The "Weekly WassUp" is a brief weekly overview of what has been showing up in "the feeds" in the last week.
In this issue:
- Nov. 17 : Happy Birthday, European Internet!
- Nov. 17 : Jerry Yang to step down
- Nov. 17 : Amazon Cloudfront launches
- Nov. 19 : IE8 not done before 2009
- Nov. 19 : Lively goes the way of the dinosaur
- Nov. 20 : Google wiki-tizes search
- Adobe MAX conference
Nov. 17 : Happy Birthday, European Internet!
At 2:30 pm on November 17 1988, system supervisor Piet Beertema from the Amsterdam Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) received an email saying his organization was now connected
to the academic National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet), which aimed to create an open network allowing academic researchers access to so-called 'supercomputers'. In the years after, a lot of other academic departments joined the network. But it was not until 1993 that the Internet became publicly available. The email -which was the first non-military connection of what was to become the Internet to the European subcontinent- was as short as it was exciting 
:
Nov. 17 : Jerry Yang to step down
Last year wasn't easy on Yahoo!'s CEO Jerry Yang. Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo!, declined a (in retrospect) good acquisition bid from Microsoft, tripped over an advertising deal with Google, came begging back to Microsoft and was politely turned down. Now, Yahoo! is looking to replace Yang at the head of the company. He will return to his former role as Chief Yahoo! upon the appointment of his
successor, and will also continue to serve on the Board. Neither the official press release, nor the internal memo however give a lot of background information on the decision.
Nov. 17 : Amazon Cloudfront launches
If it comes down to 'web 3.0' and 'cloud computing' (the usage of resources over the Internet as opposed to having everything running locally), Amazon is head of the class. With its S3 (storage space on the Internet for images, databases etc) and EC2 (high-performance servers on the Internet you can rent even for a short period) platforms, it already gave businesses the opportunity to be more flexible and scalable. Now, Amazon adds a third important service to that: Amazon Cloudfront.
Amazon Cloudfront is a content delivery network (CDN), meaning that it is designed to deliver your content (eg web page) as fast as possible to whoever requested it. It does so by (a.o.) duplicating your content on a number of geographically spread servers so that a nearby-server can be called upon to deliver your content. The content that can be delivered through Cloudfront however has to reside in S3 storage (see higher) which in its turn can be used from EC2. So no: it's not possible to just plug in your own local server. But it certainly does make the CDN technology a whole lot more accessible. For now, Cloudfront uses servers in Ashburn (VA), Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle, St. Louis, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
Nov. 19 : IE8 not done before 2009
On the Internet Explorer blog, General Manager for Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch last week announced that they will "release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that up with the final release". Meaning that IE8 won't be here before the end of 2008 as was previously stated. Reason for the delay is the massive load of feedback they gathered from the beta tests.
"We have combed through instrumentation of over 20 million IE sessions and hundreds of hours of usability lab sessions. Together with IE MVPs, we have scrutinized thousands of threads from user forums and examined the issues that people are raising (not to mention all the times users opt to 'Report a Webpage Problem…'). We have also spent hundreds of hours listening and answering questions in meetings with partners and other important organizations. We simply could not deliver IE8 the way our customers and developers want us to without all this information."
My guess however is that it might have something to do with recent launches of Chrome and Firefox 3.1 and the way those browsers have set a whole new set of standards.
The beta 2 version of Internet Explorer 8 can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.
Nov. 19 : Google pulls the plug on Lively
Launched less than 5 months ago, Google's take on virtual worlds 'Lively' is no more. Lively was a browser add-on allowing users to create a virtual world where they could interact with other users. Virtual worlds could then easily be embedded into web pages. In the official announcement, Google states that "it has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize
our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business." Lively will be taken down at the end of December, leaving the (virtual) floor to competitors Second Life and IMVU again.
Nov. 20 : Google wiki-tizes search
Do you have a Google account? And did you notice something strange lately next to your search results when you performed a search? Well meet SearchWiki, Google's new take on personalized search. SearchWiki is "... a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting,
adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you
can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can
also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that
you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every
time you do the same search in the future." For now, the modifications you make will only affect your own future searches. But by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link, you can also view how other users have edited a particular search. It's not unthinkable however that one day Google might want to use this data to tweak its general search algorithm, which would drastically change the face of search engine marketing.
Furthermore, the option of commenting on a given search result will probably also interest brand and product owners to see what people are writing about their website (to see the comments: log in to your Google account, search for your keyword and click the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link. You can then see how many people removed your website from the search, added it to the top or what comments they entered).
Adobe MAX conference
At the MAX conference in San Francisco last week, Adobe launched a bunchload of new applications. Most of them related to Flash or to the 'Flash platform' as we should be calling the Flash/Flex/AIR product suite now. A few highlights:
Flash 10 on mobiles
No we're not talking Flash Lite here (the light version of Flash for mobiles). We're talking the latest full-featured Flash plugin, Flash 10. First up will be Microsoft's Windows Mobile (despite its own Flash competitor Silverlight) and Google's mobile OS 'Android'. As far as the iPhone and its infamous lack of Flash support goes, Adobe says "We are working on Flash on the iPhone, but it is really up to Apple". The announcement fits into the Open Screen Project, an "an industry-wide initiative, led by Adobe with the participation of industry leaders, with one clear vision: enable consumers to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere." Read: Adobe's take on making Flash the de facto viewing environment not only for Web apps on
your PC, but also on your mobile phone, your TV, and any other screen
you can think of.
Google Analytics tracking for Flash
While there was already a way to track Flash events using Google Analytics, it wasn't the most elegant of solutions. Now, Adobe and Google have worked out a simplified solution for tracking Flash content, called Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash. This feature is a translation of the current Google Analytics tracking code (in javascript) into the ActionScript 3 programming language (the Flash programming language). This means that you can now track pageviews, events and campaigns easily from within Flash. Even when your Flash movie is inside a widget somewhere. To get started, you need the tracking library for Flash which holds the actionscript 3 code and the Flash visual component (see also the developer documentation).
Flash Configurator
The MAX conference was the sign for the (beta) launch of a whole series of new products and updates: Durango, PatchPanel, Alchemy, Centaur, Bolt, Flash Catalyst, Gumbo, Wave, Cocomo, Stratus, Genesis, Pixel Bender and ... Configurator. Configurator is a utility, written in Adobe AIR, that enables the easy creation of panels (palettes) for use in Adobe Photoshop. This means you can now easily create your own Photoshop (CS4) panels containing all the tools you use frequently, or create (and distribute) panels with small tutorials (including video). To see Configurator in action, check out Nack’s video demo, which shows some of the possibilities. At the moment there aren’t any available, but keep an eye on this Adobe Exchange page to find out what others are doing with Configurator.
Configurator is a free download and you can grab it from Adobe Labs.
