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Perpetual Beta

"When devices and programs are connected to the Internet, applications are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services. This has significant impact on the entire software development and delivery process. Therefore, don’t package up new features into monolithic releases, but instead add features on a regular basis as part of the normal user experience. Engage your users to be real-time testers, and structure the service to reveal how people use your product." (Web 2.0 - Principles and Best Practice by John Musser with Tim O’Reilly & the O’Reilly Radar Team)

Facebook is changing the world… again.

By now you’ve probably heard of Facebook Places, the application that allows you to ‘Check In’ to places you’re visiting, alerting all of your Friends where you are (a bit like Foursquare).

Starting yesterday, businesses can also now offer customers special deals when they ‘Check In’ to their place on Facebook (again, a bit like Foursquare but with the functionality to manage the entire process). And it’s known as Facebook Deals. 

At first the “BETA” Facebook Deals started in U.S but now its slowly spreading to other places like Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. It’s coming real soon to Australia too. “Finally in a boon for local businesses Facebook has confirmed the new Facebook Deals service which shows special deals available at local businesses within the users immediate vicinity will become available in Australia in “early 2011″, with the company currently adapting the service for Australia and New Zealand. When it eventually goes live, users will be able to access the service through the Facebook website, or through the company’s iPhone application.”  (2010 ITechReport) Facebook Deals "BETA" have slowly evolved after its long  research on the famous social buying giant "Groupon" and the deals from foursquare too.  Below will be videos to let you know more about Facebook Deals, 

Here’s how it works. Firstly, look for yellow or green tickets when you check in to places in those countries.

Everyone likes getting a good deal, but it's not always easy to find the right one at the moment you could use one. Imagine that while you're looking for a new place to try for lunch, you could see offers from restaurants nearby on your phone. On the other hand, I already love Brother Espresso at Brisbane City, so imagine if I were rewarded for coming back this place every week with my friends.

Starting today, local businesses will be able to offer you with deals when you check in to their place on Facebook. Deals will be rolling out over the next few days and will only be available in the United States at this time.

We launched Places to let you share where you are with your friends and see who's nearby. Now with Deals, you also can see what offers are nearby and share those deals with your friends.

Finding deals near you is easy. On mobile web site or the latest version of Facebook App on iPhone, touch "Places" and then touch "Check In."

Below I will be showing some of the screen shots of how the Facebook Deals work.

These deals come from merchants, not Facebook, so check with your local stores for additional details, such as when they're running, how many of the offers are available, and whether a deal is just for you or also for your friends.

You'll see a few different types of Deals: individual deals for a discount, free merchandise or other reward; friend deals where you and your friends claim an offer together; loyalty deals for being a frequent visitor to a place; and charity deals where businesses pledge to donate to a cause when you check in.

References

Web 2.0 - Principles and Best Practice by John Musser with Tim O’Reilly & the O’Reilly Radar Team: http://oreilly.com/catalog/web2report/chapter/web20_report_excerpt.pdf 

Groupon Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupon 

Foursquare Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foursquare_(social_network)

Facebook App:

http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/facebook/id284882215?mt=8

 Facebook: 10 millions Aussies now registered, Deals coming in “early” 2011:

http://itechreport.com.au/2010/12/10/facebook-10-million-aussies-now-registered-deals-coming-early-2011/

Innovation Is Assembly

"Lightweight business models are a natural concomitant of lightweight programming and lightweight connections. The Web 2.0 mindset is good at re-use. A new service like housingmaps.com was built simply by snapping together two existing services. Housingmaps.com doesn't have a business model (yet)--but for many small-scale services, Google AdSense (or perhaps Amazon associates fees, or both) provides the snap-in equivalent of a revenue model.

These examples provide an insight into another key web 2.0 principle, which we call "innovation in assembly." When commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in novel or effective ways. Much as the PC revolution provided many opportunities for innovation in assembly of commodity hardware, with companies like Dell making a science out of such assembly, thereby defeating companies whose business model required innovation in product development, we believe that Web 2.0 will provide opportunities for companies to beat the competition by getting better at harnessing and integrating services provided by others."  (Tim O'Reilly 2005)

In this post, I would like to share with you about a company on how they uses the web applications with the current well known APIs/Developer Ecosystems.

