The Top 10 Web 2.0 Trends of 2009
Dec/090
Ever since I started at Lifehack in mid-2007, we’ve compiled year-end lists of the best web 2.0 applications to come out in the previous year (here’s my list for for 2007 and Joel Falconer’s for 2008). The development of ever-more-complex software accessed online via a web browser is a huge boon for personal productivity, since it offers an increasingly nomadic workforce “always-on” access to the data, documents, and software they need. At the same time, low-cost and free online services offer an affordable alternative to costly office suites, collaboration tools, and graphics programs, especially for the vast majority of us who don’t need 90% of the functionality of an MS Word or an Adobe Photoshop.
This year I searched in vain for 10 great new apps to fill my list. Don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic contenders. I’m particularly enjoying TeuxDeux, a new to-do list app that lets you schedule tasks on particular days and view your whole week at once. And of course Google’s Wave has everyone enthralled, even if nobody’s quite sure what it’s for. We also saw evolutionary improvements of webware classics: apps like Remember the Milk came out of beta, Google Docs and Acrobat.com added presentations, and some services, like Nozbe, released 2.0 or higher versions that revamped functionality and/or interfaces.
But by and large 2009 saw few new web applications that really stood out. So rather than try to compile a list of new web applications, I thought I’d take a look at the changes across the field of web programming that are transforming web applications from “gee, neat” proofs of concept into genuinely useful tools. These are the trends that are changing the Internet into a platform for getting work done, often in surprising new ways, and if it’s still too soon to move everything online (I’m writing this on MS Word 2010, for example), these trends are at least moving us towards that future.
1. Export
2009 was the year that web programmers realized that holding their customer’s data hostage wasn’t the best way to build brand equity. Instead, a growing number of services are offering easy ways to get all your documents, images, videos, or other data out of their applications. Just as important, they’re doing this using standard formats that you can use elsewhere, making it much easier to switch to another application, share with others who use different tools, or make a meaningful evaluation of a service. Google’s Data Liberation Front is helping to make this a priority at Google, for example with the addition of Google Docs’ new “Export All” function which allows you to download your entire work history in the format of your choice, and setting the standard that Google’s competitors will have to reach to remain competitive.
2. Synchronization and Sharing
In addition to exporting data all together, the ability to share data from one application to another is finally starting to take off. Developers are realizing, finally, that users often have multiple streams of data that they need to be able to access in one single place (such as calendar data from several sites), and vice versa – that we often need to access the same data in several different places (like sending a status update to several social networking sites). In 2009, the promise of RSS and other data feed standards (e.g. Atom, iCal) finally started to be realized, with services like Twitvite offering one-click methods of inserting events into various online calendars. Likewise, numerous services have released plugins or widgets to access their data from other online apps, like Remember the Milk’s integration with Google Calendar. The centralization of authorization for various services using Facebook Connect or Sign in with Twitter, and the increasing adoption of the authentication standard OAuth, are finally starting to fulfill the function that OpenID was supposed to perform, allowing easy and secure transfer of data and login credentials between sites.
In addition to swapping data between online apps, a growing number of apps are bridging the divide between online services and the desktop by allowing access though and synchronization with desktop programs. Google’s Sync Services synchronizes calendar data and (on some platforms) contacts with desktop applications like Outlook and Apple’s iCal, although until contact synchronization is universal and they add task synchronization, it’s utility is limited for most users. At the forefront of the web/desktop integration movement is Twitter and the dozens, if not hundreds, of applications for every platform that have added layers of functionality to the service using its API. Twitter’s API has raised expectations for every other online service, and it won’t be long now before applications that don’t offer APIs simply cannot compete with those that do.
