If you take a look at the social networks, basically it allows you to connect with your friends and communicate with them. For communication you were able to use text in the early stages, but with time you are offered the facility of using rich media as well. With the improvements of broadband internet speeds, developers could introduce better rich media features to social networks like videos. In this article I’m going to take a look in to historical milestones of ‘social video networking’, technology used, its social impact and future trends.

Reasons for Growth

In the early time on Social Networks, most of the features were limited to text based communication such as Messages, wall posts, Blog, forums etc. After some time there was some involvement of graphical media such as images and GIF animation. Trend initiating online social networks including Friendster, MySpace and Hi5 were using various different combination of above features with different brandings.

There were several limitations for web applications to use rich media, mainly the speed of internet. During the time of ‘Dial up’, web developers had to think twice before they include even an image. Therefore, most of the online communication was practically limited to text and few images. Other than that there were problems related to videos such as users had to download and watch the video and video recording required advanced professional gadgets.

With time, technology improved and mainly below factors triggered the evolution of an era of social video networking solving the problems of load time, video playing and recording.

Internet Speed

If you go back to 1990’s internet speed was limited to 48 kbps which was Dial up internet. By that time it was adequate to carry out text based online communication, yet nowhere near for online video. But with the advancement of global broadband internet technologies, global average of internet has increased to 9.83 mbps.

This speed of internet is more than enough to stream an online video without interruption and upload video quickly as well. Other than that this higher speeds made it possible for the users to share HD videos online as well.

In addition to wired internet connections there was a significant growth in mobile broadband as well. Today most of the hits coming to social networks are from mobile devices.

This growth of internet speed removed the major barrier for Social “Video” networking and allowed the users to share their lives online, more comprehensibly using videos going beyond text and images.

Web Technology

In the early time of Social networking, there was sufficient technology to let the user to upload the video and store them properly. But when it comes to playing, the technology was no sophisticated enough. In the case a user need to see a video he had to download the whole video and play it using a locally installed media player and it was a considerable limiting factor for Social Video Networking.

With the time, web technologies improved and gave birth to the concept ‘online video streaming’. This technology let the users to watch the video without downloading whole file at once, right on the web interface. The most popular application used to achieve this was Adobe Flash Player for web. Users had to install it to stream the video in a web interface.

Other than Adobe Flash player, there are alternative technologies introduced recently including Microsoft Silverlight and HTML 5. Most of the popular Social Video networks are already using HTML 5 which is a high performance replacement for Adobe Flash player and it doesn’t require any plug-in installation to watch the video.

Portable Video Cameras

Video uploading, storing and streaming technologies were developing exponentially, but the problem is how to produce these videos. Few decades ago producing video was limited to high end video production studios. But with the technological advancement, today you can carry a personal video production kit in your jacket pocket.

Lots of manufactures are releasing various different camcorders which are capable of recoding videos just by pressing few buttons. The video quality of those is also improved to a position where they are good enough to be broadcasted in a public TV channel. If you take a look at the market prices of camcorders, they were starting from approximately $250. Therefore in a short period of time camcorders became a house hold item. Video recorded from those directly came to social video networks with the time.

Other than the camcorders, lots of DSLR cameras introduced to the market were capable of recording high end, professional, quality videos other than their normal usage which is capturing still images. Those devices also helped the Social video trend to grow not only in quantity, but also by quality.

Other than all the above, the most interesting trend of social video is footage captured by mobile phones. We keep the mobile with us always and let us capture valuable moments and share them online without even the help of a computer.  Today most of the Smartphones are equipped with HD video recording capability and very high speed mobile broadband internet. Hence, users can record high quality videos and upload them to social video networks without further delay.

Big Players

YouTube

YouTube is the most popular Social Video Network which is providing most of the interesting features, specially the video streaming performance. This is managed by Google and it has been integrated with Google+ which gives it most of the advanced social networking features. It’s using adobe flash as well as HTML 5 as video streaming technologies.

