Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Fidji Simo to write about web strategies and provide you with insights on how to manage and develop small & medium businesses. Fidji’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most is to start nice conversations and have fun.

It will surprise nobody that, for the first article written by a woman on Tech IT Easy, I will speak about online shopping, and especially about how to find and compare products online.

The fact that search engines are becoming the entry gate for any search on the Internet gives them a competitive advantage with the growth in online shopping, as customers use them also as product search engines.

That is why a lot of shopping comparators are becoming click brokers: they invest a lot in Adwords to attract customers who start their product search on Google, and then display a lot of Adsense on their pages (just next to product flow) to convert the maximum of visitors into clickers. No major comparator can avoid it, as none of them have managed to create brand loyalty, not even Kelkoo which sees its organic traffic decreasing.

But this type of monetization tends to provide a bad user experience: traditional shopping comparators (or price comparators in this case) just do not manage to reinvent themselves.

The question to ask is: which service would you really like to use when you look for a product? What is still missing in the market?

I will focus on three major trends which will probably force the giants of product search / comparison to innovate at a higher rhythm: visual, social and mobile shopping.

A few weeks ago, in the South of France, I saw a beautiful sofa with coloured pillows in the window of a closed shop. Nothing was there to indicate the brand of the sofa, so I just took a picture. I tried to search “sofa with coloured pillows” on Google and Shopping.com (an eBay company, so I show some loyalty!), and of course you can guess that I did not manage to find my sofa. But with Like.com (US product search engine) I would have found it immediately: indeed, you just have to upload your picture of a specific object and the picture is considered as a query. Then Like.com browses its database to help you find products with a similar graphic signature. And finally, here is my sofa! If you fall in love with Cameron Diaz’s purse (screenshot in this article) without knowing the designer, you can search for similar purses thanks to a picture of it.

Visual shopping is expected to boom in the years to come: in France, Shopoon (PPR group) is planning to launch a visual application based on LTU technology.

But you do not always run into a beautiful sofa; sometimes, the best way to find an amazing product is to have a friend recommending one. This is the trend of social shopping. It has started in France with Ciao! including customers’ advice on products, but new models tend to leverage even more the influence of other customers / friends. But the problem with models like Zlio (you create your own shop to sell your products, essentially to friends) or Xinek (you get a commission when a friend buy a product you have recommended) is that they erase the basement of social shopping: basically, you rely on friends or other customers because they have no interest in selling a special product, which is exactly not the case in those models! So I think that the future on social shopping will be based on websites ranking products according to customers’ satisfaction (Vozavi) and specs (Looneo) or on crawlers aggregating all the available content of a product (Wikio Shopping, if they improve their crawler).

Finally, people (especially women!) who search for good bargains would love to compare prices and specs even when they are shopping offline. Htfacile has launched in France a mobile comparator service: you enter on your mobile the bar code of a product when you are at the supermarket and it returns the 3 cheapest prices found on the Internet. In the US, Slifter goes further: you can now take a picture of the bar code with your mobile, and Slifter returns the best prices for this product both online and offline in your specific location. If the best price can be found in a store in your geographic area, Slifter gives you the map to go to this store on your mobile! I don’t know if I would use it for everyday purchases, but for expensive products it would definitely save me some time and money! In terms of business model, it increases the number of opportunities to use shopping comparators, and revenues for those applications at the same time.

According to market researches, people would like to have a shopping hub where they can find all the shopping-related services. Personally, I would love to have those 3 trends in one: take a picture with my camera phone, get a list of matching products on my mobile with customers’ advice!

And you, how would you like to find, compare and choose products online?

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At last, I did it! Tonight I hacked my very first Gadget for Windows Vista. It’s a simple gadget, with no other feature than thanking you for being so faithful to Tech IT Easy. But overall, if I can hack (actually, I can script) a .gadget file that works in roughly 35 minutes, pretty much anyone can do it. Since all you need to deliver at the end of the day are an .html file and a .xml file, the only tool you need – I can assure you, is good old Notepad.

