The "Weekly WassUp" is a brief weekly overview of what has been showing up in "the feeds" in the last week.
In this issue:
- Mar. 1-3: DEMO 09 and the smarter web
- Mar. 2: Microsoft Online Business Services in Belgium
- Mar. 4: Facebook's take on Twitter / FriendFeed
- Mar. 4: Facebook's new Pages
- Mar. 4: Yahoo! partners with JS-Kit
- Proximus Generation Movie Project
- Microsoft envisions 2019
Mar. 1-3: DEMO 09 and the smarter web
At the yearly DEMO conference in San Diego, companies get the opportunity to showcase their new product innovations before an audience of world-wide press, decision-making investors and market-defining visionaries. This year's edition featured 70 product launches, and although no real ground-breaking release came out of the sessions, a clear trend could be detected: we're heading towards a smarter web. We left Web 2.0 behind some time ago, but we're not at Web 3.0 (the full 'semantic web') yet. Call it Web 2.5, call it something else, fact is that a lot of companies are investing into technologies for a better (automated) understanding of web content through artificial intelligence.
A couple of examples from DEMO 09:
- Xmarks, a cross-browser bookmark synchronization tool, launched a new suggestions feature and a smarter search
- ensembli is a self-learning RSS reader that will suggest stories based upon the interests you entered and your reading behaviour
- Gazaro creates a personal sales flyer with the hottest deals from all over the net. It also 'knows' what you're looking for: it will never give you results for a camera lens or camera accessories when you're searching for just a camera
- Primal Fusion calls itself a "thought networking" service. When you enter a topic into the search field, it immediately gives you a tag cloud of related terms allowing you to further drill down into a more specific aspect of the original topic.
- Evri is a semantic search engine that understands natural language. They have a.o. a widget that interprets the content of the page it is embedded in and suggests related content (The Washington Post uses this widget).
Mar. 2: Microsoft Online Business Services in Belgium
Already available for some time in the US, Microsoft now launched its Online Business Services also in Belgium and 18 other countries, of which most are European, but also in some key markets like Canada, Japan and New Zealand. The Online Business Services hold 4 Microsoft products, offered in 'the cloud' (meaning that everything resides on Microsoft servers and is accessible via the Internet):
- Exchange Online: a hosted communication platform offering email messaging, contact management and calendar functionalities
- SharePoint Online: a hosted collaboration platform based upon SharePoint 2007 where people can create intranet sites for collaboration and document sharing.
- Office Communications Online: a hosted instant messaging platform
- Office Live Meeting: a hosted web conferencing solution for real-time meetings, training sessions and events.
The subscription price for the suite, which is already available in the United States, is $15 per user, per month, and prices
overseas will be comparable to this, Microsoft said. It is also possible to subscribe to individual products with prices ranging between $2.50 per user per month (Office Communications Online) and $10 per user per month (Exchange Online).
With this, Microsoft takes another step in bringing its products to the cloud (see also 'Microsoft in the cloud') and tries to close the gap with competitor Google.
Mar. 4: Facebook's take on Twitter / FriendFeed
Facebook announced a redesign of the personal homepage. The activity stream will now be in real-time (more like the current live feed as opposed to the default stream that updates every 10 to 15 minutes), publishers can publish directly into the stream, activities can be filtered (Family notifications, cose friends, ...) and you'll get an overview of the highlights.
The real-time activity monitoring makes Facebook look a lot more like Twitter and FriendFeed, especially if you take into account the commenting and 'like' options on everything posted...
Mar. 4: Facebook's new Pages
Together with the revamped personal homepages, Facebook also announced its new take on brand pages. From now on, companies and organisation will get a page much more like a traditional profile page, including statuses (which will show up in the fans activity streams!) and multiple tabs (owners can choose which tab will show up first when people visit the page). With this move, Facebook is laying the groundwork for marketers to use Facebook to reach people in new ways. In particular, CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes that the number of connections could become a metric for marketing that goes beyond ad impressions or clicks. With the new Pages, he says, "Now, once you have connections to all these people, you have ways to engage them".
Mar. 4: Yahoo! partners with JS-Kit
Yahoo! announced a partnership with JS-Kit allowing JS-Kit's Comments widget users to publish stories to their Yahoo! Updates feed and bring their Yahoo! identity with them on various sites. Comparable to services offered by Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and Typepad Connect, the JS-Kit Comments widget lets publishers integrate commenting functionalities into their website using only a few lines of code. But JS-Kit has the benefit of being independent and allowing for sign in using either a JS-Kit, Haloscan, Facebook, Yahoo! or OpenID profile. Additionally, JS-Kit already has an install-base of over 600.000 sites across the Web, including AOL, Evite, Experian, JetBlue, Sun Microsystems, and WorldNow.
Proximus Generation Movie Project
Brussels-based agency Famous launched a unique campaign for mobile operator Proximus: They call upon everyone to come to the Generation Movie Project website, pick a shot (hand-drawn) from the upcoming ad, take a picture that matches the drawing as closely as possible and upload it. The result should be a fantastic, 45 second stop-motion ad created by 'the crowd'. In total, they will need 470 pictures and if everything goes well, they might even take home the world record of most-number-of-actors-and-locations-in-one-ad.
Microsoft envisions 2019
Take a look at how engineers from Microsoft Labs see the future in 2019...
