Part of the big buzz surrounding Web 2.0 has been pull alerts as opposed to push alerts.

Push alerts / messages –  I send you a message.  This is how email and IM work.  I choose when, where, and how the message is sent and largely control how you receive it.  I send an email, you get it in your inbox.

Pull alerts / messages – I send a message which may (or may not) be intended for you primarily.  You decide when, where, how, and IF you receive it.  This most common form of this is RSS/ATOM feeds.  I publish to my blog / Twitter / whatever and you subscribe to me if you want to.  You can receive alerts via email, IM, Xanga, Facebook, Google Reader, BoxtheWeb, Sage, or a myriad of other options.

Some have said that push alerts are dying.

This makes some sense.  When I post on a forum, I don’t want to have their system email me every time there is a reply (email/push).  What I really want is to have easy access to a list of posts replying to mine to look over (RSS/pull).

However, this can go a bit too far.  Pull IM does exist to some extent, but it defeats the purpose.  I want you to see something NOW, it’s URGENT, INSTANT.  Pull does not fit this.

Push alert systems, however, just refuse to die!  Facebook/Myspace messages/wall posts.  Blog comments.  New friend-group messaging systems like Pownce.  Push is extremely popular.

The masses are rarely right, but perhaps we shouldn’t brush off push alerting altogether at this point.

From the ultra-creative minds of Stephen Paul Weber (that’s me!) and Trevor Creech comes a service you may never have expected.

Pranketh is designed with but one purpose in mind — to send prank emails.  Fill in the form with who you want the email to go to… and who you want it to come from!  Pranketh will send you message and when the recipient opens it, it will appear to be from whomever you specified!  Then, when they reply, it will go to that person and watch the confusion!

Have fun, but don’t hurt anyone 😉

Also known as Portable Social Networking, this is the concept of decentralising the social networking functionality of sites like Facebook so that one does not have to use every service to connect with everyone (previously covered here).

Videntity is a wonderful service for this movement, and one that I have been using as the hub of much of my efforts. Explode seems promising, but they’re down for upgrade.

So let’s talk about my list from last time:

1. hCards and Pingerati : For Blogger I have a wizard. Pingerati pings still manual.  For WordPress there is a widget.  Pings still manual.  For even more professional information (such as my resume) there is an hResume WordPress Plugin.  For other websites/services there is always the hCard Creator.  Of course, Videntity.org supports hCard by default.
2. XFN Friends lists : For Blogger I have a wizard.  This wizard will actually work on any web page or on any service where you can post (X)HTML (including MySpace or Xanga!)  For WordPress there is a nice plugin, although a widget version would be a bonus.  Videntity supports this by default.As far as finding/adding friends goes I have a bookmarklet for Videntity that allows one to add hCards, Facebook results, or Wink.com people results as friends/contacts.  Bookmarklets for other services would not be hard.  For Blogger we would need an actual blogroll-producing service beyond just a wizard to make this work.
3. Public/private profiles : Again, Videntity has this built right in (as long as you have the URL that the contact uses for OpenID on the friend list, it does not follow rel=me).  I am working on a solution for WordPress.  Would people be interested in a solution for Blogger/other websites?
4. Messaging : not sure where I stand on this.  Lots of nice contact options, and creating a ‘wall’-like interface on WordPress would be easy.  The question is : what is the goal of this?  If it is just the address book features then a way to integrate social networking contact lists with email clients / Gmail might be better.  If it is being able to communicate without revealing your email address a protocol/system for that might be easy enough.My brother (and avid Facebooker) says that it is about visibility.  The benefit of Facebook messaging, for him, is the unified notifications area that he KNOWS his friends all check.  He KNOWS that they will see his message.  He is not sure they check their email.

I still promote the idea of supporting rel=tag on hCards.  We need a better hCard search engine, one that takes Pingerati pings, crawls regularly (some of my pings from months ago were never indexed by the Technorati Kitchen hCard search), outputs results as hCards (to facilitate things like my bookmarklet), and recognizes rel=tag.

