Twitter has been spreading like wildfire of late, and it seems as if everyone from the tech elite to the tech illiterate have signed on to post snippets from places blogging had previously yet to tread. Is Twitter's growth sustainable? Maybe; As the A-list trumpet Twitter's success, web1979 makes a pretty convincing argument for why Twitter isn't going to last the year.
Mat Belez writes, "There is no substance to the house of cards that is Twitter. No deep content, nothing to learn, no reason to keep coming back to the trough, other than the thrill/obsession of pre-adolescent voyeurism - which is simply not reason enough for busy professionals."
Is Twitter a case of becoming web-cool simply because all the cool kids are doing it? Although I've recently succumbed to the Twitter bug, I'm still unsure why I do it. , when an early adopter friend told me about Twitter last summer, my first question was, "Why would you want to do that?"
I like ninjas. That being said, I don't really associate ninjas with dictionaries. However, Ninjawords aims to change that. Or something. Ninjawords is a simple Ajax dictionary that aspires to be like a ninja: smart, accurate, and really fast. Type in your word, smack the enter key, and you definition pops up. That's it! Yes, a very simple tool, and a pretty obvious use of Ajax at that, but I enjoy Ninjawords' clean, uncluttered interface. It also has a couple extra features, like the ability to look up multiple words at once (just separate them with commas) and easy URL-based lookup (just type ninjawords.com/yourwordhere). It will also make spelling suggestions. While I still love the venerable Dictionary.com, Ninjawords is a great alternative, though I wouldn't want to meet it in a dark alley.
Yesterday's New York Times included an, um, interesting article by John Markoff about the next generation of the web. He says that computer scientists and start-ups want to "add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide--and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion." He says their effort is "referred to as Web 3.0." That's nice, John, but why does your article have everyone who actually knows what they're talking about scratching their heads? Everyone who's been paying attention will identify that new "layer of meaning" as what people have been happy calling the semantic web for a few years now, but nobody but Markoff, and maybe a few overenthusiastic marketers, are calling it Web 3.0, and that bit about reasoning "in a human fashion"? Well, AI isn't new to computer science, and Hollywood got over it five years ago. I'm not sure what Markoff's excuse is.
Predictably, the blogosphere is all over the Web 3.0 meme, with notable responses from Nick Bradbury who says "The Semantic Web may happen, but if it does, it's going to be a helluva lot messier than the architects would like," and ex-Microsoftie Robert Scoble who proposes "Web 2007" as a much more hypeworthy name, Tim O'Reilly ("I was surprised to see Markoff referring to this as "Web 3.0", when that very fact is the heart of what we've been calling Web 2.0."), and, of course, Dave Winer.
Just say no to data lock-in! That's what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at San Francisco's Web 2.0 conference earlier this week. "If you look at the historical large company behavior, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users," Schmidt said. "The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better." He said that making it easy for users to leave at any time and take their data with them keeps the company on its toes, and that other software companies should adopt a similar policy. He also said that Google's ever-expanding corpus of web-based office programs isn't "an office suite" per se and that Google isn't trying to replace Microsoft's ubiquitous Office.
Despite the fact that 2006 isn't technically over yet, and the fact that YouTube was actually founded in 2005, TIME Magazine has dubbed the video sharing site the best invention of 2006. And you know what? I agree. YouTube detractors have a lot of fodder for their criticisms, and YouTube is far from a perfect product or a perfect company, but in one fell swoop the company did what much bigger companies have been trying, and failing, to do for more than a decade: It brought video to the web. Now wait a second, I'm not saying that the web was videoless before that. I don't know when the first video went on the web (if anybody does, I'd love to know what it was), but it was probably about 15 years ago. But YouTube made web video truly ubiquitous. Two years ago if you saw a video on the web, you knew that, with few exceptions, its creator had made a significant investment of time, money, technology, or all three. Now literally anyone with enough cash for a nice cell phone or a cheap digital video camera or video capture card can put video on the web with just a few clicks, and--the is the kicker--for free. YouTube did that. If YouTube hadn't come along, someone else would have shortly and the web video revolution would still be upon us, but the history books never remember the guy who comes along and says, "well I could have done that."
The TIME article cites the confluence of three "revolutions" that YouTube's founders, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, stumbled into as being integral to its success: Cheap video production tools (the aforementioned cell phones and cheap, if not free, editing software), the ubiquitous buzzword Web 2.0, i.e. the social web "exemplified by sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg-hybrids," and the cultural revolution of customers "impatient with the mainstream media." On top of those factors and Chen, Hurley, and Karim's epic luck, I think two other factors deserve top billing: Broadband and Macromedia/Adobe. The lack of bandwidth and the lack of a browser-embedded video player that "just works" limited the success of YouTube's predecessors, and broadband finally fulfilling its promises--or some of them at least--and Flash getting robust video support and finding its way into 97-point-something percent of Americans' web browsers were integral to YouTube's success.
