As german news magazine DER SPIEGEL reports in it’s online channel, two german public prosecution service offices have declined thousands of complaints of an offense by the music- and movie industry against users of file sharing services over the last months.

This would mark a 180 degree change of direction in the public policy against file sharers in Germany. Just two years ago the direction seemed completetly different, as BBC reported on 23rd of May 2006 (screenshot of their story):

A spokesperson of the Public Prosecution Service in Wuppertal said according to SPIEGEL online, that the expedition of proceedings against private file sharers would cost too much human ressources and too much of the tax payer’s money. Since the music industry just tries to get the personal data of filesharers out of such proceedings to sue afterwards individuals for “compensation of loss suffered” and not for the criminal offense itself, public prosecution is just beeing utilized.

Further the spokesperson is cited with the interesting remark, that an expedition of proceeding against private file sharers is “disproportional” since those individuals have no financial interest. Of course, if there are references to “unconventional high data transferred” and/or of “financial interest involved” in the distribution of copyrighted material, a proceeding would be expedited.

It will be interesting to see the developments in the future and how this new policy will or will not remain.

Here is the original german article from SPIEGEL online.

While the last weeks where really busy for me, I stumbled yesterday in the late evening merely by accident over a cool new site that describes itself as: “Photojournalism & Storytelling, Create a media wall of photos, video, text & music.” The site is called VUVOX.com.

Although the service is for now in private Beta (and I unfortunately have no access to the Beta for now) I was really impressed by the concept and the description of the user interface they give on their site. The concept is quite easy: they give the user the ability to create a multi-media photowall by stitching together photographs, adding hotspots that link to texts, music files, video or anything else. The output is rendered as a flash movie. While you could do this in the past already if you where Flash savvy, the main point of the service seems to be a set of tools given to the average user. So creativity is not restricted by the lack of technical expertise. They describe their features on the site as follows:

“Features include:

• Dynamic media positioning and assembly tools
• Image Cut-out and Masking tools
• Layer positioning and Compositing
• Interactive ‘Hot-spots’, providing links to media,
  text or other websites
• Ability to add rich media details”

All sounds very intuitive and the samples on the site look promising as well.

This service will change definitely what photoblogging will be in the future. I can’t wait to get my hands on a working version of COLLAGE!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: web2.0, photography, rich media, vuvox.com, photoblog, photoblogging, phlog

As read some minutes ago in this (german) post from the respected newschannel zdnet.de, the governmental authorities of France attack eBay heavily: they are demanding to forbid eBay to offer their services in France! The reason they give for this is, that eBay is just “hiding” as a intermediary between seller and buyer to cut their own responsibilities all commercial websites have in European Union by law. Ebay is in this way not protecting the customer enough and is breaking therefore a european law from 2000 reglementing online and offline auctions.

Ebay is (of course) rejecting all these complaints. A final decision in this case is not expected earlier than in 2 to 3 months. We’ll see then, how this will affect other’s european governments decisions. Maybe eBay in Europe will have a bad 2008!

Update 5. 12. 2007

Unfortunately my french isn’t as good as it had to be to fully translate the article above for you. But the main issue is clear: France is increasing the pressure on eBay. During the last months some luxury labels like Hermès, LVMH and Rolex fought heavily in court against eBay in several european countries. They blame eBay to be the main source of faked products of their brands, that come in masses mainly from China into european markets. The last victory they won was some weeks ago in Germany, where ROLEX finally won against eBay. The highest german court sentenced eBay to do everything technically possible to block offers with products that are either fake or violate a brand in any other manner. In parallel it was reported that sales on eBay went down by 16% in Germany over the year 2006 with an even more downward trend of loss in marketshare of eBay in Germany for 2007. May be the reason is somehow related to the wide presence of faked or falsified brand products on eBay.de and consequently a loss of customer trust in eBay offerings.

So that now France is spearheading the battle to finally wipe off eBay from the whole EU makes nobody wonder. France is known for the worldwide operating luxury companies like LVMH (e.g. Louis Vuitton), Chanel or Hermès - all heavily affected by eBay “uneffective” battle against brand piracy. The news from yesterday will shake eBay very seriously: in all cases ever fought the High European Court decided in the way now argued by France government against those companies who tried to maneuver around european law like eBay tries now. And -as european law is harmonized all over the EU- this would finally mean, that not only France but whole European Union is affected.

eBay has either to change it’s business model heavily (e.g. offering themselves(!) 2 years of warranty on every - even a used- products sold on eBay) or shut down their services completetly in europe.

