Everybody’s talking about it, and since I am a self-professed Mac addict how could I miss the opportunity? It seems Steve Jobs himself shook hands with the faithful in line at a Palo Alto Apple Store and “The Woz” himself showed up on a Segway and handed out t-shirts at a differnt mall, then stood in line to get his own iPhone. There I said it. IPhone. The newest gotta have it just so I can drool on it toy from Apple.

It’s absolutley beautiful. The interface could only come from Apple. Sexy? Absolutely. The quality of the screen the audio, the navigation? Gorgeous. Gotta have it, gottahaveit now. Now now now.
But.
I didn’t get one yet. I think I’ll wait for the hoopla to die down a bit and then maybe I won’t be able to resist. I’m still not sure I want to watch movies on a small screen, and I KNOW I don’t want to pay for the family data transfer bill. I also don’t use my phone for email, and I rarely use the feature to listen to music either. But still, it such eye candy I know my left brain will insist eventually. (My preciousssssssss).

In the meantime here’s somebody else’s impressions as a real first adopters.

We’ve got a few new sites this week to show off. We’ve been working with the Center for Learning and Teaching in San Francisco and have just launched these two works in progress. CILS Science Fellows, and Academies for Young Scientists. The site has some nice Web 2.0 features and a little AJAX thrown in for fun.

We also put together a site for one of our favorite San Jose restaurants, Yung Le’s Fusion. Check out the Flash based interview on the “About Yung Le” page!

Web 2.0 is SO much more than shiny buttons, quirky names and gradients. Here are the first in a series of links that demonstrate where the web is going and how this next generation of sites will change the way you work.

ZOHO
ZOHO gives you all the tools that MS Office does without a lot of the bugs, expense and hassle of the “Evil Empire”. It’s also got a lot of tools that Office doesn’t offer, like Wikis, chat, website monitoring, polls, CRM and web meetings.

Rotaboard
Organizing shift schedules, tracking hours and among a large staff can be any admin’s nightmare. What if you could put it all in one handy dandy location and easily see schedules, payables and contact info all in one place?

Pulling together a remote team to work on a project? There are several options for remote collaboration, each with their own spin on workflow. Take a look and see which flavor works for you.
Huddle
Dabble
Thinkature
Zimbra

It’s not all work and no play of course.
Make my People Sing!
Delicious Monster
Boomj
Pixelmator

A lot of people are wondering this and we get lots of calls asking us if we can get it yet.

Bottom line is that the web is an ever-evolving place. Lately there’s been a design trend towards less text, more white space and easy to use navigation. Some call it the Web 2.0 look. But that’s not all there is to Web 2.0. It’s about using the web in a more organized way. Some call it the “Semantic Web” (something that in itself needs a definition.) An essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence using things like rss feeds and other ways of aggregating information to deliver you what you want to know without the other 12.5 billion websites that can clog up your search for information. A classic example of this are feed aggregators that pull information from search engines, news articles and blogs and categorize it just for you. Technologies like Actionscript and Ajax can help make this data easily digestible.

Another example is services that allow you to use the web as your “virtual computer” making where and how you access it much less important. Your data and tools live on-line and you can use them with any computer you happen to have on hand. These services can change the way we use the web and the flexibility with which we work.
Want to know more? Here are some good resources:

Tim O’Reilly’s take on Web 2.0 (after all, it’s his idea…)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1

Semantic Web.org
http://www.semanticweb.org/

Scientific American on the Semantic Web of the future
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21

Find out if your site is web 2.0 (tongue in cheek)
http://web2.0validator.com/

Web 2.0 Security Issues
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,132153-page,5-c,onlinesecurity/article.html

People are all a twitter about Google’s latest trick. Streetview allows you to search an address or intersection on Google Maps and then zoom in to see the address as though you were standing in the street in front. It allows for a 360º view too. How’d they do it? Apparently with a fleet of vehicles equipped with multi-directional cameras roaming the byways and taking pictures of whatever they saw.
Gotta admit it’s pretty darn cool.

Violation of privacy? Maybe, but Google says that they only took pictures from the street and that they are the same thing anybody else would see walking by. Who knows, maybe they even caught a crime or two being committed.
Mary Kalin-Casey seems to thinks so. Her cat is now the most famous cat in the world.

Obviously not everybody was caught by surprise