Testing Goowy Web IM and Online Storage

Testing Goowy Web IM and Online Storage

Goowy is slowly rolling out its new web instant messaging and online storage services to users. I showed screen shots (provided by Goowy) earlier this month, and have now had a chance to use the features directly. My overall impression: Goowy is turning into a very nice Flash-based desktop replacement, but has some issues to work out on performance.

Instant messaging compatibility is good (think Meebo - which I?ve written about here). You can use MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AOL accounts or talk to other Goowy users directly. Setup was easy, and it worked flawlessly. A number of emoticons are supported. My only complaint is that the first message you send to anyone says ?(Sent using goowy web messenger. Check it out at http://www.goowy.com )? which is annoying.

Goowy IM does not yet support group chat, although CEO Alex Bard says that is coming. Another nice feature is the ability to pull a chat window out of the browser window and into its own resized window on the desktop, to look and feel more like a standard IM client.

Online storage (see image at end) is a very nice feature add as well. They haven?t built this themselves. Instead they are using the box.net API on the back end. Goowy is giving every user 1 GB of free storage, with 5 GB for $5/month coming soon. Given the new pricing benchmarks set by Amazon recently, I expect these prices to come down over time. Goowy storage has a straightforward uploading tool, and files can be tagged and set to private, public or shared.

The only issue I saw with the storage feature was on performance - it was very slow. This is understandable given that the product is still in very early private alpha and I would expect speed to increase dramatically prior to public launch. Box.net needs to add support for a client based uploader too, at the earliest possible date.

Goowy is backed by Mark Cuban (as is Box.net) and other investors. Traffic continues to rise steadily and they seem to have a very loyal user base based on comments left on this blog from previous writeups. It?s way too early to say what Goowy?s fate will be, but I am encouraged to see them (as well as Netvibes) begin to distance themselves from the pack.

Goowy

AjaxSketch?zzzzzzzz

AjaxSketch?zzzzzzzz

As promised, AjaxLaunch has released a new Ajax product one week after AjaxWrite. This week, they?ve released AjaxSketch, a drawing program that is designed to replace desktop applications like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

The functionality seems to be there on a basic level, but the performance is not. The AjaxSketch servers can?t handle the load from current traffic. I can overlook flaws in half baked products, but this smells more like its quarter-baked at best. I hope next week?s product is a little sexier.

Meanwhile, AjaxLaunch also announced that over 500,000 documents have been created with AjaxWrite in the last week.

AjaxSketch

AjaxWrite, the Newest Ajax Office Entrant

AjaxWrite, the Newest Ajax Office Entrant: "AjaxWrite, an online Ajax version of Word, is the newest entrant into the online office space. It opens and saves documents in Word format (you can also save in PDF), has good basic functionality and is fairly fast. I agree with Michael Robertson, the man behind AjaxWrite, that this and other Ajax Word products like Writely and Zoho Writer significanly reduce the need for most of the world’s population to buy Microsoft Word. AjaxWrite is bare bones by design and fast. If you need to read and/or edit a Word doc quickly, this is a workable solution and I assume it will get better and faster over time. AjaxWrite currently is Firefox only. Michael also tells us to look out for new weekly Ajax applications at his new site, AjaxLaunch. AjaxWrite is the first. I’m looking forward to the next. Will things like AjaxWrite have an impact on Microsoft’s Office revenues over time? Yeah, it must. Even so, Bill Gates says that he just doesn’t understand our infatuation with thin client versions of Word. That may be true, but at some point I expect Microsoft to come out with ad supported versions of their own clients…they’ll just wait, of course, until they have to. And Google has pushed the envelope with its recent acquisition of Writely. More on GigaOm. Om asks about the business model…If people sta"

Checking Out eSnips

Checking Out eSnips

Israeli startup eSnips relaunched today with a new look and substantial feature upgrades. I did not have a chance to meet with eSnips during my recent trip to Israel, but CEO Yael Elish and VP Marketing Efrat Moshkoviz visited silicon valley a couple of weeks ago and i was able to get a demo.

