Time for a little roundup of some loose ends rattling around my brain these days. But first I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be taking Sundays off from posting starting yesterday. I’m getting some more freelance work, and I’m going to dedicate most of my weekends to that for the near future. Now, on to a Monday Night Grab Bag!
1. Joost
Last week I got my beta invitation for Joost, and I’ve been playing around with it some. For those who don’t know, Joost is a new Web 2.0 company that has created an application for streaming television on your computer. As opposed to the majority of Web 2.0 apps, which use your Web browser to push their user interface, Joost is a program you have to download and run locally. Another innovation of Joost is their adoption of a peer to peer back end for distributing the server load of their streaming content.
So far, it’s worked really well for me. I think I was one of the first couple of rounds of the OS X beta testers, and the program is a little buggy. Also, besides MTV, BET, and Comedy Central, there aren’t many channels of recognizable programming. I know that CBS just signed a contract to supply content, and I’m sure other networks will follow suit. But for now, there isn’t a lot on that struck my fancy.
If Joost takes off, I think we’ll start to see a lot more of these hybrid client apps that run on your desktop with Web 2.0 functionality. And on a related topic…
2. Adobe Apollo
Adobe has released a new runtime environment and SDK for developing applications that could run a lot like Joost using traditionally Web-only programming languages (HTML, Javascript, Flash, etc.). I haven’t downloaded it to check it out yet, but Apollo and Microsoft’s Silverlight could set the stage for the next Web revolution. Or they could fizzle. Time will tell.
And speaking of fizzling…
3. The Web 2.0 Bubble
I subscribe to Mashable, a blog that covers news and trends in social networking sites. It’s an excellent blog, but every day I’m amazed by stories they cover of some new Web 2.0 startup getting funding for letting users share pictures of their cats or some such thing. It reminds me a lot of the last days of the Web 1.0 boom during which investors were throwing money at any- and everything that had .com at the end of it. The recent buzz around twitter, a fairly useless one-trick pony with a funny name and some shiny graphics, has me worried. Could twitter be the death knell of Web 2.0? I can only hope investors and entrepreneurs are wiser this go around.
So there you have a few things I’ve been thinking about recently. Looks like I’ve got some waiting and seeing to do. I’ll keep you posted down the road.
