Interesting, I noticed today that you can now log into Windows Live sites (and all sites which accept Live ID credentials ) using an Information Card. This is in Beta currently.
This could be a major step forward in federated identity. However, it only works on IE7 with .NET Framework 3.0 for now – hopefully that bug will be fixed soon.
via Chris
Richard MacManus, over on Read/WriteWeb has an extremely comprehensive must read post on his forecast for what will be hot in 2007.
His predictions for 2007:
RSS will go mainstream
Structured data will be a big trend
Widgets will continue rising in 2007
Web Office will continue to ramp up
The consumerization of the enterprise trend will start to infiltrate corporate IT
Rich Internet Apps will be a major force
Google in particular will continue to push the boundaries of browser-based apps
Semantic Web products will come of age
Expect more big things from Amazon
Expect some shakeups in the online advertising market
Watch out for developments in 2007 along the lines of a better, more robust online ad model
2007 will be about Search 2.0 and the rise of the vertical search engines
Microsoft’s Windows Live services will gain real momentum next year
Google may come out with some form of GoogleOS
Open Source Desktops will continue to gain momentum in ’07
Expect the competition between IE7 and FireFox (plus Flock, Opera and Maxthon) to be intense
Expect Safari compatibility to rise sharply in 2007
Internet-based TV will ramp up in 2007
2007 will undoubtedly be a good year for P2P
SecondLife will become an important platform for marketing, promotion, and of course social networking
Virtual Money: Paypal showed the way, and we’re seeing more of it now – SecondLife LindeX, Microsoft points etc.
The online real estate market will grow rapidly in ’07
The search for disruptive business models will continue!
Social networks will probably also become more open – and data portability will start to occur
International Web will finally start to get its due in mainstream media
One Laptop Per Child will create good buzz and may increase the adoption of thin-client like computers
Broadband continues to grow
VoIP space will really hot up
Mobile Web may be the big story of 2007
Mobile will be a bigger development and advertising platform in ’07
watch for an emerging Webphone market – for example Apple’s rumored iPhone and a GooglePhone.
Check out Richard’s post for an explanation of each of these predictions.
If we ignore the fact that the term Web 2.0 is controversial for all kinds of reasons and concentrate on the applications themselves, which Web 2.0 apps (using the broadest possible definition) do you use most?
I use:
What cool Web 2.0 apps am I not using that I should be using? What are your favourite Web 2.0 apps?
Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) has been released according to Dean Hachamovitch on the the IE7 blog. It is now available for download here.
IE7 will be rolled out via a critical Windows update in the coming weeks which, as I have mentioned previously, will become a support nightmare. For this version it would make a huge amount of sense to have an IE6 look and feel (skin) as the default look with an option to change.
via Scoble
I have been asked to give a presentation, on Microsoft’s relevance in the Web 2.0 arena.
What do people think, are Microsoft a player in this sphere? They have Office Live, Windows Live Mail, MSN Spaces and they are a big supporter of RSS – it will be baked into the next versions of Internet Explorer (IE7), Office and Windows Vista.
Hell, Microsoft even have Atlas, a free framework for developing Ajaxy Web 2.0 applications!
Microsoft has announced today that Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is available for download.
In the Microsoft announcement, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer development at Microsoft, said the timeline for further releases is:
Windows Vista Beta 2, and then Beta 3 of IE7, release candidates, and then a final release before end of year.
In a review of IE7 Beta 2, Mich Arrington of TechCrunch pointed out that:
The key features are tabbed browsing (including “Quick Tabs�, a way to see multiple web pages on a single tab), a continuation of the minimalist approach on the UI and toolbars, and enhancements to the RSS reader built into the browser. The team says they’ve made significant improvements in CSS rendering as well, a problem I noticed in the previous beta version.
Co-incidentally (I think!) John C. Dvorak has an article in PC Magazine today where he calls on Microsoft to abandon the browser! John reckons that:
All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised.
All of Microsoft’s Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer.
John’s solution is that Microsoft should:
pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately…. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer.
I wonder if Dean Hachamovitch and the IE team are worried about their jobs now that John has put that sugestion out there. Somehow I doubt it! John’s idea, while superbly timed and very well argued is destined to be ignored by Microsoft. Giving up and conceding defeat is not the Microsoft way.
IE7 Beta 2 caveats – According to Microsoft’s IE Group Program Manager, Tony Chor,
there is no supported way for IE6 and IE7 to install side-by-side
IE7 is beta software – install it at your own risk!
Robert Scoble has written a post bemoaning the lack of standards in using RSS feeds and the consequent confusion which this causes :
Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe� or “feed� or “web feed.�
There’s a great discussion in the comments of Robert’s post on this issue – with some making the point that auto-discovery in IE7 will solve the problem and others countering that if you want to add the feed to an online reader like Google Reader or Netvibes, then autodiscovery won’t resolve that problem.
We had a very fruitful discussion on that topic here a few weeks back, after Dave Winer suggested that we use a Subscribe button.
What we came up with was a combination of an orange Subscribe button and a Help button – thanks to FrankP‘s generosity these buttons and the Help text are free to copy and use on other sites.
Robert – you obviously didn’t either 1) read the discussion or 2) read the discussion and forgot about it – I’m hurt 😉