Web Development Live

The 2008 Horizon Report, compiled by US thinktanks the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, was released as part of Educause’s annual conference and identified six technologies likely to affect learning institutions over the next two to five years, including mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence and the social operating system.

“The next generation of social-networking systems ?social operating systems ?will change the way we search for, work with and understand information, by placing people at the centre of the network,” stated the report.

“This seemingly subtle change ?from an emphasis on file-sharing to one on relationships ?will have a profound impact on the way we will work, play, create and interact online,” the report claimed.

According to the report’s authors, the central tenet of the social operating system is that it collates existing information from a user’s “social graph” ?assorted information on an individual’s social and professional interactions embedded across the web ?to “connect the dots” between individuals, content and contacts.

Flock, which was founded in 2005, allows users to easily monitor social-networking sites by integrating them into the browser. When a user logs into a site such as Facebook, Flock allows the user to see what is happening with their friends in its sidebar, keeping track of status and comments. If, for example, a friend uploads a picture, the user will get an update and be able to drag or share that picture with other friends in other social networks.

“This is not the old model to click on a website and go from site to site in a fragmented experience,” Flock chief executive Shawn Hardin said. “We have a core mission to put the user at the centre of their online universe”.

Hardin believes Flock’s browser experience is the biggest step in browser development since “Netscape took a stream of 0s and 1s and created a visual interface”.

The user experience is now changing from information being consumed to being communicated, according to Hardin, who hopes Flock will make an impact as big Netscape: “We aspire to be part of this key inflection, as Netscape was years ago.”

Hardin claims that since version 1.0 was released in November, users have been increasing by around 10 to 20 percent per week ?with a total of 2.5 million downloads over the last year. Hardin said this compares with 130 million Firefox users and 1.4 billion Internet Explorer users.

Although the demise of Netscape is sad, Hardin said, its spirit lives on: “Netscape is still at the heart of Firefox and Flock.” He added that a significant part of his development team created Netscape 8.

Hardin doesn’t see Flock as a direct competitor to Firefox because he is only interested in the 100 to 200 million users who are regular social-networking users.

Perceived shortages in the industry jumped from 4.2 percent last year to 6.8 percent this year, a national survey of IT salaries and employment trends has found.

Just under 40 percent of respondents indicated recruitment and retention issues, a significant increase on the 29 percent reported last year.

The report warns employers to budget for increased training, with 73 percent of those who said there was a need for new skills planning to get hold of them by retraining existing staff.

Nokia announced at the end of January that, pending regulatory approval, it was to acquire Trolltech. The Norwegian company makes a cross-platform application-development framework called Qt, which is used in the KDE desktop Linux environment and in applications like Google Earth and Skype. Qtopia is a mobile version of Qt, and has already been used in many mobile Linux-based handsets in the Asian market.

On Monday, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Trolltech announced that version 4.3 of Qtopia would be able to run on touchscreen-enabled devices and support data synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook. Qtopia’s start-up time is also now “50 percent” faster and its audio and graphical capabilities have been improved, Trolltech claimed.

Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech is seen as a way to help it become an application provider whose products are able to run not only on mobile devices made by a wide range of manufacturers, but on all desktop operating systems as well.

The buyout will also give Nokia a point of entry into the LiMo Foundation, of which Trolltech is a member. LiMo is a consortium of operators, manufacturers and software developers that aims to create a shared mobile Linux platform, although it notably uses GTK+, rather than Qt, as its development toolkit.

With half the world’s population soon owning a mobile phone, the opportunity to reach more people on the web via a mobile device is huge. Research firm Gartner predicts that worldwide mobile advertising revenue will grow from less than $1bn last year to $11bn in 2011. Google has already been adapting its web search, mapping service, and advertising tools to work on mobile phones. And it’s even bidding in a US auction of wireless spectrum and developing software for mobile phones.

The company has also spearheaded the Open Handset Alliance ?which advocates open standards for mobile software ?in an effort to co-ordinate its work with that of handset makers, chip developers, application developers and mobile-phone operators.

Because Google has dominated search and advertising on the traditional internet, the expectation is that the company will also take the mobile market by storm using the same tools and the same strategies. But shoehorning its existing web tools and applications onto a tiny mobile phone isn’t going to be easy. If Google is not careful, it may find itself chasing some new, innovative start-up that figures out how to out-Google Google in mobile.

“In some ways Google is now the incumbent,” said Farhad Divecha, director of the search and mobile marketing firm AccuraCast. “Their search products and advertising tools aren’t the best right now, so there’s a good chance someone could come in and do it better.”

Back to basics with search Google first came on the scene a decade ago with a new search algorithm that could serve up better and more relevant content to users than had ever been done before. So while other companies, such as Alta Vista and Yahoo, had been in the search business for years before Google came along, it was this giant leap forward in the user experience that catapulted the company to success.

It is not surprising that search was one of the first tools Google adapted for mobile phones. And by most accounts the tool works fine. When used with the Google Maps application, mobile users can even search for local restaurants and get directions to each establishment.

But critics of Google’s mobile search tool say its results aren’t always as relevant as results from a desktop Google search. Another common complaint is that Google provides search results from regular web pages and tries to trans-code them for mobile phones. Often these sites don’t render well on certain phones.

Yahoo Go, a similar application, is considered more robust and more user-friendly than Google’s search tool.