It was founded in 2005 and became the trend setter for Social Video Networking. This web application changed the public image of online video in a short period of time. Today it’s hosting billions of social videos and connecting many users, as subscribers through channels.

Vimeo

Vimeo is very popular especially among video produces. It’s a Social video network where produces can share their video and get feedback from other produces and users around the globe.

Same as In YouTube this is also using Adobe Flash player and HTML 5 to stream video and provide the video player for users. Users can upload many different formats of videos including HD content.

Facebook

Facebook is THE social network in the millennium and still at the top unbeaten. It also has the facility for the users to share videos. It’s having its own video player for facebook hosted videos and at the same time users can embed YouTube videos as well.

Same as most of the social video networking sites, facebook is also using Adobe flash, HTML 5 and giving HD video support.

Social Impact

Even at the time where social networks were limited to text and images, their social impact was massive. When the era of social video rose it made that social impact even stronger. Today TV has practically been replaced by Social Video Networking sites.

The main thing that users will expect from a social network is a platform to connect with friends, already known in real world or may be the unknown, and express themselves freely like they can never do in real world. Hence the sole objective so any social network is to give maximum facility for the users to express themselves much freely and comprehensively.

With the growth of Social video networking many new things that world never knew, came out to public. Most of the interesting video stories are recorded by non professional individuals. They contain ‘cover versions’ of popular songs and different invaluable moments captured on the go. Here is one good example.

Everyday most of the social video networking sites are getting millions of videos captured by individuals using their personal camcorders or mobile phones that contain interesting content. Those videos are shared among public and the best part is people can give feedback to those unlike in Television. This social conversion around a video made a huge impact on how people think and global life style changes.

Other than personal videos, after seing the crowd gather around these social video networks, most of the professional video produces also started releasing their videos online. Those mainly contained the videos you can already see on TV channels such as music videos, news and other programs. The number of hits those videos are getting is amazing and here is one good example, the most viewed video on YouTube.

Other than that marketing professionals are using Social Video Networking for creative promotions campaigns. The reason here is that there are billions of people around the globe connected to these sites, which is way higher that any public television channel. Once they come up with some promotional video you can easily publish it online totally free of charge and social engagement is way higher that television.

Social networks are self sustaining systems; people upload videos, watch videos, rate and comment by themselves too. The application owner only provides the platform to carry out those operations and that gives this amazing power to Social video networking. Application of technology allow the user to upload not only HD video but 3D videos as well.  It’s very difficult to say where this trend will go next, but for sure this will lead television broadcasting to its grave.

The battle of web browsers dates back to 1995, in the time Microsoft internet explorer started competing with Netscape Navigator. From that time until now many browsers came in to battle and some of them manage to mark their territory strongly while some of them lost and retreated. The major contributing factor to win this browser battle was always the speed of loading and data interpretation.

In the new millennium, battle of the browsers has become even competitive and lots of companies are showing their colors to be the first. In this article I’m trying to do a historical data analysis of battle of the browsers and its circumstances.

Early Time

The Very First One – Nexus

Back in 1990 the very early version of web browser came to the picture. In was called as WorldWideWeb and then change the name to Nexus. Today everyone knows it as Nexus. This web browser was capable of interpreting basic HTML and style sheets only in text formats. Further, most of the Common things that we do with browsers were there even with Nexus including spellchecking, next/previous buttons and file download.

Nexus Browser

This is the time just before internet boom. There were no many internet users and most of its users were from various government organizations and academic institutions. They all were using Nexus and its versions. By 1993 other web browsers came in to the world of WWW and Nexus was unable to give a good competition to them. In 1994 January Nexus was discontinued.

Arrival of Netscape Navigator

1993 is a very important milestone for internet. In that year the web browser Mosaic was introduced which was a major contributing factor to the popularity of World Wide Web. The main reason to make the Mosaic popular was that it was the worlds very first graphical web browser which could display images right inside the HTML page. In previous Nexus, users had to open a separate page to view images.

