Web 2.0 Mantra: Faster, Cheaper and Better

Recently, I have seen an article "Web 2.0: Not very enterprising" in Business Standard, which presents not very encouraging trend for the Web 2.0 market in India, and says “the Web 2.0 market in India is still struggling for direction and funding, though the start-up scene in the Indian consumer space has been vibrant.” To an extent, the statement is substantially true, as homegrown Web 2.0 sites are still miles away from mass adoption in comparison with global biggies like Orkut, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia. Further quoting a report from IDC, the article adds that “ Progress in this direction, this year, will be slow, though steady. Excluding established global players like Orkut, Metacafe, Digg, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia, Web 2.0 startups have a combined user base of around 1.5 million in India, after eliminating overlaps, according to IDC.”

However, this somewhat disheartening trend can be changed much to Indian Web 2.0 service providers by their proactive approach. In a report “How Indian Tech Companies Can Benefit From Web 2.0”, published in Nasscom website, discusses about initiatives to be taken by the Indian companies to leverage the benefits of Web 2.0.

First, it says about Speed of Execution and Effectiveness of the Indian Web 2.0 vendors. “Indian best of breed workforce coupled with best of breed web 2.0 tools and mashups of applications can keep Indian’s outsourcing drive front of the curve.”

Secondly, Developing Creative Services can again provide us an edge over global competition. Indian companies can deliver low cost web2.0 technologies over the web.
The report asks Indian companies to leverage Community in Solution Building by involving global tech talents with the increasing use of blogs, wikis and other web 2.0sources. It further adds, “ Active open communication and mind sharing through blogs, or managing requirements real time without putting a structural workflow around it can provide you a pathway to make a true connection with your customers and create a sense of stakeholder ownership.”

By being Early Adopters of Web 2.0 technology, Indian tech companies will be leaders in the Web 2.0 movement.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

2008: The Year of RSS

A latest post on newsgator speaks about what will be the trend throughout 2008 in RSS, both from the consumer and enterprise RSS perspective. It highlighted the following trends in the year ahead:

Portal Plumbing. Using RSS / Atom as a way for backend systems to funnel information (both publishing and retrieving) into a single access points that are easy to use and easy to manage. As increasing number of users are using iGoogle and Netvibes as their own aggregator, and are using RSS to accomplish this.

RSS will be the transfer protocol between yourself and your social networks.

Ease of use will be greatly enhanced with discovery and filtering mechanisms to help you find new content and sort/organize the feeds you already subscribe to.

Atom publishing will become more important as well within social networks. A widely adaptable comment publishing protocol will emerge that would allow users to comment on an item.

Within the enterprise, the use of authenticated feeds to access transaction and master data systems will rise.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

6 Essential Things Developers Need to Know About Google’s OpenSocial

Folks,

Awfully sorry for giving latest updates on Google’s OpenSocial model for social networking applications so late, as your Blog Evangelist was a lit bit tied up with some other important activities.

What perceived by some as Google’s smart move to outmaneuver the increasing popularity of Facebook, but this is not going to stop developers from building applications for Facebook.

But that doesn’t mean that OpenSocial doesn’t have advantages. According to Joe Kraus, a Director of Product Management at Google, OpenSocial will make things easier for developers "because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places."

Better if you look at the 6 essential things, which you need to know about Google’s OpenSocial:

1. OpenSocial only offers the lowest common denominator, not the full richness of each social networking platform.
2. OpenSocial is largely based on open standards and there's only minor developer lock-in.
3. OpenSocial is a real doorway to social networking data portability as well as potential security holes.
4. OpenSocial is simple and straightforward but also capable of developing full-blown, rich Internet applications.
5. OpenSocial is from Google and excessive philanthropy should not be expected.
6. A new era in competency in social software is being ushered in by models like OpenSocial.

If you want to know more about Google OpenSocial, look at the video....



Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

OpenSocial: Google answer to Facebook for social networking power struggle

Realizing its broad social networking ambitions, Google is coming out with OpenSocial, a new project, which is a set of common APIs that developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks, called “ hosts”, that choose to participate. OpenSocial allows developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

And, more importantly, what precisely seems to be Google answer to Facebook. Google’s approach is new in this sense that instead of launching yet another social network platform, it provides an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. There are two categories of partners in OpenSocial: hosts and developers. Hosts are the participating social networks, which include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. And developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.
MySpace and Six Apart are soon joining Google’sOpenSocial initiative.

OpenSocial addresses the problems of developers learning yet another markup language for every social network platform. In OpenSocial, developers will immediately start building on these APIs to get distribution across the impressive list of hosts above.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Does OutworX have Profile,Community & Widget on Facebook ?

We all know about Facebook, which is a media, community and application platform that offers a thriving ecosystem, scalable growth, and word-of-mouth marketing. Originally kicked off as a destination for students to connect with one another through social networks, the site has expanded to include companies, professional networks and geographic regions. As per one rough estimate, over half of Facebook’s 43 million users visit every day, spend an average of 20 minutes on the site, and view over 54 billion total page views per month. Now, it is impossible to ignore the growing size and scope of Facebook.

Also, the company announced a set of APIs to make integration and support with third-party services even easier for consumers. The Application Platform gives a web team the capability to swiftly deploy a widget.

In addition, Facebook provides you with targeted advertising option to market effectively, where you can provide messages segmented by location, gender, and or preferences.

If you want to know more about Facebook, click here .

If you want to develop a Facebook platform application, click here .

Participate in Poll

Now, we request Team OutworX to participate in the poll, and let us have your mandate on the following points:

• What should be Outworx Facebook Strategy?
• Does OutworX have its profile on Facebook?
• Can we kick off a Community on Facebook?
• Shall we deploy a widget/application on Facebook’s Application Platform?
• Can you suggest a widget/application to be deployed on the API?

Send in your mandate at oxblog@outworx.com

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation.

Facebook Vs. MySpace: Race for Superiority

There is no end in sight so far as race for superiority among social networking sites is concerned , particularly between Facebook and MySpace . If a recent post of TechCrunch can be believed, “MySpace remains the most popular social networking destination”.

As per the new figures released by HitWise, MySpace is losing its market share at least in Australia, as the Facebook razzmatazz goes on. “Facebook has tripled its traffic in the 10 weeks to October 13” as compared to MySpace, which has lost its visitors by 5% during the period.

The post further says that it is tough to grow traffic when you’re already at the top. Though MySpace is soon going to open platform to provide additional services to its members, not much is happening on MySpace front at least for the time being. What goes in favor of Facebook is amazing word of mouth publicity. However, the post accepts with increasing lot of people is using Facebook , maybe it will soon become the only choice in online social networking.

You can read the complete post on the TechCrunch.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation