Most of us are curious on what is going to be the outcome on the battle between Apple and Adobe.  Recently the news has it that Apple will not be using Adobe Flash on their mobile OS  for any of its products like Iphone, Ipod, Ipad and other I’s to follow in the mobile space.

To end the speculation Steve Jobs has decided to clarify Apple’s stand on Adobe Flash products.  The following content has been directly replicated from the Apple website for the benefit of my our readers.

Thoughts on Flash:

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

First, there’s “Open”.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Second, there’s the “full web”.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

I am awaiting Adobe’s response on this letter from Steve Jobs.  There is one article which outlines Adobe’s Chief response to apple’s letter you can read it here

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In today’s day and age we are surrounded by the web world and most of our time due to work or personal reasons is spent online.  For most of us Internet has become our lifeline and increasingly people are looking at creating digital assets of their own on the World Wide Web. I have created my own Synergy Technology Services | SynergyHr | GigaThoughts and I am sure  you might be managing  websites, blogs, micro sites and other social media for personal or professional use directly or indirectly.  We put in a lot of effort to make sure we create good user experience for our visitors. At the same time we keep hearing how important it is to implement these terms SEO, Social Media marketing, online marketing, LinkedIn, Facebook and the list is endless.

Again I am sure everyone is aware that enhancing web presence is an ongoing activity and it needs constant evaluation and measurement of its effectiveness to go on and make it even better.  Over time I have been a victim of this funda that once we implement something new, we ask our immediate network and take feedback. We measure it for a while and then assume that the changes we implemented are showing results and leave it there.

The purpose of the article to share awesome tools that I have used to measure and improve online effectiveness and it can be useful to beginners and experienced people as well. There is a company called hubspot they provide software as a service to improve inbound marketing for your organization.  In addition to their inbound marketing software they have developed some really handy measurement tools that can be useful and individuals alike.

Website Grader: This tool evaluates effectiveness of your website from an SEO perspective.  This is one tool that gives me a detailed analysis on how my blog is performing.  You will see a badge that displays website grader rank it’s 98 out of 100 for GigaThoughts

Twitter Grader: Evaluates your twitter account by giving an overall rank and also gives ranks for your followers and the ones you are following. Grade for GigaThoughts is 82 out  of 100

Gobbledygook Grader: This is another impressive effort it helps you evaluate your content for Gobbledygook words. This simply means use of jargons which cannot be easily understood and this one really helps in simplifying the content to a large extent. This article content has been graded 91 out of 100.

Press Release Grader: Very helpful for PR people and for most of us it’s always good to get your press release graded as it helps in identifying its marketing effectiveness score.  We don’t have press release for GigaThoughts but I have tried this at professional level and I can recommend that.

Facebook Grader: This does the same for Facebook for business pages, individual pages or individual accounts. GigaThoughts page grade is 15 out of 100 and my individual account has grade 67 out of 100

I haven’t used the following tools myself but looking at the other tools I am sure these will be good enough as well and worth giving a try

• Action Grader
• FourSquare  Grader
• Book Grader
• Alerts Grader

I would urge you guys to try these tools and let me know your feedback.

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All of us surf the web on a daily basis and for most of us we are always online.  While reading various feeds in my Google Reader I came across this interesting post and I would like to share the details with the readers of this blog.  This post provides statistical information on internet usage in 2009 things like

• How many websites were added
• How many emails were sent
• How many internet users surfed the web
• Web servers in use
• Information of domain names
• Social media statistics
• Information on images
• Information on web browsers
• Information on malicious software

The content below is replicated from the original post on www.entireweb.com

Email usage statistics in 2009

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• 22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

• 62.7% – Internet Explorer
• 24.6% – Firefox
• 4.6% – Chrome
• 4.5% – Safari
• 2.4% – Opera
• 1.2% – Other

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Reference for internet usage statistics in 2009

Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

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Google’s latest browser sizing tool will help developers and website owners to evaluate the amount of content viewed by their users.  The tool loads your webpage behind a colour full matrix which indicates the % of people who can see specific point on your webpage. By adding this tool Google has further strengthen its offerings in the web analytics space.  I constantly use Google Analytics to monitor my blog traffic and have been using various webmaster tools to optimize the blog.  A new tool from Google is always welcome and not loosing much time I evaluated my own blog to  check if it was useful only to developers or  also to site owners and publishers like me.

