The Google+ Project is here! Is this the End of Facebook or another failed trial like google buzz or google wave? I hope this is as good as it sounds and it's hear to stay!
Sharing is a huge part of the web, a part that we think could be a lot simpler. That’s why we’ve been working on adding a few new things to Google: to make connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world. We hope you like what we’ve cooked up so far. And stay tuned, because there’s more to come.
GOOGLE Circles: You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.
We believe there really is a new era emerging in the Web's evolution. So what's next? What will define Web 3.0?
One explanation is that:
Web 1.0: Mainstream media and retailers dominate, using traditional approaches to broadcasting and sales.
Web 2.0: Blogging, peer-to-peer sharing and Google empower the masses to communicate openly. The old guard struggles to remain relevant.
Web 3.0: Mainstreaming of social media creates a constant flow of information. Challenge for users and businesses alike is to harness the flood without drowning.
The best example of Web 3.0, or at least the transition between here and there, is Twitter. The site's simplicity, flexibility and explosive growth have created more content than anyone could possibly digest. Couple that with the constant activity on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogs and Friendfeed, and it's easy to see why everyone feels so overloaded.
The mission now is to bring order to the chaos, to carve out your own tributaries from the river of information.
How's it being done, and what it does it say about where we're headed? Find out after the jump.
Here are a few trends that are distilling the conversation and, in the process, defining Web 3.0:
1. Aggregators
No one wants to manage accounts on 25 different social sites. This frustration has driven the creation of tools like iGoogle, FriendFeed and Netvibes — all aimed at streamlining your social Web into one space. But more importantly, it has led to the reinvention of Facebook as the ultimate social aggregator.
Recent redesigns of Facebook have turned it into a place where your photos, videos and blog posts can be easily (and automatically) funneled into one place. That's an approach that FriendFeed pioneered years ago, but there's a big difference: Your friends are actually using Facebook.
And now they can even comment on your shared items without leaving the social network. That's bad news for YouTube and other sites that need traffic to create ad revenue, but it's good news for users who don't want to scramble all over creation just to say "Cute video!"
2. Simple sharing
We've all been seeing those "Share this!" buttons for years now. If you're a marketer or PR person, you've probably plastered them all over your work in hopes of helping it "go viral." But the reality is that these links to sites like Digg or Reddit just haven't been that useful.
That's finally starting to change thanks to Web and smartphone tools that simplify the sharing process.
A few examples:
• TBuzz: If you find a site you want to share with your Twitter audience, just click the Tbuzz bookmark at the top of your browser. The tool automatically shortens the link using the popular bit.ly service and pops up a window showing you anyone else who has mentioned the same page on Twitter.
• Hootsuite's Ow.ly Social Bar: A bit more comprehensive than TBuzz, this tool shares sites but then also makes it easy for the viewer to share it again. So if you like the link I send you to, you can click a button at the top of the page and keep the share train rolling.
• Smub.it: Designed to make sharing easier on an iPhone, Smub actually works on just about any device with a Web browser. You simply add "smub.it/" in front of any URL, and it will pull up a page of simple buttons to share that site on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.
3. Un-Sites
The design-heavy microsite has been under serious assault lately. Why? Because businesses and marketers are realizing that there's an infinite supply of content out there, being refreshed every day. Why go through all the trouble of creating 100% of your site's content yourself?
And here's another point: A few years ago, if you wanted video on your site, you had to write or find a code that would let you host the video. Big pain in the butt. Now Google is dumping millions of dollars into making YouTube the best, most advanced video service on the planet. Why would you still go it alone, when you can just embed YouTube on your own site for free?
For now, these kinds of projects are mostly just publicity stunts. But there's no denying that repurposed content from sites like Twitter and YouTube is going to become the norm with almost any site design in the near future.
On another angle we've heard that if Web 1.0 was characterized by connecting people to content, and Web 2.0 is connecting people to people, then Web 3.0 is certainly connecting objects to people and to eachother. The Internet of things. Tim O’Reilly has also been talking about this for a while.
Inanimate objects can be embedded with sensors and connected wirelessly to the Internet. This enables us mere human objects to effectively communicate with those formerly inanimate objects. The hope is that as we are able to collect data from these embedded objects and analyze it we’ll be able to make better, more informed decisions based on all the available information we have.
This requires, of course, better analytics to makes sense of it all. But coupled together (data+ analytics) it’s truly the next transformative era of computing.