This, again, would create some nice new business opportunities for other eCommerce sites in 2008.

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As the new year 2008 is approaching fast, it’s time to throw some predictions for the things to come in the ring and expose me to your criticism! So here is my personal list of

Top 10 Trends that will change how you interact with the internet in 2008

1. Widgets

Everybody seems to try to capture some space on your desktop nowadays. Obviously “simple” webapplications within a browser are not enough anymore - content providers all over the place will try to convince you to download a small program (like a desktop application or a screensaver) that connects to the internet via a webservice and gives your daily life more or less additional value. A main driver of this development will be Adobe’s AIR (currently in Beta 2), a example of this is the SPUTNIK widget (a now highly on-air-promoted desktop app from a big german radio station) which plays back several program live-streams and offers interaction of the audience (chat etc.)

2. Surfing the API’s

The web was once a place, where a browser displayed some HTML that was delivered from a server. So the user could see a nice layout, later with also multimedia. Then came the age of the webapplication, which led to the fact, that a server now had to open it’s inner structure somehow to the public. This is often done as and called an API. Consequently, this means you don’t need a browser to use a servers functionality anymore and for the web 2.0 this means, you can mix different API’s to get something new (like taking Google Map from their API and mixing with real estate data from a specialized server’s other API). 2008 will bring even more and even more sophisticated versions of this phenomenon.

3. Commerce 2.0

The decay of eBay’s marketshare shows, that they -even if they were once on the forefront of “user generated eCommerce”- didn’t managed to satisfy the changing demands of buyers and sellers any longer (or maybe they just in manners of pure greed didn’t fought brand privacy enough and simply thought that customer service is not wanted by anyone anymore…). So others like etsy.com or dawanda.de could develop by flying under the radar of Sauron’s eye. In times of cheap mass production in China (even for the expensive brands or at least just looking like those brands) and a weekly scandal about toxic toys there seems to be a new demand for customized and manufactured products, that are sold on a personal (”social networked”) basis. Did anybody remember Marshall McLuhan pointing out, that the new electronic media will create a “global village”? So eCommerce will raise in 2008 to new dimension and will do so by focusing on a direct(er) relation of buyer and manufacturer. Interestingly enough even Gucci (some years ago exclusively selling their goods over a network of highly luxurious stores) now offers direct sale on their website.

4. Blogvertizing 2.0

The last months featured the more or less grotesque battle of Google penalizing bloggers writing payed posts by taking their Page Rank away. Besides the fact that I’m not convinced about payed blogging (this blog is also as you see ad-free) I’m also not convinced about just taking someones Page Rank away like our beloved friends from big G did. We as the people don’t exactly know how Google rank their search results that they display to us, but we surely know that they for themselfes put their very own financial interest above the human right of correct information (here you can read their lame attempt to explain their greed). Was there once a company founded under the principle: You can make money without doing evil?
Writing this and taking into account the amount of money now spent for online advertising, it will be the year 2008 where we will see new and better ways of “Advertorials” unlike PayPerPost or Trigami in Germany today (I dont link to this “bad neighborhood” I’m afraid of Google banning me LOL).
Those existing programs seem to be quite ineffective in term for effort/payment for the Blogger - besides the unimportant fact, that Google takes away your PageRank if you dare to blog for those others who also want to make some money (which seems only being allowed to Google). So PayPerPost is trying to start now their own ranking system - but thats just another ranking system and will sooner or later be also just a tool for holding down the competition like Page Rank now seems to be.

5. User Created Content attracts Classic Media investing more into Web 2.0 technologies

Ok, this is just a little biased for Germany, as it is the country I live in and where I can talk best about the developments. Television and Radio in Germany is partly private and partly regulated by public law. The latter stations (both TV and radio) have taken great efforts to establish their offerings in the web 2.0. There are video- and audiostreams of their program, podcasts and archives, which are accesible without additional payment and even great efforts towards building own community platforms. The youth-orientated Radio Sputnik (owned by germany greatest broadcaster ARD) has created a mySpace clone called mySputnik.de. This community is highly “pushed” in their radio shows. Even Bands, who upload their music or videos are played in their radio shows now. It seems to me, like the great broadcasters are not longer just looking for distribution - they also want to be the content owners. This principle is the same, that made youtube interesting for Google or any other community /e.g. Facebook) for sale today.