Visual evaluation of my blog:

Analysis of my blog:

• 30% of my visitors will not be able to see my banner ad which says advertise for free. If even you can’t then you can check this link here
• 40% of my visitors will not be able to see connect to Facebook icon on my blog
• 20% of my visitors will not be able to see the submit button to my RSS feed
• 20% of my visitors will not be able to see the following:
  • Team behind this blog
  • What we recommend
  • Our rankings across prominent sites – like blogged
  • Most importantly the second post on the blog

I plan to make certain changes and conduct a test run

I am going to  test run by:

• Moving the banner to the left so the visibility will be improved by 25%
• Making connect with Twitter and Facebook icons smaller in size to improve visibility
• Moving the subscribe button will be a design call so might take it up later

I will be keeping a close eye on Google analytics for the next whole week specifically on these links to see if the analysis is true.

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The latest Hollywood offering, ‘2012‘, is a $200 million movie about the end of the world is based on myths backed by the Mayan calendar.  Since the first promotion and marketing event of the movie 2012 there has been a casual buzz about world coming to an end and people are highly curious about the prediction.   In the past there have been numerous predictions about the world coming to an end.

To me the Barack Obama online marketing campaign was the best in terms of strategy and execution. The team at Sony has similarly done a great job at strategizing and executing online marketing campaign for the movie 2012.

Online marketing Lessons we can learn from 2012’s.

Strategy

• The What: Exploit people’s fears and generate curiosity amongst the target audience
• The Where: social media – primarily websites, Facebook pages, myspace twitter and video viral
• The How: Use of organic Google search coupled with highly focused SEO, SMO and SEM activities

Execution

It all started with a phrase “Find out the truth, search Google for 2012″. This prompted people to do just that and as a result in Google and SEO parlance the key phrase was searched over and over again in very short period of time. This increased the SEO value of that keyword and since it was passed around over various social networking sites there was a huge viral effect. Initially 2012 was not ranking first in Google it came right up there in couple of days

Big Viral effect

Search Google for 2012 the movie and you will see loads of articles, websites, videos, images, fan pages, groups, social organizations, NGO’s and last but not the least even NASA has to get into the act.  This topic appeals to wide variety of audience the viral effect was very strong and fast, this can be clearly seen in the research on Google Trends

Google Trends

Alexa Ranking

In addition to the official movie site, whowillsurvive2012.com, the search results pages include Wikipedia pages as well as Web sites built by devotees of the Mayan doomsday prophecy, lending more credibility to the premise of the film. You’ll find the same type of results at Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.

There has been a negative impact of this marketing campaign as well, since the news that the world is going to end by 2012 spread like wild fire authorities like NASA has been bombarded with people asking them to question if the world would really end.  The authorities at NASA had to create a FAQ page on their website clarifying that the nothing wrong is going to happen.

To me the marketing campaign of the movie 2012 is a huge success considering its effectiveness online coupled with its offline marketing and promotions activities.

Movie reviews for 2012 look promising the world over,I only hope that the movie lives up to the hype and expectation.

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I always thought Money can help you buy materialistic things but certainly not family and friends.  Today I came across a company that helps you do just that and I was really amazed to learn that now you can buy friends.  With the advent of social media and everyone is trying to establish their brand online and wants to be present across social media sites and the first notion is to get maximum followers, friends, connections, whatever you want to call it.  The base idea to generate lot of contacts which supposedly are interested in your products or services and you can use these contacts to create a marketing exercise around this data.  Since everyone is feeling the heat and really don’t have a success formula to create a database (so called fans and followers) of people across social media sites there comes this company uSocial who wants to capitalize on this need and make their millions ;-)

Services offered by uSocial

Regular services

• Front page services – basically getting on first page of dig, yahoo buzz and other social media bookmarking sites
• Press release distribution – the same old thing

Interesting Services

Now these are the services where money can buy you friends and followers

• Facebook marketing service
  • Buy Facebook friends – how to increase Facebook friends
  • Buy Facebook fans – how to increase Facebook fans

The packages depends on the number of fans your desire and in multiple of thousands. You can increase the number of Facebook friends and fans from 0 to 10000 and the pricing starts form $100 to $700 for 1000 to 10000 contacts respectively.

• Twitter marketing services
  • Buy twitter followers - how to increase followers on twitter

They do the same thing on twitter and the packages depends on the number of followers you desire the range starts form 1000 and goes up to 100000 twitter followers and the pricing starts from $87 to $3500.

They claim that via both services they will help you get friends and followers based on your target audience.

