Web 2.0 Blog

With Microsoft’s ‘next big thing’ Live Mesh now firmly on the horizon, more details are becoming available about the system and how it will surely revolutionize the way information is shared globally. Introducing the idea of a web-desktop where the interconnection of web technologies and desktop operating systems provide a complete service, Live Mesh is surely the future of desktop computing. Here’s a brief overview of the services offered in the Tech Preview which is now online:

Interconnectivity
The online ‘device ring’ area shows all the devices that are connected to the Live Mesh network, giving you the option to add new devices. This could include the desktop in front of you, a laptop on the other side of the world, an iPhone or any connected mobile devices that you may have registered. Adding a device to the Mesh is as simple as clicking an orange button and selecting ‘install’.

The Web Desktop
Interfaced just like the standard PC desktop computer, the online web desktop incorporates all the usable aspects of traditional computing into an online interface. This means it will ooze familiarity to a much wider audience and would probably be much more usable to people who use PCs but aren’t that used to the Internet. On this part of the Mesh you can upload and download files and any changes to these files are then applied across the Mesh network.

Remote Desktop Access
The situation has surely arisen very commonly whereby you need a file from the PC at home when you’re at work or college. The remote desktop access service through Live Mesh allows you to securely access any devices connected to the Mesh meaning you’ll always have a way of using these devices, even if you’re in another country. Current programs that allow you to do this such as Beam2Support will become irrelevant as Live Mesh doesn’t require someone on the other side to connect with you. Similar to WiiConnect24, the service is always connected to the Mesh.

Social Mesh
A news feed section in the Live Mesh interface allows users to share news, view shows and send messages to other members who are in the same group. By sharing folders, any posts that you make can be read by other users which makes the possibility of using the Mesh as a collaboration tool a more realistic prospect.

These are just some of the main aspects of Live Mesh that have been revealed so far. However, with the tech demo now available and new things being reported about the service each day, there’s sure to be much more on the horizon.

As Web 2.0 applications continue to dominate user’s time and investments in 2008, I’ve been doing some reading about Web 3.0 and what it holds in store for the future of web development and it seems there will be four very important milestones reached.

Portable Web
Traditional websites are designed with the intention of being viewed by users accessing them with desktop PCs and standard GUIs. With the evolution of Web 3.0, websites are no longer confined to the screens of a desktop computer but are also accessible via mobile devices such as mobile phones, iPods, Blackberry’s, IPTVs. This throws up a whole new set of questions regarding heuristics, accessibility and usability as users are not interfacing with the software and hardware in the way that all our previous rules were written to abide by.

Semantic Web & Web Services
This is the evolution of intelligent systems beyond the GU, that allow web services to share business logic, data and processes through a programmatic interface across a network. This results in multiple applications interfacing instead of the users. The ultimate goal of Semantic Web is to lessen the tedious work of users and encouraging systems to carry out tasks without the direction of humans. So instead of building web pages to be read by humans, Web services will allow different applications across different platforms to communicate with each other seamlessly.

Open Data
This is the idea of making the web completely integrated in an effort to encourage sharing between users and different applications. The intention would be to make code available via open source, making data portable between sites and making these sites accustomed to your browsing and sharing habits. Imagine being able to use the same login details for a host of your web applications. Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and Blogger are examples of cross-platform data sharing, allowing you to perform different tasks with the same unified account.

Customized Web
Web 2.0 applications are already becoming more customized and tailored to the individual user’s needs based on cookies and settings, and Web 3.0 aims to take this even further. We have already seen websites like Amazon adopting a recommendations engine, which generates thousands of additional sales. How about BBC’s new news site? You can choose which news you want to know about, and you can even have it delivered via RSS.

In my opinion the biggest development comes from the idea of mobile computing and Internet access as not only does it throw the traditional heuristics rulebook out the window, but due to its portability it could be always on, it is aware of its location and it offers instant ways of paying for items on the Internet.

The fact that you can call a number on a website and have credit added to your phone means there’s no reason why we can’t buy other things in the same way. Add to this the new ways that users will interface with these new devices and we could also have much more different ways of interacting with the web. With Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all driving mobile web systems we could be looking at portable Web 3.0 very soon.