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Software engineering as a discipline has evolved a set of design patterns. These are solutions that work across languages and across different systems. What we need is new design patterns for life streaming applications like Twitter. Instead of talking ab
Month: May 2008
links for 2008-05-09
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Every information architect should always have a set of favorite questions in their back pocket; they really do come in handy. I categorize mine into groups that correspond to the five areas that a user is most likely to interact with a site’s informati
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Web Security-as-a-Service, this new service is definitely moving Google closer to being a true competitor in the realm of enterprise security, as they already offer email security and compliance tools. Plus, the convenience of having all the services avai
Mashups mainstream by 2013 according to Forrester
StandardAccording to a new report from Forrester Research Enterprise Mashups will reach their tipping point during 2009-2010 and then become part of the general IT landscape by 2013. This means that the old IT gigants like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft will dominate the mashup market and mashup platforms will be part of their offerings. I guess this means that Microsoft Popfly will merge into Sharepoint and IBM Mashup Hub will merge with WebSphere.
Forrester divides mashups into three types:
- Presentation layer mashups – merge content from seperate sources into one view, the simplest type of mashups.
- Data mashups – more complex data driven mashups that get data from several sources and present them in one view
- Process mashups – mixes business processes and users with data from several data sources.
Presentation mashups and data mashups sound very much similar to me, but then again I dont get payed by Forrester… But Forrester has a lot of influence over this so unless Gartner comes up with another definition this is the ones we have to live with.
I am glad to see that Forrester also realized that enterprise mashups will be huge. It is kind of a self realizing profecy – there will be a lot of men in ties reading this report so it is going to help Enterprise Mashups grow. It is really the next wave in enterprise software. And if you are reading my humble blog you are already years ahead of the mashup wave 🙂
For more info about this report see Forrester: Enterprise Mashups to Hit $700 Million by 2013 on ReadWriteWeb.
The need to Mashup Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku
StandardI have some friends on Twitter, a couple on Pownce and Jaiku is the platform of choice in the swedish tech sector so I am getting into Jaiku as well (I am “andreaskrohn” on all of them). Which platform you use depends on what technology you prefer and where your friends are. I don’t really care about the technology at the moment, I just want to keep in touch with my friends (yes I know that Pownce API kicks Twitters ass and that Twitter goes down more than an intern in the Clinton White House, but believe it or not, I prioritise friends over tech). These are 3 different platforms, each trying to be a community. But the community of any one person will not live on one platform, unless that platform gets to be either completely dominant or the technical platform providers takes a step back and let the community live across providers. The latter has happened with telephone services (you can call friends with a different cell phone provider) with email (i can mail people that are stuck on Microsoft Exchange from my Gmail) etc etc. I can not wait until this happens to the microblogs!
It is quite easy to post to several microbloggins services at once. Jaiku does a great job of importing RSS feeds, so posts to Twitter or Pownce can easily be imported to Jaiku. Via Twitterfeed it is easy to get an RSS feed into your Twitter as well. I haven’t found any easy way of getting an RSS feed into Pownce. Also there are apps like Twhirl that let’s you post to all 3 platforms at once. In my case I also use the Twitter Facebook app to get my tweets into my Facebook status and I am looking for a way to do the same with LinkedIn (no success yet). So posting cross-platform is not a problem, even if it means that you need to do some configuration and that all your posts gets trippled or quadrupled.
Reading friends posts from several platforms could also easily be done. I could of course go to all the different services and read each posts on each one, but since I want to do other things with my day than that I would rather use services like FriendFeed or SocialThing that aggregates it all into one place. FriendFeed imports from most sources and have some nice comment features, but the UI really desperatly needs a designers touch. SocialThing imports from just a few places so far (please please add RSS now!) but I still prefer it to FriendFeed. These services and others make it easy to see your friends posts from several platforms in one place. What is missing is a way to naturally post back to the microblogging platforms from these services.
What is needed, and what will come very soon I am sure, is a mashup of all these microbloggin platforms to allow users to be active on several platforms at once all from one place. I would like to see an app that allows me to interact with Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku completely. This means reading other peoples posts, replying to posts to have a conversation going cross-platform and posting to all platforms at once. Since all of the platforms have APIs this should be possible to implement (and for all I know it already exists somewhere, if you know of such an app please let me know through a comment on this post!). This would be a great mashup that would breach the community silos that exists today. Short of everyone moving to one platform a mashup is the best answer to this problem.
Btw, I have some extra SocialThing invites so if anybody wants one please let me know via a comment on this post.
Goodbye Kapow and thanks for all the fish
StandardAs of May 1st I am no longer working as Product Manager at Kapow Technologies, instead I am now an “independent internet professional” which is just a fancy way of saying that I think I can make my fortunes by myself. I have worked for Kapow during the last 3 years, and it has been a great time. It’s a company with a great product, great people and a great future. However, Kapow’s future doesn’t match up with what I have planned for my own future.
Now I will concentrate on creating something of my own, and I will be sure to keep you in the loop of what that is. Of course it will involve mashup technologies and remixing data, as that is what I am good at. Also I think that there are good possibilities to spread the word of mashups in Sweden, I have already done some of that, for example at the Web Service Awards last year in Stockholm.
So… Goodbye Kapow and thanks for all the fish, but now it is time for me to live the life without paychecks but with endless possibilities. Part of that life is making Digitalistic.com looking better, something that I hope you have already noticed. Thank you very much to Kemie at Monolinea.com for doing a much needed upgrade of the site!