My views on the model:

I think just like in the real world you cannot buy friends and family and more importantly when you use social media for business then in that case you cannot buy customers.  The basic idea is that you need to slowly build your presence via these social media sites and deliver value to your potential customers.  If you resort to buying friends, followers, connections, contacts then they will just be there in your contact list and will not prove to be of any value.  The key is not to have thousands of followers because it is going to be virtually impossible to manage one on one relation with each and everyone and at the same time you cannot deliver value to thousands of people at the same time.

I maybe wrong but to my mind companies like uSocial are opportunists and want to make quick bucks from people who are at the start of the learning curve in social media.  According to me these auto generated contacts will prove to be absolutely useless.

What’s your take on this ?

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twitcam – developed by   Livestream and camtweet – developed by Justin.TV are utilities where anyone using their twitter login details can start streaming live to its followers, create live chat rooms and archive each streaming event.  This is not a ground breaking technological neither it’s an innovative concept.  To me it’s smart thinking and right timing on part of both companies to take advantage of their expertise and applying to the critical mass of twitter.  There is virtually no difference between twitcam and camtweet.

Twitter is certainly one of the most successful social media concepts to hit the web recently and is growing exponentially.  The more I hear about twitter’s success the more I am made to believe that micro blogging platforms will soon take over from the current main stream communication avenues like emails and blogs.  There are a lot of smart people out there who have jumped on the early innovators band wagon and developed some really cool applications around twitter and hopefully with that would have developed a business model around it as well.  The idea of developing applications and concepts around twitter is to target real time conversations and thereby making highly effective marketing campaigns.

There are many applications/utilities built around twitter and are doing reasonably well. The reason twitcam and camtweet needs a special mention is because I feel they surely are a game changer.  Services like these are likely to take tweeting to a whole new level both at personal as well as corporate marketing and relationship building exercise.

What really is live streaming on twitter?

Twitcam and camtweet are tools which lets you broadcast live using your webcam and tweet it to your followers. It’s going to be as simple as turning on your webcam and start streaming live to your followers in 3 simple steps.

• Connect your webcam
• Login using twitter credentials
• Click broadcast button.

How it can help us:

People by their very nature love interactivity and synchronous communication with other people and twitcam will help us get one step ahead of plain vanilla chat

Twitcam and camtweet will help us strengthen the relationship building exercise over the web by attaching a face and voice to each communication.  This will help us build trust and thereby resulting into stronger and deeper relationships.

• Marketers can create viral campaigns using the power of video to reach out to their customers
• Businesses can use it as a productivity tool for people working on the same project but are in different parts of the world
• Live streaming can be used by companies to provide higher level of customer services vis twitter
• Researchers can use it to understand the market better by developing greater insights into each communication
• Individuals can create their own streams and use it for fun as well as academic purpose
• Families spread over the world can have a quick live face to face update on their each family member

These are just few advantages that come to my mind when I first downloaded and tested them. I am sure moving forward people will find innovative and abstract ways of using and abusing a service like twitcam.

Livestream says that twitcam was built in about a week and uses new player tools that are going into an updated version of its API that will be released in the near future. The company hopes these will let anyone build a similar service with their own branding, and audience tools–preferably with a chat system that does not require so many tweets.

I believe that the biggest danger in developing a twitter related application is that it can be copied very easily and the early mover advantage lasts for a very short while.  It will become increasingly difficult for these companies to create a sustainable competitive advantage and ongoing revenues to justify their existence

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Facebook has announced that Digital Sky Technologies (DST), one of the leading internet investment groups globally with significant stakes in Eastern European and Russian internet businesses, has made a $200 million investment in Facebook in exchange for preferred stock, representing a 1.96 percent equity stake at a $10 billion valuation.

In addition, DST has indicated that it is planning to offer to purchase at least $100 million of Facebook common stock from existing common stockholders that would facilitate liquidity for current and former employees’ vested shares in the company.

About Facebook
Founded in February 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

About Digital Sky Technologies
DST was founded in 2005 and is the largest internet investor in the Russian-speaking and Eastern European markets and one of the leading investment groups globally to exclusively focus on internet and internet-related companies. DST is a privately held holding company backed by leading Russian and Western financial institutions. DST has offices in Moscow and London. For more information please visit http://www.dst-global.com.

Here is what some of the industry analysts say about this investment, “Facebook hasn’t yet learned to earn money, and there are delusions in the market about growth potential for these social networks. Digital Sky became a victim of such a delusion.”

My Question is Will Facebook and its other rivals Twitter, MySpace etc will be able to match the profits of their Internet predecessors?

