Google+ Hangouts: presto la tecnologia aperta a terze parti

Forse l’unica feature davvero degna di nota in Google+ è la videochat di gruppo, o Hangout.

Scopro con piacere che è ancora basata su Jingle, l’estensione XMPP che stiamo utilizzando per aggiungere il supporto audio in eConference (oltre quello via Skype già disponibile) .

“At a high level, it’s based on XMPP MUC (XEP-0045) and Jingle (XEP-0166/167), with some other enhancements needed to handle our architecture.”

L’altra buona notizia è che Google pare essere interessata ad “aprire” e rilasciare le specifiche, in modo da rendere la tecnologia alla base di Hangout disponibile agli sviluppatori di terze parti:

Google’s plans to release the specs for Hangouts also tells us a bit about the way the company is looking at the various components of its new social offering. In the short term, Hangouts could well be the killer feature that gets people to sign up for Google Plus. […] At that point, it will only make sense to empower third-party developers as well.

via Gigaom

Is Facebook anti-social?

Questo articolo mi piace e mi ha fatto pensare al collab 🙂 :
Is Facebook anti-social?

Clearly, immersive 3D collaboration technology has failed to live up to the hype of some of its early advocates and visionaries.
[..]
At its core, the Facebook experience is a clever amalgamation of voyeurism and narcissism. It’s either all about me or it’s about what I’m going to discover about you. In the old days they called that anti-social. Now we call it being social? Really??
[..]
asynchronous collaboration technologies most often associated with social business software are falling short of what’s needed for enterprise collaboration. The technologies are simply inappropriate for the context. Workers need technology that more closely replicates and integrates with how they interact in person. In the end, the technologies best suited for that will likely have much more in common with Xbox Live than with Facebook.

“Workers need technology that more closely replicates and integrates with how they interact in person” ma allora perchè Second Life è stato dimenticato? non era sufficientemente realistico? o forse il problema era la mancanza di struttura..troppa libertà di azione. mentre i videogiochi online sono “structured yet unpredictable”

Office non è collaborativo? Ora c’è Google Cloud Connect

Per quanto apprezzi Google Docs, sono ancora lontani i tempi in cui potrò usarlo quotidianamente al posto MS Office sul desktop. D’altro canto, anche Office ha le sue deficienze.

Tuttavia, una delle gravi carenze di Office, cioè l’editing collaborativo, sembra essere stata risolta oggi, con il rilascio di Google Cloud Connect. Fa specie che a risolvere questa pecca sia proprio il competitor Google.

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is now available to all users worldwide, letting two or more people work together on the same file at the same time in Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 or 2010 on Windows PCs. For example, you can edit a Word document’s table of contents from Dublin while coworkers adjust formatting and make revisions from Denver. Instead of bombarding each other with attachments and hassling to reconcile people’s edits, your whole team can focus on productive work together.

Ora non resta che provarlo.
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Browse for a good cause

Segnalazione natalizia direttamente dal Google Chrome Blog:

Whether it’s bug fixes to the Chromium open source project, dazzling apps and extensions arriving daily in our Web Store, or boundary-pushing Chrome experiments — the Chrome community never fails to inspire us with their awesomeness.

This holiday, we wanted to enable the Chrome community to work together for a good cause. Starting today, we invite you to support five worthy causes by counting and “donating” the tabs you open in Chrome.

Everyone’s total tabs will determine a charitable donation made on behalf of the Chrome community, up to one million dollars. Here’s what your tabs can do:

  • 10 tabs = 1 tree planted
  • 10 tabs = 1 book published and donated
  • 25 tabs = 1 vaccination treatment provided
  • 100 tabs = 1 square foot of shelter built
  • 200 tabs = 1 person’s clean water for a year

To find out more about this effort and the organizations we’re partnering with, visitgoogle.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cause/.

Want to participate?

  • Get the Chrome for a Cause extension
  • Browse the web with Chrome between December 15 – 19
  • At the end of each day, you’ll be prompted to click on the extension to submit your tabs
  • Choose which charity you’d like to support with that day’s tabs — you can always support the same charity, or pick a different one each day

Next week, we’ll be sharing the details of the good deeds you’ve enacted. In the meantime, browse away!

Internet of Things: chi ci scommette?

…la Cina! Interessante articolo a riguardo:

Social data is set to be surpassed in the data economy, though, by data published by physical, real-world objects like sensors, smart grids and connected devices. The United States may have dominated the first basic and the second social stage of the Web, but the Chinese government is moving quickly to make China the world leader in this next stage, the Internet of Things. A major new public/private partnership in Chongqing aimed explicitely at the Internet of Things is just the latest signal.

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La corsa alla ricostruzione della Rete di Haiti

da IEEE Spectrum:

With thousands of doctors, nurses, aid workers and troops descending on Port-au-Prince in the last week to join more than 800 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) already there, reporters on the ground have observed that the damage done to the telecommunications infrastructure is hampering coordination efforts. But in an ironic twist, it turns out that Haiti’s Internet connectivity is robust precisely because its telecommunications infrastructure is so underdeveloped.

Continua qui.

Why Google Wave Sucks (And Why You Will Use It Anyway)

Segnalo un interessante post che riporta molto dello scetticismo che provo personalmente nei riguardi dell’attuale preview di Google Wave.

This post outlines how you’ll probably use Google Wave in the future and also gives you advice on how to implement it in your company or your team of coworkers. It also reveals some big usability problems in the current version. Those issues aside, I would like to show you the advantages of the “wave” once again and describe some cool use cases that might make you love it at some point in the future.

Link: via TechCrunch

LinkedIn apre agli sviluppatori: disponibili le API

Riporto una notizia che apre nuovi scenari per la realizzazioni di applicazioni per tesi di laurea e prove pratiche per il corso di Sistemi per la Collaborazione.

LinkedIn PlatformLinkedIn nelle ultime settimane si sta prodigando nello sviluppo di nuove soluzioni: dopo il restyling dell’interfaccia,l’integrazione di Twitter e la possibilità di connessione conOutlook, è la volta di LinkedIn Platform.

Praticamente il social network ha aperto le proprie API per la creazione di applicazioni di terze parti agli sviluppatori: il numero di quelle attualmente disponibili – costruite da partner come SlideShare e WordPress – è destinato ad aumentare in breve tempo.

L’annuncio del nuovo servizio ricalca vagamente gli intenti alla base di Facebook Connect: si fa menzione anche di siti web — il ché lascia intuire un sistema d’autenticazione all’esterno, oltre alla possibilità d’interfacciare le applicazioni col database di LinkedIn (e ai widget disponibili).

Da: downloadblog.it

tinychat, quando Skype non c’è

Se mai doveste trovarvi nella condizione di fare una videochiamata 1-1 (con chat) senza avere la possibilità di lanciare Skype, tinychat fa al caso vostro. tinychat offre la possibilità di creare al volo delle chatroom “disposable” con la possibilità di effetture videochiamata e senza la necessità di installare alcun software aggiuntivo. Qualità audio buona, quella video sufficiente, ma migliorabile.