I found this last night and noted it on Squire’s Daily Interest until I could write a post here.
PhoneGap looks sooooo interesting. It allows native phone apps to be produced for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and more in JavaScript.
It started from a two day iPhone Dev Camp. The underlying reason for it coming into being is that there aren’t that many Objective C developers, but there are a whole lot of HTML and JavaScript programmers.
Under the MIT Licence PhoneGap will always be opensource.
There’s already a list of apps created using PhoneGap.
In Japan there seems to be a craze for creating artwork for mobile phones, as the majority have something called FlashLite running. Investigating this a little has termed up festivals relating to ‘Pocket Films’, the creation of video specifically for mobiles; the synchronizing of art between two phones to give a sense of connectedness between partners, Hanbunko; and a ‘concept’ from the Mobile Art Lab that combines the iPhone with a book to create
The term Web 2.0 is about five years old now. It was coined by Tim O’Reilly at a conference and was intended to indicate the second coming of the web; that it wasn’t dead following the bursting of the “dotcom bubble”. But it has taken on this kind of folklore meaning, with many seeing it as an incremental version roll-out as with a software update. And Tim says he has been continually asked what the next big thing will be.
Is it:
The Semantic Web,
Virtual reality,
The social web,
the mobile web?
And what’s it called, Web 3.0?
The short answer from Tim seems to be that it’s all those things listed, and more; and it’s not Web 3.0.
The next phase of web development is Web meets World and to achieve this doesn’t need an incremental step, but an exponential one.
Hence, the term we can expect to see moving into folklore following next week’s Web 2.0 Summit 2009 Conference is Web Squared or Web².
Back on June 25, Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle presented a webinar setting out their view of Web².
I’ve Tubechopped the initial 17min section of the video and a 1min15sec answer to questions about the impact on Higher Education. Please note: this was recorded from a webinar over a phone line so the audio isn’t great quality.
They also produced a special report on the topic; available as a pdf.
The remainder or this post is concerned with what I think is most pertinent from this report and my comments.
The fundamental premiss of Web 2.0 is that the Web is becoming an application platform reliant on data subsystems that get better the more people use them, rather than just an information platform.
The question that then arises is, “Is the web getting smarter?“
Looking at the current generation of apps is where we see the web getting smarter. An example Tim gives is Google Mobile Application for the iPhone. The speech recognition in the cloud is aligned with the search in the cloud, so Google knows what you’re likely to say – Pizza rather than Pisa – then the location information from the phone indicates that you want to know where the nearest three pizza places are located, rather than a Wikipedia entry on the history and origins of pizza. That seems to be much smarter. Speech recognition, search and location information all working seamlessly together.
And boiling down the essence of good web apps is that they harness collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is a collective working that acts more intelligently and leads to greater value than can be achieved by the individual components, be they people, groups or computers.
Key takeaway: A key competency of the Web 2.0 era is discovering implied metadata, and then building a database to capture that metadata and/or foster an ecosystem around it.
Web² Special Report, p.4
Examples of what appear at first to be unstructured data that have subsequently been identified and utilized include Facebook where online relationships with friends are used to form a social graph, Bit.ly where a URL shortening service realised the potential of realtime analytics, the fact that every web link is a vote and every link from a person deemed to have greater standing in a group (as measured by their contributions to that group) has a greater weighting.
The report considers the influences that moving sensory and input devices away from the fixed keyboard and into our hands will have. These devices (e.g. smart phones) have eyes (cameras), ears (mics), position and direction locators. All of this will enable increasing amounts of metadata and tags to be automatically and more accurately assigned to vast amounts of data stored in cloud databases. And, interestingly, when the amount of data reaches a critical point, the addition of extra data actually reduces the size of the database because the linkages become stronger and the need for explicit metadata reduces.
This will give rise to a number of new applications, leveraging these affordances. Already we are seeing interesting augmented reality applications, including Layar on Android phones;
An article appeared a couple of days ago in computing.co.uk entitled Moving beyond Web 2.0. It too was looking at Tim O’Reilly’s Web Squared concept. I’d like to highlight some points from this article, because it not only talks about the advances in technology and the concepts that encapsulates, but it also focusses on the (for me) important philosophies underpinning Web 2.0.
There is, however, more to Web Squared than new types of application that will process the immense data shadows soon to be cast by the emerging internet of things. More broadly, Web Squared is also about recognising that Web 2.0 has been as concerned with embracing new philosophies as new technologies. And in championing Web Squared, O’Reilly is signalling that the Web 2.0 ideologies of openness, transparency and rapid, collaborative value creation may have significant value well beyond the internet.
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A big idea of Web Squared is that this may be achieved by applying the philosophies of Web 2.0 to mainstream politics and business thinking.
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The CIOs who are embracing the cloud and not trying to build barricades around their datacentres are the ones who understand the philosophies as well as the technologies of Web 2.0, and who will also very much grasp Web Squared.
Some time ago I expressed my take on the importance of the philosophy of web 2.0 rather than just the software, services and mechanics in a presentation I gave (full text available).
The relevant specific audio section about the philosophy is reproduced here:
Something called Nurphy has just come out, and it’s an interesting concept that I can see potentially gaining a position for itself. The easiest way to describe it is a cross between email and microblogging (Twitter) and a forum. Effectively you can have a public conversation that can be carried out using a Nurphy account or via email. This conversation, if you’ve set it to public, has a unique URL and can therefore be viewed from anywhere. And if you’ve allowed it, anyone can contribute to the conversation. This would seem to fulfill a conversation need that falls between Twitter and via email. I’ll investigate it for a while.
Here is a conversation I set up to create some screen shots to demonstrate the process.
1. Click the Start a Conversation button
As I hadn’t got any contacts set up at this stage, I typed in an email address and then my comment. You aren’t limited to 140 characters, but equally with this service I don’t think you want to go too big with what you’re writing; it is supposed to be a conversation after all.
2. Your list of Conversations now has that particular one there.
It has been allocated a unique code that with make up its unique URL which can now be publicized.
3. The email address I included in the conversation now receives an email
which upon opening look like:
So for someone who isn’t on Nurphy they are able to participate via email. they receive your comments and can respond by replying to the email and typing beteen the lines delimited by [===> <===].
In this example:
4. From my Nurphy account I can now see the emailed response appear in the conversation:
And I can respond to continue the conversation.
At any time you can use the tabs to see who the participant in a conversation are:
And you have the option of closing off a public conversation to make it exclusive (or private), via the Options tab:
In addition, you can embed some code that provides a button in your site to allow people to start a conversation with you via Nurphy.
If you want to see more of what the potential of Nurphy is, then take a look at the video:
Oh, and there’s an iPhone / iPod Touch interface available.