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During the Google I/O keynote, Google utilized the opportunity to launch its new communication platform called Google Wave. We all know that Google likes to surprise the world by developing application that changes the rules of the game. This time around they have raised the bar further by launching Google Wave as an open source application. Earlier anyone outside of Google never knew what they are up to or what’s next, but this time around they have launched as open source and the lucky few who got to attend the Google I/O Keynote will all get Google Wave accounts to play with and give feedback. You can view the detailed video where Google’s VP of engineering, Vic Gundotra shared the vision behind Google Wave and where the immense possibility with HTML 5 standards to do all those cool stuff within your browser.

The way I look at it – Google Wave will provide single and integrated interface for Email, Chat, Social Media, collaborative communication, knowledge management, sharing of information and various productivity tools. It will enable Real Time communication right from your browser.  Real time communication is the next big thing to happen on the internet and Google wants to take early lead by having an army of open source developers helping them build wonderful gadgets, widgets, extensions using Google Wave API.

If Wave gets acceptance level that Gmail has today then I am sure that it will change the Social media communication landscape forever.

What all can I do with Google Wave using its single interface:

• Emails – They prefer to call it a wave as according to Google Email is dead
• IM – In a new Wave and also within an email conversation
• Micro blogging
• RSS reader
• Documents sharing and collaborative editing
• Project Management, Task allocation, and measurement (extent not knows as yet)
• Google Maps
• Games
• Post articles on my blog , receive blog comments and reply blog comments
• Social and Business networking
• Information aggregator
• Let me not forget – Search
• And much more as going forward individuals will find newer better ways to use Wave to communicate across applications.

Google Wave Features: Following are the ones that appealed to me.

• Real-time communication – Yes it surely is real time transmits character by character.
• Embedding – Google wave can be embedded on any website or blog or any online
• Extension – Just like Firefox and Word press developers will be able to develop a lot of extensions
• You can create your own wikis within Google Wave by starting a new wave and allowing multiple users to edit at the same time while managing the complete authoring rules.
• Drag and Drop – Each and every feature right from Images, Videos, and documents can be used by individual and a group. You do not have to upload anything anywhere. There is no upload functionality.
• Natural language processing and translation – you have to see it to believe it.
• Playback- watch conversation history in a playback mode.

The best thing I liked about Google Wave is that it has been released as open source and as a result anyone can develop a Wave service and have them interact with their own or with Google wave.  This will enable effective communication across the web and we the end users surely tend to gain from this wonderful application.

Companies like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare, and YouTube (these companies are just an example)representing various aspects of social media will have to rethink their strategy to create/protect their own niche by developing something even better or adopt wave as a part of their strategy. Will this hold true 6 months later after its released, you guess is probably as good as mine.

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Matt Mullenweg and a whole lot of creative and highly competent technology professionals came up with the most talked about upgrade for Wordpress called Coltrane commonly known as 2.7.1 this version is named after legendary Jazz saxophonist John Coltrane . As the wordpress team puts it “The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together” Source wordpress.org.  Check out the new set of features in 2.7.1 here

The reason i am writing this article is since it was first released on December 10^th 2008 I have been waiting to find an easy and safe way to upgrade my wordpress version 2.6.5 to the latest.  Finally it was yesterday, after 3 long months I was able to upgrade it in 10 minutes flat and without any issues.  I am sure there will be a lot of bloggers in the blogsphere who want to upgrade it to the latest version but are not able to do so for their lack of technical knowledge and fear of messing up their blogs, which otherwise are doing just fine.

I have used wordpress automatic upgrade plugin by Keith Dsouza, Ronalfy the plugin has been downloaded more than 2,00,000 times and has been updated recently on 19^th Feb 09. My sincere thanks to both of them without this plugin it would have been a herculean task for me to upgrade to the latest version.

Since the day it was updated I have been constantly doing research on what other are saying about the plugin and tracking each and every issues. Finally i decided to take the plunge and to my pleasant surprise it worked like a charm without any issues.  A word of caution, though this plugin automatically backs up you files and database I suggest you do it manually just in case something terribly goes wrong.  Also please check if your current sets of plugins are compatible with latest version 2.7.1 you can find list here .

What does the plugin really do?

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

At the end I must that that the upgrade has really lived up to its hype and Wordpress team has worked really hard on the usability factor.   Can’t wait to the see the next version of improvements you can check the proposed dates here

Share your Wordpress upgrade (Success/horror) story here.

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