Google has announced the release of a new web browser for today. The new browser will be called "Google Chrome". See more info on:

• Announcement: Fresh take on browser
• John Resig on the Process Manager
• John Battelle claiming this is Web OS
• Tim Anderson on a Bad day for Firefox

Having read the rather long strip introducing the new browser, which details the process model (each page will have a browser process, to avoid hanging the entire browser), its memory model (tied to the process model), its user interface style (with tabs for entire pages including the URL or smart bar and detachable pages so that you can run GMail as a stand alone program), its programmers support (using extensions, Google Gears, and more)... I agree with the shared conclusion that this will be more than a browser and could easily get a large users base. Truly it might affect Firefox, but to the public at large Mozilla is not a known brand, Google is. So this is more more direct attack to Microsoft, offers a complete alternative to the .NET architecture (with its own JavaScript virtual machine and garbage collector, for example). Plus it will be open source. Not a bad move... I'm only sad I'll have little time in the next few days as I'm busy with the Delphi 2009 book.

Digg is, in it own words, “democratizing digital media. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you.”

http://www.digg.com

User can “digg” news items and select them, and as more users add their votes, the news gains relevance. Votes of frequent contributors have more weight than votes of other users, which at times stirs some controversy. Originally focusing on technology only, digg now covers all kind of news, including political ones, and media in general. Like users of an online community, Digg users can have their personal profiles online. Mine is at:

      http://digg.com/users/marcocantu
    

A similar site, which predates Digg, is Delicious. At this site, people can collect their own links, tag them, and share their links. The site can use the “collective intelligence” to show the most popular pages for a given tag:

      http://del.icio.us
    

This is how Delicious defines tags: “A tag is simply a word you use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the web.”

Amazon has probably been the most successful company to start a business selling goods form the Internet, books at first, followed by CDs, DVDs, and now almost everything (from gardening tools to hard-to-find food ingredients). As you certainly know, its US site (as there are other localized and regional versions) is at:

      http://www.amazon.com
    

One of the features pioneered by Amazon—which quickly became popular in travel sites like TripAdvisor—was users ratings and comments. Any user, even without having bought a book, which at times caused some odd situations when comments started surfacing before a book was available, could give a book a 1-to-5-stars rating, which is clearly on display and affects the book's popularity and its display order when browsing a topic or running a search.

Users could also insert detailed comments, which (a later addition) could be approved or disapproved by other users. Amazon was also first to give out almost real-time sales figures, with a sales rank number updated hourly. But that's beyond our topic, even if quite relevant. On the community site, Amazon enables user to create wish lists and featured lists for various topics, and was the first (and possibly the only) to fully integrate third-party resellers in their system. It was one of the first to compensate for referrals using links leading to a sale by a new user. Other Amazon efforts, such as tagging books and letting authors blog on the site have had a more modest success, if any.

In case you are interested, my Amazon profile and empty blog is at:

      http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A335B2K2GCRABH
    

Today Amazon is a popular online warehouse, but on the technology side, it offers intriguing hosting, storage, and computing services, one of the biggest web services architectures, and is the owner of Alexa, a powerful web search and analysis site:

      http://www.alexa.com
    

Another site relevant only because it pioneered concepts is the to-do-list management site called Tadalist:

http://www.tadalist.com

The site claims 4 million to-do entries, which is quite modest compared to the number of users of popular sites. But the relevance here is that it was one of the first web sites to push the idea of a simple and focused web-based application replacing a corresponding dedicated or custom desktop program, and also the use advertising to support the site, allowing users free access.

Protopage was one of the first few sites to let users customize the layout and arrangements of pages that host small visual elements (often called gadgets or widgets), providing a portal-like front end of disparate types of information. Now that all the mayor players, headed by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, offer similar services, it might look irrelevant, but when the original Protopage site was launched, users were astonished:

http://www.protopage.com

My public page is at:

http://www.protopage.com/marcocantu

There is a second reference to the book in the blogsphere: Russel Weetch writes out The Social Web in his blog:

I haven't read it yet as it has just come to my notice, but I have used Marco's technical development books (programming) for many years. If it follows his previous writings it will be well worth the read.

In the Web 2.0 definition by Tim O'Reilly there are seven rules.

• The web is the platform. Rapidly replacing the operating systems, which are becoming commodities, the browser with its ecosystem has emerged as the central element of the modern computing platform.
• Harnessing collective intelligence: With blogging, tagging, most-visited lists, ratings, and user-interaction, many web sites get shaped by users' actions, and depend on what users do and write.
• Data is the next Intel inside: Who owns the data? The user or the site owner? Notice, for example, the trend of sites asking for passwords to access your data from other sites. From the technical side, you should also been good at managing the data: Database competence is key.
• End of the software release cycle: Web 2.0 sites are forever in beta, consider users as co-developers, and favor incremental deployment. For example, GMail with its millions of users for a couple of years is still formally in beta. From the technical side, operations becomes a key competence.
• Lightweight programming models: This is a technical element only, based on ideas like lightweight models; loosely coupled systems; syndication, not coordination; design for remixability; and mashups).
• Software above the level of a single device: With such examples as new activities taking the name of a device, like the podcast, YouTube video being offered directly on Google TV, TV viewed on a PC, and micro-blogging from cellphones, there is a significant convergence of devices.
• Rich user experience: Rich Internet Application development, with standard-based techniques like HTML enhanced with CSS and AJAX, or fancy proprietary solutions like Flash from Adobe or Silverlight from Microsoft, have brought the web to a new level.

In a recent blog post titled "Web 2.0 for the rest of us" and covering also an O'Reilly book on Web 2.0, Tim Anderson mentions also my book "The Social Web" commenting:

It is a brisk tour of the sites and concepts that form today’s online communities. Typical readers of this blog probably won’t find anything new here; but I liked the common-sense tips on things like blogging and creating interactive web sites.

I basically agree... and thanks for the reference.

Google Lively is your private 3D space on the web. Only vaguely resembling a virtual world, Google Lively let's you create a small virtual space where you can invite your friends. You can host your space on your own web site. I'll make some experiments ASAP.

The term used to refer to this “new phase” of the Internet is Web 2.0 . Although this term is heavily abused and applied to anything new on the web, “Web 2.0” had a specific meaning for the person who invented it, book publisher Tim O'Reilly. In “What is Web 2.0,” the original article he wrote in 2005 introducing the idea, he highlights seven features a Web 2.0 site must have. You can read the original article here:

      http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1