6. Socialiced Gaming

You heard the hype many times: the web is going to be 3D and Secondlife is the future of gaming :O
That is not the point here. The most successful games today are (besides some others) so called Massive Multiplayer Online Games. The typical subject in this games over the last years were 1. slashing some monsters in a fantasy world, followed by the total different theme of 2. slashing some aliens on a distant planet and (again, what a revolutionary concept) 3. slashing some evil creatures taken from a movie license. This was even boring for the greatest afficinado of those games, so recent titles like Tabula Rasa (which was again advertized as revolutionary) failed to excite the masses or even more failed to find a new audience (e.g. female or senior players). Although development cycles of such titles are long and expensive, I expect 2008 some games to be announced, that incorporate the social web into their innermost gameplay. Imagine playing something like The SIM’s with direct, integrated access to your actual facebook account or selling some in game harvested oak directly via the integrated etsy.com account in your new favourite RolePlayingGame.

7. Social Mashups

Open Social (again some kind of API) opens the door for some applications that take user data from one source and use it elsewhere (e.g. in a game). The interesting thing for 2008 will be, if greater players than the ones that already supporting this new approach will jumping on. But this also opens some startup companies interesting possibilities in gaining marketshare quickly.

8. Search 2.0

Besides the classical search for a keyword, like you are used to search now on Google, yahoo or web.de, 2008 will bring you another interesting possibility. Imagine you want to know “Is Jennifer Lopez single?” and you write this question into old fellowed Frankenstein GoogleBot it will (as he is programmed to find keywords) list you perhaps Jennifer Lopez Fansites and of course some AdSense Ads for buying her new Single. But this is quite Frankenstein‘esque - at least we live in a new millenium, where computers should have some intelligency. If you have an actual question a search engine is not the way to go (perhaps you know that and would have looked into wikipedia…). But let’s stay with our search engine of 2008. Take a look at True Knowledge and you see what the future will be. Asking there the same question would result in a “No” followed by the name of her groom and the date Jennifer Lopez married him. Ok, we all like Wikipedia and could use it instead of doing a phrase search. But it was just an example. Imagine a question like “When does Lie Hard 4.1 premiere in Tallahassee?” where you need connecting a film title, a location and the local cinema schedules of a special date together you get the point: a search engine of 2008 does more than just looking for keywords.

9. Mobile and Embedded Websurfing

The internet is already mobile and daily there are more devices are capable of connecting to the internet. The only drawback is limited screenspace and limited memory of the divice - but this will sooner or later be solved by better and cheaper technology. The great feature of the mobile web is it’s ubiquity. Combined with the features of web 2.0 as being two-way communication the mobile web is a new addition to the lifestyle of many people in 2008. We’ll see more moblogs (mobile blogs) and more uses of applications like twitter.com. Not just to forget a small project like Android….

10. The META-Mashup

This will be any mixture out of the nine trends above: a tourist’s mobile application for sight seeing connecting Search 2.0 with UMTS localization and a Mapservice API (explaining you the interesting things you see around you) or a social gaming widget, that alerts you when interesting things happen in your favorite game while your doing work on your desktop computer.
Maybe you have other ideas that should be included in this Top 10 list. Please let me know and leave a comment!

Blogged with Flock

The browser, that we use today on our desktop computers root back to the early 1990’s, when web was versioning perhaps web 0.5. Today in a world of web 2.0 with webservices and other trends of disaggregation of the classical website plus the social elements and multiplied by more and more users connecting via small screen mobile devices to the internet, things will change. Web 2.0 and the mobile web will need a new browsing metaphor. The race has already begun, browser war 2.0 seems to be the next big thing.

