Is there no end to web 2.0 applications?

Tuesdsay

We have been fortunate to get an extra hours teaching from Chris this week the subject of which was the Romanian styled oXygen engine. Our tasks was to use existing XML files and use the software generate html output. Of course we are only scratching the surface but it look like there's a lot out there for XML.


Friday

We listed to Chris talking about a pro gramme called LinkedIn. A business roladex type interface - more professional that FaceBook! It links (in his case) lots of professional contacts. We recognized that 150 is the optimum number of contacts and that split between the following categories:

• Professionals
• Friends
• Hobbies
• Neighbours
• Family
• Hobbies

That would give a distribution of 30 per group and through these contacts there are furthur contacts by association. See the rule of six degrees.


There are so many social networking sites out there. I looked at another called orcut It

is an online community that can help you maintain relationships with pictures and messages, and establish new ones. Orkut helps find people who share hobbies and interests, look for romantic connections or establish new business contacts. You can also create and join a wide variety of online communities to discuss current events, reconnect with old school mates or even exchange your favorite recipes. It also has a feature called scrapping which is a form of offline communication. Anyone can visit anyone else's profile (unlike Facebook)

History of Orkut

Orkut Büyükkökten a Turkish software engineer started the site as a google employee in Jan 2004. in Oct 2006 there were 37 million accounts and in August claimed 67m users

Why use orkut?

Because it is affiliated to google (is that a reason to use it?) - its free. It organises contact into "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" where you can rate these contacts as "Best Friends", "Good Friends", "Friends", "Acquaintances" and "Haven't met"

It is a busy site and has a steady 3 million hits per day as compared with Linkedin which has 400,000. Its target market was US but majority users in Brazil in Nov2007 63% Brazil and 20% India. Statistics can be found on a great site called Alexa

How time flies!

It has been nearly two weeks since I updated my blog and for this I feel ashamed...I have resolved to spend 1 hour minimum per week doing this and preferably as soon after the session as possible.

So, enough of the excuses and on with the task. My last post was 28th, two days after my presentation on social bookmarks. Fortunately my work on these has been progressing and here is the link to the wiki Of course, this is a secure page so you may not be able to reach it.

Last weeks lesson was on location mapping and using XQuery and String Analysis using regular expressions.

Unfortunately I have been interrupted by the facebook fraternity and embarrassed by an old video. Check it out if you want to have a laugh at me as a youth

Back to business then. Our mighty leader, Chris Wallace seems to have a brain the size of the planet and when questioned on how long his involvement with networking has been answers 1970. That's the year before I was born.

It seems pointless my describing in detail the technicalities of the course and much more beneficial to provide a narrative with solid links.