Web 2.0: Hot New Technology Launches

Opening day of Web 2.0 has a lot of great sessions, with an afternoon slot dedicated to some of the hottest new technologies.

Zimbra is on stage showing their new collaboration suite. They own an Ajax toolkit which is open source, have full indexing and are compatible with legacy systems.

They blend email, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies together and the UI is sweet. This thing is very cool: it's very open and seamless, the way collaboration should be. You can search header, body and 200+ different attachment types and its fast (at least the demo makes it look fast), it looks at conversations rather than messages, and can tag messages for easier categorization.

You can also view third party application data from within your email body and it integrates with web map and voice services.

zvents touts the most number of events and activities in the Bay Area. Their tagline: Discover. Do. Create. It allows you to do easy searches for activities and events in a more targeted way, such as jazz music in San Francisco. It will then give you a map of everywhere jazz music is playing on a particular evening. You can then zoom in and click for more specific informaton.

zvents also supports blogging. They show a search for Web 2.0 and the calendar of events shows up on the screen. If you want to embed this information on your blog, a few clicks allows you to bring that calendar into your blog seamlessly. It enables the user to create content; they're just the platform underneath it.

Client KnowNow shows their new KnowNow eLerts service, which is essentially instant notification service for RSS. Today, it's targeted to consumers and best of all, its free.

Users are updated of content change as soon as it happens without the need to be anchored to a web portal or a proprietary aggregator. This translates into a cleaner and more efficient experience: no pop-blockers, search, IM, voice, email, or portal interference. Subscriptions are created by simply dragging-and-dropping any RSS or Atom feed onto the eLert Toobar or Deskbar.

AllPeers is all about personalization and customization of a web experience. It's decentralized, and on your machine, so "you" are in control of your profile information and personalization options. They tout Firefox and thank them publicly......

MediaCenter, which is going to roll out in the next couple of weeks, will allow you to own your own data locally and can integrate it into your web experience and share it.

Now up on the stage is Flock. "We're essentially building a 'social browser.' We all use social software all day long, but we want to build better and faster tools in an open source environment.......we're building on Mozilla technologies and are integrating blogging into the natural flow of browsing."

They are integrating favorites into browsing in an interesting way. They can take content from one story, such as a quote or a photo and drag it over to a window. It's seamless and formatting is saved. Very cool stuff.

Bob Wyman of PubSub is last on stage. They're announcing their funding of an open-source development project to bring Structured Blogging to major blogging platforms. The universal Structured Blogging format is designed to make it easier to publish and find information on the Web. Structured Blogging lets users add different styles and tags to each type of blog entry that they post. These styles and tags ensure that movie and book reviews don't look like calendar or journal entries, and that each content type can be quickly recognized and processed by automated search services and other applications.

Tag: Web 2.0