For those of you who feel like giving it a try, here’s my source code:

• For the jeremy.html document:

<html>

<style>

body {

width:120;

height:120;

}

</style>

<body>

We love you! The Tech IT Easy bloggers

</body>

</html>

• The jeremy.xml javascript file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>

<gadget>

<name>We love you! The Tech IT Easy bloggers</name>

<namespace>microsoft.windows</namespace>

<version>0.1<version>

<author name=”Jeremy Fain”>

<info url=”www.techiteasy.org” />

</author>

<copyright>Not necessary, but let’s say it’s strategic: Copyright (c) 2007 </copyright>

<description>A gadget that displays a nice message to our readers in Windows Vista’s Sidebar</description>

<icons>

<icon width=”120″ height=”120″ src=tieweloveyou.png” />

</icons>

<hosts>

<host name= “sidebar”>

<base type=”HTML” apiVersion=”1.0.0″ src=”jeremy.html” />

<permissions>full</permissions>

<platform minPlatformVersion=”0.3″ />

</host>

</host>

</gadget>

• Deployment

Just create your Gadget Manifest from your .xml file, put it in a new folder alongside with the .html file, zip it and rename it .gadget. Vista will then recognize the file as a new Gadget of its own and all you’ll have to do is select it in your Sidebar and run it.

Conclusion

From what I see at work everyday, there’s hell a lot of market traction for Vista gadgets, which appear to be great customer relationship & buzz marketing tools for all sorts of companies and start ups. Creating a gadget (next time I’ll try to hack my first Ajax app in a gadget) is so simple, even for a really crappy developer like me, that if by accident I find myself available, professionally speaking, then I would seriously consider opening a Vista Gadget Factory to remain in the ecosystem and grow with the MS tree. And I guess you should too.

Many thanks to Clauer for the learning resource links:

English resources:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/vista/gadgets-pt1.mspx

http://microsoftgadgets.com/Sidebar/DevelopmentOverview.aspx

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1063&SiteID=1

French resources:

http://lgmorand.developpez.com/articles/sidebar-gadget/

http://blogs.msdn.com/fredeq/pages/questions-fr-quentes-sur-les-desktop-gadgets.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/france/vision/mstechdays/ (watch Clauer’s webcast on how to write a Gadge, it’s amazing)

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Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Vincent to write about innovative start ups based in the Netherlands, Apple, the media industry, incubators, business books and many other things that happen to interest him at the moment. Vince, they’re all yours!

This is a response to Kari’s recent post on “Blogging, evolved?” To start, I don’t actually disagree with what he wrote, but I do have my own opinion on blogs in general and where it is going, and this is the tale of that. Some key-points, Kari mentioned, were several alternatives to blogs, like forums and Slashdot (you forgot Wikis), as well as derivatives of the format such a Twitter, Jaiku, and Tumblr. Regarding the latter, I’ve been running a tumblr-blog for a month now, and I love it. It represents a refreshing lightness versus traditional blogging. But that’s not what I will write about, although you can see it as a consequence.

Where is media going?

There are a number of players that fill the road between where the news comes from to the readers. Companies can release their own press-releases, wars happen, presidents get elected, children get kidnapped, etc. All of which can then be re-released on a newswire like Reuters, and re-reported on other traditional news-formats, like newspapers, newspaper-sites, televisions, and such. This content is not yet discussed by the people, except orally perhaps, rather by reputable journalists and analysts. If interesting/controversial enough, it is then pushed further towards blogs, forums, and aggregators, like Technorati, Digg, TechMeme, Slashdot, Reddit, etc. etc. If it is eternal news, it will also get added to Wikipedia.

Actually my little story makes it look like a single line from the event to the aggregator, but I think it happens in parallel from the event to different types of publications to different crowds of people, which can be segregated in technological, non-technological, casual, loyal, geek, non-geek, etc.

Where is the conversation going?

Is conversation important? It is of vital importance! There are several factors, which I think contribute to conversation. A. people like to talk where other people are. B. people will respond more to questions like “what kind of pie do you like?” than “my recipe for pie is x+y, discuss.” C. people discuss popular/controversial content more. And D. people prefer discussing in formats that facilitate talking.

