Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Facebook Users Vs Mayspace Users


Ran across this really cool comparison between the users of Facebook and Myspace by Adam Ostrow. According which Facebook is a preferred place for good kids and Myspace for art fags, punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids. Well Beyondwww would agree to that fact that Facebook is the fastest growing Social Networking site today with over 100,000 new registrations every day and would be the biggest very soon. It would be still early to conclude the comparison as Myspace is still the largest.

Everybody has a beautiful MySpace page and all the pages in Facebook look the same. There are few more diffences in which Myspace is ahead of Facebook, but 85% of the college crowd is in Facebook. So until we give some more time its difficult to categorize the users of both the Networking sites.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Google Gears Vs Adobe Apollo ??

Overtly dramatic title, aye??? The whole world is talking about Adobe Integrated Runtime (started the buzz as Apollo) and Google Gears. So, why shouldn't we too talk about that. In one of the blogs written by Adobe employees I found an earnest but futile attempt to sell a product that no doubt has elegance and finesse but falls flat when it comes to value proposition it offers.

I have nothing against Gears or AIR, they are working towards the same cause as we are but I still consider them as a different league altogether. They don't share the same philosophy and certainly not the same route to a common goal that we are all trying to achieve.

The Common Goal

Suddenly there has been a sharp rise in offline applications, RIA platforms, AJAX, Web 2.0 etc. And thanks to Google and Adobe, people are taking it seriously. The common goal is to provide a desktop based Rich Internet Applications platform, that allows applications to run in offline mode and have the flexibility to sync-up when online.

This would ensure a lot of end-user control on the applications making them more interactive and usable by the ever growing Internet user community. All the major players have acknowledged this sudden trend as an important and necessary step towards growing their market share and are fiercely competing to outrun their contemporaries.

Identifying the Best Way to this goal

There is still a bit of a disarray as a standard has not yet been formed and all the players in the market wish (along with working hard on it) that their's becomes the de facto standard. Who will win the race will be largely dependent on who comes out with a simple and yet robust idea, crosses the threshold visibility early enough and offers a value proposition that no one can deny being genuine.

AIR talks about providing yet another runtime, after JRE and .NET, to be installed on our machines and then to be maintained version after version after version. They are have ignored the importance of browser based application by writing it off as :

...runtime environment that allows you to use existing web technology for apps on the desktop is an obvious next step from building desktop like Ajax applications that seem to be awkwardly confined to a browser window. (Ryan)

Also, their focus remains strongly on making elegant UI simpler to create. But to what end are they pursuing this simplicity beats me. What makes an application worthy is its business proposition, functionality, ease of deployment and availability. These are the issues one has to focus even while providing a platform for end-users. Or a platform that focuses on making online stuff available offline. Both developers and end-users appreciate the need of having offline environments but how far is making classy UI building platforms going to help them. That is something I have strong doubts about.

The only thing that they talk about which makes sense to me is using existing web technologies. Taking away the pain of going through an entirely new learning curve. Incorporating GWT is also a wise decision and even using Flex can enhance the applications' look and feel but trying to belittle the importance of browser might become a cause to regret later. A hint at that is, Adobe's Acrobat Reader and Flash have both been plugged in to the browsers which enhanced their popularity.


Gears as of now, according to me, is playing it too easy and making things slightly more dicey. Even though a noble concept, it doesn't sound like a fully thought through one.

The configuration has to be taken care of by the end-user or developer, a database support is required just to cache resources and provides no other flexibility. The entire sites would require to be re-written using gears api in order to be made available offline. There is no duplication, yet the decision for making content available offline has to be made at the time of designing the site and it certainly doesn't sound the best solution for making offline availability possible for websites.

Gears is just a tool for creating applications.There is no platform as such that might take away the housekeeping pains and let the developers focus on just building applications. The framework sounds 'just ok'.

Road Ahead

I would rank AIR much superior than Gears in terms of utility and flexibility. However, both of them have to understand that it's the end-user and then the developers who are governing the market today. You can't simply make things sell just because you are huge brand name. There has to be something special and long lasting to make it big on the popularity list.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Yahoo/4 = Myspace

Wondering is it worth that much???
Well Peter says its a bad deal. Till some extend I also agree with the fact that they missed out on crucial buys like YouTube and FaceBook and Myspace might not be worth quarter of $ 37 billion. But it all depends what do they plan after that? May be Yahoo has a concept which needs Myspace collaboration. Any way its still a rumor so lets wait and watch!!!!

Monday, June 18, 2007

Top 10 Web OSs Reviewed!!

Well the list is huge and you can see more things coming up in the comments section of the post.
The review is definitely a valuable feedback to all the featured products and should help them improvise on their current Web OS venture. the question is how many of them take it seriously and get the required modifications and additions into the market before the others.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Win a trip for LIfe Time!!

