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Zooomr, a photosharing-site indicating it’s adjacence with flickr not only by it’s vowel-scanting name, got a minor overhaul earlier this week. the launch of Zooomr 2.0 was originally scheduled for friday 14th, but had to be postponed due DDOS-attacks and further technical problems. Zooomr 2.0 improves on many existing features which outplay flickr, like shiny geotagging (google maps mashed up), keyword tagging, backtrack-support, del.icio.us-integration and audio-annotations (coined ‘Zooomrtations’). on the downside, the Zooomr-servers seem to be even slower than flickr’s, at least here in europe. moreover, Zooomr will have a hard time to match with flickr’s greatest advantage - its numerous integrations with other services (my favorite one, shozu, allowing me to upload photos from my cellphone by a single click).

attention: Zooomr currently offers free pro-accounts to bloggers - the ‘Rats! In My Brain’-blog explains how to obtain one…

just discovered & subscribed to dead2.0, a blog by a guy nicknamed skeptic, who’s obviously tired of all the web2.0-hype. besides plain criticism and sarcasm, skeptic actually has something to say, like he recently proved with his post ‘11 suggestions for not being a dot-bomb 2.0′.

(reminds me of the great book ‘dot bomb’ by J. David Kuo - Kuo has been Senior VP of ValueAmerica.com, an early & famous victim of the bubble burst. In ‘dot bomb’, Kuo gives detailed insight of an ‘internet goliath - from lunatic optimism to panic and crash’ - highly recommended!)

thinkvitman.com just released an audio-interview with Tim O’Reilly, who created a humongous business based on conferences and books on opensource software. I guess there is no geek out there, who doesn’t own at least one of the books sporting animal cover-artwork published by O’Reilly. O’Reilly Media got bad press recently for claiming trademark of the term ‘web 2.0′ when used in conjunction with tech-conferences. other topics covered in the interview: the where 2.0 conference, Second Life & virtual worlds, people not getting the ‘web 2.0′-meme, the current climate tech-startups are launching in and the possibility of another bubble to burst.

hint: thinkvitamin doesn’t offer a seperate RSS-feed for the podcast, but it’s ok to use their main-news-feed with most podcatchers. for iTunes, just choose “Advanced” - “Subscribe to Podcast” and copy&paste this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/vitaminmasterfeed - the news-items not including audio are simply ignored.

Janko Röttgers - author of the P2PBlog and the book ‘Mix burn & R.I.P’ - did a short email-interview with Kevin Rose, founder & CEO of social-news-site Digg. I’m glad to hear that the data-visualization-features I missed in the digg 3.0 relaunch a month ago are obviously scheduled to be launched by the end of july. Janko links two videos explaining the concepts of digg Incoming and digg Swarm, which Kevin outlines like this:

“digg Incoming: Think of incoming as a combination of an excel clustered column bar graph and the game of tetris. Every time a user diggs a story another block falls from the sky, causing the graph to grow taller. This will be one of the first tools that enables users to see real-time activities from several hundred newly submitted stories at once. The larger the graph, the more users are digging the story.

digg Swarm: Swarm is a graphical representation of diggers gathering or swarming around stories. On mouse over, swarm also draws real-time connections between stories that have similar diggers. The larger the bubble grows in the swarm, the more activity occurring within that story.”

btw, Max Kiesler’s DesignDemo is an interesting blog covering various aspects of innovative user-interfaces and data-visualization.

Zoho Writer

the text-processor offers basic features regarding text-formats (font, size, color etc.), paragraph-alignment, listings and enumerations. image-upload and -positioning works smoothly, unlike the integrated table-editor which needs some improvements (f.e. I wasn’t able to delete multiple rows). Zoho Writer feels more like a richtext-editor for blogs than a fully-fledged word-processor, but compared to some competitors it offers some unique features, like (english) spell-checking and a search-and-replace function - both of high importance when planning to replace a desktop-word-processor. import of Word-files even messes up documents with simple layouts, export to PDF - the only way to print your documents - works quite good (though there’s a minor bug requiring to save your doc before exporting). Besides file-export, Zoho Writer allows to send documents to blogs (Wordpress, Typepad, LiveJournal…) or share them publicly/privately.

