TechnologyDriven

The social bookmarking service del.icio.us, one of the first and most famous Web2.0-sites, is about to redesign it’s user-interface and to introduce some new features. There’s a preview available at http://preview.delicious.com, but only for invited users.

Some of the planned new features include extended sorting options for bookmarks, bulk tag editing, better organization and sorting of friends and watched people and a new search engine.

(from TechCrunch)

A new online music player called Spool.fm is out there since a few weeks. It has a nice and clear AJAX-based user-interface, and a tidy feature called “listen with a friend” that allows you to share a song you listen to with a friend in real-time!

I am wondering where they take all the songs from?

(from SocialMash (german))

Google recently launched a service called “MyMaps” which allows you to easily create map mashups (provided that you have a Google account).

“Users are able to create their own maps and mark them public or private. The annotation tools that are provided are very simple and easy to use. Users are able to add lines, polygons and placemarks. They can edit those placemarks with HTML, images, and video. Once a map is created it is very easy to share it and syndicate it via KML. Items found during a local search can be added to a map with a click. Places found via GeoRSS or KML files can also be added to a map.”

(from O’Reilly Radar)

The nice little mashup “Last.tv” let’s you watch videos from YouTube that match the music of your (or another) last.fm account.

Yahoo! recently released a new service called “Pipes“, which allows to visually build mashups, i.e. mix, merge and sort data from different RSS-sources into a single RSS-feed, called the “pipe”.

Pipes are created in a visual editor (which you can see above), so no programming skills are necessary to access the data-sources and combine them. This visual tool is very similar to a tool called “Visual Composer” from SAP, which you can see here:

With Visual Composer you can build applications based on SAP function-modules or web-services, also without writing a single line of code.

Probably no end-user will create those kind of mashups or composed applications, it is still to “technical” to do it, but it makes it much easier for people who are skilled to do so. Therefore a large number of those apps will be available, each one adapted and optimized for it’s single purpose, perhaps combined of other apps, so the end user has a bigger chance to get what he just needs.

(from O’Reilly Radar)

Technorati: yahoo pipes mashups web2.0

This fantastic video very understandingly shows the development of the web to today’s “Web 2.0“. It focuses on the change of publications forms, from HTML-based web-pages to XML-based RSS-feeds, from text to multimedia, from static web-sites to collaborative and social web-services:

Here you can find a list of the best Web 2.0 sites, clearly arranged into several categories.

You could say there are enough online- and web2.0-style calendar-/organizer-app’s out there to find one that fit’s your needs, like Google Calendar, 30 Boxes, KiKo, … But there is a new one coming up that looks “very interesting” to say the least: Scrybe.

Scrybe seems to be kind of “revolutionary” in at least tow ways: it is accessible offline (though browser-based) and has a really novel way of how users interact with the calendar-app.

Have a look at their demo-video and form your own view on it:

(from Techcrunch)

By the way, what I see there reminds me a little bit of what I saw from SAP’s “Project Muse“, which is Flash-based (Apollo) and is to feature offline-capabilities too…

Writely and Google spreadsheets are now combined as “Google Docs & Spreadsheets“, which includes that the writely brand has also been removed. Google’s office-suite assumes shape.

(from Web2.0 Explorer)

Forbes reviewed some of “The Best Web-Based Computer Applications For Small Business”, and thus gives us a very good overview of the leading office 2.0-apps available today. They covered everything from calendar and email over information managers to spreadsheets and word processors.

(from Apolemia)