2008 : The Web3.0 year

2008 : Year of Cross Social Networking Applications= Web 3.0 by my mind

2008 will be a year where we should see much of cross social network applications like Bunchball come up. This will lead to much more closer interactions among the social networks and we may see some Data Mining Applications coming up as a result of these interactions, something like Google Analytics if you will.

It will be interesting to see how Open Social fares with this challenge.

Advertising on these Data Mining Applications may be interesting as one of the Social Networks may be big and have a proprietary ad-mechanism while the other may not have so. This is going to open up new grounds in advertisting business models.

It will make the world a lot smaller and hopefully secure place to be in.

No doubt, with more social interactions and cross-connections, we will have grave privacy issues too. Privacy will be THE main concern with these new applications. Data Mining Applications will also have the ability to sell-off whatever data is mined to other 3rd parties and that will make quite a lot of ruckus.

Here’s hoping for the best- Welcome 2008

BunchBall: A real cross-social-networking App

BunchBall is a new application that is able to connect Facebook and Bebo, and that too in real time. This makes 2008 a very very interesting year to watch. I am sure that we will get to see these cross networking features soon. More on BunchBall here

That makes a good competition for Open Social.

I think 2008 will be year of the web3.0

An ideal web2.0 student application

My ideal web2.0 student application will have the following features :-

1. Tracks the student’s School notes
2. Tracks the student’s School artifacts/records
3. Tracks the student’s GRE/GMAT/SAT scores
4. Tracks the student’s various emotions and phases of growth
5. Has feeds coming in from various educational sites regarding exam dates, tips on preparation, etc
6. Has a graph which tracks his scores
7. Has feeds for various online tests which the student can relate to and improve
8. Has his private den area where all non-school stuff can be taken care of

These make the ideal application; 2.0 becos the students are inherently impatient

Wonder if there is anything out there which does these. It will be really helpful to a lot many folks.

Google – A 1-trick pony??

Comscore figures indicate that Google maintains its lead as the top search company with Google Search drawing most of the traffic.

Techcrunch has covered this in an article over here .

“It would appear that users aren’t using Google to buy goods, with Google’s worst performer in 2007 being Google Product Search (shopping), down a whopping 73.26%. Google Scholar search dropped 32.14% and perhaps oddly in a year that Google added YouTube videos to its index, Google Video search dropped 11.82%.”
I have been stating long that Google has its core competency in Search but just does not do justice to the other features it puts out. There has to be coherency in what it does. Some of these features seem abysmally layman-ish.

Mind you, the features are good in their own right but not something that one would invest his company’s resources on. So yes, in a way, it is good to have these features come out but then until and unless there is a commercial scheme of things behind it, Google is not going to see any great growth in its Active Repertoire(Search) like features. It will remain  a 1-trick pony for me.

On the other hand, what will be interesting is if Google incorporates the facial mapping/recognition feature in its Image Search. This will be really very handy and I am sure ppl will be willing to pay for the same. This is a very much sought after feature. Google can come up with Google Collage and that will be a good thing too as ppl do maintain online Albums where there is no intelligence to map similar/same fotos together yet.

TechCruch has also carried out an assessment on the popularity of the mail services – Yahoo and Gmail and states that Yahoo Mail is way ahead of Google.  This may be so becos ppl are not comfortable changing email accounts and that may also be because of the track record and the user experience with the service. Google is a relatively new entrant but has to think seriously if it needs to even compete with Yahoo. These are small things for Google but then on a bigger scale of things, these convey impressions of testing its features on live guinea pigs. The Google Brand is taking a beating by putting out some of the features that do not merit being out so long. You make an experiment, make it within a specific time period and then shut it down. This will help you get the data you want and also tell the users of user time-bound service that it is not going to go any further than that. This builds credibility.  I am not really sure what Google plans to do with its email feature. There has to be more to it or nothing at all.

The Google Ecosystem has to be solid and coherent. Google could do well with providing localized enhancements. For example, I am in India, Delhi. If I have to get something done for me locally, where is it that I look at. Right now,I make a mass ping on Google Search but it would be more pertinent to have something like Google Delhi or something in which all the local info is stored. Google has the cash to do it and this is something that has not been done before. So y leave it? Instead of providing generic features, it will be good to provide pointed local features which actually address live human needs. This is more satisfying and relevant to all concerned and ppl will be ready to pay for it if need be (though initially it must be free to get ppl used to the idea).

2008 will be interesting. Google will be gifted DoubleClick and then we will see …