Large and Mainstream Networks:
Widgets and add-ons
Social News and Social Bookmarking
Photosharing
Videosharing:
Startpages
And my personal favorite at this moment, duh… just added this nice feature to my site, Dapper. Using Dapper, any web page becomes a LEGO block, which you can arrange and manipulate in any way you like.
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Google and Microsoft are racing to provide computer users with a virtual world tour. Who will be the first to offer its readers a 3-D map of the globe? Read the rest of the story at Der Spiegel
What to expect from Microsoft at CES :
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Windows Vista isn’t even quite out the door, but Microsoft is already soliciting testers to tell them what should be in the next versions of Windows. However, in order to qualify to give feedback, you had to have been a registered technical beta tester, have filled out an opt-in survey near the end of the beta, and needed to have signed up by December 12. I did this, and I was a little bit curious about the results, 18 days later. 900 feedbacks are given today. Some things I have to mention, Vista is build by input from the same people, Microsoft has listened to them, and did some good work to include the value-added functionality wishes. In my opinion, the feedback for the next version is focussed on technical aspects, sometimes on functionality, but not in a revolutionair way. Others give feedback from an IT Management perspective, it’s good to mention, but not what is necessary for a new OS. But… there are also good feedbacks, somebody asks for Video on Demand in Windows Vista Next, team up with content providers. Another one, search per tab in Internet Explorer, search through tabs. In the next posts more details, but I’ve another one, let the user choose between a thin client, or a fat client. What I mean is that the integration between Windows Live and the desktop should be a tighter one. If you are a gamer, or a graphical wonder, then you can use a fat client. Maybe better, with all these Webservices, connect with a webservice to publish something, for example Wallop, all those startups who uses Microsoft Technology must develop webservices which can be called from the next version of Windows Vista. Give them a sort of yellow pages the web 2.0 way. Seemless integration is a must. Therefore, I don’t want to know if I’m on the internet or not. Another one, when I use a UMPC, and I want to look up contactdetails in Windows Live, but I’m offline, I need to be able to open the contactlist. So, again, there is a need for seemless offline/online connection. Come on community, out-of-the-box thinking isn’t bad!
Bill Gates has spoken again, Check out the article in January’s issue of Scientific American written by Bill Gates, co-Founder and Chairman of Microsoft. I could not more than agree with him. Microsoft has launched Robotics Studio a couple of days ago, Lego has some Robot technologies, on television I saw a commercial from I-Qbot, then there is iRobot and FischerTechnik. Bill Gates discusses the need for robots in several segments: “It seems quite likely, however, that robots will play an important role in providing physical assistance and even companionship for the elderly. Robotic devices will probably help people with disabilities get around and extend the strength and endurance of soldiers, construction workers and medical professionals. Robots will maintain dangerous industrial machines, handle hazardous materials and monitor remote oil pipelines. They will enable health care workers to diagnose and treat patients who may be thousands of miles away, and they will be a central feature of security systems and search-and-rescue operations.” Ok Bill, but I’m a consumer, what’s in for me? Me too would like to have a Robot! A robot with some value added at home. Â
Nocturnal is an automated Messenger-based information sharing and collaboration web-search system.
Nocturnal provides automated information sharing between Messenger users. A browser enhanced with our personalized collaborative-search tool bar uses URL recommendations that are shared through Nocturnal and stored to a local database in order to filter MSN-search results and bring URLs recommended by peers to higher importance.
The vision behind the Nocturnal project is to harness the power of social links for sharing information such as recommendations and reviews. The key idea is to leverage the existing messaging network in order to bootstrap the system with natural, automatic social communities. The communities are formed by a user’s buddies list, his buddies’ buddies and their buddies, and so on. Each social circle shares much in common, without requiring users to subscribe to any new service, eliciting information about users’ hobbies and social behavior, etc.
Nocturnal automates information exchange within these social circles using the existing messaging channels. It uses the Messenger Folder-Sharing feature to facilitate exchanges between a user and her Messenger contacts. A user Alice exchanges data with her immediate contacts, and stores the information she pulls from them on the local disk. Alice’s contacts exchange information with their contacts, and in this way, information from Alice propagates to her contacts’ contacts, and so on, until any hop-limit she sets. The information arriving at any user is stored in a local database, along with tags indicating the distance it came from and the path. In this way, Nocturnal builds a social information-sharing infrastructure in a peer-to-peer manner.
