I am, not the biggest fan of "Native Apps", e.g. applications that one has to install on you phone or tablet that are nothing more than a browser reading an RSS feed and displaying the results in a fancy way. Silos.

And ... without letting the user know, send lots of data of the tablet (location, contacts etc) to the mothership. Think about it, would you install "cnn.exe" on your windows host just to access one site? Would you download "microsoft.dmg" to see the website from the other side? Hell no, native apps must die, silos will fall down. I have been ranting about this for a long time, 2008, again and recent in my famous there is an app for that, it is called a browser post.

With progresive design being the standard and with modern mobile browsers honering the tags like VIDEO, a "HTML-Apps" will crush native apps. Not everybody shares that vision, but in broader sense it is clear that webapps will dominate above native apps in the mobile space; they are easy central to update and by definition cross platform.

As stated before, the browser is the OS.

If this is true, there is no reason to stop at a specific devices like a mobile. And indeed, Google docs replaced the office suite and as can be sen below, with pure HTML you can even do photobooth alike effects.

And now garageband is having a hard time with a browser based -less UI more interaction with friend- tool called jamwithchrome.
.

One day, the browser will be the OS and we will all have big fat thin clients again with a mixture of local data and apps and remote data and apps. Al I wish for is that -despite the fact that I wish every company as much sicess as they can get- Google will not be the new Microsoft and Chrome not the new IE.

newspapermap.com is een mooie mashup site waar je alle (?) uitgevers /kranten ter wereld op een kaart weergegeven ziet. Het is amusant om te zien dat een dichtbevolkt land als Nederland een zeer hoge concentratie heeft waar een land als Duitsland en Engeland veel minder geconsolideerd is en er veel meer kleine uitgevers zijn.

Met de opkomst van Hyperlocal waar nieuws weer lokaal wordt, leuk te zien waar dit heen gaat. Even van uitgaande dat kranten niet het zelfde zijn als papier (maar ook bv een website) benieuwd wat er gaat gebeuren. Gaat een grote enterprise als Telegraaf Media Groep met haar centrale kracht de lokale dichtbij.nl's Nederland juist verder consolideren of biedt het ruimte aan kleine lokale websites?

Hoe dan ook, meer dan ooit blijkt dat nieuws == colour local.

Ik ben groot fan van Vark.com, een website waar je vragen kan stellen aan mensen via instant messaging.
(Aard)Vark is

Aardvark is a new kind of tool that lets you tap into the knowledge and experience of friends and friends-of-friends.
Send Aardvark a question (from the web, IM, email, Twitter, or iPhone) and you’ll get a quick, helpful response from someone with…The right knowledge, Similar tastes, Friends in common

Het werkt voor mij, specifieke vragen die niet via Google zijn te vinden maar waar ik vertrouw op de kennis van experts, niet op de timeline van twitter.

Dus nu Google een automatische tool Google Talk Guru heeft om antwoorden te vinden, had ik redelijke hoge verwachtingen.

De eerste test laten echter zien dat de implementatie redelijk beperkt is. Google Talk Guru kent maar een paar basis commandos: "score, weather, define, translate, web". En dat kan ik ook prima via ene browser die ik waar ik in woon, jabber is slechts mijn voortuin :-) Na een tijdje gespeeld te hebben vond ik inderdaad dat de vijf basale commandos doen wat ze moeten, heb ik geen easter eggs kunnen vinden, maar ben er ook achter dat de kwaliteit bepaald niet op het niveau van "watson" (IBM) ligt; verre van. Al is dat zeker iets voor de toekomst en zal de vraag dan wellicht zelfs via voice ipv chat gesteld kunnen worden.

Niet heel erg onder de indruk dus . Hoewel:

Sorry, 'score ajax' did not return any results.

en langs de web: "Sorry, 'score a chick' did not return any results." :-)
:-)

Every day or so I try to browse so modules that might be of use for customers. Not that my team is afraid of building own modules. Not at all as the Hansel module for example shows. A rather cool module for developers to make better breadcrumbs that we build for the NCRV.nl and was donated by them. Not afraid to make own modules that make "awesomeness happen". But using Open Source means building on the shoulders of giants and no matter how tall you are, there is always someone taller then you. So despite being 2 meters tall, I always look for smarter people writing interesting code/functionality.

So the other day I came across the Drupal anywhere module that uses twitters anywhere service. Anyway, clicking the demo link brought me to... drup.al!

And this is what I wrote about that domain-name back in 2006:

If Drupal would have started in 2005 and Albania would have had a real NIC, we wouldnt have claimed drupal.org but drup.al.


But we arent followers, not here to be hip and we were twodotooo before Tim could spell it out. So we are Drupal.org, rocking without being Beta Two Dot Oooh!

And I still think it is true today. Even if Time gave an excellent keynote at DrupalCon SF. Drup.al is a funny domain-name. Demoing a nice module, that is all it is. And when the Albanian NIC was any more open back in 2001 when I registered drupal.org I am sure I would have looked at drup.al as well. Nice domain name, but search engines are the new DNS, Google is the new Bind. Funny name, drup.al. But most outsiders already think that the name Drupal by itself is funny enough.

APOSTLES

What's the buzz?
Tell me what's a-happening. (Repeat 8 times)

JESUS

Why should you want to know?
Don't you mind about the future?
Don't you try to think ahead?
Save tomorrow for tomorrow;
Think about today instead.

Google cant make waves anymore like they used to when people were bidding for free gmail accounts. To buzz has not been orkut for a long time.

Will it be a "silo integration", a flop like wave, a Spanish orkut or indeed a hit like gmail? Time will tell.