Weekly Review - Exciting or Worrying?

Reviewing two weeks' news disclosed a mixture of the exciting and the worrying.





Firstly the exciting

1. "Try before you buy" on Apple apps for iPhones and iPads
2. Twitter has reached 20 billion tweets (so it's not just me!). There's also the first tentative steps to monetization with sponsored tweets
3. Better support for micropayments using PayPal
4. With Facebook intended for those aged13+, there's a new social networking site for younger kids called ScuttlePad.
5. Hotmail has had a major facelift
6. Browsers IE, Firefox and Google Chrime are all expected to have major new releases shortly in beta mode (pre-release testing mode)
   

Then there's the worrying

Both these issues affect software developers:

1. Facebook has just announced it is removing the "boxes" feature for third party applications from Monday 23 August - hardly what I'd call notice! [See subsequent article]
2. Google has canned the Wave application after just a year, even after adoption by the likes of SAP, salesforce.com and Novell. Fortunately the core components will remain available as open source

When the likes of Micorosft have also pulled the plug on functionality with little notice, such as losing forecasting when PerformancePoint was rolled into SharePoint in 2009, the issue is affecting both paid-for and free software.

Developers and users need to be beware of trusting anyone, and need to avoid over-reliance on anything. But that's not practical!

Both Exciting and Worrying [subsequent update]

Facebook has announced, without warning, that users now have access to location-based services. These attempt to catch up on the new upstart, FourSquare, by letting users "Check-in" to events, pubs, restaurants, shops etc and commenting about them.

For individuals it's potentially a great new tool. But there are new privacy issues that need urgent attention!

For local businesses it's potentially a great marketing tool, be they national chains or privately owned. But a whole new ball game dealing with real or spurious complaints!

See the section in the Facebook changes article.

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