Facebook.
It had to come to this. How could a discussion of Web2.0 skip over the hands down best social networking site. Compared to its competitors, first Friendster, and now Myspace (among others), Facebook is the simplest, cleanest, most usable, and most secure of them all.
Facebook succeeded by building atop communities that already existed. Facebook built upon college communities, initially Harvard, but later all other Universities, and now the high school and corporate worlds as well. In addition Facebook has no pretentions to be a journal or an artistic expression. I'm looking at you Myspace. Profiles are not editable and so the layout of everyone's profile is the same. This is a GOOD thing. Myspace gives users the option to edit their profiles and most people edit them to be utterly unreadable and incomprehensible.
Personally, I check Facebook every day. It is quite addicting to randomly browse people's profiles and essentially keep tabs on what everyone else's life is like. But unlike Myspace, you can only browse the profiles of people at the same school as you and of your friends. There are also numerous options for restricting access to contact information to protect your privacy. This, in addition to the requirement of being affiliated with an organization does a good job of keeping the stalkers away.
Facebook ties in wonderfully to many of the concepts of Web2.0. It's appeal is ENTIRELY user created. Mark Zuckerberg has contributed no content to the site at all except for his personal profile. Facebook is merely a facilitator of information that is posted by individuals. This is a very democratic method of content creation. It is not top down, and not even bottom up, but instead bottom to bottom.
The first group of kids to use Facebook is now in the corporate world and from all reports are still using Facebook to communicate and keep in touch with old friends. With Facebook's latest expansion to Facebook Corporate it becomes apparent that they intend for it to be a lifelong thing. User's can now join multiple networks, so it would be conceivable to be in a high school network, a university network, another university network for graduate school, and a corporate network. In the future I can envision business deals being made or at least facilitated through Facebook. Executives could use Facebook to reconnect with members of their college alumni network or find common ground with executives at a partner or rival corporation.
Facebook really does have the potential to become a ubiquitous tool and facet of life.
30 Boxes Review
30 Boxes is the online calendar I like the most. It does a pretty good job imitating an old fashioned paper calendar that you would lay out on your desk, but adds in the convenience of being accessibly from any internet connection.
Events are tagged and sorted, can be set to repeat at a specific interval. RSS feeds can be pulled to the calendar to show updates as well.
But the most exciting featuere of 30 Boxes is one that I did not have the chance to try out. 30 Boxes works best when used by a group of friends/co-workers because events can be shared accross calendars. Invitations to events can be sent through 30 Boxes and be automatically placed on both people's calendars. The tagging system helps to protect privacy as only events labeled with a specified tag are shared with the specified group.
30 Boxes has already caught on with me at least. I use it quite extensively to keep track of long term commitments and doctor's appointments that run into the long future. My one quibble with it so far is that I wish it could easily synchronize with my cell phones calendar or send alerts to my cell phone via text message.
It's that damn AJAX. It's so hot right now.
Might as well credit my
source at the beginning.
Asynchronous Javascript and XML, not the Greek hero. From what I know about AJAX before reading Wikipedia it allows smooth refreshing of pages, reloading only the parts that change. The server sends only a small bit of data to the browser.
Excerpted from Wikipedia
------------
AJAX, shorthand for Asynchronous
JavaScript and
XML, is a
Web development technique for creating interactive
web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and
usability. The first known use of the term in public was by
Jesse James Garrett in his February 2005 article
Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. At subsequent talks and seminars Jesse James has made the point that Ajax is
not an
acronym.
The Ajax technique uses a combination of:
Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together.
------------
Used ubiquitously by web apps that call themselves Web2.0. Another typical sign of Web2.0, that the site can be called an application or a service provided online.
Del.icio.us and the Advent of Tagging
Created by a random person as a hobby and now bought by Yahoo. It is widely considered the advent of tagging and so-called social bookmarking. Everything in Web2.0 is obsessed with "social" networking. Social this, social that, maybe it'll get me some venture capital. Hence, the second tech bubble.
