Drupal (Lightweight models) Week10

Introduction.
In this week we will go through the last pattern of web 2.0 "Lightweight models & cost effective scalability". Over the past decade, technology has dramatically imporved and  one of the most sinigficant upgrade of this is websites which play an important role in people’s lives. Since the start of the Internet boardband era, a vast majority of data has rapidly and progressively increased. Consequently, Content Management Systems (CMS) are such an important tool for managing a huge of data.

Why using Drupal?

During the ten years period, many CMSs have been launced such as Mambo, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Obviously, WordPress might get most of the love in the open source CMS space (for good reason). However, Drupal provides a powerful option for individuals, organizations and brands that want to power complex, robust websites. With Drupal 7 set for release in early 2011, the Drupal team is actively addressing the one area the CMS has always received criticism: Usability. The Drupal ecosystem is becoming extremely impressive.  For example Acquia is the commercial company from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, continues to raise funding and offer an array of commercial and support services that better enhance the platform as a whole.

 
Overview of Drupal

There are several special characteristics and useful features for Drupal users.

1. Charateristics

• Reuse: Drupal is a free tool which has been mantained and developed by open source by using LAMP stack(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). As a result, the websites which are built by Drupal are economical websites.
• Scalability: Drupal is open development model means that hundreds of thousands of users and developers are constantly working to make sure Drupal is a cutting-edge platform that supports the latest technologies that the Web has to offer.

2. Features

• Administrator tools:   a registration system that allows users to configure personal options and permissions on what users are allowed to access, edit, publish and administrate.
• Menu management: The Menu Manager allows users to create as many menus and menu items as they need. It aslo can structure the hierarchical menu (and nested menu items) completely independent of content structures. Put one menu in multiple places and in any style; use rollovers, dropdown, flyouts and just about any other navigation system .
• Connected function: The aggregation module allows you publish your site via RSS feeds and Social Networking integration is also widely supported in Drupal. Modules like the Facebook connect module and Twitter module, and ShareThis module help expand your network, and make your product or message more engaging to a wider audience.There are Chat and mailinglist modules as well.
• Template management: This is a powerful tool to make your site look exactly the way users want and either use a single template for the entire site or a separate template for each site section. The level of visual control goes a step further with powerful template overrides, allowing you to customize each part of your pages.
• Search function: Help navigate users to most popular search items and provide the admin with search statistics.
• and more modules that users can download and add on.  

Examples of Drupal websites.

1. Acquia
2. MephoBox
3. Team Sugar
4. Spread Firefox 
5. Harvard Science 
6. Mac Life 
7. FedEx 
8. Fox Searchlight 
9. flixya.com

References:
Drupal

Acquia

Slide.com (Leveraging the long tail) Week9

What is the long-tail business model?

A concept coined by Chris Anderson. He states, "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream". The main idea of this business model is focusing on niche markets (Niche market is focusing on a large number of products with low volume). As a result, in the long period of time this business model is able to share a huge amount of marketplaces. Also, it can compose more opportunities in the niche market. An obvious illustration of the long tail  business model is Slide.com.

the picture shows the long tail business model 

What is Slide.com?

Slide.com is a web 2.0 website founded in 2005 by Max Levchin. Originally formed to make photo sharing software for social networking services such as Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and Bebo. But in 2009, the company switched strategies, abandoning a Web-advertising model to become a hybrid new-media studio that works with the likes of AT&T, Ashton Kutcher's Katalyst, Nestlé, and Starbucks to create commercials dolled up as entertainment. Through its branded Funspace, the company now serves some 10 million videos a month and is the largest video-distribution platform on Facebook. Founder Max Levchin cautiously predicts profitability this year. By using the long-tail business model and focus on the niche market  the company achieved its greatest success as the largest developer of third-party applications for Facebook. The company was acquired by Google on August 6, 2010($182 million).

One thing about Slide.com, is that it does not yet have a way to protect your images from having other people download them. My suggestion is to use this tool only on images that you don’t mind having people review and download. This is a social media slide show tool, and is meant for blog posts that invite discussion.

Slide.com allows you to get photos from your Photobucket or MySpace account. You may also upload photos from your computer or through an image URL. There are nine slide show styles to choose from. It only takes a few steps to create your first slide show HTML code and tutorials are provided so that you can easily integrate the slide show to your website.