What’s interesting about stories on Digg.com is that often very popular stories, with 1000+ diggs, can receive 200 comments on Digg, and no comments on the blog itself. If you look at many newspaper-articles, they don’t even include the ability to comment, but more and more frequently the ability to aggregate. Indeed, Digg.com is one of the places conversation is going for some of the reasons I mentioned above. Many people, simple blurbs, popular content is pushed up., and moderated. Alternatively, you have stuff like Meebo, and the Facebooks of this world, etc., which also attract conversation. Many Tumblrs, frustrated with the lack of commenting, installed a Meebo-widget to still enable talking. Interesting. And my brother, who has a Facebook account, just communicates via MSN.

One conclusion to draw from this is that conversation does not necessarily need to happen on the same platform as the original reason for discussing. Another is that technologies that facilitate chatting, like a nice interface, moderation, threading, etc., are favoured by the masses for communication.

RSS, a killer-feature?

To Robert Scobble, who is an apparent information-junkie, RSS means he can read 400 feeds every morning. To my iPod, it means I can download a ton of podcasts and read text-files of blogs and articles. To my modded Xbox, it means I can watch Youtube-content in painfully crappy resolutions on my television. In other words, if you are an information-junkie or a machine (or both), RSS is great. And if you want to distribute content, RSS is great also.

In the normal world, on the other hand, much is decided by input = output. It’s a classic theory, Taylorism or Scientific Management, but most businesses just want to see their employees produce x widgets per day. And getting more RSS (or email) doesn’t help these people. For blogs, RSS is not perfect either, as it enables aggregators to take their content and leave the blog collecting dust.

Conclusion

Blogging is an amazing platform for creating content, no matter what form it takes. In many cases it’s free, it requires little administrative overhead, it’s easily distributable content. It’s good for publishing, second only to Wiki’s, but it needs an interface-update. For conversation it is limited, because it is not designed for it. And that’s the problem with a lot of products, to try and design for everything. Great platforms for conversations are on the other hand, Digg, Slashdots, forums, chat, etc. Because they are designed with the conversation in mind.

The optimal future for blogs is a hybrid of blog-posts with great content and with a Digg/Meebo/etc.-button. (Unfortunately Wordpress didn’t allow me to add a digg-button to illustrate that point.)

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I found through Cyril Attias’s blog (in French) a funny website named MyHeritage. MyHeritage has a buzz feature named MyHeritage Face Recognition, that tells you which celebrities looks like you most.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m not especially proud of the results – except for Dudi Balsar, an Israeli lawyer and model that according to what my search engine tells me, often finds himself elected the sexiest man in Israel. Just like I do on a regular basis in France.

Anyways, leaving aside my own results, I found you might find funny to give MyHeritage Face Recognition a try. It’s all here.

Going back to more serious issues, I admire these companies who find ways to attract bloggers and generate a buzz through building nice little apps: Microsoft built PopFly to create mash ups in a sec, IBM built Development Engagement Service (the name really sucks though), Criteo built the Autoroll and made it quickly on the consumer market despite a DNA anchored in enterprises, U.[Lik] built an amazing widget that may easily plug onto your blog and show your virtual library, etc.

Can you think of companies that owe a good deal of their success to initially non-core business gadgets, widgets, plug ins & features?

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At last an announcement that brings in glamorous perspectives on this nerdy blog: please grant Fidji Simo, our new blogger on Tech IT Easy, with a warm welcome.

A French national with an international mindset, Fidji specializes in web strategies (business models, market trends, e-Commerce, monetization, digital convergence opportunities) and small & medium business management – and is to share with you her thoughts on these 2 topics, mainly drawn from her own experience.

Currently a business analyst @ eBay’s Strategy Department, Fidji has previously worked as a transaction service consultant for Price WaterHouse Coopers in London, a business developer @ French Network helping out IlanOVA in Miami, and..an entrepreneur! Now discontinued (after one year of operations), Fidji had started in September 2005 BlogEntreprise, a corporate blogging platform & directory. Fidji says this entrepreneurial adventure has helped her start to raise the right issues about new business development management. You know Fidji, I know exactly what you mean: I too worked hard and from scratch in a start up that now is discontinued as well (iMarket, in Israel) – and it has proven to be a steep learning curve experience.

