I 100% agree with Read/Write Web’s conclusion: Desktop RSS Readers Are (Nearly) Dead. Since I began to use bloglines, I throw away all of those RSS reader clients and almost never use them any more since after.

Google added offline features to Google Reader through “Google Gears“, I believe more and more online readers with provide similar features soon, and obviously the new Firefox 3 offline support will make this  easier to happen.  That almost take over the desktop RSS reader’s last base, now all your bases are belong to online apps.

That also make me think: “Will Desktop e-mail also dead soon?” When is my last time to use my Outlook?  I almost can’t remember…Since my last installation of my laptop I didn’t install Outlook anymore. For my personal email, I use GMail, for the cooperate email, I use Microsoft Outlook Web Access(though it’s UI is not very nice, it still far better than run a slow, huge program).

The reason why an online email is better than a desktop client is similar to the RSS readers, I think. Esp. for people like me who have more than one computers and many accounts and wish to access my accounts from any where any time, it’s really a headache if some accounts or data just resident on one specific computer or need some specific software to access, the online readers(RSS, Email) wiped always those headache.

So, Will Desktop e-mail also dead soon?

Popularity: 19% [?]

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Papadopoulos said on his blog that future world only need several computers, he listed -Google, eBay, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo, Salesforce.com, and what he called the Great Computer of China. Ofcoz his “computer” is not the traditional computer we talked about, what he said is “hyperscale, pan-global broadband computing services giants”:

I mean “Computer” as in the “The Network is the …”. These Computers will comprise millions of processing, storage and networking elements, globally distributed into critical-mass clusters (likely somewhere around 5,000 nodes each). My point in labeling them a Computer is that there will be some organization, a corporation or government, that will ultimately control the software run on and, important to my argument below, the capitalization and economics of the global system.

IBM’s Thomas J. Watson said in 1945 that ‘The world needs only five computers’. That’s the early years of Computer industry, computer are huge mainframes. From some meaning Thomas’ computer (mainframes) is quite different with Papadopoulos’ (super networked computing grid), but they still have something in common:

* They are huge guys running by your “big brother”, you can just follow the rule “big brother” made and then you get the benifit from using it, or you are out.

* “Big brother” intend to make the rule for anything in his world, if there is unfortunately something missing, sorry it’s your own fault — they just do not exist.

PC is something like revolutionist, they don’t wish to be controlled by “big brothers”, they just don’t like to follow the rule which big brother made for us, they don’t want just in the world that “big brother” created.

The very early stage PCs looks like joke to “big brothers”, but those toys become more and more powerful, and more and more people feel living with their own computer is much better than big brother’s one. PC’s success made Thomas’s “world only ned 5 computer ” wrong.

Today, google seemed like will do anything in their computer. They even created word, excel, powerpoint replacements for us, and looks like all we need is just a browser stuff connect to google, then every thing is fine, and Salesforce.com did whatever a enterprise need in their super computer, too. I guess what Mr. Papadopoulos expected is just even more powerful computers which will a lot more, they will become the true brains of the future world.

It’s not true, future PC will not be the same as today’s PC, I believe future PC will be something like a “virtual computer”, it could exists physically with you but still have a synchronized “shadow” somewhere online, so it can be accessed from anywhere and any devices, but, they are still *YOUR* PC, so you can install anything you like in your “PC” and do whatever you like, there is no “big brother” manage everything for you.

Such future PC will change today’s web services:  Do I need a gmail account? No, it installed in my “PC”, and there are a bunch of different mail applications I can choose from to install.  Do I need a flickr account? No, all of my photos stored in my own “PC” I can determinate whatever I wish to share and I can install a bunch of gallery software in my “PC” to decorate the album’s look&feel.  Do I need a Youtube? No, My videos are in my own “PC” store, share just like those photos.  In the future, we don’t need so many “service” providers, we just back to fundamental, we buy “software/service” and install in our own “PC”.

Ofcoz, such “PC” will not replace everything, there still public places to announce, aggregate, search informations that located in “PC”s,  but they are not just a few, they are many.

Yesterday’s mainframes become today’s super computer grid network, personal computer will also evolve to something in the future too, so eventually future world still need far more than five computers, even all of them are google scales…

Popularity: 19% [?]

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GFW in China is some kind terrible “big brother” which judge the live or death of a web site. Beside some websites who have been executed permently(such as zh.wikipedia.com, etc.), GFW scan the content on the fly and once some content triggered the alarm, the current TCP connection will be reseted, and this site will be blocked from your current IP address for some minutes.

Google is one of sites sufered from GFW so much, google launched a self-censored site in China with the domain name google.cn, however, for most of the people, they already get used to “www.google.com” or they have toolbar installed with google.com, and non-technical people can’t tell from “google.com” to “google.cn”, still most of the traffic will go to Google.com, that is to say, under the monotoring of GFW.

