Visions of the Future

Ik heb vandaag de focus van deze blog aangepast naar “Mobile Media, Cloud Computing and the Return of the Global Village”

Op mijn blog GridThinking zal ik voornamelijk in het Engels schrijven over de ontwikkelingen en toepassingen van Grid en Cloud Computing en het Semantische Web. Op deze blog wil ik me voornamelijk gaan richten op Web Operating Systems, zoals het Microsoft Azure Service Platfom en SaaS applicatieplatformen zoals Microsoft Online, Live Workspace en SalesForce.com.

Hiernaast blijft mijn fascinatie bestaan voor ‘Mobile Media” en zal ik hier blijven rapporteren van mijn experimenten op dit vlak. De afgelopen 6 maanden heeft dit aandachtsgebied een grote vlucht genomen. Denk hierbij aan het eenvoudig publiceren van Microblogs (twitter), foto’s en filmpjes van je mobiel naar het internet. Verder begint ‘mobile social networking’ sterk in opkomst te komen , waarbij het principe van ‘Location aware software’ ervoor zorgt dat aanwezigheid (IM/Presence) wordt aangevuld met je (GPS/GSM) locatie.

Ik ben momenteel aan het experimenteren met een applicatie op mijn Nokia N81, waarbij ik via de applicatie Belysio eenvoudig status updates kan intypen, welke worden aangevuld met een positiebepaling via het GSM netwerk.  Deze statusupdates en globale positie (GSM positionering heeft een afwijking tussen de 400 en 800 meter) worden vervolgens doorgegeven naar onder andere Twitter, Windows Live, Gmail, FriendFeed, Facebook, Hyves, Plaxo, LinkedIn en mijn website. 

De reacties hierop zijn interessant. Mensen met weinig ervaring rond IM/Presence en (Micro) Blogging hebben vaak nog moeite met zien van de  mogelijkheden van deze manier van communicatie. Zoals bekent heeft ‘ieder voordeel ook zijn nadeel’, mijn focus ligt op het vinden van de grootste (productiviteits) voordelen. Mijn doel is om de komende tijd verder te experimenteren en op deze blog hier af en toe verslag van uit te brengen.. 

Some great update on MSN Space since yesterday (thanks to bink.nu for the summary)

• No more /members
• New contact search
• Photo Comments
• Option to allow comments on Blogs and Photos
• Learn panel
• Choose where the publish date of your blog entries will appear (footer or header)
• Customize who can view your Space by contact
• 3 email publishing addresses rather than just 1
• Communication preferences so you can control who can send you invitations and requests for access to your space and your profile
• Categorized themes
• New Xbox Live GameCard and Recent Games modules
• Revamped profile with Live Contacts
• Rich text comments

Updates:

More new features:

• MSN Spaces Mobile w/ search offical at http://mobile.spaces.msn.com/
• Advertising option
• Book list with Amazon.com
• You can upload 500 photos per month now with out limits
• Better URLS... add /blog or /photos to the address to get to that part of their space

More information at Mike's Space ,  The Space Craft , and http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2006/0126-msnspaceintegration.htm

Yesterday Jakob Nielsen (a known internet usability expert) wrote that in 2005 the milestone of 1 billion internet users has been passed. On his blog he writes:

The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.  

According to Morgan Stanley estimates, 36% of Internet users are now in Asia and 24% are in Europe. Only 23% of users are in North America, where it all started in 1969 when two computers -- one in Los Angeles, the other in Palo Alto -- were networked together.

It took 36 years for the Internet to get its first billion users. The second billion will probably be added by 2015; most of these new users will be in Asia. The third billion will be harder, and might not be reached until 2040.

Ok, he guesses that the 2 billion border will be crossed in 2015. Well when I look at the fast adoption of the internet in Asia, i guess 2012 could be possible. And if the plans for the 100 dollar PC's wil be realised, then I predict that 2,5 billion can be online in 2020.

The other 3,5 billion will be hard to reach under current conditions. For this we need a lot more investments  in  the poor countries. And these countries need food and a basic economy, before the will start thinking about global communications.  

