Social networking and Web 2.0

Social networking is a concept that includes many innovative new services that have appeared on the internet in recent years. What these services have in common is that they attract many groups (or communities), where the participants (such as friends or family) share common interests.

For example:

- Flickr is a photo-sharing website where people can upload their photos and share them with friends.

- Del.icio.us is similar to Flickr, but where the objects are web locations instead of photos.

One of the most exciting directions of social networking is integration with mobile devices. For example, dodgeball is a friend network and dating service that works with mobile text messaging. When members want to meet someone, they can write a text to Dodgeball with their location and find out where their friends are. Another example is nanoblogging sites (see my previous post) which are integrated with mobile devices.

So, the social networking phenomenon is great, but its fusion with mobile computing can be extremely powerful for the web 2.0 world.

Google Accessible Search

Accessibility is more important in web services every day. Like other post told, there are many people who have difficulties accessing websites, and we can, step by step, try to reduce the problems to access to internet services.

Nowadays, Google is the most popular web search in Internet, because of this, I was looking for how Google work in accessibility applications and I found a new product...

Accessible Web Search for the Visually Impaired is a new product that Google released to enhance the search. First result pages are considered more accessible than result pages in normal Google.

Google Co-op is the technology which created the new tool. It's a users' community where they contribute, with their experience and knowledges, to enhance web search for everyone. Co-op modify result pages about different topics or interests.

In my opinion, work in accessibility pages is so important, we don't know who is the new Einstein or Bill Gates?!?!

Nanoblogging

Nanoblogging (or microblogging) are web pages where users create networks and communicate between them using short messages. Most famous one is Twitter, although the reason for my post today is that Jaiku (probably the second most famous nanoblogging site) has recently been acquired by Google.

As you know, Blogger was acquired by Google some years ago, and now they have acquired Jaiku.

To be honest, although I do have a Twitter account, I do not use it (my life is too boring to be shared every minute :) ). But with the Google acquisition probably nanoblogging sites will become as famous as blogging, and with the mobile integration they can even be a similar revolution as the SMS message were.

Active content = less accessibility, more misery

A while ago, I wrote this rant. Since web 2.0 is also often used in conjunction with AJAX (asynchronous javascript and XML) that powers all these neat tricks that can make web applications behave (almost) like real, local applications, I thought this might apply somewhat to our discussion here. So:

Embedded programs that are supposed to enhance our content are in fact making it less secure, less reliable, more expensive to create, promote monocultures and limit consumers' options. This problem is most apparent on the web, but it's permeating elsewhere as well.

Phishers trick people into revealing sensitive data by making the user believe he or she is dealing with a legit outfit. For instance, when you hover your mouse pointer over a link, normally, you'll see the URL the link points to. But with some scripting, it's possible to display something different. That's bad, but it gets worse. It's easy to scan an HTML page to determine if there are any undesired URLs in it. But if there is a script attached to that page, this is no longer possible, because the script can be programmed to construct the unwanted content when it's run.

Less reliable: if you have a browser display an HTML page with some illegal HTML in it, in almost all cases, the result is usable to some degree: the browser ignores the HTML it doesn't understand and goes on to render the rest. But with a JavaScript program, if there is one statement or function that the browser doesn't understand or implements in a way that wasn't expected by the programmer, and in most cases, the program can't be executed at all or it fails to function to any useful degree.

Because programs are so fragile, it's necessary to test them in all environments where they'll have to function. This is why it's so hard to surf the web with a browser other than the two or three most popular ones: content creators don't test their scripts on these browsers, the content doesn't work, and people switch to Internet Explorer or Firefox.

When DVDs first appeared, only the FBI warnings were unskipable. But having the ability to restrict the use of certain DVD player functions, DVD creators soon started making previews and ads unskipable too, sometimes even forcing users to go through menus to select different soundtracks or subtitles.

Please stop this proliferation of active content, for the most part, it's not making our lives better.

Predictions about the web accesibility & Web 2.0

I have been reading about web 2. and web accesibility, and i have done a summarize about some predictions and conclusions:

There are three major factors that will shape web accessibility in the very very short future: AJAX, user generated content and WCAG 2.0. The increased prominence of these factors could lead to some of the following:

Accessibility will become less and less guideline-driven
With the advent of new technology (such as AJAX), and the technology-neutral and vague nature of the new W3C guidelines (WCAG 2.0), accessibility is becoming less and less guideline driven. This means that employing accessibility experts is going to become more and more important for organisations as interpreting these guidelines correctly will become more and more difficult.
Alternative accessible versions will become the norm
Historically speaking, separate accessible versions were frowned on for both ethical and business reasons (see Separate text-only version? No thanks!13 for more on this). However, for the first time usability and accessibility are coming head-to-head with each other and rich interactive interfaces often can't be made fully accessible. In this instance, a separate version will have to be provided (but only after all other routes have been exhausted).
User generated content is likely to offer poor accessibility
Content created by users is becoming more and more commonplace on the web. This kind of content is being created at such a rapid rate that it's going to be impossible to police it for accessibility.
JavaScript, PDF & Flash will no longer be thought of as 'evil'
In WCAG 1.0, web managers and developers were basically told that their websites shouldn't rely on any of these three technologies. WCAG 2.0 on the other hand doesn't stipulate this, and rightly so as most assistive technologies can now support these technologies.

Test color blindness experience with this utility

By complete coincidence, I ran into this: Color Oracle. It's a little tool that lets you modify the colors on your computer screen so that what you see is more or less what someone with color blindness would see. When you select the most common type, deuteranopia, you immediately see that the color red is indistinguishable from green or gray. However, green and red are very often used to signal "good"/"continue" versus "bad"/"stop", even on the computer.

Web 2.0 businesses

Web 2.0 concept is related with the change on how end users use the web. Well, a more formal definition from wikipedia is: "Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users"

So, Web 2.0 is about about end user experience, but what about business experience ?
This link shows a list of the 31 most important start-ups outside the United States: companies created just few years ago using the Web 2.0 concept. You can see how different their activities are, about web applications, software, social activities, ....

The company in the photo is Maxthon, that has created a browser that avoids traffic control of the Chinese government.

The only Spanish company is Tractis (it is #9 of 31). It is a company headquartered in Barcelona, that administrates, manages and signs business contracts online.

Probably some of these companies will dissapear in three years from now, but some others will make money and create jobs using the web 2.0 concept.

Maybe one of this is the next Google !!