Fidji is to join UCLA’s MBA program for the fall term as an exchange student, where she’ll blog on her experience on her personal blog Fidjissimo. Indeed, Fidji will hopefully graduate from French business University HEC Paris in June 2008 with a Master of Management Science. And then??

As an a parte, I would like to add that the sociology of Tech IT Easy hires is pretty interesting: there is on one side the Rotterdam School of Management (I was an exchange student there back in fall 2004) mafia with Kari, Vincent; the AFIDORA mafia with Steve, Alex, & Leo (I cofounded AFIDORA 5 years ago, and left the organization 2 years ago); & the HEC Paris mafia with Raphaël, Steve, Alex, Leo, Fidji & I. I met Lucien through this blog indeed, and so did I with Fidji: hey guys, we never met physically! I’m looking forward to it.

Anyways, welcome to Tech IT Easy Fidji. I wish you excellent blogging and to achieve to convey interesting messages in all the debates you set out to start.

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“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”            

         OK then, I admit this title is slightly intriguing. Of course, it is still hardly conceivable to use a social network in order to perform Internet search. But Facebook has at least 3 common points with Google indeed :

1) First of all, it is one of the brightest success of the Internet industry. Although its revenues are not known for sure, many pundits estimate them at somewhere between $50 and $100 mln per year, not including the nice undisclosed sum Microsoft agreed to pay in order for Facebook to use their online advertising technology. Moreover, Michael Arrington (Tech Crunch) revealed that according to an internal document leaked from Yahoo!, the Internet giant considers that Facebook will generate around $1bln revenues annually by 2015. No surprise then that Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old whizz kid who designed this social network a couple of years ago, turned off a stunning $ 985 mln takeover proposal from Yahoo!. Apparently Facebook really believes it is worth much more than that, which is confirmed by the weird growth rate of their already huge 25 million-large user base (see chart). In fact, it even seems that an IPO could be very, very successful….

 2) Technology. Now this is more interesting. According to an interview of Zuckerberg by a CNN journalist, “Facebook will no longer consider itself merely another social network. Instead it is becoming a technology platform on which anyone can build applications for social computing“. Or to say it briefly: Facebook wants to be the next-generation OS, competing in a way with Apple, Microsoft and Linux ! To be honest, their project seems slightly less ambitious: the management envisions to foster (through partnerships) the development of a vast online application ecosystem around the website Facebook.com, application being here modules for Facebook – try it, and you’ll understand better. Although these little applets fall short of matching true applications for now, one must admit that Facebook is very convincing when it comes to grab its share of the time spent online by Internet users. So applications may be just at the right place here…

 But the most striking news here is that recently, Google as unveiled a bunch of online services more or less likely to replace some traditional desktop applications, such as Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Maps, Picasa, Notes, Calendar… An IT engineer friend of mine revealed me that some of his reknowned teachers at France’s top-notch Computer Science School EPITA truly believe that this approach will eventually meet a large success, and that an online Google OS could very well pose a serious threat to Windows. In fact, we could be reverting to the old terminal/mainframe conception of computing – you know, the good old time of IBM giant systems -, but on a larger scale. So instead of debating of Vista vs. Ubuntu vs. Mac OS X, we could be comparing Facebook and Google OS in a few years time.

3) Finally, the founder of Facebook (Zuckerberg) is as Jewish as Google’s fathers (Brin&Page) which will certainly nourish the vivid sentiment in some countries that Internet is basically a Zionist conspiracy . Right, who cares about what they think in Malaysia ?

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Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Leonard to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday online media insights. Leo’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to communicate one’s passion.

No episode has been broadcasted yet on French TV channels, but it is already a success.

Heroes is the last blockbuster in TV series landscape. The first season just ended last week in the US, but it has not yet started in France (planned for this summer). I have been wondering for a long time why American TV series were taking so much time to be cross the sea. I now think it is part of a brilliant buzz marketing campaign.

