The "Weekly WassUp" is a brief weekly overview of what has been showing up in "the feeds" in the last week.
In this issue:
- Microsoft in the cloud
- Oct. 28 : LinkedIn launches applications
- Oct. 28 : The Age of Conversation 2: Why Don't They Get It?
- Oct. 31 : Google Alerts via RSS
Microsoft in the cloud
In last week's WassUp post, we already mentioned Amazon's EC2 cloud
offering (quick reminder: 'the cloud' = 'the Internet', cloud computing = outsourcing applications, processing power etc to the cloud). This
week, Microsoft announced two cloud-related initiatives: Windows Azure and Office Web applications.
Windows Azure is a web-based, scalable hosting environment for applications, just
like Amazon's EC2. Developers can build websites and applications using one of Microsoft's desktop
coding tools, then deploy them to the Windows Azure platform, where
they can be accessed by any computer or Internet-connected mobile device. Microsoft supplies the storage, database server, identity management and processing
power. Compared to EC2, Microsoft claims Azure will be less 'low-level', allowing for developers to focus on building the business logic and then
scaling the platform to the demand. Details on the available licensing models were not released yet.
With Office Web applications, Microsoft is putting
the popular Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) into the cloud and makes them accessible via the browser. This means that you wouldn't
need to buy and install the Office products any more to read or edit eg Word files. You could just log in to the online version and have the Office
application available to you. And although it will only be a light-weight versions of the desktop equivalents, for most users this will be more than enough
to make the expensive, downloaded version irrelevant. Supported browsers will be Internet Explorer (of course), Firefox and Safari. The applications
themselves will be available in a HTML/Ajax version and a Silverlight version. With this move, Microsoft follows in the footsteps of other providers
such as Google (Google docs) and Zoho.
Oct. 28 : LinkedIn launches applications
In regular social web style (see also Facebook, MySpace, Netlog, ...), the business social network LinkedIn on October 28 launched its application platform. For now, there are 9 applications you can put on your profile page, but LinkedIn urges all developers to submit new applications.
Oct. 28 : The Age of Conversation 2: Why Don't They Get It?
In the summer of 2007, more than 100 bloggers from nine countries put together a collection of posts (400 words max) with their views on one single topic:
'conversation'. The book was entitled 'The Age of Conversation' and raised nearly $15,000 for Variety, the international children's
charity. Now, its successor is available from the Lulu store: "The Age of Conversation 2 : Why Don't They Get It?". This time, 237 marketing
professionals from over 16 countries joined in. The publishers describe the book as follows : "This book is a daring challenge to the business
community. Gone are the
top-down, command and control messages that held sway through the 20th
Century. In are a raft of new techniques that start with listening,
responding and action that set the scene for a continuing and evolving
dialog about brands, experience, business and community."
Brand Autopsy already collected a number of 'money quotes' in a small presentation:
Oct. 31 : Google Alerts via RSS
Online reputation monitoring is a hot topic. It basically comes down to being able to track what everyone is saying about your product or brand on the
different social networks, forums, blogs etc. allowing you, as the guardian of the product's or brand's reputation, to act on it. One of the (basic)
reputation monitoring tools is Google Alerts. Google Alerts lets you specify search terms (like
you enter them when you perform a normal Google search), the type of content to search (news, blogs, web, video, groups) and how often the search should be
performed. And until now, you then received the alerts via email. But as of last week, you can also subscribe the alerts using RSS, which makes them i.m.o. a whole lot easier to manage.