Those days I often think back to the early 1990’s, when the internet just began. I remember the moment when I installed a hot new program called Mosaic on my Mac, connected then via a modem to an also hot new local internet-provider and began surfing the internet. Instead of the textbased, shell-like commandline interfaces of the BBS’s I was used to or the directory-like Gopher / FTP clients, suddenly there was a page layouted similar to a magazine, with images and text side by side! As trivial that may sound today, in the early 1990’s this was amazing.

It looked “spectacular” as this:

WIRED Magazine wrote in October 1994: “When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing. If this sounds wrong, consider Mosaic. Mosaic is the celebrated graphical “browser” that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic’s charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext “links” to other documents. By following the links - click, and the linked document appears - you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.”

Today I consider Mosaic as the piece of software, that defined for me, what “the Internet” is. And obviously not just for me: Mosaic defined, what every browser afterwards (Netscape, Internet Explorer or Firefox and Opera) had at least to do. In fact, Mosaic startet it all by defining the Point-and-Click interface metaphor for website navigation and the integration of text, links, images and multimedia elements on a single page.

And that’s why over the last years when web 2.0 was evolving I personally found it more and more uncomfortable, to do everything I as the user has to do in a web 2.0 universe, where everything seems to be disaggregated into RSS or website API’s. Also it turned out, that it is also more and more uncomfortable to manage the shifted paradigm of not just surfing and reading the web, but also quickly responding and adding content by one self. Things went even worse after I got a mobile phone, which could connect to the internet. Although the browser (Opera Mini) on the device did a good job in squeezing page layouts to the tiny phone screen it is still really complicated to upload a picture I’ve taken with the camera of the phone to my Flickr account.

I realized, that if the use of the web changes, the software to use the web has also to change. Then, some days ago I discovered Flock. And I felt like 1992 again! This browser is practically an evolution of everything there is now - and in a sense of web 2.0 it will do what Mosaic did 1992. It integrates all the webservices and API’s in your browsing experience in a centralized and usable manner.

For instance, sharing a photo from your Flickr photostream with a friend from Facebook is like this (drag and drop):

This is also needed for mobile browsing of the internet. Todays browsers like Opera Mini or NetFront do all a great job in trying to mimic the look and feel of the big screen on your tiny loRes device. You see examples below (ThunderHawk Mobile web browser on the left, NetFront on the right):

But what if screens get bigger and sharper, like the iPhone? because you’re nearer to the screen, resolution and look-and-feel are almost comparable to a desktop computer. And the next years will surely bring mobile surfing very close to desktop surfing by means of screen-resolution.

If you have used Flock on a Desktop you also want it on a Mobile. The integration of webservices and the possibility to interact with the web 2.0 are quite unparalleled. Since Flock is based on Gecko (Firefox) I’m looking forward to Firefox Mobile, which seems to be under the way. Also Google’s Android should heavily incorporate webservices and web 2.0 features. The next months will be exciting - and I think we all will tell in 15 years about the great changes that we witnessed those days on how we used the internet.

PS: This is my first post done with Flock! It works really great.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock, Opera Mini, Firefox, web 2.0, mobile internet, mobile, web, interface metaphor, interface

When I was writing in June about Marshall McLuhan and Google and why bigG will fail someday I recieved mostly negative feedback from people who said, that this will not happening, because there is no alternative or everything is fine etc. Now you sceptical folks ou there , look at this: True Knowledge released their beta of a search engine, that could be the first considered as acceptable for the age of web 2.0. Finally, it is always astonishing how Marshall McLuhans theories prove right after so many years - even in the prediction of something like Google has to fail!

The launch of Apple’s iPhone today seems to be quite successful - or maybe T-Mobile (which is the exclusive carrier partner for the iPhone in Germany) wasn’t quite good prepared. Many new iPhone owners here in Germany report that they are not able to connect to the internet. A quick call to T-Mobile’s support hotline revealed the secret behind this issue: the german EDGE Network, which is used by the iPhone instead of the more popular UMTS, simply broke down nationwide - one may suppose this was happening by overload.

So I for myself now wait what will be happening in the next hours to finally check out my new iPhone for it’s online features. Meanwhile I’m posting this with my older K800i, which connects fine via Vodafone and UMTS to the internet…

Update at 15.00 (3 pm): Finally my new iPhone connects to the Internet - obviously EDGE Network is up and (a little slowly) running again!