3. Maturity
The lack of new applications to get excited over is counterbalanced by the stability, security, and usability of apps that have been under development for 2, 3, or more years now. As a few applications in each area have come to dominate, it’s become harder for new applications to break in, but the existing applications have become better. Just as importantly, the business practices of the companies behind these services have improved (somewhat). New Twitter users experience nothing like the almost daily downtime that plagues the service just a year ago. Acquisitions are handled much more smoothly, with Google’s graceful transition from Grand Central to Google Voice setting the tone (and their graceless handling of the recent acquisition of collaboration tool and Wave rival EtherPad quickly set right). Although privacy concerns are still unsettled, with companies like Facebook repeatedly having a hard time fighting the temptation to exploit their users’ data for all it’s worth), new standards for privacy and security are emerging, and companies that violate their users’ expectations that their data will be backed up and kept private are being called out and avoided.
4. Hidden technology
One sign of the maturity of online applications is that the technology used to create them is increasingly invisible. Applications no longer feel like Ruby on Rails applications, or advertise their “AJAX-y” interfaces as a feature. In large part, this is a triumph of design over engineering; frills like text boxes fading slowly out of view are being replaced by more immediately usable, and useful, design. This means the engineers can focus on what they do best: getting stuff to work better.
5. Social
It’s almost impossible to conceive of an online application these days that doesn’t forefront sharing, collaboration, or integration with social tools like Twitter and Facebook for publishing and commenting. The pinnacle of this trend is, of course, Google’s Wave, which as thousands of early adopters have discovered, doesn’t do much of anything until you start adding your social network. New applications like Aardvark (which allows you to pose questions to targeted members of your social network) are focusing on refining this process, allowing for greater control and selectivity over which parts of your social network are most relevant to particular tasks.
6. Mobile integration
There’s an app for that! With mobile phones edging ever closer to the dream of the portable supercomputer, the promise of “access anywhere” has come more and more to mean “access from my smartphone”. While web-enabled phones are generally up to the task of accessing online applications directly via their browsers, the small-screen experience of websites designed for widescreen desktop monitors usually isn’t very satisfying. Increasingly, every online application worth its salt is offering mobile apps for iPhones, Blackberries, Palms, and Android phones, the best of them – like Evernote – making good use of smartphone tools like voice recorders, GPS, and photo and video capabilities.
7. Location, location, location
GPS is following the path digital cameras took a few years ago – practically everything has one. Mobile phones, cameras, cars – can it be much longer before media players and pens come with GPS built in? The ubiquity of GPS – and GPS-alike services using cell tower triangulation – has made location-sensitive search and other applications possible. So you can find the nearest coffee shop, search for the lowest gas prices in the area, or have your shopping list served up to you when you walk in the grocery store’s front door. While services like FourSquare seem to have little function besides cluttering my Twitter stream with notices that some people go to the donut shop waaaaaay to often (I’m sorry, I meant to say that people have obtained really, really important titles of distinction based on their frequent patronage of places of business), it’s easy to see the potential of services like this. (Although as noted above, we’re still working out the privacy implications.)
8. Online storage and anywhere access
As services open up their APIs, online storage becomes more useful. Where your Box.net or SkyDrive accounts have been, up to recently, closed silos that allowed you to upload and download files and that’s about it, today they act as repositories of files you can access through other services. Box.net files can be opened with, worked on with, and saved from Zoho applications, meaning that working on a single document from several locations is not just possible, it’s practical. Also, online services are drastically increasing the amount of storage they offer; services that just a year ago offered storage measured in megabytes not offer 10, 25, 50, or more gigabytes, meaning that you can back up, share, or use your entire Documents folder.
9. Automation
Two of my favorite online applications are Live Mesh and Dropbox, neither of which I actively “use”. They’re just there, doing their thing. For example, I have a Dropbox folder I share with the Stepcase home office in Hong Kong; if I need a file, it’s just there, and if I make changes, they automatically get them. Same thing with Mesh – everything in my laptop’s Documents folder is “meshed” to my desktop, so anything I create on the go is just automatically waiting for me when I sit down at my desktop. Google Sync works the same way on my Blackberry – I add an event on Google Calendar, or a Contact in Gmail, and a little while later it’s just on my Blackberry. This is the revival of “Push” technology, and we’ll see more and more of it as online apps become mainstream – or they won’t become mainstream.
