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Earlier this week, Microsoft launched its Facebook connected online office suite Docs.com . Docs offers online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users can also choose to share these documents with their Facebook friends. Overall, Docs falls somewhat short of being a replacement for a desktop office suite. Even though it offers a better interface than Google Docs and Zoho , its functionality often feels deliberately crippled in order to push users to use (and buy) Microsoft Office. Sponsor Word Web App Among the three tools in Docs, the Word web app comes the closest to fulfilling its promises. While it isn't ready for managing highly complex documents, it's more than sufficient for editing standard text documents collaboratively. The Word web app includes all the basic editing features one would expect from a stripped-down version of Word, but you can't add footnotes, for example, or insert tables from your Excel files. Thankfully, though, Word will not strip any of these features out of the file. Once you download the file or open it up in Word, your footnotes and will reappear. This ability of Word to keep a document's formatting shows that Microsoft deliberately chose not to support these features in the web app. Excel Web App Among all of the apps, the Excel app is the most basic of the three apps included in the suite. It can only read documents in Microsoft's Office 2007 format, for example, while all the other tools also support older formats. That, by itself, could be a show-stopper for some users, but the most egregious omission here is that there is no graphical interface for entering a formula. Instead, you have to type every formula by hand, which is a slow and error-prone process. The good news, though, is that the Excel web app can read all the formulas in imported files. It's clear, though, that the app is only really meant for editing existing documents and not for creating new ones. PowerPoint Web App The PowerPoint web app did a nice job at opening every PowerPoint file we threw at it. When it comes to editing, however, the app is also very stripped down. You can use it to create a basic outline of your presentation or change the order of your slieds, for example, but you can't add floating images, backgrounds and resize text and image fields. You can, however, add and edit SmartArt clips. Bugs While the whole office suite ran very well in all the browsers we tested (except for Safari on the iPad, which displayed the documents just fine but crashed when we tried to edit), Microsoft still has to fix before Docs can become a run-away hit. While Docs has no issues importing most Microsoft Office documents, editing uploaded documents can be tricky. If you set Microsoft Office on the desktop to track the changes you make to a document, for example, the web apps will refuse to let you edit the document. We also ran unto issues with image uploads, which, at times, didn't finish. Docs also often complained that the images we tried to upload were not compatible with Docs, even though they were just standard JPEGs. Verdict Microsoft clearly wants users to see Docs as an addition to the traditional Microsoft Office desktop suite and not as a replacement for Office. After using Docs for a while it quickly becomes obvious that a lot of the limitations Microsoft imposed are not due to the fact that Docs runs in the browser, but simply due to the fact that Microsoft didn't want to include them. While Microsoft is partnering with Facebook on this project, Docs feels like it is stuck between two worlds: the new reality of how people collaborate and share content online - and Microsoft's intent to preserve its old revenue streams for as long as possible. To some degree, Docs feels similar to Apple's office suite for the iPad . While Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the iPad are sufficient for most basic tasks and hold a lot of promise, users with more than the most basic needs will come away frustrated. Discuss
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Hands-On With Microsoft Docs.com
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Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking a number of dramatic steps that would all add up to serving 1 billion "like" clicks from visitors to sites around the web, within 24 hours. Many people are concerned about Facebook's growing dominance around the web . One group of high-profile New Yorkers has launched OpenLike , a "very alpha alternative to Facebook Like." Working on the project so far is much-watched blogging investor and startup guy Chris Dixon , Huffington Post co-founder and MIT Media Lab guy Jonah Peretti , Jonathan Glick of Dixon, Conway , Ehrenberg and other VC-blessed TLists , Tom Pinckney who with Dixon both sold SiteAdvisor and founded Hunch.com and MIT grad and Hunch engineer Peter Coles . Dixon said this afternoon that the project is "looking for an authoritative open source person to govern it." Sponsor So the establishment is in Palo Alto and the rock-star insurgents are from the East Coast? Let no one say the Internet is boring. The lightweight technology at OpenLike is right now just a way for site owners to provide buttons for sharing content on a wide variety of social networks. One line of javascript adds a series of sharing buttons to a site, which the site owner can edit. Given that there are any number of ways to do more or less this same thing, and that these are very smart people working on this, we're sure there's a lot more in the works. The project describes itself on its site as "an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications." We'll share more details if and when this project develops. Related: See also developer Jesse Stay's blog post How Do You Compete With This Beast: Here's How , about long-time open standards community member Phil Windley's new product Kynext . The battle over control or absence of control over the internet is far, far from over. There are lots of people getting ready to step up and challenge Facebook's powerful, seductive, expanding control. Discuss
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OpenLike: All-Star Team to Challenge Facebook's Expansion
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The social networking platform
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No Free Lunch for Ning Users; Still Plenty of Bargains Elsewhere