Second Update at 20.45 (8.45 pm): The network speed slows down again (compared to my K800i with Vodafone/UMTS), maybe all the new iPhone owners are trying out now their gadget in the evening hours. One interesting error message appears when I try to use the youtube service: my iPhone is telling me, that it needs an EDGE connection to show video streams. This looks like EDGE is still down - maybe T-Mobile is using GPRS Data Services in the moment to backup the lack of EDGE? This could explain the sloooooowwwww speeeeeeeeeeeedddddddddddd …..

Surfing a little around I found another interesting post about server problems with T-Mobiles website this morning. What is going on there? Are they selling so much iPhones? Or were they simply not professionally prepared?

During the last two weeks different absolutely non-webdesign-related things led me to a surprisingly clean, but also quite disturbing explanation, why google.com as we know it will fail over a not-now known competitor in the near future. Sounds like the old song, sung by so many people around those days? Wait, my explanation is representing not only my -in a greater context more or less unimportant- personal opinion. This finding roots down to the philosophical sciences - it is based on theories of Marshall McLuhan. Oh, an even older song you say? But wait - some truth may be true for longer than the dot.com era …

In my daily work this now popular SEO (Search Engine Optimization) thing is not my main business, but somehow I have to deal with it nevertheless. I just take it for a fact, that you have nowadays to use some tricks to properly “feed the bot”, like a popular site on SEO techniques call this and also it’s site. For me as a designer this is more or less annoying, since the creative choices are limited by using e.g. <H1> tags with css and machine friendly headline wording instead of something, that would be considered as creative by a human being. Unfortunately the google bot is either creative nor has any sense of humor - it just reads words as keywords letter by letter (we need this finding later for our McLuhan analysis!) and uses a more or less sophisticated internal algorithm trying to make sense out of the whole page and it’s context within a site. By this it’s developers hope to get a clue what this page is about and if its a good site (one that wants to inform or entertain its visitor) or if it’s a bad site (one that wants to e.g. click fraud high paying Google Adwords Ads - a main threat to the Google business model). So the designer and the writer of a website these days have to be creative for the bot - not really for their audience. But as business is business, I learned to live with that.

On the other hand I discovered strange things on my personal searches on big G - especially since google (aka big G) and eBay announced a strategic partnership. As a collector of vintage audio equipment I search from time to time the web for manuals of vintage devices. Sometimes you find scanned copies, often you find nothing. But during the last weeks I encountered a massive presence of eBay auctions on big G - often three to five pages of the first search listings from google were either from eBay or from some scraper sites that just tried to drive traffic to them, maybe to clickfraud or something like that. So someone may argue, that this is right - I searched for a manual and google showed me that they are (or mostly were long ago) on sale on eBay. This is partly true - but I know eBay and if I want them there, I look there. I’m really annoyed, that google wants to tell me, that nearly the only source for this kind of stuff is eBay (in fact, it isn’t!). One link would be enough, the rest could be easily filtered out to make space for real URLs. So the truth behind that may be, that as a part of a strategic partnership with eBay, google has loosened the filter rules for ebay URLs and by this also for the scraper sites, which just scrape the links from there. But we all can only guess.

This fact reminds me to some long gone communist system, where the leader maximus is constantly telling the people, that he knows best, whats good for the people and what not. Artists and writers in this system learned by the way also, that they will only survive, if they are creative within the limits set by the system. Otherwise they will get “banned” lifelong to some remote place… Wait! Banned, lifelong? What will happen, if google finds someone, that don’t follow their (AdSense) rules? He will get banned, lifelong! This begins to sound very scary. Is Google perhaps the last stronghold of a communist dictator?

Ok, I was just kidding. This was meant to illustrate problem number one google has: No one knows, how (or if) the search is exactly performed and how the listings and site measurements are calculated. I believe they just try to do their best to deliver search results. For that reason they spider the web with a brute PC force and try to make sense out of what their bots are finding. They try even to correct mistyped words, but still a machine can’t divide between misunderstanding, misconcenception or even irony and humor. It’s hard for google, but they managed it a long way since they have massive amounts of money and a huge and smart human ressource. Saying that I have to regret that all of this is not enough - they will in the not so near future disappear. According to Marshall McLuhan, google’s faith is already closed since 1903 and the end of the cartesian coordinate system. A simple explanation is, that the whole principle of the search engine google is old (in webterms) and may have reached it’s end of lifecycle. Google tries to obfuscate this, but one fact shows, that the whole algorithm is crap.

