Digital Bytes

Personalisable Mashups

If 2007 was the year in which widgets failed to achieve the status of a significant commercial opportunity, big web companies have not yet decided to abandon hope. Facebook was the main transmitter of applications, little bits of code that allow people to flirt, amuse, and show off to each other. A number of brands trialled these as a new way of engaging consumers, but applications struggled to move beyond the status of 'clever viral marketing'

Microsoft (Popfly), and Yahoo (Pipes) have both unveiled app-based developments in the past few months, aiming to put the ability to create widgets in the hands of the relatively untechical web user, and giving them the ability to incorporate them into their social network pages.

The interfaces work using blocks, each of which acts like a component of a set of toy bricks. You drang the bricks around, and enter some parameters in them, to make a machine that does something. (Behind the interface, each block contains coding that does what the brick says of does.) Blocks include maps, business listings, social networks, news feeds, and video content.

In the name of research, I tried to build my own widget in Yahoo Pipes. I found it relatively easy, despite only understanding about 20% of the options on the page. I made a search tool that finds photos on Flickr of birds tagged with 'London'. This widget can now be accessed via my Facebook profile. If you click on my link, you can see the same search results as I can, or as if you had searched on Flickr yourself. The Microsoft product is very similar in appearance, but requires a bit more practice before you can build anything functional.

Will these new products make mashups and widgets mass-market and lucrative? Personally I doubt it. Apps on Facebook seem to currently have a very short lifespan, with a huge 'long tail' of unadopted apps. The apps listed in the directories are undoubtedly clever, but as a user you probably wouldn't use many of them to satisfy your information needs. And far fewer people are going to bother to try to make an app, rather than just install one that seems cool. Apps can work on occasion, typically for an advertiser as a supplement to a strong creative idea with an audience that is likely to adopt the tool for a period of time. But being inherently permission dependant, apps seem unlikely to achieve a presence for the majority of mainstream brands, and probably won't be the darlings of 2008.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
http://www.popfly.ms/

Bill Gates: 2007 Microsoft Global Summit

Source: Microsoft

....And so now we can think about all kinds of things being connected up to the Internet. The PC is the full-screen device, and, of course, that's moving to new form factors, things like the tablet computer where we have ink recognition and it's a very thin device that's great for reading. We think that every student will want to have one of those, and that eventually you won't have textbooks, you'll just have the tablet and it will be cheap enough that that just becomes a commonsense way for learning to be done.
So, the PC as it changes, as it moves to the living room as a new server form, also we've got the phone coming along, the device in the pocket. The changes there, of course, are very rapid as well, and that's why Microsoft is getting in, doing software there. That device will become richer and richer. It will have location information, it will have digital money stored in there. It will have the ability when it's near a large screen to actually project onto that large screen. We've shown that screens are going to be everywhere, that the cost of a projector that can project onto a table or a wall will be very inexpensive, even under $100. And so even in a kid's bedroom, all the walls, you can project and create whatever sort of ambience or situation you want. In a meeting room in business, when you say, hey, I'd like to get this data, the data can simply be projected down onto the table or the whiteboard as you work with it, and so we won't be limited by the way we think about screens today.

Linux - giving you your windows in full 3D effect

From Linux

Linux - Beryl Ubuntu

One of the features that Microsoft's new Vista platform allows you to do is to look at your windows in 3D, letting you scroll through to the one you want.

Linux (an open source operating system hard-core computer users have long been fans of), on the other hand, has launched the full 3D effect.