But, the internet can be of great value to developing countries. Recently I joined an organisation called Health Connections International. This organisation has the goal to build a portal to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and expertise between non-English speaking health professionals and English speaking HIV/AIDS, TB and demand and harm reduction specialists across the globe. 

Initiatives like this will help the people in countries to fight the problems in there region and will result in more global exchange of knowledge. The success of sharing knowledge is in the numbers. A knowledge base used by two people is not really valuable. A knowledge base accessible to 2,5 billion users is extremely powerful. On my other blog I’m writing about technologies to build these solutions (internet application that can support a billion users). For this we need a some very good de centralized internet software components and good scaling standards...

I truly believe that in the near future (in the next 10 years) the 2 billion users will have a better live because of the services that can be provided over the internet...

For some reason I can easily forget about blogging. It’s doesn’t play a role in my standard week. When I stop working and come home I relax for an half hour and I eat something. Most of the time I watch the 8 O’clock news and then I leave to my ‘working room’. When I’m behind my computer I always have a list of things that had to be done yesterday. So I do these for an hour. Now its 21:30 and I will check some RSS feeds and do some reading. This can take a long time, depending on the things that are published on the net. Some months ago I easily spend 2 hours a day reading feeds, now I try to stop after 30 minutes.. ;)

So, it’s 22:00..  now it could:
A) Spend some time with my girlfriend
B) Relax and watch a movie
C) Do some more work
D) Go to bed early, to get some sleep that I really need
E) Call a friend / Family
F) Work on one of my hobby projects
G) Play a game of Battlefield 2
H) Sit back and think about the future
I) ....
J) Do some Internet browsing
K) Read my E-mail
L) Make some hot chocolate and have a good conversation with the mirror
M) Do some muscle training
N) Pick one of the 20 books I still want to read
O) Go outside and have a walk
P)  Go out and have a drink with a frend
Q) Organize a party
R)  Read some whitepapers that I printed
S)  Start a nice topic on a online Forum
T) Clean up my hard drives and make some backups
U) Do some chatting on MSN
V) Work on my Company’s Knowledgebase and Portal
W) Start up a Virtual PC and do some beta testing
X) Start up OneNote and write down some new business ideas
Y) Visit the neighbours
Z) Prepare some work for tomorrow
 
Hmm, I wrote this list in 2 minutes and I can think of a lot of other thing that I could do…
This is probably why it don't Blog every day...

When I would take more breaks during the day and blog ten...there is a change. But for me it’s pretty hard to take a break. I start something, and I dig myself in, until it’s finished…

So.  Can you expect me to do more blogging?
I don’t know, the future will tell…
 

Ckeck out Windows Live: http://www.live.com/ 

What is Windows Live?
Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together. That's the basic idea behind Windows Live. So the things you care about - your friends, the latest information, your e-mails, powerful search, your PC files, everything – comes together in one place. This is a brand new Internet experience designed to put you in control. And this is just the beginning – you'll see many more new services in the coming months.

So you got Hotmail, Feeds and a lot of Gadgets (Microsoft widgets) on a start page.

Great working AJAX stuff!

 
I just finished watching the 3,5 hour live Keynote from the Microsoft Professional  Developers Conference (PDC05). There where so many great things, that I filled five pages of notes on new technology that was shown. I just feel absolutely trilled with new cool ideas and visions.

I will post some of the coolest things I noticed:

Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E)

This is a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (codename Avalon) that can be run on many platforms like: PC’s, Tablet PC’s, Media Centers, Pocket PC’s and Mobile Phones.

It handles automatics scaling of the user interface base on the type of device and support all kinds of input devices like Media Center Remote controls, keyboard and phone pads.
Today a video was released by Channel9.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF or codename Indigo)

It was already know that Indigo would bring a easy solution to build and host webservices on the Windows Vista platform. But today Microsoft announce it would also do REST/PCIX,
MSMQ and Peer-to-Peer!

Atlas
This is A new Client framework development tool that  consist of two parts:

- It’s a rich clientside javascript library (for Visual Studio)
- And Server side controls based on ASP.Net

And it can be used by developers to quickly and easily build AJAX (DHTML/Javascript/XML) based,  browser independent interactive web applications.