Try a search on “click here” on big G. You will see the Adobe Acobat Reader download page on top of your listing. If you examine this page you don’t find “click here” on the page at all, so google gives you a site that has nothing to do with what you are searching for. To say it honest - this is unacceptable, as I said: crap. The only reason why this page is listed on #1 is because of the web 0.5 approach of the google bot, who finds a page offering .pdf documents with the text: To download Acrobat Reader, click here! Google Bot interprets this link text as the most important keyword for the website, which the link goes to. This is heavily exploited by the SEO community and that makes it even worse. This example is an extreme, but it shows you, that the popularity of big G has nothing to do with perfect searches, it is marketing and more than that a careless webuser community, that mainly just want to have some search listing and don’t ask detailed question how this listing really relates to their context.

Now it is time to connect this whole topic to Marshall McLuhan. Early in the 1990s I bought his book “The Gutenberg Galaxy” because of the overall hype WIRED magazine those days created about their patron saint as they called him in their imprint. I found it interesting, but could really not follow all his thesis’ about the end of the alphabetical society with the dawn of electronic media. But some days ago the book again fell from the shelf into my hands and I began reading. Of course MacLuhan is writing about television as electronic media, but is the web not already developing towards an audio-visual experience? And McLuhan is exactly describing the problems, big G has. Not only as something you can fix by a software update - it is a mistake from the ground up.

Electronic media cannot be measured or examined or searched by examining just letters, words or other patterns. Electronic media needs to be treated like a spoken story. Electronic media connects directly with the human consciousness. That’s why any bot like the one from big G will fail! He has no consciousness and therefore can only try to understand the logic, if at least this is possible. Imagine a poem which is a lyrical Jackson Pollock painting. For a human it may be something inspiring, moving or something he relates feeelings with. For googlebot it will be just some dripping with no meaning - except perhaps “keyword spam”.

Maybe google is working on it - buying youtube implies this to me, as youtube has this completely new feature of a video-comment, which is absolutely non-searchable today. Maybe google will reinvent itself, maybe not. But as long as they keep their search algorithms secret, the trust in their system will be decayed with every user who searches “click here” or gets eBay junk listing or anything like that. The search engine of the future will be open sourced and will search in context instead of in letters. Google as we now know it will die. What will be next? Google 2.0? Or a completely unknown startup?

I count the blogs of the employees of Hitwise, Inc. to my first and favourite ressources when it comes to get the buzz of the latest hypes and trends in the website market. With some detail and and a professional data background here insights and findings about changes in website traffic are presented and then analyzed. Lately Lee Ann Prescott, a main researcher there, postet about youtube.com. She found that the traffic to youtube.com was now greater than the traffic to the main TV network websites combined. This news is the kind of buzz out of which most of the Web 2.0 hype is emerging. Although some colleagues and I made comments on the blog of Lee Ann, I want to discuss this here a little bit more in detail.

First this news sounds for the layman like: „TV is now dead, all the people are switching to youtube.com instead of watching TV in the future.“ This, of course, is completely nonsense. Just by finding that youtube.com has videos on it and many people are surfing to their site just don’t say anything about their preference of watching TV. The main point of the study here should be read as that youtube has a more compelling website to offer to the main audience, than the TV networks. But the main business of TV networks is not running websites, it is broadcasting. So this is like comparing -to qoute an old german saying- apples with peaches.

The future of TV may somehow be connected to broadband internet and some aspects of web 2.0, but it won’t be replaced by something like youtube.com. The future of Television is a hometheatrical experience - it is HDTV and surround sound. youtube.com is a place to share funny or disgusting or any other kind of amateurish video. It is also a place where people post their recordings from TV and can comment on them. And it is also a place, where professionals can promote their work by „trailering“ their videos to a global audience. But this is in most cases more self-marketing than broadcasting.

