Google Base for your Domain?
Could this also be extended as a "Hosted Ecommerce Platform" for Retailers? I think so. This can so easily be offered, like their "Gmail for ur Domain" service.They've a comprehensive set of elements, to make Online trasactions seamless, with Google Payments complementing the Value Proposition.
Consumers and Retailers alike, would embrace this move by Google into the ecommerce space. But the service needs to be fine tuned and developed further, before it can come out of Beta. This has all the ingredients for a battle of sorts in the Ecommerce space among ebay, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
RSS Feed Reader: A Killer-App in the making
RSS Feed Reader is a great Web 2.0 tool, to be in the know of the things that we read and care about, online. With the growing number of Web sites that one has to visit just to keep-up is just too cumbersome, to say the least. Hence using a Reader to manage is a great way of doing it.
Once we start using it, we can just about subscribe to many Sites which offer XML links to their site. I've been using Google Reader since its launch, and its second incarnation is even better, with Ajaxified-UI, better manage subscriptions, works better than its previous form for me.
There are other desktop based feed readers, but i prefer all my subscriptions go with me, just like my email. So, if you're still thinking about trying out a RSS Reader, now is the time. They've grown from their complex begining and have become much more user friendly.
Open Standards: The Harbinger for Innovation
Open standards, absence of which has stymied Innovation for over a decade, is beginning to gain traction, with Internet coming to the rescue of Innovators.
With Major players viz. Apple, Oracle, SAP which shied away from Standards, are the new poster children.
A case in point, Open Document Format, is an attempt to make it platform agnostic, which will make sharing documents a lot easier for users. Microsoft is not supporting Open Document Format in its upcoming Office 12, fearing losing control on the proprietary .doc format, tantamount to “holding Microsoft users to ransom, would be an understatement. The decision of Massachusetts State to embrace Open Document as the only document standard, is a good beginning.
The overwhelming success of the GSM standard in Mobile Phones, which is a non-proprietary technology, as opposed to CDMA, owned by Qualcomm, only proves the players liking for the Open Standard, GSM.
The Internet standards body, W3C, has set Technology Standards for the Web Viz. HTML, XML, CSS, Scripting etc.. which has led to massive adoption and popularity of Internet, for new generation Applications, with the Web becoming the de facto platform.
On the Web, HTML is the de facto standard. "And XML will do to Data, what HTML has done to the UI", as aptly pointed by Adam Bosworth. With RSS, XForms, XSL will greatly help the New Internet age Applications . HTML stood the test of time, as the standard UI for the Internet. which spawned explosion of Applications in Web 2.0 space.
The pace for Standards, will only increase exponentially, once companies realize the coming revolution of The Internet Era.
