Google’s OpenSocial, APIs released for Social Networking platform

From September, 2006 facebook became open for globe. Till October, 2007 it had 42 million active members. It is the fastest growing social networking site on web. In May 2007, Facebook launched the facebook platform. It’s providing framework to developer to develop their own application and use it with facebook. FBML that is FaceBook Markup Language is used for the writing applications for it. Top Friends, Graffiti, iLike applications made facebook more popular.

Then there were rumors of selling out facebook. From Viacom(MTV is Viacom’s brand), Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google was thinking to buy or getting some stake in this growing venture on web.

September 20, 2007; a highly confidential meeting held at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. This was to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the ‘Facebook issue’. In the next month, October 2007, Microsoft acquires 1.6% equity stake in Facebook for $240 millions, also expands ad partnership with facebook.

Meanwhile, Google had already started with their progress in this issue. What was lacking in Orkut?! It’s the applications building platform, which will provide a framework for developers to build an application like facebook. And more on that they didn’t want to limit it for Orkut. They wanted developers to access its APIs and build applications which will work on all social networking sites including facebook.
This platform got released yesterday. Google call it OpenSocial. Social networking sites like Hi5, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, Ning and software makers like salesforce.com, Oracle are partnering with Google in this project.

The main benefit of OpenSocial is developer need not learn the new language like FBML. They can build application using their exiting JavaScript and HTML skills. OpenSocial APIs are made flexible to embed flash objects too.

How to upload and use your iGoogle gadget?

After creating your internet gadget, how you will use it in iGoogle? It’s two step process, made easy by google.
1. Upload your gadget XML file on some hosting site.
2. Add it in iGoogle

Let’s see how you will upload your Hello, world! Gadget. For this, either you need your own hosting space, or you can upload it in GooglePages. Googlepages aka Google Page Creator is hosting service provided by Google.

a. Go to your Google Page Creator account.
b. Upload your XML file; let’s say hello.xml is the file.
c. Copy the file location address.

You can send your gadget to Google Gadget Directory. Your gadget will be added into it after manual inspection. For that go to Submit Google Gadget page. Add your gadget’s URL into Gadget URL textbox and press Send. After listing in this directory your gadget will be accessible for people who browse this directory. And will give your gadget popularity.

Till Google moderate your gadget, you can start using it. Go to iGoogle Content Directory.

a. Click on Add by URL link beside ‘Search Homepage Content’ button.
b. Enter your gadget URL in the textbox there
c. Click on Add


Now, go back to your homepage and check your gadget in iGoogle!

Make your own ‘Hello World’ iGoogle gadget

Making an iGoogle gadget is very simple task. iGoogle gadget is an XML file where code is written using few web technologies. You just need to be familiar with HTML, JavaScript at the beginning.

We’ll see how we can make ‘Hello World’ iGoogle gadget
A. Making XML file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Module>
<ModulePrefs title="hello world example" />
<Content type="html"><![CDATA[
Hello, world!
]]></Content>
</Module>

1. As we write a simple standard XML file, we’ve to start in a same way. Writing XML version tag is mandatory. like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

2.

<Module>

This tag is a root tag for the XML file and it is used to identify this is gadget’s file

3.

<ModulePrefs>

This contains title, author, and description for the gadget

4.

<Content type="html">

This indicate that this is HTML gadget

5.

<![CDATA[
Hello, world!
]]>

In the place of ‘Hello world’ we can place any HTML, JavaScript content. Gadget’s XML parser will not parse CDATA as XML content.

Check this 'Google Gadget Editor' for editing XML and to preview it there itself. Add this gadget into iGoogle from here

Thats it!

SMS alerts from Google Calendar

My old mobile had memory of 60 reminders and current has 300. But what if we have no memory restriction? Now onwards Google Calendar will do this for us. Calendar will send you SMS alerts as per events added in it.

How you will start your notification?
1.Go to Google Calendar
2.Go to Settings > Mobile Setup
3.Enter your mobile number and press ‘Send Verification Code’ button
4.You will receive verification code on mobile, enter that number in box there and press ‘Finish setup’
5.Done!


These notifications are restricted to limited carriers; hope Google will increase the list gradually. Currently, in India only these carriers are providing notifications

* Vodafone-Mumbai
* Vodafone-Delhi
* Vodafone-Gujarat
* Hutchison Essar Cellular Limited
* Vodafone-Kolkata
* Spice Karnataka
* Spice Punjab

Orkut! Now, read & write in pure multilingual mode!

'MTV Youth Icon' is now became multilingual!

Now, Orkut scrapings are easy with various languages. Writing in Indian language was never so much easy before. Usually, while typing in english, we write non-english word as per it's pronunciation. And now, we don’t need to change that style. As you'll type text, it'll change into language you selected.