The future of webvideo will definetly change to higher picture and sound quality – definetly it will reach the HDTV/surround sound mark very soon for a broader audience. Videoserver technology seems to be quite ready, but is now waiting for greater bandwidth and a more defined network infrastructure. VideoLAN is a very interesting opensource project, I have constantly an eye on. But my guess is, that you will not see a Youtube with a HDTV streaming service. For many technical and practical reasons I believe more in a scenario, where the user decides to see a special programme and than a software like Freevo or some automated Bittorent clone is downloading this in the background via a peer to peer system.

All this is not really ready for prime time yet, but it will be sooner than some today expect. The interesting thing for a webdesigner is, that those technologies will open new possibilities both in programming and in design of webapplications. I think, this will do for webvideo what the DVD did for consumer homevideo – both in terms of quality and in terms of design: think of the animated menus or games you find nowadays on almost every DVD and remember VHS.

When I look at all the nowadays famous and successful Web 2.0 applications, something quite astonishing comes to my thoughts: while many of those applications are meant to be used by people during their leisure time, none of the successful ones deals by its nature with something that comes close to „interactive entertainment“ or even „games“. Yes of course, watching videos on youtube.com is most of the time entertaining and even somehow interactive (since the user can decide, what video to watch or can leave a comment – if you really want to call this already „interactive“). On the other side, sites like secondlife.com are not generally called first to be Web 2.0 sites, since they lack some important characteristics, that seems to be generally necessary to receive the merit of being considered as Web 2.0. So I ask myself, why are so few people try to connect the rich experiences that exists in the field of the computer game industry with possibilities of Web 2.0? Or am I just missing some interesting development? (If so, please comment to this post!)

To start thinking about it deeper, I have to talk (very shortly!) about, what the characteristics of a Web 2.0 application are for me today. There are three main points:

1. It’s content is constantly developed/maintained/pushed forward by a community of people. Examples are Wikipedia, digg.com or again youtube.com

2. It runs within a common browser without exotic software add-ons (this one is obvious: The whole thing is called „Web 2.0“ - not „Special Software 2.0“ or something like this)

3. The interaction of a critical mass of users created something, that not otherwise could exist or be created – either because the development cost would be too high or the whole concept is the networked inter operation of real people (Examples are del.icio.us and flickr.com)

Saying this, many of the huge and successful Massive Multiplayer Online (Roleplaying) Games are near those characteristics of Web 2.0. They exist, because many people live a „second life“ online as some Fantasy Hero or Villain. By spending their time in those worlds, they are the same time it’s content. Some games even allow the players to create worlds or parts on their own. So point 1) and 3) seems to be clearly fulfilled.

But as the infrastructure of the Internet and it’s protocols and servers is used, for several technical and business issues the great and successful ones among those titles are not running in a common browser – they come as (mostly) commercial software, which has to be installed on a computer. Titles to notice here are for instance World of Warcraft or LOTR online.

One interesting thing in this market are the games like ogame, which are called browser games. They fulfill point 2.) as well as the other ones, because they are played in a conventional browser. From my personal researches they gained over the last year massively in momentum, especially among younger male players – which is quite interesting, since those browser games offer a visual entertainment of nearly zero. But the audience of younger males, which owns and knows mostly the modern 3D graphics PCs and consoles nevertheless uses and plays those games, although that are visually as hot as the front page of google.com. Time will tell, if that is just a short episode or a trend. It may be, that content and real user/gamer interaction is experiencing a revival among the gamers, it may also be that it is just kind of trendy to have something like ascii art on your screen instead of full fledged 3D graphics.

So where is the professional Web 2.0 concept that will be somehow the next big thing in interactive entertainment? By researching this I came along some interesting experiments like wednus DRPG or dutchpipe. The first one is the attempt to program a game with dhtml/javascript framework, the latter is a server experiment for a persistent online world (which is what you need for something like a real multiplayer game like WoW). But if you really want do those things, openlaszlo has everything you need. So if technology exists, and nobody is using it for interactive entertainment in Web 2.0, there seems to be no market. Or simply no business idea?

On the other side they exists an active community of enthusiasts that develop and read interactive fiction (which is more a classical single player game approach). But there is nothing I found, that combines those proven markets (the interactive entertainment industry is performing mainly well, so it’s no niche business) with the hype and the possibilities of Web 2.0.

Did I missed something? Please let me know!