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Given the recent developments in the Twitter developer ecosystem, I think it's a good time to revisit the idea of an open Web alternative to Twitter. The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I'm going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge. Sponsor Guest author Chris Saad is VP of strategy at Echo , the world's leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. His role is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction. His background includes co-authoring of the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founding the DataPortability Project . Used by Digg, BBC, NewsGator, France Telecom and others, APML is industry standard for Attention Profiles. The DataPortability project's mission is to advocate interoperable data portability for users, developers and vendors. Length Microblogs are, well, micro. They are shorter. This is not some marvelous invention - it is a simple, imposed limitation on the input field. Any publishing software today, from WordPress to Drupal, can be modified to force users to stick to 140 characters - call it "microblogging mode". I don't think this particular difference (or how to bridge it) warrants much more explanation. Real Time While blogs used to update rather slowly in a publish and subscribe model, microblogging has had a reputation for being faster or real time. The old school refresh rate of 15 minutes or more (the time between RSS refreshes) seems like an eternity these days. Of course the reality is that the Twitter API is still incapable of sending updates to individual clients in real time, and the whole thing is far from real time. Updates in seconds, however, is a key trait of microbogging. The fact is, however, that blogs now have a method of pushing updates that's faster and more effective than even the Twitter API. It's an open standard called PubSubHub and it's supported by both Blogger, WordPress, Buzz and countless other smaller services. Blogs are already real time. Identified Subscriptions One of the nice things that Twitter does that traditional Blogging software does not do is called Identified Subscriptions. That is, when you subscribe to (a.k.a follow) a user, their name and face appear in your sidebar, and you get a nice little ego boost in the form of a notification email and increase in your follower count. Why couldn't we add a simple mechanism to PubSubHub so that when a client subscribes to push updates, it leaves behind some optional identifying information about the user like their name and avatar? Or maybe instead of leaving the actual username and avatar, it might provide a URL to the subscribing user's own microblogging site that has that metadata stored in the header. Addressability This is perhaps the most complicated difference and gap to close. With Twitter, you can easily say, "Hey @chrissaad you are are a crazy hippy" and I will get it in my message stream. Blogs can't do that right? Well, actually, blogs have been doing addressability since day zero. The same way the rest of the Web does addressability - using links. Bloggers frequently link to each other and then check their trackbacks and pingbacks for incoming references. The only problem with this model is that it's not user friendly enough. Mainstream users don't understand URLs and checking pingback and referrer logs is just plain silly. So rather than reinvent the wheel, why not just add rubber? To make it easier for users, imagine if blogging software kept track of the users you were following (see Identified Subscriptions above) and when you type the equivalent of "@", they provided a list of suggested aliases to choose from. When you select the person you are addressing, the software could insert the alias and hyperlink the name to the associated URL of that user's microblogging site. Clients, then, could subscribe to Google Blog Search (remember blog search is essentially the blogging world's open firehose) and search for any reference to your personal URL. The rest is just presentation tricks to show those replies mixed in with the rest of your microblogging items. Clients Why can't existing Twitter clients allow users to subscribe to PubSubHub enabled RSS and Atom feeds. They would also subscribe to the Google Blog Search for references to your own URL (for @ replies). No need to rip and replace Twitter, just offer an open alternative: subscribe to any site - anywhere. The Future As you can see here, microblogging is and could be fundamentally the same as blogging in terms of the mechanics and technologies involved. The techniques used to build and improve the open blogosphere could be used to bootstrap a microblogging sphere as well. There have been many big strides in this area, such as Status.net. The opportunity now is for the (ex?) Twitter clients and blog publishing platforms and the standards groups to make small tweaks to extend the technology in the right way. Discuss
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Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative
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New York-based online video management company whistleBox has developed a new browser-based augmented reality (AR) experience geared directly at children by integrating it with the one thing every kid loves: cartoons. The project, dubbed Do Crew , is a series of animated stories for kids that include interactive AR games and challenges that the kids can play with using a webcam attached to a desktop or laptop computer. Sponsor In examples shown in videos on the Do Crew site, kids can control cartoon vehicles by jumping or leaning side-to-side, and can play other games by waving their hands in front of the camera. Think Project Natal but in a web browser, and integrated within kids' cartoons. This is an excellent use of augmented reality technology because it is a practical application with genuine value, an attribute we discussed last week as being the strongest way AR can break into the mainstream. Best of all, with games like these, kids will no longer be passively glued to their sofas as this new AR project encourages the kids of stand and use their body and arms to control the games. The Do Crew developers state that their mission with the game is help combat the growing epidemic of child obesity. "Children will not stop watching television, and parents will not stop feeling guilt about that fact. So, where does that leave us? It leaves us with a rare opportunity to acknowledge this epidemic and treat it at the most basic level," the site says. "The Do Crew team is dedicated to making all passive media active, and we believe that with a little technology and imagination we can reimage the personal computer or console video game system as effective electronic exercise equipment." Going after the children's entertainment market could also be a boon for the augmented reality industry which has yet to find the public spotlight. Time Magazine named AR as one of the top tech trends to watch in 2010 , and by engaging children, AR may be able to make significant strides towards mass public adoption and acception. Actually, AR experiences aimed at kids are not a new concept; a LEGO Store installation that helped kids see 3D reprensentations of model kits right on their boxes, and a web-based Topps baseball card experience that made the players on the cards come alive in 3D are two of the most well known AR roll-outs to date. New projects like Do Crew are not only great for kids, but also for AR as a whole as it strives to gain credibility and traction with as wide an audience as possible. Discuss
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"Do Crew" Augmented Reality Cartoons Help Get Kids Off the Couch
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