So what's your take on the term "Web 3.0"? Is it a bold new era? Or just a reorganization of all the information we have today? I'd love to hear what trends you've noticed and where you think they're taking us.
At Destiny Tech we believe that if you reduce travel and meet virtually and collaborate online instead, you can save both time and money. We know that there is a time and place for travel, but we believe that with the right tools, a little know-how, and some adventurous spirit, you can save money, be more productive, and lower your environmental impact.
V.S.
We use these tools in every project, meet remotely, use IP phone technology to teleconference with professionals and customers all over the world and best of all, save you time and Money. This collaboration saves us time and money so we extrapolate these savings into your final price.
Personally we prefer CITRIX GoTo Meeting (To do online meetings) but there are a lot of collaboration tools (and a lot of free ones online). We also use Google Docs (to share documents), instant messaging tools for easy & fast communication and Ip phones for free international teleconferences. We also have these tools working with our mobile devices (iphones) to help everybody be connected at all times, updated with the project growth and also communicated with new requests, changes, etc.
Commuting to work and traveling for business is often unavoidable. There are many good reasons to travel: There is nothing like a face-to-face meeting to forge a relationship or read subtle body language cues; spending time immersed in a different culture opens our eyes, minds and hearts; traveling to a client, partner or donor shows them that they are important to you and your organization. However, many of us travel when not necessary. Not only does travel use up money and valuable time that you could be spending in other ways, but it's costly to the environment.
We are rethinking work-related travel (including commuting), just like may non-profits and for-profit companies. Here you have a list of 10 recommendations for reducing or eliminate business travel without completely losing the advantages of meeting face-to-face. We encourage everyone to use these suggestions so organizations and individuals can use technology to save time, reduce travel costs, and reduce impact on the environment at the same time.
10 Ways to Change (Save TIME, Save MONEY & Save the environment too):
Here are 10 technology tips to help you reduce your need to travel:
Measure your travel: Determine your organization's travel and commuting environmental footprint as well as the amount of money your organization is spending on travel. Make a list of meetings, training's, and events attended by your staff or volunteers that might be suitable for teleconferencing, Web or video conferencing.
Attend online trainings using a webbing service or screen-casting to observe its effectiveness, and how you might use it to substitute for a meeting or training at your organization.
Try out one or more telephone conferencing services. Some good options are: Ready-Talk, Care2Call, and FreeConferenceCall.com, Skype, Vonage, etc. GotoMeeting has its own phone component for teleconferencing wile having the WEB conference.
Try one or more Web conferencing services. Some good options are: GotoMeeting, ReadyTalk, Microsoft Communicator, and WebEx.
Check into video conferencing services. Some basic free options are: Skype and gmail voice and video chat.
Explore an online virtual world environment like Second Life to see how that tool might provide a fun and more personal meeting environment.
Use instant messaging technologies (chat/IM) like Skype, Pidgin, or AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) to allow more spontaneous communications. Or consider tools like Communicator 2007 that include instant messaging as part of a robust online communications package.
Collaborate and share documents online. Some free services are: 4shared.com, GoogleApps Education, Google Docs, Microsoft Office Online, Google Groups, and Yahoo Groups.
Encourage staff to telecommute. Technologies like remote desktop software like pcAnywhere, virtual private networking (VPN), voice over IP (VoIP), and virtual PBX can help make working at home as effective as coming into the office. Many corporations and very large non-profits have used custom-built VoIP infrastructures to facilitate unified communications for years, but VoIP products and systems have recently become more accessible for small-to-medium organizations too making it easier to effectively work from home and stay in touch (Vonage ip phones is a great example of this technology coming available for people and small organizations)
Look for conferences that have a virtual component or will be recorded and can be accessed online, such as the Craigslist Foundation's Nonprofit Boot Camp. Or ask a local volunteer or board member to attend and report back to your group instead of asking someone to travel.
What's Difference Does It Make?
One 4,150 KM (2,578 mile) flight emits 762 pounds of CO2 per person, which is equivalent to 5% of the CO2 emissions from the electricity use of an average home for one year. The IPCC estimates that aviation emissions are currently 492 million tons per year and growing at a rate of 6% annually.
Telecommuters last year saved 840 million gallons of gasoline and reduced carbon emissions by almost 14 million tons.
The Telework Coalition estimates that $20,000 per year can be added to the bottom-line of your organization per full-time teleworking employee in reduced real estate needs and related overhead expenses.