Later this browser was renamed as “Netscape Navigator” with its popularity and further development. This is the first time in history that a Web browser became popular among general internet users and it did a great job in popularizing internet. Netscape introduced innovative technologies to internet mainly Secured Socket Layer(SSL) and Java Script which are used even today with modern web browsers.

Netscape Navigator

By that time there was no significant competition to Netscape Navigator and according to statistics it was holding more than 90% of usage share back in 1994. However with the arrival of Microsoft Internet Explorer the trend of Netscape Navigator died and today it’s only a legend.

Internet Explorer

Microsoft also came in to the browser battle with their Internet Explorer in 1995. When it comes to functionality it was almost same as Netscape Navigator, but they were having other advantages. Mainly it came with the popular operating system Microsoft Windows. hence users won’t have to install a separate web browser. And of course Microsoft always polishes up the product to deliver the maximum user-experience.

This setup initiated the world’s very first Battle of the Browsers. On one side Netscape Navigator was competing with their innovative new technologies such as SSL, JS and even with the advantage of “Be the first to come”. In another side Internet Explorer was competing to gain more territory with Operating System support, market reputation and ease of use.

Microsoft Internet Explorer was able to win this war and Netscape Navigator had to retreat. By 1996 the popularity of Netscape Navigator started to decline while popularity if Internet Explorer was booming. After that Internet Explorer could hold his ground for many years without having any significant competition. The development was continuously going on and many versions of Internet Explorer came with Windows Operating System. This is the most powerful regime ever in history of Battle of Browsers.

Opera

Opera browser came in to the picture in the peak of browser battle and offer competitive feature to the internet users. Especially they were developing web browsers for mobile phones. The most interesting thing about opera browser is its performance. By that time speed of networking infrastructure was around 28 Kbps and managing the bandwidth was critical. Opera was offering the feature ‘fast rewind’ which allows the users to go to previous pages quickly without wasting data.

Opera Browser

However, opera never was able to gain a significant usage share. It was always fluctuating around 2%. I still recommend this as a very good browser if you are having slower internet connection. By the time I was using Dial up internet this was my favorite browser. But with the introduction to broadband internet the importance of Opera was not significant.

In New Millennium

Mozilla Firefox

The era of Internet Explorer was continued for many years and its users were satisfied with its capabilities. Mozilla Firefox is the very first browser which shows some new possibilities to the Internet Explorer users becoming a new competitor in battle of browsers.

The Mozilla Foundation was initially launched by Netscape, the early competitor in the battle of browsers. The idea was to set up the environment to develop open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer. It gave birth to Firefox and first version came in 2004. This came in with lots of new features such as Tabbed browsing that allows you to open many web pages in the same browser window, spellchecking, bookmark manager and download manger. Furthermore the browsing engine of Firefox is very fast due to the technologies like ‘pipelining’. With all these Mozilla Firefox could gain a usage share of nearly 40% in 2011 and limit the share of Microsoft Internet Explorer to 21%.

Safari from Apple

Safari browser came with Apple Mac operating system. Safari was having the same advantage as Internet Explorer since it comes with a popular brand and operating system. Initial version of Safari came in 2003 and of course gained popularity among Apple Mac users. It was having fastest browsing engine which was even faster than Mozilla Firefox and providing lots of competitive features as well. However it was unable to gain a significant usage share due to its limited platform compatibility. Throughout years its usage share was fluctuating between 5-10%.

Safari Browser

Chrome from Google

Chrome was developed by the internet giant Google and became very popular with the massive online promotion campaign and competitive features. Chrome introduced the “Tabs On top” style screen arrangement which is very user-friendly. In addition to that Chrome engine was very fast and ranked as world’s fasted browser. Additionally most of the Google features came built in with the Chrome browser which was an added advantage to become even popular as a web browser.