But as del.icio.us is the first it actually works very well. Since picking it up I've actually begun bookmarking sites on a regular basis. Before if I found a useful, fun, or informative site I would just try and memorize the URL or remember how I had gotten to the site. IE, and then Firefox's bookmarking systems kind of sucked. Kind of still do.
Here is a screenshot of my del.icio.us page. I've selected the tag "tech," and as you see, the panels on the right show related tags, and a list of ALL of my tags. By the way, the photo is hosted at Flickr, another ostensibly Web2.0 site, also originally a startup that was later bought by Yahoo.
Del.icio.us's power comes from the fact that its content and dichotomy is totally user generated, and this allows its results for searching for a tag to rival and quite often be better than a traditional search engine. The sites that get posted to del.icio.us are sites that real people actually enjoy using and have selected as one of their favorites.
Blogger
In most ways self publishing predates the first use of the term Web2.0, but the phenomena are intertwined. Self publishing and blogging were the first examples of interactivity with the web for end users and drove the development of Web2.o. But really, even before then, services like Tripod and Geocities dazzled users by giving them free websites. The novelty of being able to own your own personal web space was incredible. Now it's commonplace.
My first experience with web design came in middle school with Tripod. Blogging, enabled and made simple by Xanga, caught my attention in ninth grade, and creating content instead of layouts and HTML becamse important. Xanga has become very popular and very widely used. It provides an opportunity for every teenager to write and produce their won published works.
It was only after this, after people learned to interact with the web, that Web2.0 and the wave of websites driven by user generated content became possible.
Thus, Blogger.
A Review of Netvibes
My new homepage.
A very nifty RSS feed aggregator running on AJAX with drag and drop boxes and a few added bits of cool functionality. Combines a to do list, a notepad, e-mail, a Flickr photostream, and is customizable by adding other custom modules.
Very useful. But also leads to wasting a LOT of time. Information overload if you will. I can see a dozen newsfeeds, e-mail as it arrives in my inbox, maintain a notepad (without wasting real paper), and the to do list is VERY useful.
Netvibes typifies an example of GOOD Web2.0, its a very useful service (how they make money is beyond me, but whatever).
Life is Research
The following ostensibly Web2.0 tools have been integrated into my life over the course of this semester.
Netvibes
Del.icio.us
Blogger
30Boxes
Flickr
Digg
RSS Feeds
I've used these to conduct my daily life on the internet and stay up to date on tech news. For the most part they have worked very well, but for each useful Web2.0 startup there seem to be a half dozen worthless copycats.
BusinessWeek on May 22, 2006 published an article about the Web2.0 bubble, comparing it to the first web bubble.
Web 2.0
The research portfolio will be done on the concept of Web 2.0, whatever that is, and if it even exists at all.
Of course, the first question is if Web 2.0 is even real, whether there is a discrete break and divide between the Web and Web 2.0, and then whether or not that discrete break exists what qualifies something as Web 2.0.
The ultimate focus of this research portfolio will be on how Web 2.0 shapes our lives with a report on a successful internet business model as the end product.
To compile and do this research I will be using a few tools that at this stage I think typify Web 2.0.
-this blog, Blogspot.
-the online calendar, 30boxes.com to keep me organized.
-del.icio.us to keep and index my research.
A Research Portfolio Eh?
This sounds like bitch work. I like the idea though to be doing some research. But the so called "Guidelines" are a piece of bureaucratic garbage. Fuck that, I'm doing it my own way.
Now what am I going to research?
-social networking online. (myspace, facebook, xanga) Tagging and sharing might go along with this too.
-online business, internet taxes, adsense, ebay
-viral marketing
-free stuff, open source projects/alternatives.
-online communication, AIM, e-mail, txting, comments as opposed to traditional face to face
Maybe some more later on.