It’s hard to categorize eSnips. We looked at it as part of our review of online storage providers - and although eSnips does provide 1 GB of free storage for users, they clearly are up to something else as well.

The core idea is to allow users to upload media files of any type - photos, videos, office documents, whatever - tag them, and either keep them private, share with other or make them public. But eSnips is also allowing bookmarking of web content, from a whole page to a line or paragraph. Others can comment on each piece of media or content as well, and rate a user created page. Given the social aspects of the service, eSnips is really a content-centric social network.

eSnips also offers a client uploader for file transfers, and a toolbar for easier bookmarking. Both only work on Windows machines at this time, however.

I like combining media and other files with bookmarked content, and although I’m not sure if eSnips in its current form will stand out enough from the crowd, I do think they are on to something interesting. If virality kicks in from sharing, they could have a winner. eSnips is free, and they will charge for storage above 1 GB and other services.

[via TechCrunch]

Google Finance - Lots of Flash & Ajax

Google Finance - Lots of Flash & Ajax

The rumor is that Google internally tested Google Finance through two full versions before releasing it today, and the extra attention shows. This is a great looking product overall. And they’ve taken things at least a step further than Yahoo Finance in its current form.

The included information is similar to Yahoo Finance for public companies (stuff that can be scoured from public SEC reports and company related news), but there are some key new features:

• Use of Flash for charts to change features like timeline on the fly; drag and drop to move back in time


• Use of Ajax on the home page to switch between market views (Nasdaq, NYSE, etc.)


• Inclusion of recent blog entries relating to the company (see link in first bullet above)


• Private company information

The flash charts are loading very slowly right now, i assume this will improve. The last bullet above is really interesting - they’ve created some original content for private companies and have indexed more from the web. Google Finance information will also be displayed at the top of normal seach results for public companies, in what they call the One Box area.

Om says Google Finance is dissapointing and is little more than a “me too” on Yahoo. But in this case I disagree and am happy to give a nod to Google - Other than the very slow Flash charts, I like it, and I think this will push Yahoo to move its own finance property forward.

More on Google Finance at John Battelle, SEW and Memeorandum.

Google, Google Finance

[via TechCrunch]

NetJaxer: Web-Desktop Integration

NetJaxer: Web-Desktop Integration

NetJaxer is a windows app that integrates the desktop with a number of web apps, like GMail and Writely. You get shortcut icons in the desktop and system tray, and there’s a special NetJaxer browser for interacting with the web apps.

Our program is called NetJaxer http://www.netjaxer.com/ It’s a free and easy way to integrate a users favorite Web 2.0 apps like Gmail, TadaList, Digg, Writely, Kiko, iOutliner, Meebo, financial sites, and other Ajax based web programs right into Windows. They can create desktop, tray, and quick launch icons. These applications can easily be used with our custom browser.

It’s hard to see how NetJaxer is adding a lot of value at this stage (you can achieve similar functionality by dragging website icons to the desktop), but there’s certainly potential in the idea - imagine dragging a document into a GMail icon or having desktop notification that your buddy just logged in to Campfire.

[via Ajaxian]

AOL's New Module Playground

AOL's New Module Playground

AOL has just released a new site called I Am Alpha, which is their version of Yahoo! Widgets or Microsoft Gadgets. Google has modules and all the smaller players have similar widget featuresets - PageFlakes calls them "flakes" and Goowy calls them minis. All of these things are basically little web apps that can be integrated into your desktop or a webpage (e.g. a personalized homepage such as live.com or PageFlakes). Here's how AOL defines its modules:

"A module is a "distinct piece of content or functionality." That's a fancy way of saying it's a very small web page that can be embedded easily in another web page."

Screenshot from the intro video

As SiliconBeat noted, this is "another departure from AOL's infamous "walled garden'' days." Although I would add out that none of these widget or module platforms is yet interoperable. Especially not the big companies, although of the smaller players PageFlakes and Netvibes seem very keen on developing an open API platform.