WinFS
With the new WinFS (Windows next File System) according to Bill Gates it will be possible to realise a ‘schematic server and client storage’. Bill Gates talked about a 'extend and rich way to hyper linking data’.


LINQ

This is the ‘Language INtegrated Query(LINQ)
It’s the query language that can be use to query all kinds of datasources like databases, file stores and XML files.  You can do some very cool thing with it like doe a ‘SQL JOIN’ on a database and the file system with just a couple lines of code.  Here is a video from Channel9.

Office 12
And there is much cool news on Office 12. Too much for me to write down at the moment.
Just check this great Channel9 video!

More cool stuff can be found on:
http://microsoftgadgets.com/  (the Windows Widgets)
http://windowsmarketplacelabs.com/ (the way to buy and download software in the near future) 

There is much, but since a lot of people will wite about it in the next couple of days, seach here for what you like:

http://pdcbloggers.net/
http://www.technorati.com/tags/PDC05
http://www.talkdigger.com/index.php?surl=pdc05

Have fun! 

I'm back, after a month of  'silence'.

I tried to limit my time on ‘the Net’ for the last 4 weeks. During my holiday to the French Alpes (photo's here) I had a good two weeks without an internet connection. The other weeks I have been working, but I didn't use any RSS readers or blogging tools.

During my vacation I realised that reading and writing blogs didn't always have a positive effect on me. Sometimes this resulted in a form of stress.  The main reason for this, is that I just find too many topics interesting and I just can't read everything I want…. Mostly because the limitation of time.

 I also admitted to myself that I’m an information junky. Reading a lot of RSS feeds, can result in an information overdose.  

After i got this insight, I’m thinking about new ways to fit my ‘internet information consumption’ habits in my life. I’m thinking about only reading blogs on specific times of the day and to limit the information that I read about. I only should subscribe to feeds that bring information that are in line with my primary interests or information that brings joy or new insights.

I’m also looking at new ways to consume my ‘daily dose’ of RSS feeds. I really like Microsoft’s start.com at the moment. It delivers my a nice 'chunk size' dose of information. This is an amount that I can handle... I now only open my Sharpreader once a day. And I never spend more that a half hour on reading new feeds..

New media bring new habits… and they will require new disciplines...

Technorati has done another State of the Blogosphere.

Check it out here: Technorati Weblog: State of the Blogosphere, August 2005

Summary:

• Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
• The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
• A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
• About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
• About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly

Wow! This is even 'worse' than Moore's law!
How long will it take before my parents are going to start a weblog?

Follow this trend (using a 6 months periods in stead of 5.5)
2005 July      14.2
2006 Jan       28.4
2006 July      58.8
2007 Jan     113.6
2007 July    227.2
2008 Jan     908.8
2008 July   1817.6
2009 Jan   3635.2
2009 July  7270.4
2010 Jan 14540.8

How long will it take untill this trend is broken?
Or will my dishwasher get a blog?
Will it dish me on the web by telling the world I don't do the maintenance according to the manual? :)

Have we got any idea of what the amount of hits on Feedbrokers (like NewsGator, Bloglines, PubSub, IceRocket, Feedster, and Technorati;) really mean? Robert Scoble started comparing ' link hits' on this earlier this month.

Does a high ‘hit count’ on a keyword really is related to how hot a particular subject is?

Well at ZDNet they wrote this article titled 'Setting Scoble's record on Technorati straight '. It's about the troubles with 'doubles' in the 'Feed Search Results' from Technorati and Bloglines. Thins is a real interesting story!

But say that in the near future these numbers are going to be 99% correct, the amount of results on links that have been found are no exact science about how many people are linking or reading these feeds, right?
We need a read count, a human rating and other thing like that..
Or am i missing something here?

I once published 16 feeds on Bloglines, but I haven’t edited this list in 8 months or so, and I have only looked at then a couple of times. One of those feeds could have a post on a specific keywords or phrase, but maybe nobody is reading this feed.

What does it mean when in one of your OPML lists (at a feedbroker), there is a post using a specific keyword or phrase? This OPML list could be a snapshot from a list you published a year ago!  This is an old snapshot of what you did read a year ago…. Maybe you changed to another aggregator and deleted half of your feeds and maybe you added another 50….   