Right after introduction its usage share hit the roof and most of the people believed that it will surpass the share of Mozilla Firefox as well. But according to the statistic in w3schools it’s still slightly behind the Firefox browser. Different sources come up with different browser usage statistics. I’d like to stick to w3schools browser statistics. In there you can see the browser usage share by browser and different version of the same browser as well.

Recently there was news reported by many online news sources saying that Google Chrome has surpassed the usage share of Mozilla Firefox.

Effect of the Browser Battle

The Battle of web browser gave lots of good things to the users. Competition is always good. The major factor that improved throughout the years was mainly user-friendliness and performance. Even in the very early time Netscape won the war against Nexus due to the user-friendliness and performance. Along with those lots of new technologies were introduced to deliver excellent browsing experience such as Java Script, Flash and Silverlight. Lots of updates came for HTML and browsers were fighting to be the first to support those especially with HTML 5. With the arrival of Mozilla Firefox, browsers went open source and through community development lots of interesting features were added to the browser. At the same time it opens the opportunity to make the browser cross platform compatible. Today we can install Firefox and Chrome in many operating systems and hardware platforms.

The Battle of browsers didn’t give only the white side. There are some problems that came with this war as well. The major problem is increased browser incompatibility. In other words different browsers interpret the same mark up in different way which is a major problem for web developers and confusion to internet users. This occurred due to proprietary technologies that used to make the interpretation faster by different companies. The problem continues even today.

I always see the Battle of web Browsers as a good thing. It gave lots of good things compared to few drawbacks. In the future the war will continue mainly between Firefox and Chrome. Result will always be beneficial for the users since both browsers come for free anyway.

A surprising number of people don’t sign up for these types of programs. Why? Maybe they feel like it is simply too much work. Those who don’t think the workload is too heavy often think that the free products and coupons aren’t all that great a deal. Others are concerned that their mailboxes, both real and virtual, will start to fill up with nothing but spam. Still more people would sign up if they knew where to start, but aren’t really sure where they should begin.

The reality is that it might not really be worth it to sign up for only one of these programs, but if you sign up for enough of them you will find that your overall expenses will start to drop quite dramatically if they are the types of products that you already use on a regular basis.

Before filling prescriptions at the pharmacy, make sure to check out NeedyMeds.org for coupons. (I’ve personally saved almost $150 in the past year alone!)

By following a few basic principles, you can make the most out of this strategy for saving money on the internet.

1. Start by looking for information sources that reliably provide people with the latest offers. You will most likely find the best results by searching Facebook and other social networks for socially branded websites. Stay away from advertisement-centric sites. It’s important to receive recommendations from blogs, forums, and websites that are authoritative and won’t mislead you.
2. Set up a new and separate email accounts specifically for each programs. (Setting up a new Gmail account is easy!) Why is this important? Spam emails quickly accumulate and this way your personal inbox will stay organized and clutter-free. I recommend setting up a different account for each program you decide to enroll in; however, one email for all of them will suffice.
3. It is a good idea to set up an automatic form filler on your internet browser. This allows you to automatically complete each form so that you don’t have to waste time entering in the same basic information every time you sign up for a new program. It won’t necessarily work every time, but in most cases it will.

Simple, right? You’ll be saving money before you know it if you follow these simple steps! Remember to only sign up for products that you need. It is easy to get ‘sucked in’ to the incredible deals available online. Don’t sign up for everything just because it’s free. Do you really need it? Will you really use it? Be honest with yourself so you don’t go coupon crazy.

All software designers are keens to future-proof their products as much as possible but they all recognize the difficulty of predicting the future.  There are very many possible futures and building in future-proofing can also mean backing the wrong one.  And the costs involved in making the product adaptable, capable of evolution in the market and responsive to changing customer demands, can mean that the product life has to be greatly extended to recoup the investment through sales.

The technical problem is one of abstraction.  How can we separate out those aspects of the product which are likely to change frequently, perhaps in substantial ways in response to customer and market needs, from those which can be kept stable and unchanging during the longer life of the product?

