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when will Microsoft release a free, ad-supported online version of their office-suite? will it be called Office Live? and will it happen before Google’s lightweight office-apps finally include a featureset that will be a sufficient replacement for mainstream-users? a - though quickly altered - blog-post from within Microsoft leads to new speculation at TechCrunch.

Freebase - currently in private beta - is generating some buzz (Tim O’Reilly, John Markoff, N. Carr - who describes Freebase as the first major Web 3.0 app). Freebase is a massively distributed, collaboratively-edited, freely structured database - or, as O’Reilly puts it - a folksonomy-based approach on weaving the Semantic Web:

“But hopefully, this narrative will give you a sense of what Metaweb [the company that created Freebase] is reaching for: a wikipedia like system for building the semantic web. But unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.”

now here’s a cool iTunes-plugin: iConcertCal automatically retrieves upcoming events matching your music library and displays them within iTunes. current sources seem to be a bit US-centric, but that could be fixed by mashing with upcoming.org.

going to be released on monday, RatePoint will be adding avatar-rating and social networking features to SecondLife. quite amazing, considering it’s based solely on SL’s scripting language.

37 Signals is joining the growing number of wellknown sites supporting OpenID with their upcoming CRM-tool Highrise.

here’s one for the weekend: another Google-song

Adobe Apollo/Flex continues to dominate this weeks tech-news with two - though distant - product announcements.

Virtual Ubiquity is aiming for a public beta-release of their Flex-based word-processor BuzzWord (Screenshot courtesy of GigaOM) in summer 2007. thanks to Apollo, BuzzWord will run both on- and offline, which puts it way ahead of Google Docs. it’ll be interesting to see if Flash-based apps for print-production will handle pagination and typography better than current Ajax-offerings (Google Docs f.e. sucks majorly by not even supporting headers & footers).

proving that they’re eating their own dogfood, Adobe itself announced plans to release an online, free & ad-supported version of their flagship-product Photoshop. as noted by Michael Arrington, this must be scary news for all the current players in the online photo-editing market…

back from London and the first thing I notice is Techmeme overly cluttered with news about Google, which finally did what so many have expected and demanded in the past: launched feb 21st, Google Apps Premier is a subscription-based, corporate version of the application package launched in late summer 2006, including the already well-known Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets. for 50 USD per year & user, Google offers 10gbyte mail-storage, 24/7 phone support and a guaranteed uptime of 99.99% for email-services . it doesn’t take a major in business administration to realize that these numbers undercut offerings of Microsoft and others by _far_.

moreover, the comparison chart of Google Apps Standard and Premier edition unveils that the paid service lets users opt-out of contextualized advertising in email and includes an additional application for resource-management, which could be an indication on where Google Apps Premier might be heading in the near future. TechCrunch’s Marshall Kirkpatrick hits the nail with his headline: “It’s G-Day“, extensive coverage all around the web can be found at Techmeme.

according to Read/WriteWeb, Firefox 3 will offer support for running web-applications offline. though it’s not yet clear on which level this might happen, this is major news for providers of service-based web-software. the biggest advantage of online-apps - using them on any device with net-access with no need to sync data - is at the same time their worst caveat - when connectivity goes down, so do online-apps and all data stored within them (that’s why it is a good idea even for fulltime Gmail-users to backup their mail via POP3).

of course, Firefox isn’t alone in trying to move web-apps offline - Adobe’s Apollo framework promotes offline-services on top of their successful Flash-platform. Flash has bee used to store data in a local cache for quite a time, as it has been the only cross-browser solution besides storing (mini-chunks of) data within cookies (Niall Kennedy gives a good overview on various methods of storing data locally). applications like Scrybe (private beta) let us anticipate the way future online/offline-apps might look&feel.

besides Adobe, several open source projects are working on solutions for the offline-dilemma: the Dojo Offline Project and POW (Plain Old Webserver) both implement a proxy http-server for running local copies of web-applications. while Dojo Offline isn’t available yet, POW - a firefox plugin (which means basically a web-server implemented in Javascript!) - is ready for download.

naturally, existing web-apps require heavy modification to work with any of the mentioned offline-approaches, meaning we still have to wait for real-life apps leveraging the benefits of going offline.