On Monday, ICANN, the organisation that maintains the internet’s addressing systems, said it had for the first time added IPv6 addresses to the appropriate files and databases on six of the world’s 13 root server networks. Before it did this, those who were using IPv6 had no choice but to run it alongside IPv4, because the root server networks were IPv4-only.

“IPv6 will be an essential part [of] our future, and support in the root servers is essential to the growth, stability and reliability of the public internet,” said the chair of ICANN’s internet service and connectivity provider constituency, Tony Holmes. “The ISP community welcomes this development as part of the continuing evolution of the public internet.”

Almost all IP addresses currently use the fourth version of the protocol (IPv4), but the length of those addresses limits their number of permutations to around four billion. As more people become connected to the internet and as more devices are manufactured that can themselves intelligently connect to the internet, that number is rapidly becoming insufficient.

Businesses are now being urged to start migrating to the sixth version of the internet protocol (IPv6). As it uses a longer string of characters, this version makes it possible to have more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion possible unique addresses. IPv6 has already been in use for a while in large corporations, where many employees need to be hooked up to a semi-private network, but ICANN’s latest move marks the start of the wider migration.

David Conrad, ICANN’s vice president of research, said the addition of IPv6 addresses for the root servers “enhances the end-to-end connectivity for IPv6 networks, and furthers the growth of the global interoperable internet”.

Nominet is the not-for-profit company that runs the .uk registry. Speaking to ZDNet.co.uk on Tuesday, Nominet’s director of IT, Jay Daley, said the onus was now on those running large websites to make the transition to IPv6.

Microsoft announcedon Fridaythat it was making a further attemptto acquireYahoo after approaching the company’s board in February 2007. If the deal goes through ?and many think it will ?it could go some way to closing the gapMicrosoft and Yahoo have endured between themselvesand web-adleader Google.

“Microsoft needs to beef up its content capabilities,” said analyst Andy Buss of Canalys. “Google is becoming a behemoth and Microsoft has been feeling left out.” As well as chipping away at Google’s 75 percent share of the online-advertising market, Microsoft also wants to use Yahoo’s online users to drive a move to subscription services, he said.

“Yahoo used to be a leader, but it has been struggling under the onslaught of Google’s development of internet-based services,” said Buss. Combining forces removes one competitor and could build an online presence that might finally reverse Google’s rise, he added.

Microsoft is making no secret of the fact that it wants Yahoo not so much for its technology but its members. The online-advertising business relies on scale, pointed out Chris Liddell, chief financial officer for Microsoft, on a conference call on Friday to discuss the proposed deal.

“Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers,” wrote Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer in his letter to the Yahoo board.

The two companies combined can get better economies of scale, said Ballmer, to compete with Google, and “offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers and publishers”. Microsoft is expected to use Yahoo’s research and development arms to augment its own software-as-a service offerings, and combine the two user bases of Yahoo and MSN/Windows Live into one.

Gnome is, along with KDE, one of the two major desktop environments used with Linux-based operating systems. Aside from managing the graphical windowing portion of the OS, it includes a number of applications, such as a web browser, email client, configuration manager and other components.

Gnome is the favoured desktop environment for Ubuntu, the most popular desktop-oriented Linux distribution. According to Ubuntu, it ispreferred by around two-thirds of Ubuntu users, and is also used in embedded devices such as Nokia’s N810 tablet.

One of the more drastic changes in the latest Gnome release is a change to the back-end engine of the built-in Epiphany web browser.From using the same Gecko engine found in Firefox and related browsers, Epiphany will switch to WebKit, the KHTML-based rendering engine found in Apple’s Safari and Mac OS X, KDE’s Konqueror and other applications.

WebKit is integrated with the upcoming Qt v4.4 application development framework. Qt could soon become more widespread in embedded devices followingNokia’s acquisition of Trolltech, Qt’s developer.

Previously, Google’s mobile search offered a search box and several radio buttons for different types of results ?images, news, the web and so on. Under the new system, Google has mingled all types of results together, and organised it based on what mobile users are most likely to be looking for.

Another tweak is the way the service handles local information ?another main interest of mobile users. Previously, to get local search results, a user would have to enter a postcode along with the search terms and then scroll down to the local business listings button. Now, a user has only to enter the postcode once, and all subsequent searches will remember that location. For instance, a search for a term such a restaurant, coffee shop or weather will take users straight to relevant local information.

Accenture’s head of research and development, Martin Illsley, on Monday advised businesses that mashups, web applications combined with more traditional business software, were becoming increasingly useful but have to be managed so as not to overwhelm IT departments.

“Systems can be integrated in a lightweight manner,” said Illsley. “But mashups and the like have to be managed very well or they drift out of the IT department into many departments. Most IT departments are aware of that and spend an awful lot of time trying to keep things together.”

While there are tangible business benefits to allowing employees to create their own combinations of applications, Illsley said,there has to be a balance between “stifling the process by making it go through 20 stages” and loss of control of the application.

“Today, if you want to build integrated back-end and front-end systems, you use technologies like Google Maps with lightweight APIs [application programming interfaces], whereas you used to buy several packages and integrate them into a framework,” said Illsley. “These days organisations can throw applications together quite quickly.”

Illsley said that businesses should be cautious of other Web 2.0 practices. While “crowd-sourcing” technologies ?used to formulate ideas among large groups ?could prove very fruitful for companies, businesses should be wary of such technologies until they mature, he said.