I am Alpha is focused on the AIM product right now, although I imagine this will extend out to AOL's portal products in due course:

"I Am Alpha is a site for developers and other curious folks to play around with the underlying technology behind a whole new crop of cool AIM products."

I have to say this announcement by AOL looks promising. They're talking of developing a microformat called AOL ModuleT: A Module Transport Microformat Profile. The documentation for the modules is well done too and all in all it's a promising addition to the Web's growing widget ecosystem.

[via Read/WriteWeb]

eJamming - Distributed Jamming

eJamming - Distributed Jamming

eJamming, which launched v.1.0 today, allows musicians located anywhere to get together for jam sessions. Your drummer’s in New York, lead guitar is in India, your bass player is somewhere else, and you’re on keyboard. No problem. eJamming lets you jam anyway. And you can talk to the other musicians via a VOIP feature.

All you need is digital instrument (midi enabled) and an internet connected computer. Download the client (Mac or PC), and either get the old band back together virtually or find a musician on the service. See the demo here.

eJamming has a one week free trial and it’s $20 a month after that. Price plans are here.

The only instrument I ever played was a Recorder in 4th grade..so if anyone with musical skills tries it out, please ping me with your review. I’m particularly interesting in how eJamming handles latency issues. They discuss the issue here and say “eJamming’s patented algorithms delay the sounding of your instrument until you receive music data from your fellow eJammers.” They go on:

Musicians accommodate their playing to other musicians all the time, ever-so-slightly altering their attack in different situations. The players who’ve been testing eJamming — including the most proficient and skeptical we could find — have accommodated very quickly to these instrument-feel delays (surprisingly quickly), and many have found they can even deal with the 50-90mS delays when collaborating from the East Coast of the US to Eastern Europe.

Distributed/edge jamming sessions…how cool is that?

eJamming

[via TechCrunch]

Google Personalized Home Page

Another cool feature from Google.
In MSN, Yahoo, the default homepage is being fixed by the provider.
But Google allow user to personalized their google homepage based on their preference at
www.google.com/ig














To personalize your home page, you can log on with your gmail ID.















On the left pane you will be able to see a list of topics, if you still think it is not enough, simply click on the More Content>> to get this :















One of my favourites is the SUDOKU, the number game :















And you can play around with the Tree Frog-the stupid frog that follow your mouse.

Try it out. Something that will lighten up your office life.

Review of Goowy, a Flash and Ajax desktop suite

Review of Goowy, a Flash and Ajax desktop suite

by Ryan Stewart

(Richard's Note: I'm introducing guest bloggers to Read/WriteWeb, to write about topics that I think will be of interest to R/WW readers - but which I'm not an expert in myself. Ryan Stewart is the first of my guest bloggers, writing on the topic of Flash and 'rich internet apps'. I'll be editing the guest posts to fit in with the R/WW style, but the content and 'voice' behind each post will of course be that of its author.)

In 1996, FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia Flash 1.0 and people all over the world were amazed by its animation capabilities. Everyone started downloading the Flash Player and nearly every site experimented with Flash animation. Unfortunately, the ubiquity of Flash, which is one of the major reasons it is so powerful as a platform, led to a lot of "Skip Intro" buttons and later a way for advertisers to take up the entire screen with annoying Flash ads. For a long time, Flash has had to cope with a bad reputation for degrading the web. However with creativity running wild and a renewed interest in Rich Internet Applications, Flash has grown up and some powerful applications are now being built leveraging the full potential of Flash.

One of the applications that is really taking advantage of this power is Goowy, which started out as an e-mail client but has since expanded into a full fledged virtual desktop suite. Goowy combines the rich interactivity of Flash along with some of the best parts of AJAX to create a great user experience.