Google developed some hack inside the front page of www.google.com, it’s a small pieces of Javascript, which send some ajax request and if such ajax request is not returned successfully, it will redirect the URL to google.cn with the same query strings. ( I guess only people from China IP will get this piece JS code, but not confirmed)

The JS code is not quite readable, obviously google don’t wish you do so…:) But we can still easy understand what it intend to:

<script>
<!–
window.google={kEI:”7dmIRuzeIJOesAKC0pnIDw”,kEXPI:”17259,17497,17585″,kHL:”en”};function sf(){document.f.q.focus();}
window.rwt=function(b,d,f,j,k,g,l){var a=window.encodeURIComponent?encodeURIComponent:escape,h=”",i=”",c=b.href.split(”#”),e=”";if(d){h=”&oi=”+a(d)}if(f){i=”&cad=”+a(f)}if(g){e=”&usg=”+g}b.href=”/url?sa=t”+h+i+”&ct=”+a(j)+”&cd=”+a(k)+”&url=”+a(c[0]).replace(/\+/g,”%2B”)+”&ei=7dmIRuzeIJOesAKC0pnIDw”+e+l+(c[1]?”#”+c[1]:”");b.onmousedown=”";return true};window.gbar={};(function(){function C(a,d,b){var c=”on”+d;if(a.addEventListener){a.addEventListener(d,b,false)}else if(a.attachEvent){a.attachEvent(c,b)}else{var g=a[c];a[c]=function(){var f=g.apply(this,arguments),h=b.apply(this,arguments);return f==undefined?h:(h==undefined?f:h&&f)}}};var k=window,u=k.location,A=u.search,z=u.protocol,j=document,q=”appendChild”,m=k.gbar,l=”",s,w=”",e,i,n,t=”wivnlmzbjpcoegz0tqfys”;function r(a){return escape(unescape(a.replace(/\+/g,” “))).replace(/\+/g,”%2B”)}function v(a){return i[a].firstChild.tagName==”A”}function o(a){return A.match(”[?&](”+a+”=)([^&#]*)”)}m.init=function(){var a=0,d,b=”affdom,channel,client,hl,hs,ie,lr,ned,oe,og,rls,rlz”.split(”,”),c=o(”as_q”),g=o(”q”),f=j.getElementById(”gbar”),h=k.navExtra;s=o(”near”);if(h){for(var y in h){var p=j.createElement(”div”);p[q](h[y]);p.className=”gb2″;f[q](p)}}i=f.getElementsByTagName(”div”);g&&(l=g[2])&&c&&(l+=”+”);c&&(l+=c[2]);while(v(a++)){}n=t.charAt(a-1);for(a=0;b[a];a++){d=o(b[a]);d&&(w+=”&”+d[1]+r(d[2]))}for(a=0;i[a];a++){v(a)&&B(a)}C(j,”click”,m.close)};function B(a){var d=i[a].firstChild,b=d.href+(d.href.match(”[?]“)?”&”:”?”),c=t.charAt(a);if(c!=”z”){b+=”tab=”+n+c;if(”com”.indexOf(c)>=0){b=b.replace(”http:”,z)}else{b+=w;if(l){b+=”&q=”+r(l);s&&n==”l”&&(b+=”+near%3A+”+r(s[2]))}}}d.href=b}function x(a,d,b){a.display=a.display==”block”?”none”:”block”;a.left=d+”px”;a.top=b+”px”}m.tg=function(a){var d=0,b,c,g,f=0;a=a?a:k.event;a.cancelBubble=true;if(!e){e=j.createElement(Array.every||k.createPopup?”iframe”:”div”);e.frameBorder=”0″;e.id=”gbi”;e.scrolling=”no”;e.src=”#”;j.body[q](e)}for(;n&&i[f];f++){c=i[f];g=c.className;if(g==”gb3″){b=c.offsetLeft;while(c=c.offsetParent){b+=c.offsetLeft}x(e.style,b,24)}else if(g==”gb2″){c.id==”gbar”+n&&(c.style.padding=”.2em .5em”);x(c.style,b+1,25+d);d+=20}}e.style.height=d+”px”};m.close=function(a){e&&e.style.display==”block”&&m.tg(a)};})();// –>
</script>

Does this work well?  Unfortunately not, and in most cases it does not work well.   Why, because the GFW ’s response is not as fast as expected.  In most cases, if the query result contain something GFW think “bad”, it will not able to stop you on first page, that is to say, the first result page will show correctly, but you will not able to go through the next pages.  Google’s Javascript make a call to check first, but that call may return correctly and then google get blocked, user will still get a error page and not able to access Google in the next several minutes.

Popularity: 15% [?]

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Pls. forgive this shameless self promotion.  I did have some small contribution on this coolest search engine frontend.  I can say in today’s search engine market, this frontend is still the most advanced.  Here is an Introducing Ask3D - A Truly New Way to Search.

You can get more details from Ask.com’s blog.

Our New Home Page: There’s No Place Like It

The power behind the panels

Yes, I should admit that the search result is not as good as it looks like, but I believe the backend guys are working hard to improve it. Image that, if such a cool frontend plus a similar strong bankend search engine, this should absolutly take some more pie in the search market.

Popularity: 16% [?]

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Powerset, a legend “google killer”, everybody are expecting something fresh from them to make us suprise, including myself.

But I just felt something don’t right… I don’t know what it is and why I feel so, maybe just 6th sense? I write this blog as a record of what I think right now, and maybe in the future I will have chance to know what makes me think stupidand will be helpful to let me learn how to look forward something I may never imaged before.

Here is what I heard about Powerset (or rather say what I think they are after I read those buzz and subcribe to their Powerlab as a “Powerlabber”, maybe some mistakes):

1. They rasied a bunch of $$$ before the release anything to public;

2. Their website is as empty as google in the early years, except google can provide search they don’t;

3. They use Amazon’s EC2 and S3, so they don’t have to host a lot of servers and rent IDC racks;

4. They use Ruby on Rails to develop front end, they will have great guy to make Rails as fast as XXX; so they don’t worry about scaling;

5. Since I join Powerlab, I received nothing really interesting… The actual lab till now is still just a mail list, all I get was a private unaccessable Youetube video link, and finally when I can view it, it just tell me almost nothing except one well know screen shot.

So I just feel something is not right… but have no idea what’s not right and why I feel not right. Let’s just wait and see what Powerset guy will bring us and how to make us surprise.

Popularity: 18% [?]

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