Building software using a framework in which components can be placed to meet changing customer needs is far from a new idea.  Component technology has been around for decades but it has always failed to live up to its promises.  Components inevitably need to interact and the coupling we end up with often compromises those beautifully modular designs.

So even building on a framework is no guarantee of a simple solution to the problem of obsolescence.  The framework itself suffers from obsolescence pressure.  Libraries and collections of components evolve as the problem domains are better understood and the technologies are fine-tuned to be better performing, and there is a significant cost even in maintaining a stable application framework.

And the frameworks themselves also have to undergo changes often in response to the capabilities of new hardware.  Sometimes it is the manufacturers of the frameworks themselves who drive the change. The various incarnations of the .NET platform and the attempts to preserve interoperability with previous generations of code, have led to substantially increased complexity.

By modifying the existing architecture and code, we will meet current customer needs but at the expense of gradually increased complexity.  Despite the good intentions, constant re-factoring of the underlying code is not a commercial reality and so there is an understandable tendency to add rather than substitute.  Interfaces proliferate, additional components appear, supplementary functionality is introduced.

Brian Foote and Josef Joder described (from a suggestion by Brian Marick) such a system as a “big ball of mud” showing how with the best will in the world, constant updates and fixes can obscure an elegant design under layers of coding which eventually make it impossible to repair and develop further.

But there are some strategies which can reduce the risk of a system becoming a big ball of mud.

Evolving Architecture

We might think that a complex piece of software has to have a clear, well-defined design on which the functionality can rest and to a point that is true.  But it is a mistake to think that the architecture is somehow immune from the process of change.

Often no-one knows the correct architecture for a large-scale application until a substantial amount of code is working.  Only when the problem domain is already very well-understood will there be that knowledge of architectures that work, so in many cases it is premature to settle on a fixed architecture in a novel environment.

So architectures will change and the design of the architecture of the initial development should permit that.  High cohesion and low coupling between modules will assist this process.  In the early stages, complexity is the enemy because although highly skilled engineers can create complexity rapidly, they generally do not have time to explain it.

Where the architecture is expected to evolve, it has to be simple enough for this process to be managed.

Layering to Represent Abstraction

Abstraction is used to remove the specific in order to focus more effectively on the general and in software that means hiding more and more specific aspects of the system.  The user interface should not care about the machine’s processor or even ideally, the operating system.

By abstracting the details away from the higher levels of the software, any machine or OS-specific details are insulated from the upper levels of functionality.  This has the significant benefit that changes in user requirements can often be implemented at the higher levels without changing the lower levels.

A layered approach to software development has been common for many years but frequently the demands of performance and usability have required compromises.   The promises of cross-platform development have often been tempered with the real-world needs to gain performance advantage by tapping into the native OS functionality.  True platform independence has still not been reached even with the much-vaunted .NET framework and the Java language.

Hardware-induced Obsolescence

Advances in hardware design such as touch-screen technology, drive changing user expectations.  Users expect to be able to use very different methods for controlling software, and expect it to run in on a variety of devices.  Their paradigms of computer control shift noticeably from year to year so frameworks have to be portable and so must the functionality.

By abstracting the framework on which applications rest from the applications themselves, portability is made easier but this imposes constraints as well on the underlying code.

A framework has been able to call on uniform facilities from the underlying operating system and these will change rapidly with developing technology.  We therefore see a repetition of the same problem: how do we prevent the underlying frameworks from experiencing obsolescence as well?

The layering and abstraction which temporarily solved application software’s problem, is now also essential for the underlying frameworks.

Break Away from the Hardware

With Web 2.0 and the increasing use of cloud computing, we see a separation of the services provided to applications from the platform on which they run.  A small device can run an application making use of the prodigious power of a large collection of other machines, all delivering their services on demand.

Does this mean that the localized, computer application is condemned to obsolescence?  Probably not, because there will always be a need for high performance local applications able to work independently of any connectivity.  But it does mean that the necessarily rapid response to user demands is more likely to come from distributed computing, and the provision of services from remote sources.

