While Myspace and Facebook may have introduced the world to social networking, it is evolving quickly. There is new web-based software coming out (such as channelme.tv) that can turn just about any blog into a social networking site. So, if you want to talk about cats all day, you can have a million other cat lovers on your blog talking about them with you.

2. Iphone and geography tracking

The days of tell your parent that you are going to the movies when you are really going to a party are over. Not only can your parents track your geographic location, but just about everyone else can too. The days of getting lost when following someone in a vehicle are over.

3. Streaming Live Video

Want to be the star of your own show? Now you can! And, it is incredibly easy to do. Sites like www.ustream.tv allow anyone with a $20 webcam to host their own show. In the past, if you missed your favorite television show, you pretty much had to depend on your friends to inform you of what happened. Not anymore! In fact, many shows now stream new episodes at the same time, or very quickly after the show has aired. Why live your life according to someone’s schedule, when you can watch your favorite shows where you want, when you want? This philosophy is applied to movies as well. Netflix, Apple TV and Vudu all offer movies streamed right to your computer.

4. Social Lending

Need a personal loan? You used to have to go to the bank, fill out a stack of paperwork, have to prove how worthy you were and then spend a week waiting to see if you were approved. Now, getting a personal loan is easier than ever. Peer to Peer Lenders like Lending Club can get you a 25K personal loan funded by individuals across the USA. You still have to fill out personal information, but the stacks of paperwork that we were all accustomed to are now ancient history. While there are still some people who are little apprehensive about applying online for loans, security features are updated constantly, making it safer everyday to share information online.

5. Online Elections

While this idea hasn’t quite caught on yet, just think of the possibilities. If we can do everything from purchasing movie tickets to paying our bills online, why can’t we vote online as well? Not only would there be a larger number of people voting, but if done properly, there would be less errors and it would be more secure.

6. Mobile Profiles

With GPS, WiFI and iphone like devices it isnt hard to imagine one day walking into a bar and being able to scroll through the profiles of everyone who comes within certain proximity to you. While this may sound like something out of Minority Report, this just might be our reality in the near future.

7. Universal Connectivity

If you are like me, trying to keep track of all of your usernames and passwords can be extremely difficult. Especially trying to remember what sites required a capital letter and symbol in the password, along with at least one number. On top of the rules for the actual password, you are warned not to use birthday, address, your dog’s name or anything else that will help you remember your password. You have also been warned not to use the same username and password at more then one site. How can anyone keep up? In the near future you won’t have to. Sites such as www.openid.com are coming close to safely allowing users to only need one username and one password for everything. These accounts will link all of your various networks in one place. This is welcome news to people all over the world, who have trouble remembering birthdays, let alone what username goes with what password.

Source: http://thefutureofsocial.com

I could not agree more with the  article below. There is need for a web model dedicated more on delivering high performance with  emerging multimedia technologies  rather than the traditional static web. We have more video being delivered over the web now and the trend can only increase.  There is need for better 3-D support on the browsers as the cloud slowly takes over as the preffered computing model for serving the applications ranging from your simple Gmail to the most complex erps.

Please read on..

China has installed a secure operating system on government and military computers, according to Washington Times.The new system, called ‘Kylin’, is designed to be impenetrable to foreign military and intelligence agencies, the report said.

The existence of the secure operating system was disclosed during recent US congress hearings on how China’s government is preparing to wage cyberwarfare with the United States.

Security experts said Kylin’s deployment is significant because it has “hardened” key Chinese servers. The system is known to have been under development since 2001 and the first Chinese computers to use it are government and military servers that were converted beginning in 2007.

The newspaper said US offensive cyberwar capabilities have been mainly focused on getting into Chinese government and military computers outfitted with less secure operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows.

China also developed a secure microprocessor that is known to be hardened against external access by a hacker or automated malicious software, according to US security experts.

Operating as Funtrench Technology, the promise is of  3D development technologies that support rapid application development (RAD) needs across the entire multimedia spectrum.

Current products include:-

Our current products include the following:

1. 3D Development framework. Eden 0.1.0, Eden 0.1.2
2. Eden Framework SDK.
3. Memphis Integrated Development of Games Environment (MIDGE).
4. Funtrench GamePark and GameStore.

Eden is distributed under the BSD Lincense.

