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I finally understand why Spore has been delayed for so long. Originally expected for a 2007 release, the simulated evolution game from Electronic Arts (ERTS) studio Maxis was suddenly withheld, much to EA’s chagrin. Maxis head Will Wright explained the delay, saying that the company wanted to make the follow-up to its wildly successful […]

Most programmers today use Java and PHP in Web 2.0 applications, from social networking sites, to shopping carts, content management systems, and other complex applications. Popular sites, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, are using Java and PHP in some of their most important development work.

On Friday I caught up with Jason Shellen, one of the members of the original Blogger team. Following Google’s February 2003 acquisition of PyraLabs, the company behind Blogger, Shellen joined the search engine giant, working first on Blogger and later on other projects, including Google Reader.
In July 2007, he became a member of the ex-Googler […]

While Powerset unquestionably has some interesting and valuable semantic search technology, there are other semantic search engines that produce equally meaningful and relevant results.
In this post, we compare Powerset results with those of a demo implementation from one such search engine, Cognition Technologies. And we compare them both with the current gold standard in web search, Google.

Google and other large Web 2.0 operations have had to design totally proprietary, specialized systems in order to scale their databases that large – but with Aster, all that scalability is completely transparent because your front-end apps and your middleware business logic is the same as it always was on monolithic systems – applications communicate with the Queen via standard ODBC and JDBC interfaces, so you don’t have to do a ton of re-coding to stand up your own Hive.

Here is another fantastic artwork by Shulgin and Chernyshev. Unfortunately, this is all the information I found on YouTube.

Urgently! is an info-sculpture that explores such phenomena as information overload, Web 2.0 and information aesthetics. News coming from the Internet in real time, is thrown right away into a giant recycle bin in order to be updated at the next moment. A snake-like LED display coming in and out the bin shows the RSS feeds from various news channels. Urgently! metaphorically represents digital data - an endless flow of information that is updated every second and gets obsolete and trashed immediately after that. The piece is wirelessly connected to a computer network in order to retrieve the data. A user can select news channels and control update period.

Here is the YouTube link

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So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the next generation of IT. Software + services… While the concepts for Web 2.0 are intriguing many questions come to mind. What is a good candidate for Web 2.0 especially if it’s not maintained inside the corporate infrastructure?
The approach is very attractive but introduces many new obstacles, how do we ensure the integrity of transactions, data ownership issues, transparency. As services grow and mature they tend to change significantly over time with inevitable impact on subscribers. How do we continue to reduce TCO in this type of environment? Can subscribers create prescriptive contracts that prevent this from occurring? On the provider side of the house are there design patterns that allow for providing services flexibly to a multitude of subscribers without incurring the high costs of maintenance?
What is required here will likely turn out to cause providers to migrate in one of several directions.
The first option will be to provide only services that are either marginal or no value add to the majority of corporate businesses. Services that I see falling in grouping will likely fall within the IT space. Messaging services- IM, SMS, etc…
Level two services will likely provide services that are designed to replace existing data interchanges such as EDI. AS2 and Internet EDI really fill this space currently but I can foresee a day when the XML standards based spaces solidify and begin to define Contract based data exchange that will allow businesses to move away from internal EDI and or VAN based exchange. The main hurtle to overcome here will be timing as the standards based bodies do not move nearly as quickly as the remainder of the industry creating contention between technology and standards.
Finally, in the software +services arena there will be those who approach their services as core infrastructure that are extended through interfaces. These will be provided as the contract for subscribers that can be easily added to or extended and managed for each customers need. A great deal of effort will have to be invested in the design and architecture by those who choose this road. Companies that expend the effort up front to design for flexibility will be the winners in this space. Once established as a framework mission critical services as well as the more mundane service can be managed via a single infrastructure achieving economies of scale on the support model. Decisions to implement this strategy (enterprise wide vs. mission critical) will then become a simple question of economics.

I thought to myself, now, there must be some web 2.0 site which allows you to signup, maintain a collection of code snippets, choose source language (C, C++, Java, XML, etc.) and provide widgets, clippets, RSS feeds of the code or the like, which you can easily paste in your blog using > > tags. But there obviously wasn’t something this mundane.

Twitter, in a post on its blog, has acknowledged that it’s been having problems. It attributes some (not all) of them to so-called “popular” users that it says overloaded the system when they sent updates in too quick a succession. In other words, it was a tactical acknowledgment by the company of problems that have […]

Update: As pointed out in the comments below, Symantec has since clarified their original worries about this being a zero-day exploit affecting current versions of Flash. However it still remains a problem affecting earlier versions of Flash. For details about the specific issue, see Adobe’s post on the problem.
Yesterday’s news of an exploit in Flash […]