Milot's Blog

EMU Google Gmail - start.bus.emich.edu

I finally got to use EMU's Gmail account and I love it. I updated my contact information so I can stay in touch with your favorite classmates. I like the features, the personalized weather, contacts, and the 2GB storage. I like the live chat without having to connect, to invite people is easy. For some reason, I’m having some problems with the calendar. When I update events, it does not show them on the page of my email account. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong until I figure it out; I don’t know what it is. I think this might be my main permanent email account for now on. Currently, it's free of spam and I'm going to keep it that way and use one of my older accounts when it comes to giving my email to a company or someone I don't trust.

If you think VISTA is taking over XP...think again. DELL has reinstituted XP as an option for small business computers. The main reason being that more time is needed to transition to Vista. The idea to bring XP back was brought up by users on Dell's website, where users express their concerns, needs and desires. This website called www.ideastorm.com is Dell's interactive consumer-manufacturer site. Apparently DELL did not just hear the complaints; they actually listened to their consumers and made change. I visited the ideastorm webpage where you can register and post comments or blog.

SITE

This is by far the most sophisticated website in our class. I like the setup and the menu, easy to navigate. In terms of graphic design, I think this site deserves better. The popup screen that requests users to enter their unique name before even exploring or navigating the site is just brainy. The log off option is also a clever feature along with the RSS feed option. I think what the website is missing is some type of menu with some information on the website such as, ‘About.’ It would be useful to have information on the purpose of the web page and how to use it (although, it’s fairly easy to understand how it works. I also like the idea of the local search; the identification of the IP address. In my opinion, this is not my favorite website.

Where my caffeine website has an awesome layout. I like the setup and the idea. I like how this team focused their idea in the local sector. User interaction is there, people can finally cast their vote to their favorite coffee shop using the least amount of time possible. Map looks good, it’s clear and zooming in will make pinpoint the locations closer and not as clustered. I like the suggestion box to continuously get feedback from web users. The site is functional, although it has some weakness. For example, I do like the idea of their photo menu using Flikr but today, when I visited the website and clicked on Beaner Photos link, I got multiple photos of Beaner coffee as well as a photo of two GIs who don’t seem to be drinking coffee! I do like the website and the fundamental idea.

What I liked about team extreme is how they adjusted their project based on people’s desires. When they started in iteration 1, aside from the website not looking that nice, some features were still under construction. By iteration 2, their website was full of interactive stuff, from blogs to user ratings and such. It seemed like they had done everything right until James asked, “who is your audience and why would I go to your website?” So, team extreme did a little survey with various students and got the answers they needed on basis of ‘customer’ wants and desires. They implemented the inputs from other people and turned them into a reality. In my opinion, the best feature from the website is the Group Discussion. This user-interactive feature could be the reason why people will revisit the site. It’s fast, informative and easy to use.

IrDA or Infrared Data Association, defines the specifications for communications protocol for exchange of data through infrared light. The layers that define IrDA are: IrPHY, IrLAP, IrLMP, IrCOMM, Tiny TP, IrOBEX, IrLAN and IrSimple. It is used for short range exchange of data for personal area networks. It is wireless but the devices must a direct line of site to communicate via IrDA.

For more information, you can check out the official website of IrDA at www.irda.org.

MySpace is going to the news business and their news has gone live. Apparently, MySpace will not give preference to any news agency. According to the Social Web Blogs, "This approach blends elements of Google News and sites such as Digg and Netscape, which rely on readers to submit stories and determine their prominence."

PC world released the top 50 best tech products of all times. Among the products, Apple dominates the list with Apple II computer (1977), Apple iPod (2001), Apple MacIntosh Plus (1986), Apple iTunes (2003), Apple Mac OS X (2001), Apple Airport Base Station (1999) and Apple Hypercard (1987). This is a good example why Apple's innovation and engineering is sound and why Apple is doing well today. Other products that made the list are, Red Hat Linux (1994), Netscape Navigator (1994) etc.

Even though the feed syndication has been popular, it had its problems and was not so simple to integrate it in mashups. This new tool will support multiple versions of RSS and Atom feeds. Google is doing this by taking advantage of JSON format. According to Sean Michael Kerner from Internet News.com, "Google presents raw XML for developers that want to see the original and also presents it in JSON because it has become very common for JavaScript developers to access server side data."

Web users are becoming lazy; they are not using features to create, which is what web 2.0 is supposed to help. Instead, web users are mostly an audience. For example, instead of using Google's YouTube to upload videos, most of the people are the audience. According to Reuters, only 0.16% of visits to YouTube are users that actually uploaded videos. The same goes for Flickr, which is a popular site for photos, but only 0.2% used it to edit/upload photos.

Despite the low number of users in terms of user involvement in Web 2.0, the number of users who visited these sites skyrocketed 688 percent in the past year. So, Web 2.0 is not going away...at least not for now.