Mail and Calendar

The most important part of Goowy is the mail application. For the most part, it's a pretty standard mail client with a couple of cool twists. One is the ability to drag and drop e-mail messages into folders. It makes organization very intuitive and "desktopesque" for the average user. The graphical elements of the mail application (and the entire app for that matter) will make any MacOS user very happy and provide a nice level of interactivity valuable for anyone new to web apps. The other great thing about using Goowy for your e-mail is that you can send e-mail from the address you already have. Unlike Gmail which allows you to set the Reply-To and then shows up as "yourgmail@gmail.com on Behalf of yours@emailadress.com", Goowy will simply send the message with yours@emailaddress.com. Importing contacts is a one click operation and you can import contacts from a .csv file or Gmail, Hotmail, MSN and Yahoo.

Viewing HTML email is one place where the Flash/AJAX interaction provides a big boost. The spell checker, the draft view and the rich text editing are done quickly and nicely with AJAX. The mail tree, auto complete features and all the navigation is pure Flash. The interaction is slick and the result is awesome.

One of the coolest things about Goowy is the calendar application, which not a lot of people have talked about and is 100% Flash. When I was looking at web based e-mail clients, what I wanted was an Outlook replacement, and Goowy was the best one I found - due in large part to the calendar. The current calendar is in beta and hasn't been updated since it was released a few months ago. Currently, it allows you to schedule events in 5 minute intervals (hopefully they'll remove this restriction in the future). It provides an Outlook-like view, with the monthly calendars over on the left and your daily view in the main right pane. The day view is a custom flash control which allows you to view events in a single day, those spanning multiple days and events that overlap times. 

What's also cool is that each individual event is a custom MovieClip that provides right-click menu options, such as canceling the event or editing it in the window. It's a very simple, easy to use interface that people can jump right in and feel comfortable with. The other reason I love Goowy's calendar is that it fully supports the iCalendar protocol. Goowy users can send and receive events from other people who are using email clients that support iCal events. This means that Goowy can receive and send calendar events to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange users. They're also planning to release recurring events, weekly and monthly views - as well as the possibility of calendar sharing in the near future.

Minis

The thing that really distinguishes Goowy from the slew of other AJAX desktop clients are their minis. [Editor's note: minis are little apps that run on your desktop - also known as widgets by Yahoo, modules by Google and gadgets by Microsoft.] At first, I thought the minis were a useless throw in, but after fully embracing Goowy for my e-mail and calendar needs, I've come to use the minis for sorting a lot of my information. You can track your favorite RSS feeds using the newsreader or keep track of YouTube videos and listen to podcasts right from Goowy. Flash allows it to stream multimedia seamlessly within the application. 

Goowy's minis also provide a range of functionality by tapping into external APIs. You can search for Flickr photos, tag things on del.icio.us, follow sports scores, see the weather, watch your stock portfolio, or see the top songs on iTunes. The minis also include functional applications like a personalized To-Do list, a summary of your e-mails and any calendar events you have today.

Goowy Games

Goowy has a built in game library that allows you to play a variety of Flash games from Tetris to Presidential Knockout. If you're getting tired of answering e-mail, you can switch over and game a little bit. Combine this with the fact that Goowy lets you customize your look and feel (right down to the background image) and you've got something that can hook common users and give them some ownership over their web client.

As a Flash proponent, I love showing people Goowy because it uses Flash to perfect the user experience, which is what Flash is really all about. The Flash/AJAX interaction is the perfect example of the two technologies working together to create a better application. Using the Flash Platform allows a smaller company like Goowy to compete with applications like Gmail and 30boxes because a well-written Flash application can deliver a better user experience and it makes the application available to anyone regardless of OS or browser.

IM - a case study of Flash/Ajax integration

The IM feature showcases another example of Flash/AJAX, through the use of AJAX to perform the Jabber communication via an AJAX XMPP API. This feature required using cross-domain Flash/AJAX communication, because the backend is hosted on different servers than those serving the virtual desktop. Flash is responsible for all of the window management - and all of the sending and receiving is done through the XMPP AJAX API.