References:

Slide.com
Wired.com

Max Levchin (Wikipedia)

Music Beta By Google (Perpetual Beta) Week 8

Introduction.
This week we talked about another vital characteristic of web2.0 which is “Perpetual Beta”. According to publisher and open source advocate Tim O'Reilly, this pattern has come to be associated with the development and release of a service in which constant updates are the foundation for the habitability or usability of a service.

What is Perpetual Beta.
Perpetual beta is the keeping of software or a system at the beta development stage for an extended or indefinite period of time. It is often used by developers when they continue to release new features that might not be fully tested. As a result, many operational systems find this to be a much more rapid and agile approach to development, staging, and deployment.

An obvious example of Perpetual Beta(Google Music Beta).

This is the first step of Google on the cloud media service. The service named “Music Beta” is a new service which has been launched by Google. This is an absolute free service and it allows users to keep their music up to the cloud around 20,000 songs. By comparison, the Amazon’s cloud service offers only 5 GB of free storage for about 1,200 songs stored at a mediocre bit rate. Google will also best Amazon with a feature that automatically creates playlists. Moreover, it will also work with any music on any phone running Android 2.2 or above (The iOS from iphone will be supported shortly). There will a simple presentation with artists, albums, and easy playlist creation. Users can manually create them, or another feature called "Instant Mix" that will make a playlist based on any single song. The system will auto magically pick 25 different tracks to build a "truly ingenious mix". All of this syncs to the cloud, which means no wires needed to download anything. However, more importantly, songs can be cached locally. Users can pick any song, album, or playlist to download onto storage, at an unknown quality. The bad of Music Beta is it is currently only available in the United States.

Introducing Music Beta by Google

References:
Music Beta
Wiki

eyeOS (Software above the level of a single device) Week 6

Introduction.
In this week lecture. we talked about another charecteristic of web 2.0 which is “Software above the level of a single device”. Obviously, most people will say social media like facebook or twitter can be the right answer. I am not arguing that they can be the right answer, yet my answer is pretty strange and more challenge. It is not only applications but It is an online operating system called "eyeOS".

What is eyeOS?

According to eyeOs.org, it clearly states that  eyeOS is an open source and cross platform web operating system following the cloud computing concept that leverages collaboration and communication among users. It has been developed by using PHP, XML, and JavaScript. It acts as a platform for web applications written using the eyeOS Toolkit. 

Why eyeOS is above the level of a single device?

First of all, its development base on web platforms. As a result, eyeOS is able to run on any operation systems, such as, Windows, MacOs and Linux etc. It is also able to operate on PDAs, mobile phones and tablet PCs, for instance. Moreover, There are several key features that allow users to gain more benefits from this online operating system.

• Collaboration: Share files and edit them in a real-time collaboration suite with other users.
• Simplicity: From its first steps, eyeOS has been planned and created to be intuitive and easy to use.
• Security: Keep your eyeOS under control. You are the one who manages roles and permissions for each user.
• Privacy: Decide where your files are: You can have your own eyeOS server.
• Ubiquity: Access your documents, files and applications from anywhere and any device.
• Flexibility: From the small business to the big corporation. Also for individual use. There is an eyeOS for you.
• Integration: The eyeOS architecture makes easier and faster the integration of any web application that you want to use.

Nevertheless, there are some limitations of using the online operating system  which are unreliable performances and internet accessability. The first downside of eyeOS is performances rely on the speed of the Internet. Another drawback of this is it requires the Internet accessability and it also use a lot of bandwind.

What you are allowed to do on eyeOS? 

There are four main features which users are allowed to uses in eyeOS.

• Office Manager - where you can manage your files and create some basic document, such as word processeor, spreed sheet, presentaions. Furthermore users also sent emails, manage their calendar and contacs.
• Network - where people can work with the public board,  instant messenger, FTP client, navigator(Browser), and RSS Feed.
• Accessories - all the basic tools are provided, such as calculator, text editor, and several widgets.
• Entertainment - where you can find a few games for relaxing and entertainment.

Additionally, uses can use the right click to customize the destop and reach to shortcut manus.

Refferences:

eyeOS

wikipedia

Flash vs HTML5 (Rich User experiences) Week 5

In week 5 we talked about Rich User experiences which is the one of web2.0 patterns that has been included into web 2.0 era.

Is that content still the king?

