I’m trying again with a branded daily update of Web 2.0 news and
views. Not content with cornering the “Web 2.0” niche in blogs, I’m now making a play
for the term “2.0” 😉 Let me know what you think of the new format.
Backpack:
Web 2.0 Email?
Popular Web Design firm 37signals has announced a new email-to-web product. They’re
promoting it as a kind of Web 2.0 makeover to “the star of Web 1.0” – email. So what does
Backpack do? Apparently it will receive an email and “turn it into something useful on
the web” – in other words, it’ll transform an email into a functional web page.
I have to admit, this sounds really cool and something I can picture myself using.
Practically speaking, I already use Gmail as a ‘To
Do List’ and to keep track of projects I’m involved in. Gmail’s ability to label emails
and search them, together with a highly interactive interface and huge storage, has
turned out to be of immense use to me.
Hmmm. I’m not sure at this stage whether Backpack would be a competitor to Gmail, or a
complimentary product?
Peak inside Longhorn
PCMag.com has screenshots of Longhorn, Microsoft’s next-generation Windows (via waxy.org’s fabulous linkblog). Of most interest
to Web 2.0 fans will be how they’ve integrated the browser and search, the two core Web
interfaces.
The final screenshot shows Internet Explorer and to be honest the only real
difference I noticed was a search bar in the top-right – presumably the same search that
will be integrated into the core Longhorn OS. That’s potentially a threat to Google of
course (no surprises there).
Google
after Quality not Quantity
NewScientist reports that Google plans to “dramatically improve the results of
internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their
date and relevance to search terms.” What worries me is that most of the values to be
measured are suspiciously quantity-based: e.g. number of stories, average
story length, number with bylines, number bureaux cited, how long they have been in
business, number of staff, volume of internet traffic.
Um hello – what about niche sites and bloggers?
Were those the golden years?
Geodog gets misty-eyed about pre-Web 2.0, before the hype and money.
It’s A Whole New (No
It’s Not) Internet
Counterpoint to the Adaptive Path
article. For me, the great thing about Web 2.0 is how many great ideas are
being executed. A financially healthy environment begets more of those ideas – don’t you
think?