Zoho Show

Zoho’s presentation-builder contains similar text-formatting-options like the Writer-app. Zoho Show allows to create slide-templates containing headers, logos etc. which are applied to all individual slides. text, images and bullet-lists are organized in independent frames which can be freely dragged around the slide. however, the user-interface is quite clunky. editing the content of a text-frame requires to right-click the frame and select ‘edit’ - users familiar with Powerpoint and such will be alienated by such intricacy. slideshows can be viewed (almost-) fullscreen using cursor-keys and spacebar to swift through slides. Zoho currently offers no way to export slideshows.

Zoho Sheet

there are loads of competitors in the online-spreadsheet market (f.e. Google Spreadsheets or WikiCalc). Zoho Sheet offers most features you’ld expect a web-spreadsheet to contain: formatting of cells (very basic, f.e. no spanning cells), loads of numerical, logical and statistical functions and Excel-import (destroying complicated layouts though). what it differentiates it from similar products is the capability to draw basic charts (bar, pie, columns and line). Zoho Sheets exports to pdf, Excel and OpenOffice.

Zoho’s web-office-suite is easily the most complete offering in web-office to date. still, it’s hard to imagine users to replace their desktop-suite with Zoho: file-import of Microsoft Office-files only works with very simple files, printing documents by exporting to pdf is long-windend, and there are plenty of features even an average user will miss. most of these problems are shared by all upcoming web-office-apps I’ve seen to date. what’s a bit disappointing is the current low grade of integration within Zoho-apps. the user-interfaces of the three main-apps not only look very different, but also follow differing design-paradigms (f.e. Zoho Sheet doesn’t offer context-menus on right-mouse-clicks, while Show and Writer do). in addition, the supported features for sharing and exporting documents aren’t consistent among the apps.
still, I encourage everyone interested in web-office to try out Zoho, especially the Writer- and Sheet-apps offer unique features the competition doesn’t have (yet).

(read my other articles on office-is-dead)

dabble db is a web-based tool for data-management, -collection and -sharing, aimed at corporate information-workers which are currently organizing data among small teams using Microsoft Access or similar software. since Access’ initial launch in 1992 (click to read about the products’ history), Microsoft has done quite an amazing job in enabling database-amateurs with profound insight into business-processes to realize data-driven applications - without the cost of involving IT-departments or external services. sure, Access’ database-engine has been critized by pro-developers since day one (and rightly so). and yes, ad-hoc data-models designed by the typical Access-user tend to break. but still I think that Access is the most significant part of Microsoft’s Office-suite regarding empowerment of the user. surely it is the Office-application which is hardest to replace (either by opensource- or webbased-solutions).

dabble db migrates the spirit of early versions of Microsoft Access into todays web 2.0-reality. users are encouraged to start entering data right away, even without designing table-definitions or inter-table-dependencies. the data-model (which at its core is of course still based on a relational data-model, although ‘tables’ are called ‘categories’ which might lead to confusion at first) evolves iteratively, adding columns or references whenever they are needed. dabble’s AJAX-driven user-interface and the whole design-concept are really worth a look, a comprehensive screencast can be found here…

naturally, dabble’s biggest advantange are its features for sharing databases on the web. databases can be shared with specified users (invitation via email) or with the general public (read-only or even writeable). these collaborative features give dabble an advantage over Access, which is mostly still bound to local/corporate networks.
in it’s current state, dabble db addresses only the very basic needs of data-management. it is a great tool for distributed data-collection on the net. however, compared to desktop-applications, the feature-set is extremely limited - no customized forms, no reports, no scripting. currently there is no way to integrate images or other multimedia-data into dabble db. what might detain dabble’s success even more: it is actually costing money (starting with 25 US$ a month for a multi-user license, free trials are available). still, many applications can be solved with the current featureset sufficiently, so the next time you are in need of a simple collaborative data-management-tool while lacking a budget, you might give it a try!

today we face several major problems using instant messaging software: a) there are several products on market (ICQ, AIM, MSN…), establishing IM-networks which are not interconnected. b) messaging-software has to be installed locally on the PC, which is a serious problem for users working in environments without permission to install software (i.e. most companies and universities). c) many corporate networks prevent instant messaging by blocking required ports.

meebo is an AJAX-driven web-IM-client tackling all these problems, and - despite in ‘alpha’-stage - is doing a good job! meebo currently supports AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, Jabber and MSN, the only major network missing is Skype (which applies to all ‘meta-Clients’ - web-based or locally-installed - I’ve seen so far). meebo’s user-interface emulates well-known desktop applications smoothly, its functionality covers basic IM-needs (advanced features like sending files are not - yet - available). recommended!

