While in some ways 2008 has been an exciting and historic year, in other ways it has been a year that many people would like to forget, especially those who have seen their businesses, job prospects and retirement savings shrink or disappear altogether.
But when it comes to emerging technologies, 2008 wasn't just a good year, it was a very good year. The past year saw the rise of many new exciting products and technologies and also saw renewed growth in some areas that had become stale.
Best of all, these technologies of 2008 aren't just limited to this year. Many of them are the building blocks that will be used to create and grow the technologies that will be important in 2009.
Click here to see screenshots While many site providers have been intrigued by the idea of adding social networking capabilities, for the most part efforts in this area have been unsuccessful. This is mainly due to the fact that the last thing most people want to do is join yet another social network, especially one that is tied to a specific Web site.
But this week may see a big change in the ability of Web sites to add social networking capabilities. Both Google and Facebook released services that make it possible for Web sites to easily add social networking features that don't require visitors to join a brand-new social network.
For the last couple of days I've had the chance to test out the beta of Google Friend Connect. Google Friend Connect lets any Web site operator easily add functionality to a site that lets visitors join the site, see other users of the site, and participate in social networking activities such as commenting on and rating content.
There are plenty of products out there that make it possible to create narrated walk-throughs of content, but most of these tend to be either static PowerPoint-style slide shows or video-based walk-throughs. What if instead of static images and files, you wanted to walk people through live Web pages, or even a mix of live Web pages and static content such as images and media?
That's the purpose of FlowGram's Flowgrams. Available at flowgram.com, Flowgram is a free beta Web service that lets users combine live Web pages and other content and create a shareable narrated walk-through.
Flowgrams are based on Adobe Flash technology, but users don't need any familiarity with Flash. Basically anyone who has created a narrated presentation or photo slide show can create a Flowgram.
Click here to see screenshots You're a social networking junkie. You can't stand to not know what the status of your friends is, what photos and videos are being uploaded, who is blogging about what, and what your friends are tweeting about right now.
Being this type of person means that you often have to have multiple browser windows and tabs open at all time, or that you are running several special purpose applications and plugins for the social networking sites that you rely on. Or you could just use the free Flock web browser.
Flock, which has been around for a few years now, is essentially a heavily customized implementation of Firefox. And almost all of this customization is geared towards making it simple to view, interact with and directly create content on Web 2.0 and social networking sites. In Flock, social networks like Facebook, video sites such as YouTube and multiple blogging platforms are all integrated into the browser.
At MIT's Emerging Technology conference, I had the opportunity to speak to Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director for Google Enterprise.
Chief among the new enterprise capabilities we spoke about were the new video features for business that have been added to Google Apps. We also spoke about the potential effect of Android phones on Google enterprise offerings.
Click here to watch the video Among emerging technologies for the enterprise, few have received as much attention and hype as Unified Communications. Unified communications offers the promise of bringing all of a company's communications under control and making it possible to integrate these communications with enterprise applications.
But UC hasn't been growing as quickly as many have predicted. That's because, like most emerging technologies, it faces many hurdles that slow its adoption.
In this video, eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst, Jim Rapoza looks at some of the biggest problems facing Unified Communications. Click here to see the video on overcoming the hurdles for UC.
One of the biggest negative side effects of the Web 2.0 boom has been data overload. From the many feeds, messages, comments and status updates that we receive from the multiple services and blogs that we all follow, users can quickly get overwhelmed by the amount of messages and data.
Sure, there have been tools and solutions to try and control some of these things. But just when you think you have one under control, say the feeds from the blogs you read, another new service such as Twitter or a social network comes along and you are once again faced with lots of data from lots of different sources.
Of course, the main way that most people find these data sources is in their web browser. So it might make sense to try to manage all of these messages and conversations from directly within the browser.
That's the idea behind Snowl, a new prototype project from Mozilla Labs. Snowl is a Firefox extension that is designed specifically to centralize management, browsing and searching of all of the online conversations that a user has, from blog comments, to Twitter tweets to social networking pokes to email and IM.
Click here to watch the video Two of the most hyped emerging technologies of the last couple of years are Unified Communications and Web 2.0. But besides getting lots of hype, what do these two technologies have in common?
Quite a bit it turns out. After all, both are all about improving collaboration and communication. And both take advantage of new and old technologies in unique and innovative ways.
In this eWEEK video interview, Ashley Daley talks to eWEEK's Chief Technology Analyst Jim Repoza about how Unified Communications and Web 2.0 technologies can work together.
Traditional thinking tends to always favor in-person meetings and training over virtual Web-based replacements. Most people would say that while Web-based meetings and conferences have their place, especially when travel is difficult or too expensive, in most areas they fall behind a face-to-face meeting.
But anyone who has used Web-based conferencing extensively knows that there are certain advantages over real-world meetings and conferences that extend beyond the travel savings. And one of the biggest is the ability to instantly quiz and poll meeting and conference attendees to track their knowledge and grasp of the information being presented. This kind of real-time feedback can be invaluable when it comes to customizing and even changing presentations on the fly.
And it is also much harder to gather in person. In small meetings you can ask for a show of hands, but this doesn't work with complex questions and there's the reality that people will change their vote to match the rest of the group rather than be the only person without a hand up. And when it comes to auditorium-sized conferences and training, shows of hands are pretty much useless.
If you're lucky enough to work in a modern university environment, or have a business with advanced and dedicated training facilities, you may have access to audience response systems built into seats and desks. But these are very expensive to deploy and can't be taken to any conference room or meeting environment.
Click here to watch the video Unified communications has become a very hot topic for enterprise IT operations. The ability to combine and easily manage all forms of voice and digital communications within a company clearly offers huge cost and time savings benefits.
The importance of this field can be seen by the number of major vendors jumping into the Unified Communications arena.
But unified communications has been slow to take off. In this eWEEK video interview, Ashley Daley talks to eWEEK's Chief Technology Analyst Jim Repoza about the future of Unified Communications.