How are we going to measure the 'freshness' of a published OPML list?Is there a date field in OPML for this purpose? Does it hold the publication date of a OPML file? I won't be surprised if there is such a thing...

But what does this mean for the result of those feedbrokers?

Probably I’m forgetting something here, but….
Shouldn’t we have a categorisation of the results based on the amount of people who added the feed that has the result? And shouldn’t we categorize this by how long ago this OPML list was updated? Or even better.. How many people opened a particular post related to your search…

If this information is not added by all the feed brokers, we will never have a good feeling about ‘how hot’ a particular subject is…

Controlling your desk phone, your mobile phone, your voicemail box, your Voice over IP (VOIP) line, digital video and Instant messaging from you mobile phone or PDA…
This can be done using the product Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 Mobile, that probably would be released somewhere at the end of 2005…

I predicted it would come, and a couple of weeks ago (when i was on Teched Amsterdam) it was officially announced. 

Check this post on msmobiles.com:  Microsoft presents new features of Windows Mobile 5.0

Last night Microsoft release the first beta of Windows Vista (formally known as Longhorn) with the first IE7 included. But they also release the IE7 Beta1 for Windows XP SP2!  

Check it out the Story from Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley ..

Microsoft Delivers Pair of Internet Explorer Betas

Google added RSS functionality to there service this week, at last...

The Googlepersonal page and the Microsoft Start.com site are looking more similar every day!
Look at the attached photo's for a game of 'find the differences'

This news will be a hot one on Technorati...

MSN Virtual Earth Beta is live.
MSN Virtual Earth

It isn't a Google Maps killer yet, but it has some nice detail photo's.
This is going to be a nice 'Mapping War' that will change our lives.
Here is a nice Flash demonstration about the differences of both products (its 22 MB!)


Last month I showed Google Earth (the Windows app) to friends and family. They all responded in the same way 'So Cool!'
And second: How old are these photo's? Is this a 'live feed'?

Hmmm, I guess the live feed will take another 5 years...

When I think about the future, I’m always thinking about the ‘good things’ to come...
But for the last year, three topic just couldn’t fully escape my attention.
 

Radio frequencies and Magnetic fields
There are a lot of reports on the possible negative effect of GSM/FM/WIFI/GPRS/UMTS to people. Most reports focus on the possible damaging effect of radio frequencies to cells in your body (there are 100.000 billion). A friend of mine let me in on an new view on this. It could be that the radio frequencies don’t damage our cells, but what about the communication between these cells?
At the moment we don’t know. We are not abele to really research the consequences of people living in a word surrounded by electromagnetic fields and broadcasts from millions of radio frequencies.

Global Flu
There are scientists who say that there is a 30 year cycle for ‘global flu’. This flu is so tough that it could kill millions of people. The last cycle was 40 years ago (the spanisch flu) 
At the moment there are children that are raised so clean, that they don’t evolve the natural resistance to bacteria. 
What has our understanding to the benefits of hygiene done to this 30 year cycle?
Did we cracked the puzzle or is there more?

The fact that people with different opinions and beliefs don’t like each other
News flashes of people who kill lots of other people to proof that they commit to there belief isn’t a good thing. There is something like a 'common understanding' that there are people who think different then you do, because they experienced other things in there lives. This is basic physiology, right?
How can this be a bad thing to a god? This happens totally random! Is this a war between gods?
Gods don’t battle right? They just sit together on clouds….and relax..and stuff..
I guess people are making bad assumptions about there gods..
People should focus on today and make there decisions for tomorrow.
Not based on what could happen when you die..

A promise..
This are the three ‘less positive’ topics that crossed my mind this year.
I promise that I will not think (and blog) about negative visions of the future for another year.
This is because there is a emotion that we don’t need on this planet, and that’s ‘fear’…
The future should always be seen as a brighter future, no matter what happens….
 

Check it out!

The new name for Windows Longhorn has been set!  It's Windows VISTA !

Microsoft Unveils Official Name for “Longhorn” and Sets Date for First Beta Targeted at

Windows Vista Beta 1 
targeted at developers and IT professionals, will be available by August 3rd 2005.

 

This will be a beta program i would like to join!