You saw the bus and the bar, now there is prize to win too!!

Adobe calls it the trip of a life time.

Use the AIR beta software to build the most unique Adobe AIR application. Then enter it into the Adobe AIR developer derby for your chance to win a trip of a lifetime or other amazing prizes.

Grand Prize / Best of Show
The Best of Show winner will receive the trip of a lifetime, a travel certificate valued at up to US$100,000, to be used for the travel of your choice!

Five category winners will each receive “The Ultimate Development Environment” to power your Adobe AIR development (and play) for years to come:

  • A Mac Pro 8Core with 4 gigs ram, 1.5 TB (2×75) of storage.
  • (2) Dell 2707WFP 27″ widescreen monitors.
  • (1) one Sony Playstation 3.
  • (1) $200 gift certificate to Amazon.com.
  • (1) Herman Miller Aeron chair.
  • (1) Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones.
  • (1) copy of Adobe Flex™ Builder™ version 3, Macintosh edition.
  • (1) copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection for Macintosh.
    And one squishy stress ball.

Plus each winner also receives:
A trip and conference pass to the Adobe MAX 2007 annual user conference.
Your application showcased on Adobe.com for the world to see.
Contest open for following categories:

  • Best Business Application
  • Best Community Application
  • Wild Card
  • Grand Prize / Best of Show

This Contest is open to individuals who are citizens or working or studying under a valid visa/permit in the 50 United States (including Washington D.C.), Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Singapore, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey.


The AIR Derby<---------Click me to know more

Adobe is not ( AIR)!!

As the launch(Adobe Apollo-----> AIR) took off on 11th Monday, AIR(Adobe Integrated Runtime) also announced the Bus tour for 18 different cities to make people aware of the things they might require in the near future. The Bus will be covering Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, LA, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, St Louis, Cincinnati, New York and few more cities.

Well the bus looks some thing like this:





The bus will be wrapped when it goes for the tour so thought of showing it in its initial stages.

Now what happens when the bus reaches Portland?

Well they hit Kells Irish Pub(you want to see that as well):






Who all are invite? Anyone interested in learning more about the AIR.
What happens? A one night conference on Adobe AIR with technical sessions, showcases and discussion.

How much to shell out ? Its free and very much open to you if you are in the city on 12th July, all you need is to register prior your visit.(Please go to Adobe's web site, I cant give you the link here ).
What to Bring? Yourself, laptop, any Flex, HTML and JavaScript apps you want to get running on Adobe AIR. They will provide the beer, Red Bull, coffee, food, XBoxes, schwag, knowledge, venue and bits.

Well I certainly think Dekoh also has things building up at its end. Lets see what have they got to offer except for their incredible product?

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Adobe AIR(Adobe Integrated Runtime)

The new name for Adobe Apollo is now Adobe AIR(Adobe Integrated Runtime).

Adobe is also announcing a beta version of the runtime, which will include Ajax and HTML support. This means developers can create an Apollo application entirely based on HTML, without using Flash at all.

AIR would be releasing by the end of this year.
AIR and Flex 3 released on Monday.
First time Adobe is simultaneously releasing its programming model and runtime for building rich Internet applications (RIAs) that can be run both on the Web and locally on the desktop.

AIR competes with other so-called Rich Internet Application runtimes, including Microsoft's new Silverlight software and Google Gears and the much talked Dekoh which also supports other web technologies like JSP, Servlets on the desktop.
Dekoh addresses this hole which Adobe has left. Dekoh is a social media platform on the desktop bringing web 2.0 functions like sharing, tagging, commenting, rating and RSS to the desktop.The second difference is Apollo applications run outside the browser, more like desktop applications where as dekoh runs inside the browser....

Apollo also announced a
bus tour in which Adobe will be traveling to 18 cities to perform demos and spread the word on the platform.


Monday, June 11, 2007

Music at your Office Desktop!!

Before I say some thing more, few questions I you need to answer

  • Can you take your iPod to the office?
  • Can you carry your camera phone which has an mp3 player?
  • Can you open raaga.com, youtube.com, or can you download mp3 to your office system?
  • Can you smuggle CDs or may be DVDs into your office premises?
  • Do you think if you could listen to your favorite music, you work efficiency would be hampered?

Well if you are unable to have a 'yes' in your mind while reading this, welcome to my tribe.

May be a solution awaits you saying "Bring Life to Digital Music. Access Your Music from Anywhere ".

I am waiting for the music widget, which I would put on this blog to show off my collections and may be the next time you read some other post of mine you might pull that off to your blog as well.

 
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