I must admit that, as a series-addict, I couldn’t resist to take a tour to Youtube to corroborate all I read about this one (“a Marvel Comics with actors”). Since I saw the first episode, I have been promoting it all around me. I was quite surprised to see that, even though all episodes are available on the web (subtitled in French the day after it is broadcasted in the US), most of my friends were waiting to see them on French TV channels. They told me some reasons for this:

• Poor encoding quality
• Want to see it in French
• Prefer to see it on a TV than on their small laptop monitor
• Too complicated (not all of my friends are geeks!)

People watching TV series on the internet are early adopters (see Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory). They accept a certain level of service failure (not ideal broadcasting conditions), but can’t wait a year to see what’s hot overseas. More important, they are social leaders: their consumption habits will spread in their environment.

If TV series production companies were threatened by internet uncontrolled broadcasting, they would plan simultaneous broadcasting worldwide. This is not the case.

I think most of the readers of this blog can be categorized as early adopters. I would be curious to know how many of the TV series addicts reading these lines don’t watch them on the internet.

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I don’t really like the format of a blog.

As frequent readers of this blog know, Jeremy would love if more people were active in the comments (even if says he doesn’t care anymore). I too agree that more discussion on the topics we can only so much write about would be welcome. I don’t learn much by writing and telling, but I believe that there is much to learn from a good discussion. In this way this blog is not enough forum-y. Is there a platform that could balance community and content?

The length of a blog piece and it’s nature of being defined in time are also problematic. No-one’s going to read a blog post that’s too long, yet we can’t just write “I find this site interesting” and put a link. Yet, this is how we communicate in Reddit, del.icio.us, IM and sometimes in e-mail. Unfortunately none of the mentioned (besides Reddit, but that’s public and not private link-sharing) give any opportunity to expand your ideas or get commentary (except e-mail and IM, but that’s too private). Forums on the other hand would give us a place for discussion, but the format doesn’t is hard to publish to. More forum-like approaches in my opinion are Worse than Failure and in some sense, Slashdot. Unfortunately, as readers of these two sites know, the discussion are rarely intellectually stimulating.

Commentary on blogs is hard, one main reason is poor design. I think the default WordPress templates actually discourage commentary. Blogger goes to extremes as it likes to separate discussion into a pop-up window. There are some blogs that have been designed with comments in mind and give good space to them, but commeting still sucks. It’s really difficult to engage in a discussion in a blog’s comments and I don’t believe I’m the only one who thinks so.

I’ve noticed that Jeremy has added his del.icio.us links to the sidebar, and in fact, we have been trying to share links using del.icio.us for a while. It is amazing that this “social bookmarking” doesn’t actually seem to suit our needs. Unless we used a special tag in each of our links (which is kind of a hack), it’s almost impossible to link to a group’s links. I can view my network, but my links aren’t there. I can’t even find a way to follow my network’s tags like I can either mine or everyone’s (ie del.icio.us/network/zyx/webcomics in this case). The only way, devised by Vincent, is to create a dummy-account and add everyone to its network.

Then there are the other ways to mini-blog (or is it called microblogging?). Most people associate this with twitter, which in my mind is starting to look more and more like a successful and simple hack. Maybe the idea is in the simplicity. Also, it seems the major talking point about twitter is about the fact that it’s developed using Ruby on Rails (for better or worse).

In my opinion, there are two really good competitors, both which have a killer feature, that unfortunately hasn’t been developed fully. Both Jaiku (which I already mentioned as a formidable opponent to Twitter in a previous post) and Tumblr give you the option to import your “life-feeds” into them. By “life-feeds” I mean your photos in Flickr, your tracks at last.fm, your wines at cork’d, your saved links in reddit, etc. I’ve tried to give a shot at both these tools (see mu jaiku and my tumblr blogs), but even they don’t fulfill my need to express myself completely. In Tumblr the shortcoming is you can’t comment on someone’s entry, buth at Jaiku they’ve thought this out, which in my opinion is another killer feature. There’s still a lot of promise in Tumblr and Jaiku. At least I hope so. They might not be the platform I’m looking for, but that doesn’t really matter as I can always integrate the content in these aggreagated life-feeds into whatever finally feels right as, naturally, you can export their data as RSS.

