web 2.0

A couple of promising applications have been brought to my attention recently. Both are tied closely to the Web and have great collaboration potential. These applications are Writely and AllPeers.

Writely is an AJAX enabled web-browser based word processor. It has some very tidy formatting tools and supports the loading and saving of Microsoft Word compatable .doc files. Whilst its operating system neutral design is very encouraging what is even more interesting is its in built collaboration tools. As it is founded on the Web it has the inherit capability of allowing more than one person to actively edit a document at the same time without any security implications (try doing that in Microsoft Word). I only wish they provided a downloadable version of the software so that local versions of the applications could be used and developed upon.

Recently I submitted an abstract for the CAADRIA 2006 'Rhythm and Harmony in the Bit-Sphere' conference in Kumamoto, Japan. I am pleased to say the abstract was accepted so now I have the arduous task of completing a paper for submission January 21st 2006. The comments that came back were very good (compared to others I have received) and these are included below the abstract.

USING WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES TO PRESERVE DESIGN HISTORY AND IMPROVE COLLABORATION

Abstract. This paper describes ongoing research into how emerging Internet concepts used in conjunction with existing Information Technologies (IT) can improve inter-project communication and understanding. The emphasis of the research is to use technology as an enabler to share personal thoughts and enhance the conversation that takes place within a development team. It stems from the observation that the emphasis of many new Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) technologies is to minimise and diffuse project conversation with highly complex, machine interpretable building information models.

Riya seems to be a pretty promising set of technologies, although whether or not it pans out to be a successful product is another story. At the core of Riya is a set of facial and text recognition algorithms that can intelligently identify people or keywords within photographs. Consequently as photos are added to the gallery rich meta-data can be passively pulled from the photos without any user interaction. In instances where a person or text cannot be identified it is possible to manually add this meta-data or have others supply further tags to your photographs to identify people in crowds or foreign words.

Fluxium caught my attention the other day as browsed through the articles in my newsreader. Initially what brought me to the site was a posting by Geoffrey Grosenbach referring to what Thomas Fuchs was doing that was to sensitive to comment on publically until very recently. The Quicktime promo movie looks very promising indeed especially for someone in the photographic industry. I really like the way resources can be easily tagged and shared between other people in a manner that seems more graphical and targeted than Flickr's generic gallery system. The graphical interface was very slick and entirely web (html/css/javascript) based. Of real interest to me was the obvious role of RSS in the application. Prominent RSS feeds were in the demo but the extents  of their functionality was unfortunately not covered in the demonstration. Given the intelligence of the developers I would not be surprised if RSS functionality was extensive and well thought out.