We are familiar with T9 mode in mobile messaging, similar way if there are many combinations from one english word, it’ll suggest possible multilingual options.

Orkut already started with multilingual service, with showing profile in multi languages. You can change your profile language from Home > Setting > General > display language


After changing my profile into ‘Marathi’ language, it is looking like this.

Social Bookmarking, a new trend in links sharing.

Have you heard about tagging? And wonder why people are using ‘tagging’ more and more. Do you know about del.icio.us? Are you using your browser for saving bookmarks? Then, you are still behind in web 2.0 world. More than two-million users are using del.icio.us. And many more are using Digg, StumbleUpon, Furl, Google bookmarks, Yahoo MyWeb.

These sites let you share your Internet bookmarks on their websites. You can access those and also can view others by searching on the site. Generally, for adding bookmark you need to add link, title and description.

del.icio.us uses collaborative filtering including searching. Where digg.com combines bookmarking, blogging and syndication. In Google, you can add & manage links using your 'Web History' service.


Look at this report from Addthis.com.

See the image link below this article with the text ‘Bookmark’, using which you can bookmark this blog. Once you click on it, you will see the list of social bookmark sites available.

One phone number world wide! from Google.

As we change our locations, job or phone service; there are many people we need to inform and update about our new phone number. Many times old numbers are connected with business records, finance records and government records. What will be the solution for this to make life better?

Take this case, You have a landline and couple of cell phones. What if you want to receive a call on landline only when you are home? What if you want to receive a call on your cell phone one when you are in office? And what if you want to receive a call on some other cell phone when you are out of town?

And what happens when a person calls particular number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time?

What if we have one phone number for all your phones, for life? This is the basic idea behind ‘GrandCentral’, telecom management startup acquired by Google in july this year. Whenever, your GrandCentral number called, your chosen phone ring. You can choose a phone based on the time of the day.


GrandCentral has a web interface and also available on mobile. There you can manage your all call routing and access to voicemails. It also provide various other services like caller id, call block, call recording, call forward, switch line during call, voicemail greeting etc.

Currently, this service is in beta stage and has access to invites only. Did you get one?

The web is becoming smarter..

Right now you are reading my Blog - Google knows. Google knows which page you came here from, and which page you'll go to from here. Google knows how many times you've visited this page. Google knows how many minutes you were on this page. It also knows your each and every minute activity on page including your machine id, clicks, browser, connection speed, OS, new/old viewer, resign you are accessing the page, does your browser support Java and Flash and everything. It gets recorded into Google’s database.

How is it done, huh? It’s done with a simple a JavaScript code. All actions are tracked and sent to Google server. The basic purpose of keeping records is online advertising; as per user habits and region for targeted marketing and advertising.

Like Google there are some other services on web, which keeps tracking users’ activities. It will track your browsing habits and searching habits. The next time you will search, you’ll get result based on your habits.


In this year Google acquired DoubleClick, who develops and provides Internet ad serving services. DoubleClick’s website was linked with the controversy over spyware which was tracking users using cookies and IP addresses. It currently has the world largest data of buyers, which includes his/her IP address, browser, operating system, ISP, bandwidth, time of day etc. Google + DoubleClick = your privacy sold out, is this true?

This is the main reason Microsoft is suing Google against DoubleClick deal to avoid potential monopolistic effect. lol, are these words, monopoly and Microsoft related somewhere?! ;)

Did you watch this awesome video before? Its time to re-think our privacy!

Baidu, New challenge in search!

"We've got a lot of work to do to differentiate ourselves in search and advertising. We're number three, working to be number two, and working to be number one."

Does Steve Ballmer know that while he is dreaming for it, Microsoft placed fourth behind Google, Yahoo and Chinese Web portal Baidu in search.

Baidu, which is analogous to Google, provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. It started service from Japan. Now, Baidu provide several searches like mapping, finance, video, books, wap, blog including Image and mp3 seach.

From the current survey from web analysts comScore today Google is powering half of the world's web searches. For the month of August’07, total internet searches were 61 billion, out of that
1. Google searches: 37 billion
2. Yahoo! searches: 8.5 billion
3. Baidu searches: 3.2 billion
4. MSN searches: 2.1 billion

View this ‘the first comprehensive study of worldwide search activity’ report from comScore.

Web Syndication, today!

Syndication means the distribution a news article through some medium. It’s making information on a website available for a wide range of uses. There are mainly two syndication protocols used RSS and Atom. The latest version of RSS 2.0 seems to be the standard used for many news sites, blogs, podcasts, however Atom is probably technically superior.

Web frameworks and software packages now feature basic support for syndication technologies such as RSS 2.0 and the Atom Syndication Format.

