The big three social networking sites (Facebook, Bebo and Myspace) are seeing their page views decline during the last months. It seems to be a general trend, people is also stopping logging. The read/write web is becoming much more "read" and less "write".

The comments from this article in theregister make clear that the main problem with social networks is spam.

Some interesting comments to think about:

"Let's face it, keeping your myspace/facebook/blog/whuteva up to date takes time and effort".

"Static sites, laziness, privacy - add it all up. That's why these sites will eventually lapse into obscurity."

"Facebook should not be a spamming tool. Unfortunately, most apps are an excuse to spam, and lead in to commercial services."

"Ask yourself this: how many of your friends had a blog two years ago? How many of them are actively maintaining them now?"

"It's the same with all these things. They start of as brilliant ideas, they catch on and all of a sudden the big corporations come sniffing round. At that point the innovators sell out, the sites become bloated and ad-ridden, and the users turn tail."


Have social networks and the whole "Web 2.0" passed the hype phase?

Mozilla has released the first prototypes of a Mobile Firefox seeking feedback about the UI. It will work for Windows Mobile and Linux. It has not an official name and it will probably be released after Firefox 3.0.

It is not the first try of porting Firefox to mobile devices. The most serious one was Minimo, mainly because it was backed by Nokia. The project was abandoned after the release of version 0.2, probably because Nokia lost interest on the project.

This beta version supports multi-tab, content zooming and features a virtual cursor to navigate through the controls and links within a web page. It also supports touch screens.




I find it really interesting because Mozilla based browsers are the only ones supporting Http-Push or Comet. We tested Minimo for some internal projects and Http-Push applications worked really well with mobile connections.

This week, Google has released the first version of the Android SDK, which is the software framework behind the so-called Google Phone.

This SDK is essentially a Linux-based platform to develop mobile applications in Linux O.S. It is a complete stack to build a smartphone supporting features such as speech recognition, 3D graphics, video codecs, Midi sequencer, etc... It also contains a complete web browser based on WebKit. Google claims that the entire infrastructure will be released with an Open Source license.

The SDK contains a Java API, support for XML-based User Interface definition and a battery of tools to work with the platform: an emulator, an Eclipse plug-in, the bytecode translator (see below), debug tools, SQL Lite, trace tools, etc... So, although the Android phone won't be released until the next year, it is possible to start playing with the platform right now! Furthermore, Google is expecting a lot of comments from the mobile developer's community to improve the framework in the next releases.



As a core piece of Android, there exists the Dalvik Virtual Machine. It will allow developers to build applications using Java and XML to define some UI components. It is basically a Java based framework but Dalvik don't execute Java bytecode but a new standard called Dalvik bytecode.

It is possible to build an entire application in Java/XML with Eclipse, compile it into Java bytecode and convert it to Dalvik bytecode by using a dedicate tool included in the SDK. This release includes many but not all the Java standard libraries. So, in summary, it is a new Java based Virtual Machine outside the Java standard (.. history reminds us how others were hardly blamed for creating their own standards in the past ... ).

I think there are three reasons for Google and the Mobile Handset Alliance going outside the Java standard:

• Support advanced features such as the ability of executing many instances of the Virtual Machine.
• Develop hooks to interact with the mobile hardware.
• Develop the above features outside the JCP, far from the Sun's veto power.

In fact, many are expecting an IP-related battle between Sun and Google after the release of the platform.

I think it is an error. I will not discuss the particularity of the mobile networks in the United States that is probably behind the decision of not including support for 3G; but thinking in a mobile device for European countries, with a lot of rich web applications integrated, just operating over slow GPRS connections seems a joke to me.

iPhone includes also WiFi support but I don’t consider it as a mobile network connection but a “fixed” network connection. You can only use a WiFi connection when you are very close (few meters) to a WiFi hotspot. It doesn’t provide mobility. Mobility is about moving your connection session when you enter a new cell in a transparent way. Mobility is about using Google Maps directions driving a car inside a not well-known city, making dozens of cell handovers.

GPRS is good enough to read e-mail or to perform small web searchs, but not to download large multimedia files or watching TV. Furthermore, the iPhone is a closed platfom where a web framework, based on Widgets, HTML, JavaScript and AJAX, is the only way of developing applications. It seems a first class web framework with Safari, the best existing mobile browser, but with a second class network connectivity.

As probably everybody knows, Apple is holding conversations with several European mobile operators to introduce the iPhone in Europe. During the last days several news related to these conversations have appeared in the European press.

The most important points leaked from these conversations are:

• iPhone will be first introduced in France, Germany and UK
• It will operate over GPRS, no 3G version planned
• First iPhones will come to Europe this autumn
• It will arrive to other European countries in 2008
• Commercialisation in Asia will start in 2009
• Apple is negotiating with T-Mobile, Orange, O2 and Vodafone
• There are not closed agreements but conversations are in an advanced stage.

According to these news coming from a source next to the negotiations (being Gartner one of them), Apple is trying to make operators grant a certain volume of sold iPhones and they are negotiating the possibility of subsidize the iPhone to reduce the price for the final user. It seems that Apple will close an exclusivity contract with an operator in each country.