At any rate, congrats to YouTube for this deserved accolade (do you think they get a trophy or something?). And if you're into inventions of all kinds, TIME's Best Inventions 2006 is a great read.
Instacalc just blows my mind. It's such a simple idea, brilliantly executed: It's sort of like a Web 2.0 mini-Excel, allowing you to quickly create a calculator for anything--body mass, loan repayment, YouTube valuation--with simple or complex calculations, and then share them with your friends, colleagues, or the world. It knows lots of mathematical operations and functions, understands things like "3 billion" or "8 kbps," and even does some basic programming-like operations.
Unlike a full-fledged spreadsheet, Instacalc just has rows, and in each row you can enter a number or bit of math, and the result will be shown at the end of the row as you type. You can refer to values from other rows by their row number (e.g. 5 + R1), or you can give a row a name by putting "rowname =" before it and then refer to it by name (5 + rowname). You can click on the result at the end of a row to hide the row and show only the result, and you can put "//" before a row to make it into a comment, i.e. a text label that doesn't do anything but give information to whoever's using your Instacalc. If you've ever done any programming, all of this is probably sounding pretty familiar, but even if you haven't Instacalc is easy to use. On top of all the various operations, you can also quickly create bar, pie, and line charts, like this country population chart.
But wait, it gets better. Like any good Web 2.0 service, Instacalc lets you embed your calculator in any web page with a snippet of HTML.
Obviously, I'm very impressed by Instacalc and am shuffling it straight into my bookmarks. Head over there and check out some of the sample calculators to quickly get an idea of what it's capable of. Once you've played around a bit, post links to your Instacalcs in the comments.
Awhile back I linked to Media-Convert, a web service that will convert files while you wait. I was duly impressed by Media-Convert, and I'm even more impressed by Zamzar, a very similar free service with a Web 2.0 touch. It can convert between five image formats, 14 document formats, 11 audio formats, and nine video formats, and unlike Media-Convert you can convert many files at once, up to 100MB (though you can only do one kind of conversion at once). After you've selected a file or files to convert, Zamzar will tell you which formats are available to convert to. Then you supply your e-mail address and click "convert" and Zamzar will e-mail you a link to the converted file. Not only was I impressed with Zamzar's ease of use, I was very impressed by its speed. After clicking on "Convert," I received the e-mail instantaneously. Also, the conversion is pretty faithful--though converting a complex Excel file to HTML didn't result in a perfect facimile, it didn't look bad at all. Zamzar is definitely a tool I'll be keeping on hand for when I need to do a quick conversion.
Flash player Previously listening to Last.fm radio required downloading and installing a desktop app, which was less than optimal. While the desktop player remains, Last.fm now also has a version in Flash that plays inside your browser. It's compact and works pretty much as advertised, though I experienced a few minor connection issues. The buttons from left to right are Recommend this track to your friends, Tag this track, Express your love for this track, and Don't ever play me this track again. The player's only failing, in my opinion, is the absence of a Pause button.
Events system Last.fm now has a built-in event calendar that shows upcoming concerts near you. It shows gigs for the bands you listen to as well as (optionally) your friends' favorite acts and recommended artists. Users can add events that the system doesn't already know about, but I'm not sure if it also draws data from a more authoritative source, e.g. Pollstar or Ticketmaster.
Free MP3s The site now offers some free MP3 downloads. The download links appear both on your dashboard (based on Last.fm's recommendations) as well as artist pages. You can preview the each track before downloading.
Taste-o-meter Lastly, the Taste-o-meter, which appears on other users' profiles, tells you how closely your musical tastes are aligned with theirs, and what artists you have in common.
Overall, I'm pretty impressed with these new features, in particular the Flash player and the event calendar. I had almost given up on Last.fm in favor of Pandora (OpenPandora in particular). I've always been a fan of Last.fm's social features, and I'm glad to see them expand.
Seeing a bunch of lean code jockeys building the next generation of web browsers is a reality TV show I'd watch. Since that's probably not happening any time soon, I'll take the next best thing: Read/WriteWeb's Web Browser Faceoff, by Alex Iskold. Iskold reviews six of the latest crop of web bowsers: Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, Safari, Opera 9, Flock, and Maxthon. I highly recommend reading his entire round-up, but in case your attention span ain't what it used to be, here's what he concludes about our trusty browsers:
IE7: "Solid release, which is going to help Microsoft maintain the market leadership in the near future"
Firefox: "We think that Firefox is going to continue narrowing IE's lead, but await with interest the next major version!"
Safari: "It's a clean and simple web 1.0 browser, but needs a major feature boost in order to be a contender even on the Mac."
Opera: "We can see why fans like this browser, but a bigger future depends on spicing it up and poring in the marketing dollars."