The abstraction which led to layering in application architecture has reached the hardware level as well, in what may seem almost like a full circle.  Fifty years ago it was common for a dumb terminal to connect to a mainframe computer which would provide all of the processing power.  Now a simple but reasonably powerful handheld device can connect to an abstract cloud of processing resources.

Obsolescence in software may be kept at bay by the adoption of new ways of delivering functionality, the abstractions not simply being the separation of layers of software, but of lifting them now onto a cloud of disparate platforms in different locations.  Platform independence might yet become a reality.

About The Writer

Henrik Larsson owner of a new application that enables users to install additional Facebook Emoticons writes. Emoinstaller enables users to use additional Facebook chat emoticons.

Background

Tech World

The tech world is the place where geeky people live. They talk about JAVA, Algorithms, SQL etc. They are well capable of producing any kind of business application in any range. They have solid knowledge about information technology applications and their architecture. In most of the cases they are more comfortable with machines than people.

Business World

Business world is where thinkers live. They have great imagination. Talk in simple English. They want to implement a business idea that they have in mind. They are very good with people and know how to control them to implement ideas. In most cases they have only a general knowledge about technology and information system architecture. Therefore, in the case of ICT implementation they won’t be able to express what they really need.

Business Analyst

It’s clear that there is a huge gap between Business World and Tech World. But the collaboration of those two worlds is essential for modern businesses. That’s where Business Analyst come to the picture. He has a solid knowledge about technological applications, at the same time he has a wide knowledge about various Businesses and its requirements. He can identify the problem, specify it and make it visible to both tech world and business world in a common format. Furthermore he can be a bridge between the two worlds to enable active communication and better understanding in order to perform tasks together.

Knowledge

Business or IT Graduate

As The primary requirement the Business Analyst must have a degree in Business or IT. As long as he is going to make a communication bridge between Business world and Tech world it is essential to be an expert in one knowledge area first. If you are planning your carrier as a Business Analyst you can choose your subjects in Degree program accordingly. If you are following ICT program you can choose related Management subjects like ICT Project Management. If you are following a Business degree you can choose related ICT subjects like Management Information Systems.

Business Analysis BOK

Business Analysis Body of Knowledge is the dominant framework introduced to the process of Business Analysis. It contains some knowledge areas which explain the process of Business Analysis.

• Enterprise Analysis: This knowledge area is about how to analyze organizational context, understand its structure, policies and other boundaries for the proposed system.
• Requirement analysis: This knowledge area is about how to capture the exact requirement of the proposed system.
• Solution Assessment and Validation: All the above two knowledge areas would come to this before proceeding to the next step in order to asses and validate the information captured.
• Elicitation: This process will be applicable in all the main knowledge areas and it’s about how to elicitate the requirement correctly.
• Requirement Management and Communication: This knowledge area is about how to manage the captured requirement and maintain active communication.
• Business Analysis Planning and monitoring: In order to carry out the whole process there has to be a plan and monitoring mechanism and this knowledge area is about that.
• Underlying competencies: Analysis process is not always about knowledge. In order to perform that there has to be various competencies possessed by the professional and this knowledge area provides support to improve those.

Modeling Tools and Techniques

In order to make the requirement visible to all the stakeholders there are various representation of requirements. There are number of tools and techniques developed to serve this purpose. Business Analyst must have a good knowledge about those tools and techniques. There are various PC application that are developed to model and specify requirements using above mentioned tools and techniques and business analyst should have good knowledge about those as well.

Skills and Competencies

Interpersonal Skills

The most important skills that a Business Analyst must possess are interpersonal skills. He should be able to get on with anyone from any background. Furthermore he must have the ability to understand the untold Business requirements and make it visible to Business world as well as Tech world.

Communication

Communication is his greatest tool and it has to be very sharp. In order to communicate effectively business analyst must have up-to-date technological and business understanding, otherwise the credibility of information which are communicated will be low. Furthermore communication doesn’t end in speech and documents. To perform an effective analysis process, business analyst should be able to read the body language properly. That will be a great advantage to understand people and give what exactly is fit for them.

