A lot has been said and written about Web2.0. But, a question always arised to my mind :-
Is web2.0 all about YouTube, profile websites like myspace and orkut and Blog websites .
What are the implications on the hardware and what are the implications of the software ? With the advent of interactive Television sites like joost.com , the traffic on the internet is always going to be jammed like hell ? Consider the bandwidth required by emerging economies like BRIC countries apart from the US/UK/GER/FRA/JPN etc....
Companies have already started aggressively investing into products to meet the demans of the applications involving improvements to Web2.0. Definitely there will be new improved packet based networks and as I expected, Cisco is already working on one of the hardware versions of Web2.0
One of the interesting things which Cisco is working on is a router which does "deep packet inspection of multi-gigabit stateful and stateless application traffic flows." Such "packet inspection " might probably deal with "error correction" software too I guess. But Web2.0 has a LOT of streaming applications and a retransmission is something NOBODY desires. I am too quizzical to comment on this. Honestly, I am not sure where the bottleneck for the IP traffic is ? Is it in the transmission media (like optical fibres or coaxial cables) or is it in the intermediate routers and other gateways ?
The other software application which is making a lot of news is a Microsoft Product called Silverlight. It is very similar to Adobe Flash, the de-facto application (currently) for Youtube. MS strategy looks simple. Take this player and port it to various Platforms like Windows and Mac OS (note : The application is conspicuously missing for Linux - But, why ? ) Also it is available for many browsers like Firefox, IE , Safari, Opera etc. etc.
But what edge does it have over Adobe Flash ? is the question which naturally comes to my mind. According to reports Microsoft claims that content created with Silverlight would be more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash as it is not compiled, but represented as text!!!!!. Sakkath hot maga !!! And on top of that, it is planning to open source some parts of Silverlight.
The future looks good for Web2.0
1 comment:
What is indexable as text is the key here. Silverlight applications will stream multimedia in XAML format or some such, most of which are, at best vector graphics markup languages. So, instead of Pixel information, like in most video format, it will have curve, vector, and other next-level video encoding. But does that help me find out where Alfred Hitchcock made a cameo in Psycho? hardly. Indexing into video is a huge deal, and work of cutting edge research (for example, to insert contextual small video ads during your most favorite program's most boring section).
Silverlight will take a long time to get people to shift from Adobe. And if you look at Google Finance, or sites like http://harrypotter.co.uk/site/index.html, you'll realize that Youtube is but just one Adobe avatar. There is more to this fight.
Tech Crunch's coverage of Silverlight's features is quite cooL.
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