Social Networking and Web 3.0

'If Facebook was a country, it will be fourth largest in the world'. Such is

the volume and usage of social networking sites among organizations. While some

companies use Linkedin to find prospective employees, others use Twitter or

other social network to capture new customers. The potentials of social networks

have become clear to companies, and thus is the adoption of multiple social

networks by organizations  for purposes ranging from collaboration to promotion

of their brands. Here, we take a look at some of the upcoming trends and

technologies in social networking, and how is Web 3.0 going to change the

landscape.

While it's  hard to predict what the future of Web would look like, one thing

is apparent. Today you don't  need a PC or a laptop to browse Web. Browsers have

reached almost everywhere —right from mobile devices to gaming consoles (Wii and

PS3) to even television. Even in places where there is no browser (as yet) such

as Xbox360, Twitter and Facebook have already made their way to. New firmware of

PS3  also as Facebook. Social networking vendors are making sure that you can

access them from where you are, without needing a computing device.

Everything mobile



One of the key reasons why microblogging got so popular so quickly has been

that, the vendors in the space have targeted mobile users since beginning. They

realized that, for a person to fully utilize the power of social networking, he

should be able to update his microblogs from anywhere and at  anytime. Even

today majority of Twitter usage comes from mobile devices.With social networks

leveraging mobile devices more and more, location based social networking is

also gaining momentum. In a research done last year by ABI Research, location

based social networking is expected to be a $3.3 billion market by 2013.

Twitter would be launching geo-tweets very soon, which will allow users to

embed their location with their tweets. Similarly a company called PhotoWALL

displays real-time media streams (or WALLs) by presenting live media precisely

when it happens. It allows mobile users to send live photos along with various

geo-tags and VoiceTags to an attractive searchable website for public, network

or private viewing.  It also enables simultaneous live uploading of mobile media

to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. It was launched in India last month with MSN

India and is available  http://msn.photowall.com. Location based social

networking also opens a whole new range of possibilities such as location based

advertising, finding like-minded people who are near to you, recommending places

to friends, finding reviews what people around you have to say about a

particular place or product, etc.

Social TV



Television is mostly enjoyed to its fullest, when it's watched with friends

and family. And one can't always be around friends or like minded people to

fully enjoy a show or game. But now things are starting to change, TV is not

only going interactive but is also getting social. There are quite a few models

starting to come in this area. Orange has tied up with Twitter to improve

Twitter experience  for its mobile, Internet and TV users.  As part of the deal,

Twitter will be integrated into Orange's IPTV platform and Twitter feeds will

run alongside programs to create an interactive environment.  Another approach

that is coming up is in the form of Social TV widgets or just TV widgets.

Verizon's FiOS TV already provides Facebook and Twitter widgets to its

subscribers. Also earlier this year, Yahoo!  tied with Samsung, Sony, LG and

Vizio to provide TV widgets for their televisions sets, popularly known as Yahoo

connected TV. Similarly there are companies who are offering software that bring

social networking to set top boxes.

A slightly different example is  Clikthrough (www.clikthrough.com), which

makes watching videos online even more interactive. Videos hosted on the website

have 'hotspots'; if someone clicks on  the  hotspots, they can view information

like comments made by others about that video, products used in the video,

people present in the video, etc. You can even add the product in your wishlist.

Web 3.0



Web 3.0 is always an interesting area. We talked about web 3.0 or the

semantic web quite a few times earlier.  Semantic web refers to the study of

meaning and web-study of interlinked documents accessed via the Internet. Web

pages are generally written in HTML,which describes the structure of information

i.e the syntax but not the semantics. But if the computers can understand the

meaning behind the information then this can help us in a better way with

information that we are looking for.  There are quite a few Web 3.0 applications

we have been exposed to already including the likes of Twine, Google Squared, Mozilla Ubiquity,

etc. Also many regard Google Wave as the start of Web 3.0 wave. Last month, W3C

declared OWL 2 as a official standard as part of its Semantic Web toolkit. This

standard will help users to capture information of any domain and then use

semantic tools to search, manage and drive more data from it.

HTML 5 and CSS 3



Some say that XHTML is dead or not used at all and HTML 5 is taking over the

market.  Again, there are speculations that  HTML 5 won't completely be

supported until 2022. Does this mean that HTML 5 won't be widely adopted in near

future. For a web designer, who wants to play with HTML 5 and CSS 3, take full

advantages and explore new features which would be beneficial; so they must know

the new 'modules' or the elements. Though CSS 3 and HTML 5 is still not

implemented fully, one way to implement them is to use a Modernizr. The current

browsers don't support these new standards. Modernizr is a small, easy to use

and simple JavaScript Library that helps in taking the advantages of these new

technologies. Features like rgba(),border-radius, CSS transitions can be tested

for a particular browser using its own  feature detection technique.

Google, as they always keep on googling with the new technologies, has

recently launched Google Wave which uses HTML 5, in which they aim to control

the environment.

Safari also supports new elements of HTML 5 and API's, and is also a Webkit

browser that supports HTML 5. The Palm Pre, iPhone 3Gs and the new Google

Android phone all have browsers that are based on the Webkit rendering engine

that fully make use of HTML 5.

CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheet 3) is one of the new member in the style sheet

family. CSS is basically used to describe the presentation semantics of a

document that may be written in HTML, XHTML, XML documents including SVG and XUL.

The development of CSS3 is split  into different 'modules'. The old

specification was simply too large and complex to be updated as one. So it has

been broken down into smaller pieces — with new ones also added. Some of these

modules include; Box Model,  Lists Module and Hyperlink Presentation.  One of

the advantages CSS3 offers is its ability to handle multiple background images

per element. Another advantage is the use of separate stylesheet area which

provides an easier and comfortable HTML markup. The concept of differentiation

and isolation in CSS 3 helps users to have presentation separated from structure

so that for every heading in the HTML markup won't get repeated and thus making

it a easy, simple presentation with a low level maintenance.