Category: Technology & Startups

Microsoft has started another push to say that web applications (these days, those including AJAX) can not do everything that locally base applications can. I disagree. I used to consider myself to be a power user, but 99% of what I do now i can do through online only apps such as Writely.com (MS Word) , NumSum.com (MS Excel), HipCal.com (MS Outlook), Gmail.com (MS Otlook Express), Flickr.com (MS ?) and others. Check out this snippet, and read the rest from the link..

A key premise behind Microsoft’s “smart client” pitch is that Web apps are not as good as fat/rich/locally based ones.

Microsoft defines smart clients as software that combines the best of Web apps with the best of locally hosted ones.

Microsoft’s smart client elevator pitch: Web apps can’t handle all the complex tasks that smart-client apps can. They can’t gracefully switch between connected and disconnected states. And they can’t take advantage of all the rich graphics and processing power that smart-client apps can.

Microsoft has been pushing the virtues of smart clients for at least two years. But this year, the company is intent on getting that message to stick.

But not everyone thinks you need Microsoft’s .Net, Visual Studio and Windows environment to write powerful, savvy apps. There’s an alternative camp that’s gaining some mind share. They are backing a programming model known as “Ajax,” which translates roughly to “asynchronous JavaScript and XML.”

Adaptive Path, a consultancy that does Web design work for companies large and small, is the firm that coined the Ajax moniker.

Microsoft Watch: Could Ajax Wash Away ‘Smart Clients’?

My mind is officially blown.

Facebook supports 882 colleges today – there are about 2,000 in the U.S. if you count community colleges. Their goal is to support all of these over time.

The penetration rate is staggering – about 85% of students in supported colleges have a profile up on FaceBook. That’s 3.85 million members. Chris tells me that 60% log in daily. About 85% log in at least once a week, and 93% log in at least once a month.

TechCrunch » 85% of College Students use FaceBook

Just wanted to share these stats about the state of the blogging world. Quite amazing how it is gaining in popularity and soon, podcasting should catch up.

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Technorati Weblog: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth

This was a very interesting image… it is a collage of loads of Web 2.0 company logos found at flickr.

See Whole Image

This Photo taken by torrez