Many years ago it was ok just to throw up static information on a site and have a good site and it seemed content is still king. Nowadays, what has changed is that content alone isn’t enough. We demand much more from a good website. Consequently, there are many technologies have been put into the modern websites, such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and so on.

What technology can fill up Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)?

Around 10 years ago, there were plenty of choices for website developers, such as Flash, VRML, OpenGL, Java Servlet, JavaScript, PHP, ASP, JSP etc. Meanwhile, Flash with Action Script has done a great job to grab users’ attention and became very popular. However, there were a few problems which were time-consuming and high consumption of resources; due to Flash files are pretty big and low speed of the Internet.

How does this affect the choice of flash or not? We need dynamics, ways for both editors and users to add content to the site, and Flash files are hard to update! Just the fact that I need a special program to edit them speaks for itself.

This day, many web technologies have a massive upgrade AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3, for example. All these technologies have a capability to perform like Flash. For instant, they can create dock/drop-down list menus or colour scheme function in HTML5 also works extremely well.

Example
I tried to find good looking websites to compare between Flash and HTML5. Please click the link below the pictures and see differences.

Click here to visit Zign (Flash)

Click here to visit GreenHouse (HTML5)

If you go through both websites. It can be obviously seen that both are extremely well design websites. However, there is a big difference between those two websites. GreenHouse can perform very fast while Zign is pretty slow because the browser has to download a huge Flash file to your computer.

Another example is Flickr. They started out using Flash to display all of the images, including the image notes and the other toolbar options along with each image. While this might have been a good choice as the site started out, it was soon replaced by a more efficient HTML version of the toolbar and notes system that works just as well as the Flash version. They did end up keeping one small bit of Flash so users can rotate images and see a preview before they save it.

To sump up, the next time you start planning to develop a website then you  have to start thinking  and design your website components very wisely, then choose the right tools(Flash or HTML/Javascript) for each individual component instead.

Refferences:
Flickr
Zign
GreenHouse
ReadWriteWeb

Face.com (Innovation in Assembly) Week 4

Face recognition  

Humans have always had the innate ability to recognize and distinguish between faces, yet computers only recently have shown the same ability. In the mid 1960s, scientists began work on using the computer to recognize human faces. Since then, facial recognition software has come a long way.

 

Face.com Opens Free Facial Recognition API

Most of the input form for search engines is in the text format. However, many services are looking to go beyond with features like location and people tagging. The big downside of these features is that they rely on end users to manually enter in the appropriate data. To help automate the process of face recognition, face.com, who have a consumer service for both tagging and automatically doing facial recognition, have open their APIs that you can integrate the face detection and recognition technology with apps and services. Whether people are looking to add tagging for photos, cool sci-fi experiences, or creative flavors to apps,

**Note: There are a number of potential uses. Face.com offer services for detecting, recognizing, finding, and tagging faces in any photo, such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. More importantly, saving Facebook and Twitter tags improves recognition for you and others, and it qualifies you for better rate limits.However, Face.com services are offered for free with rate limits while premium license option is available.

Opp!! few more about free face recognition app.
 If you would like to log-in to your computer by using face recognition software. This a good example and it is free.

Refferences:
KeyLemon
Face.com
Facebook 
Flickr 
Twitter

Yellowpages.com (Data is the next "Intel Inside") Week 3

Introduction.

The next vital pattern of web 2.0 is Data is the next "Intel Inside". Just providing functions and services on websites cannot warranty that the site will gain the successful. because for Internet applications, success often comes from data. a clear instance of this pattern is "Yellowpages.com" which is the well known website about about telephone directories.

overview of yellowpages.com

What is Yellow Pages?
Yellow Pages refers to a telephone directory of businesses, categorized according to the product or service provided. As the name suggests, such directories were originally printed on yellow paper, as opposed to white pages for non-commercial listings. The traditional term Yellow Pages is now also applied to online directories of businesses

Today, the expression Yellow Pages is used globally, in both English-speaking and non-English speaking countries. In the United States, it refers to the category, while in some other countries it is a registered name and therefore a proper noun. The term Yellow Pages is not a registered name within the United States and is freely used by many companies.

 
In conclustion, as I mentioned data/content is a very important part of online application to be a successful website. Also, The way to build up content and the way to use that information are the important method to gain more benefits and effectiveness of using data.

Refferences:
Yellowpages