The company I am sharing with you guys will be, Threadless.  

Company information about Threadless, it is a community-centered online apparel store run by skinnyCorp of Chicago, Illinois, since 2000. Co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart started the company with $1,000 in seed money after entering an Internet t-shirt design contest. Members of the Threadless community submit t-shirt designs online; the designs are then put to a public vote. A small percentage of submitted designs are selected for printing and sold through an online store. Creators of the winning designs receive a prize of cash and store credit. Below will be the screenshot of their web site and a video link about them... 

I have created the company's API diagram, which is showing which are the famous APIs that Threadless are using right now. Its the Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and Flickr. 

Facebook 

They have smartly used the Facebook API as their "JOIN US" Membership, and if there is any updates they will be sending you a message to your Facebook Inbox and they even can advertise on your Facebook account too. Below will be some screen shots of the Facebook API that they are using.  

Threadless also have their very own Facebook Fan page, where their members or Facebook users can have a look at their latest collections, and also allow people to make comments about the design or click "LIKE" if they love it. Members also can share the design with their friends or sharing it just posting it on their Wall. 

They have make full use of the Facebook API and they even have the SHOP App on Facebook, which allow users to purchase Threadless tees on Facebook too. Checkout the screenshot below. Users can make comments about the design and adding it into the cart, by using the API. 

Twitter 

Threadless is also using the microblogging tool, Twitter to spread out informations and links to the world. Users can also ask the questions on expecting a speedily response from them. They also have their blog and forum service available for their members to use. Below will be some screenshots of their twitter site, forum and blog page. 

Vimeo 

Instead of Youtube, Threadless uses Vimeo to share their video. I personally felt that the interface and navigation of Vimeo site is much better compare with Youtube. Threadless have used video as part of their marketing or advertising purpose. Like their more premium apparel line known as SELECT, always uses video to show off their latest collections or what are the latest news of what they are doing right now. Below will be a screenshots of Threadless Vimeo page and SELECT. 

Flickr 

Its an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. Threadless have used this API to share some interesting photo of their work or users/members are allow to tag them too.  Below will be a screenshot of their Flickr site. 

Using the power social technology to market or advertise their product will be the taking over the normal channel like printing it on newspapers or brochures. Now this will overtake it in this current generation.   


References

Web 2.0: Principles and Best Practice: 

http://oreilly.com/catalog/web2report/chapter/web20_report_excerpt.pdf
Youtube video about Threadless business:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VKRbmnqXR4 
ScreenShots and information about Threadless: 
http://www.threadless.com/, http://www.facebook.com/threadless, 
http://twitter.com/threadless#, http://vimeo.com/threadless, http://www.flickr.com/photos/threadless365

Data is the next 'Intel Inside'

Every day, consumers from all over the globe are uploading, transferring and downloading valuable data online. Web 2.0 has become a vastly growing global resource for people to connect with each other and gain instantaneous information. 

The following might be some of the best examples of what everyone in the world who are using the power data in Web 2.0 environment: 

Microsoft’s collaboration software, Sharepoint, which in its early days was a simple document sharing tool, is now chockfull of social networking features, including tools to support blogs, wikis, and a robust interactive community. It’s free version, Windows SharePoint Services, which comes with Windows, you can do BI, reporting, and integration, and it’s an entire application development platform as well. 

Google Docs can easily do all the basics, including making bulleted lists, sorting by columns, adding tables, images, comments, formulas, changing fonts and more. They have successfully creating wonders in the generation of mobile smartphone and tablets industry too, allowing google users to work and collaborate on mobile seamlessly. If you want to work and share docs within the team, now every team members can view and make changes at the same time. There’s an on-screen chat window for spreadsheets, and document revisions show you exactly who changed what, and when. We can also add in more details or comments.