Gather Wisdom from Many Sources

Business Analyst will have to deal with various kinds of business professionals. In order to get in to their world and understand what they need, a Business Analyst must have knowledge about that context. This is an active learning process of capturing wisdom from many sources which is highly essential for a successful Business Analyst.

Problem Solving Ability

After the elicitation of requirement the Business Analyst will have to propose a solution supported by a solid logical background. Here, the main task is to identify the main problem and figure out where to get the solution. Then develop active communication between the person who has the problem and who can implement the solution for him. During this process the Business Analyst will have to carry out many tasks simultaneously and he has to be well capable of that.

Pending Problems in Projects

According to the statistics 2008 is the worst year of project completion for decades. The failure rate was 68% and the main reason behind that was poor requirement analysis which is the duty of Business Analyst. Furthermore 45% of the features in developed systems are never used and huge amount of money was wasted to develop those. Due to these facts this is a challenging time for all Business Analysts to focus more on those areas and never let those errors happen again.

Evolution of Business Analyst

Due to the evolving complex business requirement the duty of Business Analyst is becoming even challenging. Most of the modern businesses demand agile development when it comes to Information Systems. In most of the cases the requirement is frequently changing and Business Analyst have to put extra effort to keep the project boundaries within the limits of Cost and Time. In order to become successful in this competitive environment, a Business Analyst will have to be sharp and flexible. Completion of the project mainly would depend on Business Analyst and it’s proven since 50% of the projects failures are due to poor requirement analysis according to statistics.

Current Social Networks

Facebook

Facebook is at the top in when it comes to the popularity of social networks. It’s providing all the common features of any social network including personal profile, multimedia sharing etc. In addition to that Facebook API provides facility to develop 3^rd party application which can share facebook member details. This is the one of critical success factor of the facebook. In addition to that it provides highly performance tuned streamlined interfaces with a chatting module. In past few years facebook was doing so many developments and so many new applications were introduced. It leads facebook to highly sophisticate at the same time highly complex social network. However traffic ranking was continuously increasing for facebook.

Twitter

Compared to other popular social networks Twitter is new. But it gained exponential popularity due to its highly simple functionality. The major feature is members can write a message which contain maximum 140 characters and other member who follow can read it in their main page. In addition to that your message will be added to twitter main time line if your profile is not protected and the entire world can see it. Due to this simple functionality so many user were attracted to twitter and it was showing nearly 300% member base growth in past few years. And it won’t collect your personal data like facebook and other social networks. So there are lesser chances of privacy issues to occur. These days most of the online marketers using Twitter to promote their products and services to large crowd.

Ning

Ning is a special kind of social network concept. It allows its members to create their own social network on Ning platform. And they have made it so user friendly, so any non-technical use and create their own social network within few minutes. They also providing major functionality for the social networks and users can easily configure them by drag and drop development interface. At this moment Ning supports large amount of social networks on their platform. According to Alexa ranking it’s gaining its popularity in a decent rate along with the number of social networks on it.

There are so many other social networks including MySpace, Hi5, Flicker which is specially designed to share images, Orkut which is prowled by Google and LinkedIn.

Features

Networking

The most common feature in any social network is Friends network. It allows you to create your own profile and add your personal data in to that. After that you ne send request to other member, the one who confirm it will become your friends. Your selected private data will be shared with all the members and other may shared with your friends. It provides features to communicate with members through text messages and various other ways. Multimedia sharing is one of the popular features. There you can upload image or video and your friends can

Micro Blogging

This was a pretty old feature in social network. It was there in almost all the social networks including hi5 and Facebook with different names. But Twitter took only that feature and creates a new social network with lead to huge success and popularity. It allows you to write a message with limited length and share it with your friends.