Zoho adds another feature to its online office-suite (read my previous review). Zoho Notebook allows users to collect web-snippets, images, notes, flash-based video, RSS-feeds and documents from other Zoho-applications in a single place. currently not available to the public, Zoho Notebook supports collaborative access and will be controlled by Firefox- & IE-plugins.

Nexo is an easy-to-use, yet feature-rich collaboration & content-sharing tool. Nexo allows closed or open user-groups to create comments, polls, list, calendars, feeds, maps, directories, photo-galleries, web-snippets and more. pages support detailed permission-settings and customized page-layouts. even better, all content is exposed via RSS.

trying to use Google Docs & Spreadsheets as fulltime replacement for Microsoft/Open Office on my secondary computer, I’m running into all sorts of shortcomings every day. opening an excel-spreadsheet containing several sub-sheets (but otherwise quite barebones) lead me to the error-message pictured below :(… I wonder why it’s limited to 20 sheets in particular, I mean, I’ld get 32, but 20?

Google Docs’ lack of support for headers and footers is another major reason why I think that Google isn’t yet there… way to go, until even the most basic functionality is covered…
(click for more posts tagged office-is-dead)

I haven’t been using online collaboration- & email-suite Zimbra until now, but todays announcement sure sounds interesting: Zimbra is about to receive a local cache-feature, which will allow users to access email even when being offline - auto-syncing included. however, the official blog-entry doesn’t go into detail on how this will be implemented. recently introduced online-PIM Scrybe seems to realize similar functionality by using a flash-based cache.

solving the offline-dilemma might be crucial for the success of web-based office-apps in the nearer future (”network anywhere, anytime” doesn’t seem very realistic, esp. considering airplanes). what seems to miss is a general, standards-based approach on solving this issue (mabye browser-integrated?). while this spawns lots of different, incompatible on/offline-synching mechanisms, it’s at least a way for upcoming products to differnetiate themselves.

Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogscoped reports the recent integration of Google Spreadsheets into Gmail. when receiving xls-attachments, Gmail users are now given a direct link to open such files in Google Spreadsheets. a similar feature for Word-documents / Google Docs (ex Writely) is still missing but almost certain to follow soon.

with the current hailstorm of news on upcoming web-office initiatives by Google and others, one might easily be tempted to forget about what that particular company in Redmond is going to do about all that. tonight, Marshall Kirkpatrick from TechCrunch (down-to-earth) and Steve Gillmor (way-beyond) both give us an appropriate reality-check about what to expect from Microsoft…

• Office Live (a free communication-service centered around email, calendar & file-storage) is announced to leave beta on november 14th. Gillmor says its dead-on-arrival, and who’s to disagree, since Google’s equivalent has been out for so long now)
• Microsoft announced a longterm partnership with PHP-company Zend today, therefor ultimately validating development-paradigms aside their own .NET-platform
• as of yesterday, there seems to be a free accounting software from Microsoft - Office Accounting Express 2007
• moreover, there’s an article on InfoWorld promising two new services to be launched by mid-november: ‘adManager’ will offer advertisers a single interface to manage ad-campaigns on arbitrary platforms, including Google AdSense, Yahoo!, Ask and Microsoft’s own. meanwhile, the ‘Business Contact Manager’ will integrate CRM-services into Office Live

the official Google blog just has announced the aquisition of JotSpot, a well-known player in the market of collaborative wiki- & online-office products reviewed some time ago. as for the deal, I’m not sure what to make of it: while few key-modules of JotSpot (spreadsheets, word processing) are already part of Google’s web-office offering (in my opinion outperforming JotSpot’s counterparts), JotSpot could bring in new features like business-oriented wikis, project management, call-tracking, knowledgebase- and recruiting-management etc. regarding how long it took Google to snort up integrate Writely, I wonder if they wouldn’t be better off adding their own wiki-functioniality to Google Office, which is just taking shape.

for the moment, JotSpot’s registration is closed until accounts are integrated with Google, charged JotSpot-customers will be converted to free-accounts (while remaining functionality, of course).

update: following coverage at GigaOm and TechCrunch.