Allowing your staff and volunteers to work remotely has proven to increase both productivity and job satisfaction.
Microsoft, home of the Zune, has just announced that they're going to launch Bing, a rebranding and reformatting of their search engine (they actually call it : Decision Engine). So far, they've earmarked $100 million just for the marketing.
Bing, of course, stands forBut It's Not Google. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it is trying to be the next Google. And the challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google. It's called Google.
Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent. In times of change, the rule is this:
Don't try to be the 'next'. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new.
If Microsoft adds a few features and they prove popular, how long precisely will it take Google to mirror or even leapfrog those features?
With $100 million, you could build (or even buy) something remarkable. Something that spread online without benefit of a lot of yelling and shouting. Something that changes the game in a fundamental way. The internet works best when you build a network, not when you buy a brand. In fact, I can't think of one successful online brand that was built with cash.
Comment: We predict Bing will take some market share so we need to be prepared for that and we are working on it. Bing is a new search engine and your OLD SEO campaign may not work for it. Our engineers are constantly evolving and working with new technologies and Bing is one of them now. If you need SEO that works today and will work tomorrow, contact us! If you really want to know what the NEXT GOOGLE is ready this Blog entry about WAVE, the new product coming from Google.
Google Wave was released at the recent Google I/O event as a demo product. It is an amazing real time collaboration and communication platform with email, instant messaging and heaps more combined to form an awesome product.
The demo product is an HTML 5 applicaion built using the Google Web Toolkit. Wave is being released as an open source product. Its open platform encourages developers to build other Wave clients, extensions and embed waves in other web pages and platforms. The product is characterised by the 3P’s namely product, platform and protocol.
The brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen from Google Australia are the creators of this incredible product. Their previous creation was Google Maps which is now the defacto standard for online mapping of geographical locations. This has taken a good couple of years to develop and bring it to its current form. Jens stressed this fact to the audience - You must remember that all this is happening in your browser.
A “wave” contains equal parts document and conversation where people can simultaneously work and communicate together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.
How Google Wave Works
You create a wave and add contacts to it. All the contacts on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, videos, gadgets and feeds from other sites on the web. All members can edit the wave directly and also insert replies. You can see all the edits in real time as the changes are made to the wave by others.You can be running a Firefox browser and your friend can be on Safari browser. You can add as many contacts as you want.
The playback feature is a very powerful feature. If a new contact joins the wave, she can see the collaboration and communication that has taken place in a certain form at that point of time. By clicking playback, she can see how the whole wave has evolved from the beginning to the point of time she joined the wave. This is a very powerful feature especially when teams are working on different parts of the same project document.
Some of the really cool features are:
Google Wave offers plain vanilla type email conversation where you can send emails to contacts you choose to.
Instant messaging where unlike the typical IM chat, you see the message - Sarah is typing before you get to see the message once Sarah is done typing, in a wave, you see the chat transferred character by character in real time
Use playback to see how the wave has evolved to its current shape
Drag and drop attachments, say photos, into the wave from your desktop and everyone else on the wave can see it almost instantly
API for embedding your wave to web pages such as a blog
Wave can be embedded in social media sites like Orkut
You can participate in a wave from your mobile phone
Editing of the wave in real time and edits appear instantly with markups denoting the different edits
Ability to send a private message to a particular contact which others cannot see
Teams working on a project document can collaborate in real time and communicate simultaneously when working on it
Google Wave can be viewed as a platform with a rich collection of open APIs. This allows developers to build new extensions that can work with waves and also embed waves in other web services.
The Google Wave Federation Protocol is the basis for storing and sharing waves with the all important live concurrency mechanism which allows edits to be viewed in real time across contacts and services. This protocol is designed such that any user’s wave services can communicate with each other and with the Google Wave service. This is going to be achieved by making the Google Wave protocol code open source.
An excellent video on the Google Wave demo by the development team will give you a great idea of the amazing features that have been built into it.
Google is encouraging the developer community to create some cool apps that can be incorporated into the Google Wave before it is made public. You can sign up at http://wave.google.com to be notified of the release date when Google Wave is launched as a public product.
Sharing is a huge part of the web, a part that we think could be a lot simpler. That’s why we’ve been working on adding a few new things to Google: to make connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world. We hope you like what we’ve cooked up so far. And stay tuned, because there’s more to come.
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