I made some video's at Teched 2005 Amsterdam...
I had put them on Google Video and they where approved yesterday.

They can be found here:

Google Video Search for Teched 2005 Amsterdam
(You will need the 'Google Video Viewer' that can be downloaded here).

My excuses for the bad video quality
(i have a memory problem on my HTC Magician PDA/Phone)

Microsoft will bring out a Presence Toolkit for developers, so that all applications can benefit from Presence functionality. Developers can build solutions this way, so that users can hover over a name of a person (like in Sharepoint) and will be able to use all the Presence actions available in the Microsoft platform, like integration with Mail, IM, VOIP, Video actions in Outlook, MSN Messenger and  Office Communicator 2005.
Nice. :)

Read more a MicrosoftWatch

I wrote the following post today on the OpenBC Forum "Corporate Blogs and RSS" .

>>Dave Winer ( Friday, November 19, 2004)
>>RSS is not email. Don't sort them out into little boxes that you have to go to, make them >>flow to you, in a river, unsorted. Your time is what's valuable, there's no value to the items >>you didn't read. If it's important it'll pop up again.

>Alex de Jong wrote: (20/11/20040)
> how do you read your rss feeds ( I like 'em served raw on a plate;) )

Well, this used to be true for me. But when in March this year (2005) I got around 400+ feeds and the 'information river’ just became to big to swim across every day. I would like to share the way how I managed this problem…

I used Sharpreader as my one and only RSS reader. This reader does nice ‘Outlook 2003 like pop-ups’ when items are published, but with 400 feeds this was just too much…
I saved my OPML file with all my feeds and I divided it in three new OPML files.

The first OPML only had all newsfeeds (like BCC news, Dutch news sites and Movie guides)  and the blogfeeds I read most (like Adam Curry, Dave Winer, Scoble, etc.). I imported this OPML file in Sharpreader. My Sharpreader is always on (except when I give presentations with my notebook;). . I like this because I see the ‘information flow’ almost in real time.
This are around 35 feeds that are auto-refreshed every 15 minutes.

The second OPML had all technical feeds and are more related to my job (in IT).
This OPML has around 75% of all my feeds (around 300). This feeds are most about particular products  and technologies. I put all these feeds in RSS Demon and I start up this RSS client once or twice a week, to look what’s happening in the ‘technology and work related scope’.  I also use this client to search for keywords (and use it like an online knowledgebase).

The last OPML file had al the feeds that didn’t fit the first two categories. Most of them are about my hobbies, culture, events and local info and feeds of friends that are blogging.
I put this OPML on Bloglines and I read the feeds when I have some free time. This is mostly in the weekends, like on a Sunday…

So.. Is Dave Winer is right? In a way he is. The information that comes from RSS Feeds should flow thru your desktop (as a river) and the need to categorisation is not the same as with e-mail. But you NEED to divide the RSS streams in ‘multiple rivers of information’ based on your ‘state of mind’, (Instant Messaging) Status or day/time combination. It would be nice to build this within RSS Aggregators. Examples of categories should be ‘always on’, ‘work mode’,  ‘home mode’ and ‘hobby mode’.

What do you think about using Personal Status information in RSS Aggregators?

This are the things i found most interesting at Teched 2005

• SQL Server 2005 has become a far more powerful product that in already was.
• SQL Server 2005 in combination with Sharepoint Services, Office Scorecard Server (codename: Maestro) is really gone make Business Intelligence available for the masses.
  
• BizTalks Server 2006 is going to tot transactions, what SQL Server is for Relational databases.
  A really powerfull product for managing proceses, and busines to business transactions.
  
• The integration between SQL Server, BizTalk and Visual studio 2005 is very, very good.
  This is more and more the ultimate programming environment that developers are dreaming about.
  
• Windows Server 2003, the Compute Cluster Edition looks to be a pretty cool product.
  It lets you you do 'grid computing' (share server resources) with your Windows servers.
  Bink.nu has some goods info and screenshots of the beta product.
  

There where no real spectacular new product announcements, but a lot of great improvements on existing products…I'm off to the teched party now.  I will upload some videos to Google video later this week, so you can get an impressions of the event.