10. Ubiquitous Internet
This isn’t a quality of online apps as much as a quality of the real world in which we use them, but it’s an important factor nonetheless. Wifi is nearly everywhere, and high speed cellular Internet is just about everywhere wifi isn’t. This has already changed the way people use the Internet – such as the location-sensitive apps I mentioned above – and will continue to do so.
That’s how 2009 looks to me, anyway. What emerging trends have you noticed that have made online applications better or more useful? And what do you think is on the horizon – what will I be writing about at the end of 2010? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
Is Google Ready to Handle Your Business? (Part 2 of 2)
Oct/090
In part 1 of this post, I discussed the communications offerings that Google offers and the role they might play for small- and medium-sized businesses. In this follow-up, I will cover their productivity and promotional services, ranging from the productivity suite Google Docs to the free hosted blogging service Blogger. While Google’s communications tools are generally quite excellent, their productivity and promotion tools are much more a mixed bag. After the overview of Google’s various services, then, I’ll offer a short analysis of how well-suited Google apps are for business use overall, as well as discuss some new tools that might make a big impact in the near future.
Productivity Apps
Google Docs offers a reasonable alternative to costly office suites, although for complex work comes up short of Microsoft Office or even OpenOffice.org’s desktop-based software. Consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software, Docs imports from and exports to all of Microsoft’s default formats (although it cannot save to Office 2007’s docx format yet).
The word processor is great for creating, editing, and viewing short documents, offering a range of formatting options typical to basic word processing tasks. For longer documents, however, Docs comes up lacking: page numbers can only be applied to printed output, and the size of the document itself is limited to 500K, plus up to 2MB per inserted image. This makes Docs poorly suited to the creation of technical or training manuals, as well as formal documents like legal briefs.
Spreadsheets and presentations are similarly size-limited. Spreadsheets can be up to 256 columns, 200,000 cells, or 100 sheets, whichever is reached first. Presentations started within Google Docs are not limited in size, but imported presentations are limited to 10MB or 200 slides. Below those limits, however, both applications are very strong. The spreadsheet allows you to use most common spreadsheet functions and even populate cells with data pulled from Google searches. A form generator makes it possible to collect data from, say, website users, and view the data as a Google spreadsheet.
The presentation editor is well-designed, making putting presentations together about as easy as it is with any other program. A number of themes are included, and you can import your own backgrounds as well. Giving presentations is another story, however. The presentation mode, even when you use F11 to make the browser full-screen, still includes a Google toolbar at the bottom of the screen, detracting attention from your slides. You also won’t be able to control your presentation using a PowerPoint remote.
Where Google Docs excels is in collaboration and sharing, making very effective use of the Internet to get work done. Documents and spreadsheets can be easily edited by multiple users, with tracking and permissions to make sure nothing irreparable happens. Presentations can be delivered remotely, paired with Google Talk and controlled from the host’s computer. Anything created with Google Docs can be shared on the Internet, either as a webpage or as an embedded document.
The newly released Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook allows Premium subscribers to use Google Apps as a replacement for Microsoft’s expensive Exchange. Installed alongside Outlook, the program allows calendars and contacts, to be shared and searched across your company, with features like schedule availability that users expect from Exchange. Notes, tasks, and journals are not shared, but for businesses that don’t rely on them too heavily, this might be a fairly effective replacement for Exchange. A migration utility allows existing Exchange systems to be easily transferred to your Google Apps account, making the whole process transparent to your employees. (A similar program exists for Lotus Notes users.)
Google Sites, a simple-to-use wiki engine, offers further options for collaboaration. Combined with the task manager in Gmail and the Google Calendar, you can handle most basic projects fairly easily. More complex project management isn’t possible, though – for flowcharting, GANTT charting, and other project management mainstays, you’ll need a dedicated application.
