Archive for March, 2010
Rich user experiences (Animoto)
Animoto (http://animoto.com) provides rich user experience by producing TV quality videos using photos in just minutes. By uploading photos and video clips, then choosing a song file provided, Animoto will use its program to analyze and produce a unique video. Animoto’s best selling point is that, there are no two same video are ever the same (even uploaded from a same set of image).
Videos that are produced with Animoto can be shared by using e-mail, Facebook, upload to Youtube, burned into Dvd disc and also able to placed on blog or MySpace.
According to Animoto: “Animoto’s founders have produced shows for MTV, Comedy Central & ABC, studied classical music in London, played in rock bands in Seattle and developed software in Japan. They have developed a patent-pending, Cinematic Artificial Intelligence that thinks like an actual editor and director”.
Animoto also provides business service by producing professional videos and other extra functions such as call-to-action button which turns an Animoto video from a passive viewing experience into an active marketing tool for lead generation. With less than a minute, a well presented video can be created to bring an amazing presentation for the meeting.
Below is a simple guide how to create video with Animoto:
- Sign up for an account
- Choose create a short 30-sec video or a full length video
- Choose to upload images from your computer; or pick one of the following services: Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, and others.
- Allow Animoto to retrieve images and processes them
- Once uploaded you can choose to use them all or remove other unwanted images.
- After confirm the images, choose a song from Animoto’s library or upload own music files.
- Then finalize your video with a title and description and let Animoto works it’s magic.
- Email the video, download it or even embed in a webpage to share in with others.
Animoto’s terms of use stated that videos that are created with Animoto is shareable with individuals but restricted for commercial use. Animoto’s video can be sold to individuals or couples as a gift but not prohibited to be sold to another businesses or company.
Below is an example of a video I made with Animoto, enjoy:
References links:
Animoto – http://animoto.com
Innovation in assembly (AWS – EC2)
AWS (Amazon Web Services) portray “innovation in assembly” with it’s unique services for normal users to businesses organizations by utilizing cloud computing web platform. AWS is a collection of web services where Amazon provide for other businesses to “rent” computing power, data storage, and bandwidth on its vast network platform. The main advantage of using AWS is that upgrades are available to any extend according to the user’s needs at anytime and anywhere, without needing user to upgrading their own hardware systems.
Amazon Web Services provides:
- Simple Storage Service (S3)
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- Flexible Payments Service (FPS)
- SimpleDB
According to Amazon, the Amazon Web Services delivers a number of benefits for IT organizations and developers, which can be seen here. Most developers would be more interested in Amazon EC2 as it allows user to “rent computers” which is virtual machine where user able to run their computer applications on it. It is scalable and cost effective since it’s paid by hours for active servers or amount of data transferred. Amazon EC2 also able to provide back up to servers which is down at some time.
Amazon EC2 also provides Amazon Cloud Watch API tools to allow user to run, monitor and terminate any instances at real time. Cloud Watch can be accessed with command line tools and web API’s through user’s enterprise monitoring software. Amazon EC2 also provides other API tools such as Auto Scaling API tools, Elastic Load Balancing API tools and more here.
There are few disadvantages of Amazon EC2 if compared to its competitor such as GoGrid, such as server instances are not recoverable with Amazon EC2 where GoGrid will try its best to recover it, and Amazon EC2 doesn’t support Windows Server 2008. Further information of comparison with Amazon EC2 and GoGrid can be read from here.
Amazon AWS’s Terms of Use mentioned that services are provided “as is” and “as available”. There are no guarantees and warranties for user’s material, information or contents which held on Amazon AWS services. User also unable to run different API’s or web services at same time with Amazon AWS. More terms of use can be found here.
In the past, most people would expect that web services will be the next source of Internet-scale grid computing, but it seems that virtual machines based on web platforms is the next major change in the web with Cloud Computing usage arise.
Below is a video of Amazon EC2 Tutorial:
References:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9002865/Amazon.com_s_rent_a_grid?pageNumber=1
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=251
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud
Data is the next Intel Inside (Yahoo! Maps)
In order to provide a successful Web 2.0 service, it is important for the providers to design an advance database system by using SQL database queries, which is widely used by most providers such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon and more. According to O’Reilly at here: “Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as “infoware” rather than merely software.” Therefore, data is the next Intel Inside.