Lately some people in this blog have argued that XHTML, AJAX and XML are the cornerstones of Web 2.0. I still believe it’s actually RSS. Granted, it’s XML, but its the killer application, the open format was just an enabler and catalyst for its adoption. (In other sidenote, XHTML was a mistake and what we call AJAX was actually just a revelation that all modern browsers have a mature JavaScript support, and XML is way too generic in general sense.)

Anyway, what are your development ideas for blogging, revision 2? Mine is more engaging commentary, or actually, more engaging discussion. I think the first mistake is calling those things below these posts just “comments”. They should and could be so much more.

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I’m very impressed with what IBM Research Lab based in Haifa, Israel, just came out with: an Ajax-powered web app that allows non developers to build form services.

I’ve been playing with IBM Development Engagement Service (lousy name though) and indeed, built in 3 simple & natural steps:

1. Name your application and describe it (max. 3 minutes)
2. Create a form definition (max. 45 minutes)
3. Publish the newly created application (max. 2 minutes)

Even dummies are able to publish web forms in less than an hour.

Remember, I was talking a few days ago about PopFly – a killer web app made by Microsoft to empower non developers with a tool to help them devise their own mash ups.

Now it’s IBM’s turn. And I can assure you one can tell the elephant can dance indeed. To give IBM DevEngage a go – which I highly recommend, click here.

It’s late and I’m too tired to write a short analysis about software giants (IBM is second to Microsoft on the software market) putting on efforts to become more agile against the new competition from the web (mainly Web 2.0 consumer apps & enterprise SaaS). But I’m sure you’ll do it in the comment section of this post. Enjoy the discussion!

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Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited blogger Lucien to write about Web 2.0, China, and many other things that happen to interest him at the moment. Lucien, they’re all yours!

I am among the minority who didn’t notice the recent bull market trends in Chinese stock market. I never really look at what is happening in the market, because I never bought any or sell any in my life. Maybe people outside Chinese also didn’t pay attention to the performance. Here is what happened.

4 Times Increase

The Shanghai Stock Exchange Index was 998.23 in June 2005. Yesterday, it reached 4151.42, which is the highest in the history of the stock market, and almost four times than two years ago, and keep increasing.

Buy stock in China is always like buy lottery

If you bought the right stock, you can get 50% gain in days, and if you are not lucky enough and get the bad stock, it will shrink at the same speed. Unlike NASDAQ, the stock price in China has a threshold. If it raise or drop too much, it will stop trading and hold until the next day.

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Funny: type in ’search’ in Google and the first result to come out is Microsoft’s Live Search.

At least, it shows Google keeps a fair approach when it comes to result relevancy: Live Search contains the keyword ’search’ so the result is pretty logical indeed.

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Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Kari to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Kari’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most is raising the right issues on underlying market trends as well as purely technical considerations. Kari, the floor is yours…  

I’ve been putting off writing about Google, because, well, it’s omnipresent. Everyone uses it. Everyone knows it. And it knows everyone. Anyway, I feel a strong need to pay tribute to this force. For a while, I was staying away from using Google’s services, but about couple of months ago I decided to just say “Eh, fuck it” and embrace all the things Google could help me manage my Internet journeys better.

It was Google Apps for Your Domain that finally lured me in. I had registered a domain name about a year ago for a simple reason, as a joke to my friend. He’s running a forum on a certain domain name and I bought a domain name, which was a bit of an imitation. I’m not going to name it, because it’s just a small forum for friends of his and it’s in Finnish, but let’s just say that if his site was called moghul.tld, then my site would be called caliph.tld. Sooo…. long story short, the joke was funny for a while, especially when the only function of my domain was that I forwarded it to his site – which caused funny Google-anomalies, like my “site” being more highly ranked than his. I also used the domain to have a classier dynamic DNS-name for my laptop for the rare occasions I’d need to ssh to it, let someone ftp some stuff out or I’d need to demonstrate some crappy RoR-project.