Eden provides several superclasses that allow for access to Panda’s rich set of features – physics, particle generation, and makes things such as gripping and walking much easier. Games are required to conform to an MVC (Model-View-Controller) structure that eliminates the need for paths and uses XML for defining almost everything about the game.

The project has nine sample projects and a full-featured sample game – Eden Maze.

visit the project website here or the project blog here

Sample renderings are as below powered by Eden are as below:-

To me, this is a business opportunity  for developers in these low income countries to come up with product whose business models would work in their localities yet drive the huge traffic.Otherwise,  the mainstream applications like youtube could also be modified to maximise revenue in the locality.  Indeed, most of the advertising on the big web companies menu is geared towards the North American and European consumer.

The full article was carried in the New York times as shown here

Facebook is booming in Turkey and Indonesia. YouTube’s audience has nearly doubled in India and Brazil.

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That may seem like good news. But it is also a major reason these and other Web companies with big global audiences and renowned brands struggle to turn even a tiny profit.

Call it the International Paradox.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.

Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.

“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”

Internet start-ups that came of age during the Web 2.0 era, roughly from 2004 to the beginning of the recession at the end of 2007, generally subscribed to a widely accepted blueprint: build huge global audiences with a free service, and let advertising pay the bills.

But many of them ran smack into global economic reality. There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.

“It’s a problem every Internet company has,” said Michelangelo Volpi, chief executive of Joost, a video site with half its audience outside the United States.

“Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low,” Mr. Volpi said. If Web companies “really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries.”

Few Internet companies have taken that drastic step, but many are exploring other ways to increase revenue or cut costs in developing countries.

MySpace — the News Corporation’s social network with 130 million members, about 45 percent of them overseas — is testing a feature for countries with slower Internet connections called Profile Lite. It is a stripped-down version of the site that is less expensive to display because it requires less bandwidth.

MySpace says it may make Profile Lite the primary version for its members in India, where it has 760,000 users, although people there could click on a link to switch to the richer version of the site.

Perhaps no company is more in the grip of the international paradox than YouTube, which a Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang, recently estimated could lose $470 million in 2009, in part because of the high cost of delivering billions of videos each month. Google, which owns YouTube, disputed the analysis but offered no details on the site’s financial situation.

Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations at YouTube, says the company still hews to its vision of bringing online video to the entire globe. In the last two years, it has pushed to create local versions of its site in countries like India, Brazil and Poland.

But Mr. Pickett also says that YouTube has slowed the creation of new international hubs and shifted its focus to making money. He says that does not rule out restricting bandwidth in certain countries as a way to control costs — essentially making YouTube a slower, lower-quality viewing experience in the developing world.

“We may choose to set a limit to how much we are willing to pay in bandwidth cost,” Mr. Pickett said. In some countries, he said, “there may be particular peak times where instead of high definition, we might decrease the resolution.”

The Facebook social network is also considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs delivered to some regions in an effort to reduce expenses.

We can decide, either on a country by country or user by user basis, to engineer the quality of the service for that cohort of users,” said Jonathan Heiliger, the executive who oversees Facebook’s computing infrastructure.

Facebook is in a particularly difficult predicament. Seventy percent of its 200 million members live outside the United States, many in regions that do not contribute much to Facebook’s bottom line. At the same time, the company faces the expensive prospect of storing 850 million photos and eight million videos uploaded to the site each month.

Facebook, which says it favors membership growth over profitability for now, is trying to increase revenue overseas by hiring advertising sales staff in countries like Britain, Australia and France.

In other parts of the world, Microsoft serves ads on the site and Facebook offers self-service tools to advertisers. But those ads are far less lucrative than the ones Facebook itself sells in the United States and Western Europe.

As a result, speculation has swirled about Facebook’s finances. Industry analysts wonder aloud how fast the company is losing money and whether it needs to solicit another round of investment.

Facebook said last month that it was on track to become profitable next year. But as it did, Gideon Yu, Facebook’s experienced chief financial officer, left the company. Three people familiar with the internal maneuverings at Facebook said Mr. Yu objected to such a rosy projection as the company was struggling to finance its expensive global growth.

Web entrepreneurs like Mr. Shapiro of Veoh, still struggling with his decision to restrict his site from much of the world, might have to find a way to soothe their battered consciences.

“The part of me that wants to change the world says, ‘This is unfair, it shouldn’t be like this,’ ” Mr. Shapiro said. “On the other hand, from the business side of things, serving videos to the entire world is just not supportable at this time.”