Flock: "Great productivity browser for web 2.0"
Maxthon: "Need to apply Occam's Razor (i.e. make it simpler), but definitely could be a contender because of solid service integration."
"Even though IE and Firefox are far ahead today," Iskold concludes, "we see that other browser like Flock and Maxthon are ramping up support for the latest web 2.0 services - making themselves stand out and attracting early adopters. ... Faceoff bottom line: This round of browser competition is going to be at least as interesting as the Netscape vs. IE ten years ago. And hopefully less one-sided!" Hear, hear!
Gickr is a cool web app that lets you quickly created animated GIFs without leaving the comfort of your web browser. Gickr has two modes: The first mode lets you grab frames for your animation directly from Flickr. Just enter a Flickr username and/or tag and your pictures will pop up, then you can include the ones you want to include in the animation. The second mode lets you upload images from your hard drive. The options are simple and few--you can choose the size of the resulting image from a drop-down and you can pick a speed from "Slow" to "Blasting." Gickr's main purpose is to create simple slideshows rather than sophisticated animations, so you're not able to control looping or change the order of the frames. Refreshingly, Glickr doesn't require registration or anything like that. Take a look after the jump to see a quick animation I put together in Glickr.
iFilm, grandfather-in-spirit to the current crop of booming video sites, has quiety launched a totally revamped beta version of the site at beta.ifilm.com. The new site is a breath of fresh air compared to the outdated, cluttered, graphics-heavy site of yore. The navigation is much-improved and all videos now play an embedded Flash player, finally! iFilm was acquired a year ago by MTV Networks and content from MTV, MTV2, and Logo are featured heavily, but not too heavily. Unlike the old iFilm, the beta takes a cue from the new breed of video-sharing sites with a prominently-displayed "Upload a Video" button. I don't know if this new direction for iFilm will be enough to shore up its flagging popularity, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
Looking to update your desktop wallpaper? Having trouble finding anything good. Ask Wallpapr to find something for you. It's a nice, simple Ajax app that will spit out a bunch of photo wallpapers from Flickr's Wallpapers pool on command. Just enter a tag (e.g. clouds, skyline, food, whatever you're into) and click on 20, 40, or 100 to get that many thumbnails, or leave the tag field blank and get a nice variety. Every photo in the pool is at least 1024x768, and clicking on a thumbnail will take you straight to the photo download page. Excellent!
I've long been on the fence about whether seeing a thumbnail picture of a web site actually gives me any useful information about the site, but I know a cool web service when I see it and WebSnapr is pretty cool. It's a service aimed at developers and more technical users that generates thumbnails quickly and easily given a URL like images.websnapr.com/?url=www.example.com. This makes it easy for developers to add web site thumbnails to their own sites and software. WebSnapr has an example JavaScript that demonstrates how to make external links display a thumbnail of the destination site when hovered over with the mouse. As you might expect, capturing those thumbnails takes processor cycles, and as a result thumbnails aren't immediately available--while a thumbnail is processed (which, like most such services, can take awhile depending on server load), WebSnapr generates a "Thumbnail in queue" image instead.
Ajax domain search has been done before, but nevertheless I'm fond of Domjax's shiny interface. Like other services, it pulls up domain information as you type, but presents rather more information in a nice, clean interface. In addition to telling you if the domain name you enter is available with any TLD and giving you three registrar options, Domjax also shows SEO tools like Google and Yahoo! information, code and usability validation tools, and research tools including WHOIS information and links to Alexa and the Internet Archive. For available domains, it also has a "domain list," which is just a handy scratch pad for you to save domain names you're interested in buying. Oddly enough, Domjax completely omits .org domain names, which may be a deal-breaker for some, but the slick interface might be enough to keep me coming back.
Awhile back I wrote about Joe's Goals, a super-streamlined site for keeping track of your daily goals. I've been meaning to post about it again, because though I liked the site immediately, it wasn't until about a month later that I started really using it and discovering how incredibly useful it is. Now Ian Smith, the "Joe" of Joe's Goals, has launched Joe's Logbook, a companion site that's integrated with Joe's Goals and lets you track your life's ups and (if you please) downs with a little more specificity. Its interface looks very much like the Joe's Goals grid, except that instead of just clicking to add checkmarks, you can enter specific information that you want to log, like what exercises you did today or what you ate. Other uses suggested by the site are dream log, writing journal, or travelogue. Of course, like Joe's Goals, Joe's Logbook's utility lies not in its robustness but its simplicity, which is perfect if you want a web app that will let you take quick notes while staying out of your way, but perhaps less so if you're looking to write your memoirs. By the way, if you already have a Joe's Goals account, you don't need a new account for Joe's Logbook. Just log into Joe's Goals as usual and click on "Add Logbook" at the top of the grid.
Yesterday's New York Times included an, um, 
Flash player
Events system
Taste-o-meter
Gickr