Goowy is a great application precisely because it makes the best of Flash and the best of AJAX. Flash allows the Goowy team to build an application that performs the same way across platforms. It also gives them the ability to create rich drag-and-drop functionality as well as animation and visual cues that perfect the user experience. AJAX provides the text editing functionality as well as some of the backend server communication. The new features will only make Goowy more prominent in the virtual desktop space, and Flash is what separates them from the crowd.

Summary

Despite all of these great features, Goowy isn't sitting back just waiting for users to sign up. They're aggressively moving into competitors territory in order to create a one stop shop for anything you need. They're in the process of opening up a premium account for users who need more space and some additional features. They've also partnered with Box.net to provide online storage in the near future as well as jumping into the instant messenger space.

Ryan Stewart's blog is Digital Backcountry.

[via Read/WriteWeb]

Writely Confirms Google Acquisition

Writely Confirms Google Acquisition

So much for the rumor, the aquisition of Writely by Google has now been confirmed on both the Writely blog and by Google. Congratulations to the Writely team.

This signals two things: a confirmation of Google’s desire to hit Microsoft hard and attack their largest revenue product, and that they will do this at least partially through acquisition rather than building the office suite entirely in-house. When, if ever, will Microsoft respond with their own online versions of the Office products?

UPDATE: Russell Beattie has a very funny web page congratulating Writely. Check it out.

Writely

 

[via TechCrunch]

Google to buy New Zealand

Google to buy New Zealand

The Register investigates. [via]

Full whiteboard image here

I knew Google was up to something big. It's always the quiet ones you need to watch...

[via Read/WriteWeb]

New Look, Features for Live.com

New Look, Features for Live.com

Live.com rolled out a new toolbar and website feature today, and the site has a somewhat better look and feel. New features include the ability to have multiple pages (a good thing), enhanced search, new themes to choose from and more. Richard MacManus has more details.

Search has also been significantly enhanced. Live.com clearly has the best image search on the web now (both results and UI). Standard web search is also good - note the “infinite” scroll bar on the right. The only problem is that search is massively slow, and Microsoft needs to fix this problem immediately.

Note to Live.com Team: Hey! How many posts do I have to do on Live.com to get TechCrunch into the default technology feed?

Live.com

[via TechCrunch]

Google to Acquire Writely?

Google to Acquire Writely?

Om Malik thinks Silicon Valley based Writely, an online Ajax word processor, and Google may be getting cozy. Unlike me, Om tends to really dig before posting on acquisition rumors, so this one may be for real. I’ve also been hearing endless stories of the imminent acquisiton of Writely - given the difficult business model that Writely will be forced into if they stay independent (premium fees and/or ads), the plethora of eager buyers, and the obvious synergies between Writely and Google Drive, this deal just makes too much sense not to be real. More on Writely here (just scroll down). My favorite Writely feature: save a document to PDF.

Writely

[via TechCrunch]

AJAX Isn’t Just All-Purpose SOAP…

AJAX Isn’t Just All-Purpose SOAP…

Justin Schultz has posted this extensive introduction to Ajax over on his blog.

In this post, my goal is to provide you with a thorough AJAX primer and give you a real-world illustration of its usefulness. Later, I’ll demonstrate the benefits of AJAX using a test case application for a chemical sales company. First, I’ll illustrate the immediate advantages by using an application that I built for a medical insurance company a few years ago that allowed customers to proximity search for medical providers near their homes.

It’s much easier (at least for me) to learn when there’s a goal set ahead of you, so it’s good that he starts with the medical insurance app example. He describes how, by integrating Ajax into the application, he was able to reduce the time that the search would be broken down into smaller, bite-sized requests instead of the large, slow ones previously used.

He notes that Ajax features take some of the load off of the server and push it out to the client, where more and more machines can handle much more than the casual web site can throw at them. He gets into what Ajax is (the technical aspects) and looks at a different test case (with sample app) to illustrate some of the real life stats differences that Ajax-enabling your site can produce. He wraps it up with a confirmation of Ajax’s benefits and some links to external resources for more information.

[via Ajaxian]