popfly

Mashups mainstream by 2013 according to Forrester

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According 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.

Streamy, Pownce & Popfly invites up for grabs

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This is not a feeble attempt to increase my Web 2.0 coolness by following tip #5 in “5 Top Tips on How to be Cool in a Web 2.0 Crowd“, but since I like to play around with new apps and sites I have some of the latest coolness currency to distribute. What I am talking about is of course beta invites to all those services that are trying to get maximum hype by creating more demand than supply. So I have a few invites for anybody who wants. Just leave a comment on this post why you want an invite and unless you have a really crappy reason I’ll give you the ones I have.

  • Pownce – This is Kevin Rose’s (of Digg and Revision3 fame) latest project and one of the most hyped startups the last few months. It has been called a Twitter killer, it has been called a new Social Network, it has been called ICQ on steroids. However you choose to classify it it is damn cool and had a great userinterface and lets you chat and send files to your friends. You can read a good review on Tech-Buzz.
  • Microsoft Popfly – Microsofts Mashup Builder that shows of their new Silverlight platform. Pretty cool and it has good potential to mature into something really usefull. But right now they go a bit overboard with the effects sometimes when everything is semi-transparent and things are spinning all over the place.
  • Streamy – An RSS reader with a social touch. Innovative AJAX user interface that is quite cool, even if not that usefull. Mashable has written a long post about Streamy.

Enjoy your new toys and remember me if you happen to stumble over beta invites to the next big things.

5 Top Tips on How To Be Cool in a Web 2.0 Crowd

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In the 50s a black leather jacket, smoking, pink cars and greasy hair was cool. None of that will get you far in a Web 2.0 crowd. As in all crowds only very few acctually knows what they are talking about and the rest are faking it (I am not, I promise, I really really belong!!!!). The trick is of course to sound like you know what you are talking about, and the rest does not matter that much (that is good old Marketing 1.0 or How-to-survive-High-School 1.0). Just follow the 5 tips below and you will be considered cool by any Web 2.0 crowd. A bit of a warning though, it won’t get you chicks and the chances it is going to land you a job outside of Sillicon Valley are slim to none.

1. Know when to be new school and when to be old school
Adobe Apollo is now named Adobe AIR, where AIR stands for “Adobe Integrated Runtime” (this means that the name includes Adobe twice, what a great feat or marketing!). Right now the correct thing to call Apollo is AIR, since that shows that you are hip to what’s happenin’ (forgive my non-techie slang here, it might be a bit out of date). However, in a few months when Adobe throws all it’s marketing might behind the name AIR, you should once again start using the name Apollo. That will show that you are old school cool and don’t care about marketing dollars. From new school to old school in a few months, that took Hip Hop years to achive.

2. Social X 2.0
Use the word “social” and “2.0” for everything, it does not have to make sense. These buzz words of the day will soon go out of style since all kinds of uncool Media 1.0 are talking about it, but for now it is the in thing to use. It is a bit like the Dilbert mission statement generator, just take an existing term and add Social in the start and 2.0 in the end and voilá, you’re cool. For example “Social Work 2.0”, “Social Search 2.0”, “Social Latte-Grande-with-an-extra-shot-of-expresso 2.0”. To be extra cool you might wanna start mentioning “Web 3.0” – it is such a badly defined term that it can be used for anything from the full semantic web to the latest improvements on Flickr, very practical.

3. The Power of the T-Shirt
T-Shirts have worked well for many generation of Geeks. Power of the Sys Admin is displayed by the wild beard, the pizza built body and, most importantly, the dirty and worn “Linux Rules” T-Shirt. ThinkGeek has built a good business on this fact, and Threadless is doing the same thing for the “damn I am creative, I have a Mac and I understand the inside joke” crowd. Everyone has blogs (at least everyone that will read this), everyone has accounts at the lastest cool sites, but not everyone has the T-Shirt from just that event. The Social Events 2.0 (yay, I got a cool point there, see how easy it is) now has unique T-Shirts where you can add your own little personalization sentence. That was the thing both at the Web 2.0 Expo a at JavaOne (bonus tip: mention the events you’ve gone to lately) and it was really popular. T-Shirts can show the pure mortals that have only read about Web 2.0 in Times Magazine that you are a hard core Geek 2.0!

4. Use a Mac and make off-hand comments about it
This is not as complicated as it sounds. It involves using a Mac, but you have to keep from making the blank-eyed-freaky-smile-all-with-Mac-is-wondeful-and-Steve-Jobs-is-my-God statements all the time. Instead just happen to mention every know and then how great that latest Mac utility you found is and how much time is saves when you do [insert technical babbel here]. For extra coolness just end the sentence with mumbling a bit about “or maybe you don’t have a Mac…”. A given is to just happen to mention how great a Mac is to use when you are using Ruby On Rails, that is 2 coolness points for the price of one.

Disclosure: I don’t use a Mac (but I do own a fully working Mac Classic II)

5. Get in on those Beta programs and use them as if you were Social Machiavelli 2.0
Register for all beta programs you can, the earlier the better, they are the currency of Economy 2.0 (to really beat the 2.0 analogy to death). Once a beta has been mentioned on TechCrunch your hard work will have paid off because you can just happen to forward to article to your “friends” (term used loosely), of course via Jaiku (Twitter is soooo over), and mention that you do not agree with what Michael Arrington is writing (bonus tip: dont refer to TechCrunch, refer to Michael Arrington, this buys you some cool) and you should know since you have tested the mentioned app for a few weeks.

By the way, I have a Microsoft Popfly beta account and I don’t agree with whatever Micheal Arrington is writing about it!.

A Cry for Help
Let me know if I have missed any key points. I am soon going to Mashup Camp to talk about Social Mashups 2.0 and comparing that to Microsoft Poplfly and, what is then called Adobe Apollo, so I need all the help I can get!