Now, whenever you visit a blog or news site and want to know what the updates are going on there, you can very easily subscribe for the RSS feed by clicking on RSS icon in the address bar of the browser IE 7 or Firefox 2. And then you have to choose your favorite reader. Thats it!

There are desktop applications using which we can read RSS, but the most popular RSS readers now seem to be online services such as iGoogle, Google Reader, Bloglines and many more. If you are viewing this blog on http://mycodefactory.blogspot.com , you can see the icons which is saying ‘Add to Google’, ’Add to Yahoo’, ‘Add to AOL’ are the feed links. Those you can add to your RSS readers online and as my blog get updated, you will come to know in your reader. This is called blog subcription. Those icons are well known as chicklets.

And simple way to subscribe for my blog is to enter your email address and press subscribe!

Does adobe have an eye on Fauxto?

Web applications are applications which are accessed via web using internet or intranet. The main advantage of web application is ability to maintain and update without installation on client machine.

As web 2.0 progresses, RIA that is Rich Internet Applications started popping up on web, which has features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. People started working on flash based applications, and flex technology emerged. As flex was setting up on the web Ajax based applications with no proprietary like flex entered in. And it started a new era for webapps. Techies started comparing both Ajax and Flex. We will come to know which will sustain down the line.

As of now both flex and ajax based applications are used in web 2.0. Google’s gmail, Google suggest, Google maps and many services are Ajax based. However, Google’s chat gadget, Yahoo’s online chat, online streaming media like YouTube are using flex/flash technologies.

Office applications started online and spread to wide by the initiative by Google doc, spreadsheet and presentation. Now photo editing applications are also started entry in this new web. Check out these online photos editing applications comparison.

Apart from these, one application which really dragged my attention is flex based online photoshop, having very basic tools to play with image yet. Fauxto providing Canvas, Toolbar, Image info, Color info, Layer info with few Filters and Zoom in/out facility. Image crop, transform, editing is possible in it.

Adobe must be waiting for mature development in Fauxto, probably this will be their next acquisition after Buzzword.

There is a big fight ahead

Improvement in Communication between people, Improvement in Communication between separate software applications & Improvement in Web interfaces are major hit in web 2.0.

Many social networking sites Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube etc are connecting people worldwide. Web standards like XML, RSS etc for describing and accessing data, using which online applications are exchanging data within themselves. High use of single sign-in with wide range of online application, services as Google, Yahoo! providing. Real-time responsive applications using Ajax, Flex technologies are popping-up only in one browser window.

Now, when Google, Yahoo & Microsoft are having really tough competition these days among them, Adobe jumped into with acquiring Buzzword, a web-based word processor, a Flex-based RIA that represents the future of online collaboration. Before, adobe also announced Adobe AIR, Its Adobe Integrated Runtime, is a cross-OS runtime environment for building Rich Internet Applications, using Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application.

There is a big fight ahead.

Picasa Web, photo sharing web app from Google

A web 2.O application integrated with its desktop brother Picasa, having two modes of uploading photos. First is online, by creating online album and web upload option. Second is using Picasa on desktop which upload photos in bulk.

PicasaWeb uses an "unlisted number" approach for URLs for private photo albums. This allows a user to email a private album's URL to anyone s/he wants; the recipient can view the album without having to create a user account.

Other than this sharing feature, PicasaWeb is integrated with Google’s mapping service. While creating an album, it also takes an optional field, 'Location' and map comes beside it will point a location there. This will not only show album location, but also offer to place a picture in the map where we want it to relat. This is the cool thing I found in PicasaWeb.


Start sharing and mapping your album now!

Ref
Picasa Web
Picasa Desktop
Wiki – Picasa

iGoogle, making life integrated!

One more interesting thing I’m using more in web 2.O is Internet Gadgets. I remember before using it, I used to surf few sites here and there. I need to search for the related information and it was very much unmanaged.

RSS feeds; it was a solution for many news related sites, but how to use it on internet instead using few different desktop applications?!

I was often using google for many simple tasks like for many types of conversions, tips and tricks, stock values, keeping watch on portfolio, technology updates, dictionary, wiki-ing and mapping. With all this checking email, connecting with pals using IMs, todos, calendar.

Internet Gadget is perfect solution from RSS feeds to many small web & personal tasks. I’m using iGoogle for integrating, with wide range of gadgets classified in News, Tools, Communication, Fun & Games, Finance, Sports, Lifestyle, Technology.We can also create our own gadget and share.

Checkout Features, Themes, Compatibility on Wiki for iGoogle

Web 2.0

The concept of "Web 2.0" began when the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. In the dot-com boom some of the web-sites which survived in collapse had something in common to make an impact point for the web.

The term became popular following the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. This is not the upgrade for any technical specification, however new version of for World Wide Web.

Watch this awesome video.



Ref
What Is Web 2.0
Wikipedia - Web 2.0