But then came GAYD(ar?), or Google Apps as it’s know called. Until now, I had stayed even away from Gmail as I was happy with having my e-mail hosted by a friend - it was IMAP and I got SquirrelMail for web interface and, well, I probably had more than 2 GB allocated for me anyway. But, I had a domain and I wanted to take a look at GAYD Beta, because all new and shiny just happens to interest me. But seriously, every private domain owner should consider off-loading some of their services to either Google Apps or Live Domains. It just makes your life easier, for free.

And now I have taken Google Apps to full use. Homepages, Mail, Docs, GTalk/Jabber, … I got it. The difficult part was to find a free, reliable DNS-hosting that supported SRV-records so I could get my GTalk work with rest of the world (Hint: Editdns.net). I have to say that the package is amazing. Google Talk and the whole Jabber movement is slowly gaining momentum, but is still far from critical mass. Google Talk is a good example where Google didn’t go and invent its own but rather sponsored an existing high potential open solution, giving it a major push at the same time. The other thing that I find really great is localization. As a Finn, I’ve grown not to find even the most popular services in Finnish, while pretty much everything is always available at least in French, German and sometimes even in Swedish.

Now, I use Google Reader for my RSS-feeds… daily (okay, hourly). I use Google Toolbar at work daily, because it’s the only way of having a sane web experience with IE6. I’ve used Google Docs to write to this blog for a while now (I mean, I can copy and paste and it keeps all formatting and hyperlinks! How cool is that? Only downside is that it doesn’t work properly with Safari and you also need to break intergalactical laws to use it with Safari…). I use Google Earth and Maps at least monthly. And sometimes I even use Groups.

I put the new Google Analytics for test drive. The amount of data you can gather is amazing. I had previously used Google’s Webmaster Tools to monitor simple stats how Google indexes my site.

I just found out about Google Notebook and I’m not yet sure how I could benefit from Google Calendar. I used to have a blog on Blogger in 2002, but I’m not going back. Picasa? I prefer Flickr. (Yes, Yahoo!, you too finally got me to get an account. I do admire some of your stuff.)

But what about privacy? Am I not afraid of Google spying on me? Well, in short, yes. But did I have that privacy before? I think I can trust Google better than my previous providers. Nick Carr (or someone else? Ironically enough, Google Reader doesn’t have search) had a good post about that a while ago …okay, I’m beginning to see the need for Google Notebook, but then again, I use del.icio.us. I can’t find the link anymore. And no, I’m not interested in Google’s Web History…

In summary, the portfolio of tools Google offers is amazing. The best part of them is that you can pick and choose as each is a self-standing service and interoperable with other apps. Anyway, if you’re interested, I can do a more in-depth review of any of the services above.

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I’m very glad to announce a new blogger on Tech IT Easy: Leonard Sellem.

Leo is really passionate about the media industry: he said he would emphasize his posts on the business of editing, publishing & broadcasting, advertising trends, new media, IT infrastructure in the media industry, interactive marketing & actually anything related to high tech Leo feels like posting something on. Leo also runs his own blog, obviously focusing on the media: e-Remediable.

Leo and I already worked together @ AFIDORA, an online French think tank on the geopolitics of the Middle East I had cofounded in 2002 with my mate Jeremy Ghez, developed from scratch to a structure that matters in the Paris geopolitical landscape, and left in mid 2006. Actually, Steve & Alex, also bloggers on Tech IT Easy, also used to be colleagues of mine at AFIDORA. So one may tell Leo has real hands-on experience of what online edition is, and one wouldn’t be mistaking. Leo recently spent 10 months traveling the globe as a corporate auditor with Schneider Electric.

Leonard now works as a business developer in the advertising industry in Morocco, and will graduate from leading European business university HEC Paris with a Master in Management Science specialized in high tech management in September 2008. A French national, Leo is a lover of Toulouse (his native city), and a citizen of the world.

I’m very happy to have you with us Leo. Warm welcome on behalf of the Tech IT Easy team!

