jodhpuriGuy | Avi Mehta

2007 was a interesting year(for internet and other things too :). But I will be talking about internet here :). While in 2005-06, many of the new startups were founded, the deadpool started populating a bit later on. There were many interesting concepts experimented with. 2.0 was attached to many things and people found more and more ways to spend their time on internet. But coming back to 2007, Google got good and bad publicity. Digg continued to grow its user base even though the comment system and deletion of entries the created a huge fuss.

We saw loads of office apps being released for web from google, zoho and others. Social networking took a big shape with facebook and the Google’s OpenSocial . Microsoft released silverlight and adobe attacked with AIR. But both the technologies have yet to see some serious use. (What is next year for??)

The mobile phone (add media and internet to it) market saw two bigshots jumping in with iphone and Android.  There were otherbig things happening but I need to stop writing right now as I am headed to Las Vegas for the new year…

But what to expect next year?  Well… Wait for the phones with Android! Wait for how EU responds to google and doubleclick merger. Wait for companies to respond to iPhone. Wait for the interesting news from me :D!

Avi

Oh! I just meant it in the technical sense :). I was reading a blog and while reading it, I pondered over various things. The first thing that I thought of was “Why just Audio-Visual?”. Surely, the kind of meta-data talked about in the post is relevant only to audio, images and videos. But is that the limit? Is it not relevant to text - the form in which we have most of our data? I, for one can list things like when, where, by whom and in which meaning that can be associated to text(knol). The knol can be take from internet, from a book, or from notes. Surely that can help us find a lot about its content. Given the time-period when a person came to know about the knol, We can know about the complexity of the content(is it something deep or just introductory). Many of us have heard of semantic <insert keyword here> so does using that information to index also help? I think it does. In fact, We had done something very similar in last year’s Imagine cup with recog.

Recog uses the meta data, not only from text but also from audios and images too, to index them. It uses semantic indexing along with use of other meta-data to present the content to user. This meta data and the way to organize knowledge surely does spice up the things and opens up many possibilities for future.

Sounds interesting? It is and surely we are going to see some great innovations in this field soon (i hope :) )

Google published the initial documents about OpenSocial API yesterday. Wondering what it is? Well look here. OpenSocial has been referred to as (one of) the biggest competitions to Facebook. If you have used facebook, you would have heard of the thousands of applications that are available on facebook. These applications are not developed by FB but by other developers from other companies. The powerful platform and the user reach has been the biggest advantage of facebook. And it was looking like it is going to be difficult for anyone to reach their level anytime soon.

Then came the news about OpenSocial. The fact that more than 200 other web organizations(the participants include myspace, Hi5, flixter etc…) are taking part and going to actively support OpenSocial was interesting. It would lead to several changes in the field of “Social Networking”. One thing I see in near future is the facebook-isation of orkut. We have had the “Updates” feature available on orkut for quite some time. This “Wall” would provide a platform for app developers a medium for communication. You will soon be able to add applications to orkut the same way you do it in facebook.

Now this could very well lead to a direct consequence: Google competing with a lot of products from other companies. For example I saw the “Ask Friends” feature on orkut recently. Although it is not mentioned anywhere that it uses openSocial Api, I would not be surprised if it did use it. The reason why I mentioned it is that, with this feature, Google is directly taking on Yahoo Answers!(which is way ahead at least for now…). This and I believe many more things that are yet to come will probably change the perception of limits of Social Networking…

There has been lot of buzz about Microsoft Silverlight for quite some while now… Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform technology that can be used in the form of simple plugin to browsers. It provides various facilities to develop rich application interfaces that can be used to develop even complete applications in it.

At wynapse I came across a very very simple “Hello Silverlight” application. Go check it out in case you want to start something. More resources can be found here, here and here.

Happy Coding!!!

NOTE: I just found that I was on 1st page of google for “Microsoft Siverlight” so changing the typo :)