Applications

So many social networks provide API which can be used to develop 3^rd party application which can be interact with it. Facebook is showing major success in there with Facebook API. In the Facebook there is millions of application developed and so many users are addicted to them. In Addition to that Twitter is also providing highly sophisticated API to control Twitter using 3^rd party application. However this has its negative effects, why so many people develop robots to spam and do other harmful things in the social networks using their APIs.

Future Of Social Networks

Privacy And Security

These days’ main concern in all the social networks is Privacy and security. In past few years there was so many incidents reported about the breach of privacy in social networks and sometimes they led to huge disasters as well. If you take a look at those incidents most of the time it about “Not using” provided security and privacy features. Due to that all the social networks providing highly simplified privacy and security controls. More creatively some social networks don’t collect member’s private details as far as they can. In future social networks will provide more sophisticated privacy features and users will be able to control each and every parameter as they want. And the privacy groups will be well defined like they have in Facebook now as Friends, Friends of Friends and Public. In the other hand when you increase privacy it will be difficult to share things freely. In order to solve such a problems social networks will provide clearly defined public data and more comprehensive searching to connect with each other. There may be search which shows a relationship between you and another member who is not your friend in a tree structure like graphical representation, but still you can see his personal details.

Simplicity

Twitter became success it selects only one feature which is micro blogging. At the same time Flicker is a huge success it select only image sharing. This is the future trend in social networking. People need them to be simple and highly user friendly rather than full of complex features. And most of the social networks provide mobile interface where users can control it over the phone or its browser. This further increases the interaction and simplicity of the social networks. In near future there may be dedicated mobile devices which can be used with Social networks.

More Personal Details

With the improvement of the security and simplicity of social networks people will share more and more probate information with them. Even now Google Latitude provides a facility to update your location via mobile phones GPS unit. And social networks already have your email, its password and large part of your personality details. In future if they manage to get your DNA structure online? There won’t be any privacy and it can simply re create you not just with physical features but with personality features as well.

There will be continuous and increasing impact on human civilization by online social networks. They can be positive or possibly negative according to current observation.

• Google Products
  • G Mail
  • Calender
  • Reader
  • Maps
• Yahoo Mail
• Facebook (Partially)

Normally a traditional web 2.0 web site refresh on every dynamic change. But rich internet application never refreshes the whole page. Look G mail, once you go in there, read e mail, compose or edit settings. It refreshes only the necessary section of the web page. So in there user can’t see a “Flicker” on every change on the web page. This is the main goal of creating rich internet applications. Furthermore it utilizes the bandwidth and provides smooth browsing experience to their user. In other words, user doesn’t feel that he is browsing. It acts like normal software installed locally on the PC.

To develop rich internet applications the base line technology is “JAVA Script”. When a JAVA script calls the web server to get some data from the database to update the web page dynamically, we call it AJAX (Asynchronous JAVA Script and XML). Traditional web 2.0 web page is “Synchronous” means it waits till the server response comes and can make only one response at a time. In AJAX its “Asynchronous” means only a part of the web site wait till the server response comes and many server response can be made at the same time. Whole page never waits till a server response comes. (Never refresh as whole). To make the developers life even easier there are some AJAX frameworks.

• GWT – Google web Toolkit
• Adoby Flex
• IceFaces

Using above framework the developer can make the web site is a agile manner. If someone chooses to write AJAX come manually, it will take very long time though he has the total ultimate control. The above mentioned frameworks provide IDE integration with “Drag and Drop” tools which saves lots of time.

This trend is walking toward a new era of software development. In near future there won’t be setup.exes. Instead of that there will be online software, like G mail for all the day to day needs. Furthermore this will end (almost) software piracy. All the users who need to use the software must pay the subscription fee. No installation, no cracks. And I think current speed of internet is good enough to run rich internet application. But the reliability should be improved. The last thing I need to see is, I can’t type a document because there is no internet. Smart developers will come up with smart solutions for this as well. There are already some offline versions for some Rich internet application which solve the problem up to some level. Let’s look forward.