Users love the tool because it consolidates information from many applications, and loves it because it’s a single technology they can use for many purposes.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) keeps growing and growing and growing, experts and analysts say, with many large companies adding SaaS components to on-premise software installations. Salesforce.com, considered the bellwether of the SaaS industry, reported record revenue of $305 million, up 23% from 2008, in its fiscal first quarter ended April 30, 2009. SaaS is winning favor because it’s often 20% cheaper than managing a non-premise application. SaaS is on track to be the dominant model for software by 2012. There are still lots of security issues, but the economics are definitely there. The other sweeping advantage is the flexibility that companies gain by rapidly adding new functionality. The paradigm shift is where you can go acquire a piece of what you need and assemble that into the software that you already own.

The Next Big Thing, Cloud Computing. 

It’s only a matter of time before cloud computing gains its place on center stage. Sure, there are still security and reliability issues, but what aspect of IT doesn’t have that today?

Cloud services, offered by tech giants such as

• Amazon
• Microsoft
• Salesforce

They are making it relatively painless and certainly cheaper for a company to add infrastructure than if they were doing it themselves. They also gain best practices from the cloud provider. If the company decides it doesn’t need that extra infrastructure in six or 12 months, it simply cancels the service. That’s why enterprise customers are now doing cloud computing pilots, whereas a year ago, CIOs were turning up their noses at the concept.

One of the famous service that everyone is using right now is Dropbox. 

Its one the most amazing thing for users, as they can upload whatever files they wanted in the cloud and then retrieving it in almost every mobile devices. Watch the video below understand more about the goodness of Dropbox. 

Next will be the Microblogging. 

Using social networking sites to broadcast news and other information about your company is a pretty darn cheap and widely acceptable way to engage with your community of partners, customers, and prospects. From the IT management side, there’s not much to do and why not educate your executives about the social Web?

“It’s virtually free, except for the labor involved, and you have unprecedented reach into decision makers,” says Jonathan Jaffe, founder of its-your-internet.com, a New York City-based company that advises organizations on technologies for online marketing.

This will change because as more people use Twitter these individuals will get bombarded, but now there’s a lot of accessibility. IT people are also broadcasting technical problems to the social Web and sometimes getting answers within an hour or two from vendors and experts.

Internal social networking using by the companies are best off starting internally when experimenting with social media. For one thing, it’s better to make a mistake inside the company than with customers and influencers. For another, employees increasingly prefer to communicate via social media, and now, enterprise social networking tools incorporate security and other requirements that big companies seek. Leading Web-based applications for internal blogs, micro-blogging, mashups, and wikis include Confluence by Atlassian, Socialtext, and the open-source MediaWiki. Such tools are often available at a fraction of the cost of traditional collaboration products (from companies such as Microsoft and IBM).

In Conclusion, IT pros should stay close to the people who hold the purse when they are looking into new applications and projects, as always.

“From my point of view, having developed Web applications for the past 13 years, a key issue I’ve seen everywhere is the communication gap between the financial controller (FC) of the company and the development team members. So my advice is don’t focus too much on the buzzwords. Get in synch with your FC and look at your projects from a business point of view.” Dan Bridge, a UK-based developer

Reference

Sharepoint information: 

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/default.aspx 
Google Docs screenshots on an iPad and information: 
docs.google.com/
Youtube video of "What is DropBox?": 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFb0NaeRmdg
Cloud Services: 
Amazon: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
Salesforce: http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/
Wikipedia information: 
SaaS : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service
Cloud Computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
Microblogging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging
Dropbox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(service)
Quote by Jonathan Jaffe :
http://www.its-your-internet.com/index.php/about-us/founder-jonathan-jaffe.html

Evolution of Internet

I truly believe that we will start to associate thoughts and wishes with the Internet World. In the near future, I'm sure that technology will evolved into a brand new level to combine human consciousness with digital world. The hard truth will set us free and unleash the human potential and we will be able to reprogram it or customize it to our own perspective. 

From this image below, you can see the history and the evolution of internet.