Waiting in Transit…

Yes, you have standalone GPS devices; yes, you have phones that support GPS. But tell me, how many third-party applications have you used on either? Not many, I reckon, because the platforms weren’t very tempting for developers, and the screens and GUIs of most devices other than the iPhone simply aren’t good enough. Standalone GPS devices, on the other hand, were closed affairs; what the manufacturer put in, that’s what you got.

GPS can do so much more. In its most basic sense, adds another dimension to your life: it knows where you are. It knows where everyone is. Geotagging your photos? That’s just the surface being scratched. Think social networking; in fact, we already have that, and it’s called Loopt. It’s an application that alerts you when your friends are nearby and allows you to share your location and photos with them. Yes, we’ve had such applications before, but now the location is going to be very precise – you’ll be able to know which club, street, or coffee shop they’re in.

It’s not only about social networking. Everything: event recommendations and reviews, weather, traffic and flight info, gaming – all of it will have a “location” component from now on.

Link:Mashable

Whoever is listening… I want one! I want the new iPhone. I’m so excited about it I’m gonna go hysterical! wow.
: iPhone, GPS, Tehcnology, New, Cool, Location

written by Muhammad \\ tags: Cool, technology, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

This is an amazing development by Magnify.net, what they’ve done is integrated their site’s functions into MovableType and WordPress Platforms where you can integrate relevant video’s or photo’s straight into your post on any topic you desire.

How it works is that in your WordPress/MovableType post page, you click a little orange button (which gets integrated via your plugins) and a search box appears… you type in a search term and out pops various videos from Youtube, Google Video, etc. for you to choose from and you can simply then just add it into your blog post.

Simple, Effective, Amazing… and your blog readers will appreciate the relevant media content.

written by Muhammad \\ tags: Blogging, Social Media, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Following on from the post about Powerset Semantic Web Search and Web 3.0. ReadBurner, which shows news from the point of view of how many people have shared it via Google Reader’s Shared Items function, has tied up with NetVibes (About an hour ago) via the Ginger API in order to provide a similar function as Shared Items in Google Reader.

The tab is already live and available on the Readburner site. You can test it out now.

So from Smart Searching we now have Smart Filtering :) Web 3.0 here we come… and as Chris Brogan put it, Why let Google have all the fun?

written by Muhammad \\ tags: Google, Social Media, Web 3.0

Having been long predicted as the shaping the next generation of search, Semantic Web Applications are now coming to the fore with Powerset leading the way. Powerset has released its beta version, allowing the public to finally try out the new key word technology. Ushering the new era of search, Powerset hopes to change people’s expectations of search by offering a far more intelligent and efficient form of searching, at least in theory.

“We’re changing the way information is searched by doing a much deeper analysis of the pages we index,” said Scott Prevost, Powerset’s product director.

Keyword engines treat pages as word bags, indexing their content without grasping its meaning, he said. Meanwhile, Powerset’s engine, applying technology developed in-house as well as licensed from Xerox’s PARC subsidiary, creates a semantic representation by parsing each sentence and extracting its meaning. “Meaning is what we index,” he said.

Google’s Marissa Mayer has even elaborated on the benefit of the semantic web…

“People should be able to ask questions and we should understand their meaning, or they should be able to talk about things at a conceptual level. We see a lot of concept-based questions — not about what words will appear on the page but more like ‘what is this about?’. A lot of people will turn to things like the semantic Web as a possible answer to that,” she said.

She also said that Google seems intelligent more through brute force because of the amount of data it crunches rather than it being really “smart” and working out what the user really means when they are searching for certain terms.

I can already see Google Scurrying to upgrade their system to incorporate this though… they certainly have the budget to do it. The current form of Powerset is limited, consisting only of millions of pages from Wikipedia and Metaweb Technologies’ Freebase, a Web-based structured database of information. Whatever it is, here’s to ushering in a new era in search, one that will ultimately provide a real challenge to the Google’s and Yahoo’s of our increasingly connected world.

Could this possibly be the beginning of a Web 3.0?

written by Muhammad \\ tags: Google, Internet, Search, Web 3.0, Web Applications