Google’s Calendar is quite powerful, making it easy to add and share events. A natural language text-entry system parses statements like “Lunch with Bob Smith at Joe’s Cafe at noon on June 27th,” or you can add appointments using a form. Calendars can be easily shared, and third-party iCal streams can be subscribed to as well. Several non-Google services, like the task manager Remember the Milk, use Google’s API to allow access to their services from the Calendar interface, as well.
On the near horizon is Google’s new Wave platform, a real-time communications and collaboration tool that combines elements of email, instant messaging, wikis, document editing, multimedia sharing, and social networking. Wave is still in invite-only testing, and as with all things Google we can probably expect it to remain in Beta for a long, long time. From what Google has released about Wave so far, it looks like it will offer great functionality to a limited audience of corporate teams and departments, where traditionally wikis might have been the main form of collaboration. For small face-to-face businesses, it’s hard to see what Wave offers, but larger businesses may find it a significant step up from current collaboration platforms.
Promotion
Google is, most properly, an advertising company, especially with their purchase of online advertising giant Doubleclick. Thus it stands to reason that for promoting your business, Google would be a fine place to turn.
Blogger, Google’s blogging service, offers a decent enough platform for a simple website. Features are limited, and the lack of customization options might make branding your site tricky, but it’s free, even if you post the site under your own domain name (which is simple to do and well-documented in the help section). For anything more complex than a simple blog, though, you’re going to want to turn to another service.
Google’s AdWords are an effective way to promote your business on the web. You choose how much you want to spend and what keywords to display your ads with, and Google handles ad placement on relevant search pages and sites that host Google ads. Make sure to add your business to Google’s local search and Google Maps at the Google Local Business Center as well, so you come up when people search for businesses in your area.
Can you run your business using Google applications and services?
So, can you run a business using only Google applications? The answer is, “it depends.” For small, local businesses, Google Apps along with a Blogger site and Google Voice might be more than enough to handle virtually everything they need. Businesses that do a significant amount of collaboration will find Google Docs useful, regardless of size.
For larger companies, as well as businesses that handle a great deal of sensitive information, privacy and security issues loom large. Having your email, documents, and other material stored on third-party servers is worrisome, no matter what Google’s policies promise. And Google is a big target for hackers and other nefarious sorts – though your data might never be targeted, there are plenty of people out there taking a stab at cracking Google just to see if it can be done.
The lack of customer relationship management (CRM) is a challenge, as is the lack of any sort of database (ironically, Google Base is not a user-programmable database). Spreadsheets combined with forms just don’t quite act as a viable substitute. A small sales team might manage, but a large sales team will need more appropriate tools.
Offline access is also a concern, one which is only partly solved by Google’s offline plugin, Google Gears. Gears ostensibly offers the ability to work offline and synchronize your updates when your computer is back on the Internet, but generally offers only a subset of the full capabilities of Google’s apps. In Gmail, for instance, you can read and reply to emails, or compose new ones, but you cannot attach files to emails when in offline mode. Google Docs is worse – access is read-only when offline, meaning you cannot create new documents or edit existing ones. So much for getting work done on the plane…
Finally, there’s the question of uptime. Google promises 99.9% uptime on Google Apps – but that’s an industry-standard promise that has little meaning for end-users. Attempting to log in only to find yourself in the middle of that .1% downtime can be a big hassle, especially if you are waiting for an important email or about to send an important document.
On the other hand, small and medium businesses experience security and downtime problems just as severe (if not more) all the time, whether through lack of expertise, user error, or just plain bad luck. And chances are you don’t have anything like the resources, personnel, and security know-how Google has at its disposal to protect you.
In the end, whether Google applications and services are right for your business depends on your needs. Carefully weigh your requirements and choose from Google’s menu of applications when they adequately fit the bill. Where they don’t, look at their competitors at Zoho, ThinkFree, and even Microsoft (such as Office Live, soon to offer online versions of Office applications). But you could do much worse than considering Google first.
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
