Beyond Widgets: MuseStorm’s Advanced Data Services Vision July 5, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Ajax, Application Development, Companies, Enterprise Application Integration, Lite Computing, Small Apps, Web 2.0.3 comments
MuseStorm has created a lot of buzz in the past couple of weeks with its much linked tutorial on How to Create an Ajax Homepage and its web site that allows users to customize pre-made widgets, then add them to their site using a few lines of code. I spoke to MuseStorm co-founder Ori Soen by telephone this morning and he gave me an overview of company vision which goes far beyond widgets.
Right now, MuseStorm aggregates content from various Web sources (APIs) and serves data to applications. On the client-side, it provides modules that free the developer from dealing with APIs, Web services, data manipulation and most client-side programming.
MuseStorm widgets allow blogs and web site owners to easily integrate data from search engines, photo sharing services, EBay, Amazon, YouTube and others into their Web pages with no programming required. Web developers can use MuseStorm’s components and service to add dynamic data to their applications with minimal programming, in a variety of development environments.
As more, and more valuable, web-delivered services are developed and deployed in the future, Ori foresees the demand for a middle layer of advanced data management services to function as a “gateway” for customers on both sides of the server-client divide. For proprietary reasons, he is reluctant to name the specific services right now but he did share some of them with me and I think they are solid and have a lot potential. Says he:
It is no secret that the web is emerging as a service delivery platform, not simply a collection of static web pages. Right now, API providers are doing everything themselves. We think that a year from now, maybe a little bit more, these application providers are going to want to add various kinds of business management functionality and metrics to their offerings. That would require a lot of programming and platform- building that is extraneous to their core business. Long term, we see ourselves becoming that middle layer. If you’re an application or data provider, you can plug-in to MuseStorm and we can provide all kinds of valuable services to help you manage and run your business. At the same time, we are making it easy for users and developers to add dynamic functionality to their projects.
My impression is that MuseStorm’s plans to add advanced data services on top of its aggregation and distribution technology looks like an attractive business model.
Cross-posted from my other site Practical Widgets.
Nokia Mobilizes Widgets July 3, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Companies, Lite Computing, Mobile, Small Apps, Social Networking.2 comments
Nokia has quietly launched a new venture called WidSets within Nokia Ventures Organization, its business incubation unit, with the goal of bringing the joy of widgets to a million registered mobile users by the end of the year.
A company spokesman said Nokia was looking to claim the same kind of mind share in the mobile world that Yahoo widgets have in the web. No word on how the company plans to monetize its entry into mobile widgettry but, for now, it is happy to simply spread the gospel and build a giant user base.
WidSets work across all platforms and to have a very short development cycle so that refinements can made quickly. The service was launched on June 6 and already got its first expansion at the end of the month that included several new key features: two-way functionality, more to read from the feeds, audio alarms, skin editor for widget creation, and better information from the system widget.
Testdriving Musestorm’s Awesome Widget Machine June 28, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Ajax, Application Development, Companies, Enterprise Mashups, Lite Computing, Web 2.0, Widgets, WordPress.2 comments
If you’re among the millions of people who belong to the curious-but-not-all-that-geeky crowd, the folks at MuseStorm have put together a fabulous AJAX Desktop Tutorial that will give you a hands-on, step-by-step demonstration of how to build an AJAX desktop or homepage in ten minutes or so. I went there last night intending to spend about five minutes kicking the tires and wound up killing a couple of hours moving boxes around and happily turning feeds into merry little widgets.
In addition to the terrific tutorials, MuseStorm also has a collection of customizable forms that allow you to easily create widgets for RSS feeds, Google Search, News and Definition, Technorati, YouTube, Amazon Books, eBay Auctions, Flickr photos and del.icio.us tags. Create a feed, push a button, and MuseStorm generates code that you can drop into your blog or web page. I would have liked to drop some in here to show you but, alas, the WordPress folks are a little paranoid about javascript they haven’t pre-approved.
Once you play with widgets for a few minutes, you begin to realize that this really could be the future of the desktop. What is likely to make the little devils ultimately appealing to enterprises is their simplicity of use and their ability to eliminate a lot of wasted and unnecessary tech fat from the way office work is currently performed.
Imagine going into the office in the morning and instead of firing up the old PC with its cranky, mostly Microsoft office applications (so overloaded that you actually use perhaps 2% of their features), you flip on a networked thin client, which opens your personalized homepage with the lightweight applications you use most often, i.e., a calendar, e-mail, and maybe a collaborative teamspace. If you need something special–a spreadsheet, for example–you go to the widget closet and pull one out and drop it on your desktop. As you work, your output is automatically saved and stored–not on your PC–but on a giant server farm in Montana or somewhere.
This won’t happen overnight, of course. Too many Western companies have too much money invested in huge operating systems designed to run needlessly complex applications. As was the case with telecommunications industry’s shift from landlines to wireless, the countries and companies that will benefit first and most from thin computing will be those who have the least investment in existing infrastructure. China, for example, managed to leapfrog directly from a 19th century economy into the digital age by leveraging Western advances in telecommunications and computing. You can bet they (and many others) will do the same with the new lite computing paradigm.
If you want to experience Web 2.0 firsthand, give MuseStorm’s AJAX Desktop tutorial a test drive. You’ll understand what all the excitement is about.