update: A UK developer nicknamed ‘Tones’ has published a meebo-extension for Flock…

‘(Microsoft) Office is dead!’ - that seems to be the mantra of many web 2.0-apps. but can current web-office-applications really substitute an office-suite with a decades-long history of improvement and extension? over the next weeks, I’m going to review several popular web-apps to see if that’s the case, starting with Google Spreadsheets, which recently was introduced by Google Labs. while Spreadsheets is currently not actively marketed as a product, I bet Google plans tight integration into GMail, similar to recent acquisition Writely.

usability & featureset

basic editing-functions and many keyboard-shortcuts for entering data into the sheet are comfortably similar to Microsoft Excel. the product currently offers only very basic format-options like a few fonts, text- & background-color and text-alignment. more complex layouts are prevented by the lack of features like setting the border-color. Spreadsheet supports loads of mathematical and statistical functions, but misses to integrate contextual help on how they are used (i.e. Spreadsheets doesn’t display each functions arguments).

Google obviously advocates the paper-less office, since Spreadsheets doesn’t offer a print-function. trying to export to HTML and use the browsers built-in printing isn’t an option either, since the original column-widths are not reassembeld correctly. besides HTML, Spreadsheets exports also to .CSV- and Excel-files.
on an average Windows-PC, Google Spreadsheets is feeling quite responsive. supported browsers include Internet Explorer 6.0+, Firefox 1.0.7+ and Netscape 7.2+ - Safari is currently not supported.

import of excel-sheets

while many layout-formats are not imported correctly (f.e. basic things as cells spanning serveral rows or columns), Spreadsheet handles formulas and functions sufficiently, as well as regional differences regarding date-format and decimal point. graphs of any sort are not imported at all, special characters are lost in translation. in its current state, Spreadsheet does a good job importing excel-files mainly containing pure data, but fails miserably when it comes to adapting even basic formatting & layout.

collaborative features

spreadsheets can be shared (read-only or writeable) with other users simply by sending them invitations via email (all collaborators are required to have GMail-accounts though). what’s really cool is the ability for users to synchronously edit the same sheet. data entered by a contributor just pops up on the screen of each user currently working on the same sheet. an additional chat-sidebar allows live-communication between the collaborators. while the latency is quite low (about one second), I would appreciate if the changes each user made would be represented in different colors.

it’s important to note that Google Spreadsheet is not a finished product, not even feature-complete as a ‘beta’ normally would be. however, the user-interface looks very promising and the possibility of realtime-collaborative editing gives Spreadsheets a fresh twist. users of GMail will probably see the integration of Spreadsheets into the mail-application as an instant file-viewer sooner or later. until that happens, I recommend everyone interested in the state of AJAX-based webapps to try it out!

if you’re in San Francisco, you’ll probably have a hard time deciding which conference to attend today: if SuperNova wasn’t enough, BloggerCon IV is starting on june 23rd. BloggerCon is an “un”-conference organized by Dave Winer, the sometimes-debatable A-list- & longtime-blogger who came to fame by inventing and evangelizing RSS and podcasting.

there are several options to tune into BloggerCon:

• IRC channel at irc.freenode.net/bloggercon
• live audio-feed at http://smartstr.wm.llnwd.net/smartstr_liveces (windows media)
• live video-feed at http://media.ito.com/kevinmarks/bloggercon.mov (quicktime)
• mp3-recordings are available after the sessions
• …and of course numerous (live-)bloggers

ps: in case you wonder, “unconference” is a geek-term describing a meeting where content is driven by all its participants instead of just a single person.
pps: don’t forget Gnomedex, another tech-conference starting june 29th

social tech-news-site digg is about to launch its version 3.0 on monday, june 26th. the most groundshaking change might be the new categorization of topics into six categories (technology, entertainment, gaming, science, world & business and online video). as Mike Arrington points out, digg has surpassed former leader slashdot in terms of pageviews long ago, and is now going to challenge the New York Times. a lengthy interview with digg-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson available at TalkCrunch right now is promising to unveil some of the other new features of digg 3.0.

update: valleywag.com reports from the digg 3.0 launch-party and features a picture of a new mindmap-feature, not unsimilar to the one found in feeds2…cool!

update: digg 3.0 was launched today… though the mindmap pictured above seems not to have made it into this release