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Remember 2 days ago, I was threatening Youssef of organizing a huge demonstration if he didn’t blog about what he knows best: software architecture. But Youssef know how important staying close to one’s customers (in our case, bloggers, from our readers) is and how to keep them happy: he just started a series of articles on the urbanization of information systems (in French only, sorry about that). You may read it here on his blog bearing his online nickname: Joseph Cargo. Excellent stuff.  I wish there’s (a lot) more to come or… But thanks Youssef, I mean it.

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“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”            

      Considering the number of comments and most of all very interesting private emails I received from a number of readers (to them: THANK YOU), apparently there’s a real case for posting about Web 2.0 here. In the ever-going process of sucking up information from you guys to complete my working paper, here’s the next step: trying to identify the major trends affecting Web 2.0.

First of all, let’s recall my definition of Web 2.0: Web 2.0 = user-generated content+social networking features (sorry Jeremy, I disagree about your definition).

OK, so now, here’s the big question what’s next ?

Let us explore just a few possibilities.

1)  Mobility. Although one might consider this only as a non-disruptive, incremental innovation, it seems clear to me that social networks, including the most advanced ones, who can understand well the needs of the PDA/smartphone/handhelds devices market will gain a significant advantage. Geolocalized services might prove more than useful for most Web 2.0 companies. Imagine a social network able to track automatically people (OK, it may sounds like Big Brother): this means that you might eventually find a friend in no time who happens to be hanging around next door. Of course telcos operators could eventually provide themselves such a solution, but hey: who wants to be dealing with 36 different social networks ? I believe the most successful social networks will eventually end up as “social life webcenters” - sites you just visit every single day of your life to get in touch with the world. The best candidates for these are networks you are actually using most of the time – ie websites you essentially access through a PC, be it a laptop. By the way: I believe Google Maps services for the iPhone and other smartphones, as well as m-facebook.com are the forerunners of such an evolution.

2) Mashups. Right, so definitely most readers actually understand better these strange things than myself. What I understand personnally is 1) basically mashups consists in APIs or Web Services provided by various sites, and aggregated in brand new website 2) more fundamentally, this implies a growing modularity of Internet sites, favored by XML and Javascript technologies (or else one must explain to me why these nasty little bits of HTML codes you just copied-paste from various websites to implement, say, a traffic counter on your 1990’s website cannot be dubbed as mashups !). It seems like the dream that Apple failed to concretize with OpenDoc, ie shifting the focus from application to “document”  and designing specific workplaces on the go (thanks to various modules), proves to be more useful in the Web sphere. So far so good.  But…What next ? Can a website really consist in a collection of bits of websites ? And what about IP issues ? Whereas mashups can wisely complete the user generated content trend (FlickR feeds on a blog, for instance) I am not that sure that they will deal a new hand for the Web 2.0 economics.

3) Market dynamics. This is more serious. I expect most social networks to gain more and more functionalities and enrich permanently their mission statement. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook and MySpace actually tried to compete, in the end, with eBay, Match.com, Monster.com, Youtube etc…

This particular point deserves an explanation. Becauses uses are so different, many specific websites have gathered a huge user base, and occasionnally a very nice traffic. Meetic has million of users, so has eBay (a true Web 2.0 company Matthias ), so has LinkedIn, etc… The finality of such companies are not the same, but wait a minute…couldn’t it be the same users (mostly) for all these services ? I think this is likely. So instead of subscribing to a social network, maintaining an active eBay account, searching for job on monsters,etc… why not try to MERGE IT ALL and provide a unique service, where a unique login can make you access to all the different activities: dating, netwotrking, buying&selling, providing UGC, commenting news, etc…

I definitely believe that the company which will eventually design a simple way to introduce smart privacy settings, while keeping a simple switch for a user from a service to another, could actually end up as the big winner. I have no clue yet if this will be done by a merger, a series of partnerships (OK, so Facebook develops a marketplace on its own, fine…but the experience will be just so bad for people trying to sell rare/peculiar objects) or adding new functionalities to existing sites. But I may be thrilled by such a result.

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