In order to address trust concerns, recommendations shared in Nocturnal include an origin and the number of hops they transfer through. A Nocturnal user controls how far in the network to pull information from, or how far to send it, usually bounding it to several hops away.
Nocturnal is used for sharing URL recommendations among Messenger peers and forms a personalized, collaborative web-search tool. Collecting URL recommendations is done in either automated mode or manual (or both): For the former, the user may allow automated copying of her `favorites’ files. For the latter, she may voluntarily click a `recommend’ button on her browser.
Nocturnal is divided in two parts, one is the shared folder in Windows Live Messenger, the second is part of the Windows Live Toolbar
Ford Motor plans to unveil a deal with Microsoft in January that will put the software company’s technology into some of the automaker’s cars, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Read the rest at ZDNet,
Microsoft will, at the Consumer Electronics Show, unveil their new Windows Home Server (codenamed Quattro), which is probably based on Windows Vista, not on Windows Server. Also, the digital Amnesia campaign refers to this Windows Home Server. But wat about the Vanishing Point Game, check it out at http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=523893, they are at this moment at page 91, and are stuck…
A couple of days ago I read an interview with Annop Gupta, Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Unified Communications Group about Exchange 2007 and Office Communication Server 2007. It was about simplifying the ways in which people work by bringing voice technologies to both servers. In my opinion both servers are really nice and full of innovative functionality, things we are waiting for. As stated in the interview it has some integration with SharePoint, Quote: “Also, when people go into a Microsoft Office SharePoint team site, they can view the availability of other team members and decide whom to contact. Similarly, these products share a single conversation history folder that tracks not only the e-mails that someone has sent but also the instant messages and telephone calls in a seamless way”. I have two questions about it: 1. If I’m looking for some knowledge, some questions needs to be answered by experts, is it possible to search for this knowledge, and in the search results you can see the owner with is status at that moment? 2. e-mail tracking, instant messages tracking and tracking of telephone calls. It sounds a bit scary to me in a way that a company is now able to track and trace everything you do. I know, it’s not the goal, but abuse is a possible issue in some organisations (and I prefer not to work for that kind of companies.) By the way, these server, Sharepoint, Office Communications Server and Exchange together are a fantastic service. Everything is in one place, use your outlook client to contact people by mail, IM or phone, I hope workflow can be used to, if a person whom you need is away, in a meeting or just busy, assign the email, IM or phonecall to another person with the same knowledge 
etc… So, I think Microsoft is going to race with these products. Just keep one thing in mind, Mobile communications will plug into the web in 2007. Yeah, and? It will have a big impact on the telecom providers with their GSM networks. WiMax will finally launch in 2007. Just like you have VoIP and sporadically there are Wi-Fi mobiles you can use at home, in 2007 their will be VoIP for mobile communications, with or without WiMax.
Windows Vista has been released for a month now to business, and is going to
be released to the general public in a month (January 30). For those who haven’t
been following Vista’s development, it is worh noting that even though Vista
comes 5 years after XP, it is a rushed product.
Originally set to be a relatively small update to XP, to be released in 2003,
it was re-envisioned as a major release, with revolutionary technologies such as
WinFS (a new file system), Palladium (security system), Avalon (graphics system)
and Indigo (communications system).
As the years went on, the folks at Microsoft found out that they are in over
their heads with it, and following numerous delays and feature-cuts and
slimdowns and a complete development restart in late 2004 - early 2005, they
finally got on track of a much simpler OS. Nonetheless Windows Vista is a huge
improvement over previous versions, and has many great features that makes it a
must have (despite what many might say).
It doesn’t really matter if Vista is a success or not, Microsoft cannot wait
another five years to release another Windows. People are becoming more aware of
the choices they have, and Linux is no longer a hobbyist OS, and that day isn’t
far away when it becomes simple enough to be a viable alternative to Windows.
And that is why Microsoft is planning a “Vista R2″, codename ‘Fiji’. From
what little information is available we know that this will be a minor release
sometime in 2008.
Original post by jameskyton and software by Elliott Back