Yahoo! Maps is a free online mapping portal provided by Yahoo!, which allows user to search for a location, store a list of commonly used street addresses in Address Book, showing live traffic conditions by using traffic incident markers, find business and other points of interest nearby a location by using SmartView, and also provide driving directions by displaying on the map or simple text.
Recently, Yahoo! Maps has released a new and improved version which is called Yahoo! Local Maps. It is written using AJAX where provides new features such as drag-gable maps, multi-point driving directions, widgets and satellite imagery.
Yahoo! Maps indicates in their Terms of Use that data provided are only for personal use and not for resale. It is protected by copyright, and it’s provided by licensors such as NAVTEQ, United States Postal Service, Cartifact and more providers.
Yahoo! Maps also provides web services through the Yahoo! Maps Developer APIs which allows user to embed their interactive maps into their web and desktop applications.
In my opinion, Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps are quite similar. It just depends on which platform or providers does the user feels comfortable to use with.
Here’s some tips on how to use the Yahoo! Maps:
Reference links:
Yahoo! Maps – http://maps.yahoo.com/
Data is the Next Intel Inside – http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=3
Harnessing Collective Intelligence (Google Buzz)
This week I would like to talk about a Web 2.0 application that everybody might heard about it but not familiar with it, and it’s Google Buzz.
Google Buzz is about sharing status updates, photos, videos, and more. It’s built right into Gmail and uses friends that has been added so it save user’s time to start adding their friends. Google Buzz allows you to pull images straight from links, watch video online (empowered by YouTube), and also view photos in their original size with bigger photos and fast. The best part of Google Buzz is that you can connect to other sites such as Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader and Twitter, which allows interoperability between different Web 2.0 applications without having to logging into each of them separately. Also, to allow conversation keep going on, comments are sent into inbox for easy viewing and replying purposes.
Google Buzz is similar to Facebook where it is harnessing collective intelligence pattern by allowing users to participate explicitly by creating status update or topic, communicating with each other and more. Google Buzz also provides extra information by default through Google ads to keep their user up to date with the current latest news or hot topics around the world. Google Buzz also involve implicit user participation where side effects of user actions such as what current topic interests them, information of how does users get to find their new friends and what has user done to get more comments or popularity in their network.
Google Buzz is also compatible with mobile where user able to update their profile status and upload photos at anytime, anywhere which is similar to Twitter. It is also said that Google Buzz are combination of various web 2.0 applications that are famous now: Google, Gmail, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.
Google Buzz provides privacy control which allows users to choose whether to publish their ideas to the public or only for their closest friends. However, Google Buzz does auto add friends into your friend list based on your Gmail’s contacts which might have some trouble with privacy issues since not every personal contacts you have might want themselves to be in your “social network friends list”, such as your employee or employer.
Google Buzz does provide some insight of how important and useful if there is interoperability between different social network applications, but however due to large amount of people who are currently involved in Facebook and MySpace, it is expected that if Google Buzz unable to provide integration with Facebook it will results in failure. On top of that, Google’s rival Yahoo already identified the weakness of Google Buzz where Yahoo already have similar social features before Google does (“Yahoo had Google Buzz”, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359012,00.asp). Also, one of Google Buzz’s feature which allows user to import status updates from Twitter doesn’t seem practical enough since the feature can’t be turn around, by having Google Buzz’s status updates posted on to Twitter.
Google Buzz can be a hit if only they are able to solve or improve these problems:
- Auto added friend list
- Integration with Facebook and MySpace
- “Complete interoperability/sync” with Twitter and other web 2.0 social applications
- Provide more applications and functionality such as groups or fans page
I guess people will still prefer to stick with Facebook for the time being, since I do still prefer to Facebook, too.
References links:
Hands on With Google Buzz – http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359015,00.asp
Yahoo: We Had ‘Buzz’ – http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359012,00.asp
Google Buzz: What It Means for Twitter and Facebook – http://mashable.com/2010/02/09/google-buzz-facebook-twitter/
Introduction of Google Buzz:
Hello World!
Hello world! A first try on posting new post for my university’s unit: INN347 Web 2.0 Applications.