Perhaps a tagspace could do a rev=tag for members.  If an hCard URL has rel=tag to a page that has rev=tag to it that would give credibility to the category.

Notifications (think Facebook mini-feed) need to fit into this idea somehow.  Events are hCalendar.  Notes/posts/shares are hAtom/xFolk.  Status is something I’ve blogged about recently too.  Services like Twitter are heading in the right direction.

I wrote once before about the existing WebOS systems. I planned to follow that post up, but time did not allow. Now I will follow it up twofold.

Using
I have come to use WebOS in a broader sense than I once did, which seems to be the ‘catching’ way to use it these days. That is, defining WebOS to include things such as Netvibes and BoxtheWeb, Omnidrive and Box.net, Zoho and Google Docs. I have been asked by some how I find WebOS useful at all, or if it is just an interesting experiment. I will attempt here to answer that.

Online storage is amazing. Work at home, save online, work at school, save online, etc. It is far more convenient than carrying flash media everywhere I go. I have used YouOS, Google Docs, and Gmail for this, but the result is basically the same.

Online office is similarly useful. I can work on and access the same document across computers at my house, or on campus, without any real hassle. Open, edit, save. Collaboration features just make it that much more fun! SVN for documents

AJD (ala BoxtheWeb or Netvibes) is something I really love. I use BoxtheWeb, being the project originator, but there are many out there. I have many feeds, but I still like to be able to glance at them all at once. See what my contacts are reading these days, access my del.icio.us, and search, all from one page. There’s something to be said for that convenience.

Last but not least (and I’ve likely forgotten others) : YubNub. I couldn’t live without it. The amount of time saved being able to type ‘g singpolyma’, ‘tet microformats’, ‘hwdial singpolyma.net’ is amazing. And the development stuff is fun.

As for full-scale webtop integrations. I haven’t been using the full-fledged features yet. There’s something there though… just not ready yet (or maybe I’m too geeky to see it past the GUI ).

Standards
I mentioned in my last post the need for standards. If I could run Netvibes widgets on my BoxtheWeb page while integrating my YouOS storage, that would be very most awesome. The companies themselves seem to be organising, but it’s private and they’re not taking input. So, as always, the community needs to get their foot in the door before the industry runs on its course and we have many too many products and it takes years to create standards.

Drawing inspiration from the Microformats process, research into existing practices/standards should be present before suggesting something new. To aid the community in organising such research and development, I have created a wiki and a discussion group.

Perhaps not all of us are geeky enough to do the research and formal stuff for the wiki, but anyone who uses any of the products listed above, listed on the wiki, or related products, as well as those interested in Simile and related projects can contribute to the discussion on the discussion group. Anything from observations about how things work, suggestions as to how things should/could work, or even pointing out projects that may have been missed is welcome. Feedback from users as well as geeks is necessary to make this project work.

Whoever first came up with the idea of WebOS was a genius. Somehow I doubt it started with Google OS, but my own interest certainly started there.

Soon there was YubNub, the command line for the web. A flexible, open command-line system for the Internet that is practical as well as cool. A backbone kind of application while also being immediately useful to users.

Webtops started popping up, such as those provided by 30boxes and Goowy. They allow you to integrate the major services you use into one convenient location, sort of like an extension of the idea behind Google IG, BoxtheWeb, and others.

Now we have at least two genuine WebOS: YouOS and EyeOS. Both provide their own ‘standard’ way to code apps, with APIs etc to help in GUI and back end building. YouOS allows developers to code and share apps on the public server, as well as allowing users to install these apps. EyeOS requires you set up your own server to install apps, but allows apps to be distributed in an offline format. There are distinct pros and cons to both, and to the APIs provided by both.

WebOS is where it’s at, with YubNub, YouOS, and EyeOS. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. However, if we want to see true Web 2.0 here we must not repeat the mistake that was made with offline OS. WebOS communities/developers must work together for standards and interoperability, etc. Each will be so much better if it works with the strength of the others.