last few weeks I've written extensively about social media, what you need to do corporately to get in the swim, and how to behave once you've got your feet wet. This week I want to talk about what not to do.
Corporate coping with the Social Age: 05/06/09; I was talking yesterday to David, one of my oldest friends. David is a recruitment consultant who now works mainly in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries and he's a genius in his business. Back in my corporate days, David found something like 35 senior staff for me who were all excellent and fitted perfectly - that's an amazing track record for a headhunter.
The first 10 Rules of Twittiquette: 04/29/09; Some time ago a friend asked me (on Twitter) what I thought the rules of etiquette were for Twitter. I said I'd have to think about it and, having done so, here they are.
10 keys for making social networking work: 04/22/09; One of the big challenges when you put any kind of content or service online is getting people to actually take a look - 'page views' are the 'eyeballs' of Web 2.0.
Social content testing: 04/15/09; When you're developing Web content and you want the widest possible audience you're going to have to make sure that whatever your Web site displays can be viewed in as many browsers and variants of those browsers as possible without problems.
Fantastic SaaS-based graphics tools: 04/08/09; A decade ago the idea of being able to rely on online services to provide personal productivity tools seemed hopelessly futuristic not to mention optimistic - the Internet wasn't generally fast enough and it seemed that the problems of duplicating the functionality of top end tools such as Photoshop would be just too big a hurdle. That was then...
3scale makes your API cheaper, better!: 04/01/09; If you're building serious Web applications, whether for internal projects or as commercial offerings, and you want to maximize the reach of your services, you're going to have to provide an API.
Green Phosphor makes virtual world valuable: 03/25/09; Online virtual worlds have been around for a long time and interest in them is enormous - in a report titled "Market Forecasts for Virtual World Experiences" published in June, 2008, Strategy Analytics predicted that 22% of global broadband users would register for one or more virtual worlds, resulting in a market of 1 billion users worth about $8 billion (note that these figures are hard to verify due to a lot of confusion in the market about the number of registrants, frequent users, and numbers of avatars).
Google Voice: GrandCentral grows up!: 03/18/09; Google's GrandCentral is about to be reincarnated! Yes, after almost two years in development limbo, Grand Central Communications, purchased by Google in July 2007 for a reported $50 million and renamed simply "GrandCentral," is about to reappear as "Google Voice."
URL shortening: 03/11/09; Web URLs can get really, really long and that, in turn, leads to all sorts of problems. The first problem is one of simple usability. URLs that are 50, 100, or even 200 characters in length will wrap over one or more lines in most documents and if the URL doesn't get truncated it may well get mangled by automated hyphenation and line breaking.
Wireframing Web applications: 03/04/09; Designing Web applications is complicated and one area in particular where painstaking, expensive, iterative development occurs is user interface design. Get it right and your Web application will stand or fall due to its underlying functionality. Get it wrong and it doesn't matter how good the underlying service is, the chances of success will be seriously reduced if not short-circuited altogether.
The Twitterverse Ecosystem, Part 3: 02/25/09; Today I'm going to cover a couple of services that add value to Twitter in interesting and creative ways.
The Twitterverse ecosystem, Part 2: 02/18/09; I got some great feedback about part 1 of this series so this week we'll continue looking at software and services that work with Twitter.
The Twitterverse ecosystem, Part 1: 02/11/09; I've been following the Twitterverse from its earliest days (to be quite honest, even back when I didn't really "get" Twitter). One of the things that have been remarkable about Twitter besides its phenomenal user uptake, its fascinating but frustrating growing pains, and the amazing rise of the service's social significance is the diversity of its "ecosystem."
Microsoft turns Web Sandbox loose: 02/04/09; In a notable, and some might say uncharacteristic move, Microsoft has released the Live Labs Web Sandbox project source code under the Apache License 2.0.
Making social networking work: 01/28/09; The headlong race towards social networking continues at its insane pace and what's interesting about much of this - dare I say, lemming-like rush - is that many of the participants have little or no idea what they are rushing towards or why.
Traversing the Twitterverse with ease: 01/21/09; The Twitterverse - that's the virtual ecosystem that has evolved around the now mega-famous Twitter service - has become important enough that PR and marketing people now pay serious attention to what people are "tweeting."
An amazing free microwiki: 01/14/09; Over the last couple of years Wikis have moved from experimental to novelty status, and with the rise of Wikipedia, became definitely a mainstream idea. Over the same period Wikis also went in the opposite direction becoming small and definitively personal, although I doubt whether many people are aware of these microwikis yet.