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This week: Google vs Skype, BBC puts TV on the Web, New Apps on the Block, Worldwide Web 2.0 Camps, Techie post of the week – Kottke’s Web OS.
Google Shakes Up Web – but Skype fights back
On the back of an 18 August announcement that they are
raising another $4 billion in funds, this week Google announced a new instant
messaging and Internet telephony product called Google Talk. It integrates with Gmail, so Google
now has all the primary Internet communications channnels covered. Lots of people had
opinions on Google Talk during the week and Download Squad
seemed to get the breaking story. But the most interesting angle to me was the
competition with Skype. I use (and love) Skype for
both its telephony and IM services, similar to how Steve
Gillmor uses Skype. Now that Google Talk has arrived on the scene, I and many others will have to choose between the two.
What’s Skype doing in response to this huge competitive threat? Nothing short of opening its platform to the web –
if this 24
August press release is to be believed. In a move of breathtaking Web 2.0-ness, Skype
is “opening up its platform to anyone who wants to integrate Skype’s presence and
instant messaging services into their website or application”. This statement sums it
up:
“By opening up its platform to the web, Skype will instantly be creating the
largest open instant messaging platform in the world.”
Skype’s APIs are an attempt to strike back at Google. And the press release has got
some keywords in it that are designed to directly challenge the Mountain View company. For example, “open”
is a word that is largely foreign to Google – and I counted 8 instances of “open” in the
press release. I also counted 8 instances of the word “platform”.
Open platform – gee, does that sound like the only thing that could conceivably stop
Google from pinching all of Skype’s customers? I believe the phrase is: Game
On.
BBC takes TV to the Web
According to the BBC
News website:
“A simulcast of BBC One or BBC Two, letting UK viewers see programmes on the web at
the same time as they go out on TV, is being planned.”
It also plans to beef up tv coverage on mobile phones. The report says the Web
simulcast will be restricted to UK viewers only, although how that will work is not
explained. PaidContent.org has more details on this development, including pointing to news of the MyBBCPlayer – “which will allow viewers to legally download seven days of programmes”.
As TechDirt
outlined, this is the latest in a long line of innovative moves by the BBC to open up
their content on the Web. I’ve been a fan of the BBC’s Internet
efforts since they started their developer network in May 05, BBC Backstage, which lets people remix BBC
content.
BBC is in the vanguard of media and television companies in Web 2.0 – let’s
hope other media companies follow suit.
New Apps on the Block
Time to highlight some new Web 2.0 apps and
services:
Spanning Salesforce 2.0 – Charlie Wood releases his RSS-powered
Salesforce.com service. “Spanning Salesforce delivers presentations, price lists,
collateral, and other documents stored in Salesforce.com right to your laptop, desktop,
or PDA.”
Personal Bee – I still haven’t figured out what it
does, but it’s described as “a ‘discovery engine’ that helps you discover information
from a collection of RSS feeds”. No I don’t know what that means either, but it’s an
interesting app and worth keeping an eye on. TechCrunch profiled it here.
Pandora is “a music listening and discovery
service” that “enables users to easily create streaming stations that explore their favorite parts of the music universe.” Robert Scoble likes it and has sent it to Bill to check out. It’s invitation-only right now, but for a preview listen to Joe Lindsay‘s Pandora music station
that he created – named
Steriogram Radio.
LiteFeeds – free mobile RSS service, for Java
Phones/SmartPhones, Blackberry, Palm or PocketPC.
SearchFox – a Personalized RSS Reader that
“uses machine-learning technology to automatically rank and personalize incoming feeds to
reflect each reader’s unique interests.”
NewsGator APIs – this
week NewsGator announced APIs for both commercial and non-commercial applications.
Talkr – “Letting blogs speak for
themselves”. This isn’t so new and I’ve mentioned it before. But it’s so cool and this
week I found out some of my family have been clicking on the Talkr audio links on my
blog. They were expecting to hear my voice, but heard the lovely computer woman instead.
Talkr rocks!
For more Web 2.0 app profiles, check out TechCrunch. They do this full-time and give a lot
of background detail on each profile.
Worldwide Web 2.0 Camps
My Ireland correspondent Fergus Burns of Nooked
informed me this week that Ireland is holding a Tech Camp – “the Irish
version of FooCamp and BarCamp”. The wiki for this event
says:
“Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be as much tech innovation coming from
grassroots-tech in Ireland. The US is doing some great work in Web 2.0 and Blogging;
having loads of conferences and blogger-dinners; while all we have here is a few very
business-like events, and seemingly very few new projects. What’s needed is for us to
CONNECT and SHARE and maybe a few companies will get started as a result!”
I feel exactly the same way about my own country. Indeed my first thought on reading
this was: why doesn’t New Zealand do the same? Then a couple of days later I noticed O’Reilly‘s resident kiwi Nat Torkington bring up the topic
on O’Reilly Radar:
“The Maori
Haka: learn to do the Maori war dance that the New Zealand rugby team starts all
their games with. We’ll learn this when I do a New Zealand FOO Camp.”
Of course I piped up in the comments: count me in! Although I can’t imagine kiwi geeks
intimidating anyone with the haka 🙂
Actually I think we need these Foo/Bar Camps all over the world. One day maybe
there’ll be a Live8-type deal, where we have simultaneous Techie Camps happening in
different countries – all of them webcast and blogged of course!
Techie Post of the Week: Kottke’s WebOS
You’ve gotta love Jason Kottke – he writes about his personal life as a blogger in New York for most of the year, but every now and then he comes up with a brilliant techie post. His
provocatively titled GoogleOS?
YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS? is well worth a read. Here is my favourite passage, which
is on the tantelizing thread of using the open source Mozilla web browser as the base for a Web OS:
“If Mozilla could leverage the rapidly increasing user base of Firefox and start
bundling a small Web server with it, then you’ve got the beginnings of a WebOS that’s
open source and for which anyone, including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and anyone with
JavaScript chops, could write applications. To market it, they could refer to the whole
shebang as a new kind of Web browser, something that sets it apart from IE, a true “next
generation” browser capable of running applications no matter where you are or what
computer (or portable device) you’re using.”
That’s a wrap for another week!
