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Google has announced that there are over 1 million users for the education version of Google Apps. this doesn’t surprise me at all, as Google is offering very low per seat pricing on these contracts.

It’s always been difficult for universities to manage their email and messaging systems. Email is the lowest common denominator for Internet users, which is one reason why phishers, scammers and crackers target email users. Everyone on the Internet has at least one email account.

University users have adopted social media en masse as an alternative to email. But that doesn’t mean that email is not important. It’s still mission critical for universities.

See this announcement, Back to school with over 1 million users worldwide, for a list of universities and schools that are adopting Google’s enterprise cloud computing solutions.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• 9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
• 12 May 2008: Software and services - free or paid?
• 22 April 2008: It’s 2008 and email is still broken
• 11 April 2007: Google wants to hear about your university email service
• 23 February 2007: Google Apps vs Microsoft Office
• 7 December 2006: Spam is back with a vengeance
• 22 August 2006: 95 percent of all e-mail is UCE
• 4 August 2004: E-mail is broken

From Business Week: large companies, startups and individuals have been developing and launching widgets over the last few years. Widgets are small software applications that run inside a specific environment.

Yesterday I discussed a specific example – PicLens, a web browser extension for image viewing. Back on 9 January 2008, I mentioned Zotero, a Firefox extension that helps students and academic researchers organize their literature searches. CEO Lawrence Coburn of RateItAll has an extensive blog with reviews and comments about widgets, including this article about Google’s Facebook application.

Widgets are not new. Om Malik mentioned them in September 2006 in this article on Business 2.0.

Widgets a small applications that are run and installed on the client – the computer desktop, a web browser, or another application. A widget pulls specific data from servers on the Internet, or the cloud as it is usually called in the industry. Settings are usually based on the user’s preferences. My Mac dashboard includes time and temperature widgets, a calendar, an RSS widget that displays my blog posts, and an NHL scoreboard with the latest games.

Widgets can also be deployed on an intranet or extranet, but there are additional security concerns that have to be addressed, including logins and permissions.

Mac users got their first taste of widgets in 2005, when Dashboard was first included in Mac OS X. Yahoo soon followed with its own widgets for Windows users. Windows Vista and Google each have their own gadgets. Of course, most these widgets won’t work on another system.

Facebook added support for third-party applications last year, as I noted on 28 May 2007. As i mentioned on 19 February 2008, I usually ignore invites that I receive for Facebook applications. I’m never quite sure who can see my data, profile or status, even when Facebook lets me set these preferences.

Where’s the value?

As a flood of widgets, extensions, appls and other software comes to market, it’s important to ask about the value of these features. In many cases, these are little more than features or mini-sites that get embedded into the web browser or the computer desktop. The vast majority of current widget developers are writing code for their own use. Some developers post their widgets and share them with other users.

It’s rare for a company like Slide to emerge. As I discussed on 28 January 2008, Slide recently received US$50 million in venture capital, based on the company’s successful line of Facebook applications. It’s a risky business, as Slide and other Facebook app developers are almost totally dependent upon the success of the main Facebook site itself.

So any developer who depends upon widgets for their business revenue has to diversify. Costs increase as the same widgets are duplicated for multiple platforms, because revising and recompiling each widget requires some duplication of effort for each specific operating system or web site. MySpace will soon offer widget support, and various interoperability and user privacy schemes have been proposed that may let widgets work on multiple social networking sites. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has its own proposal, as mentioned by Lorelle back in November 2006. David Berkowitz has a Widget Standards wiki.
These two issues are holding back user adoption of these tools on social networking sites. Business Week’s recent revision of its social media article is a great place to turn for more information, as I mentioned on 25 February 2008.

I rarely see the New York Times mention a Firefox extension, but it happened Sunday. John Markoff wrote an article about PicLens, a browser plugin developed by CoolIris. Browser extensions are small programs, written by third-party developers, that add or extend features in the web browser. Developers use an application programming interface (API) that includes hooks or connections to various browser features. Firefox has the broadest range of extensions available, but Safari and Internet Explorer each support their own families of extensions.

PicLens lets a web site take over the entire computer screen, displaying a seamless interactive slideshow of images from a specific web site. The user interface is minimal, and tucked away on the edges of the screen. Users move around the screen with the direction keys, or by grabbing and throwing the display with the mouse. Click or highlight a photo, and it zooms to full screen.

The experience resembles the CoverFlow interface on the iPod Touch, iPhone and the new Mac operating system, Leopard. The web version is as fast as any disk-based image viewing program I’ve used, and its a fine demonstration of how user interfaces are already changing.

“I’ve wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn’t changed from 20 years ago,” said Austin Shoemaker, a former Apple Computer software engineer and now chief technology officer of Cooliris. “People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind.”

Extension software is an important part of these changes. Users can customize their computer by adding highly specific features. The original browser software is still available, but the user experience becomes more personal and possibly more productive.

The PicLens browser plugin works with a small set of web sites: Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Yahoo, Friendster, and a few others. Web publishers have to add code to their site that lets PicLens download a gallery of images. Blog and site publishers can add a server-side package to enable PicLens support on their web sites. WeSeePeople has an excellent discussion of how users might benefit from the extension.

PicLens has a demonstration site that uses WordPress, the same software that powers my blog. I am experimenting with PicLens as a PowerPoint slide viewer, but I haven’t posted any demos to my blog yet. PicLens doesn’t support audio or text notes, which are two helpful PowerPoint features.

Tomorrow, I’ll post a broader discussion of widgets, the general family of software that includes extensions.

Download and install PicLens for free for the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer
• Safari
• Firefox (also see the Firefox extension library)

From the New York Times comes a quick article about competitive forces in the mobile phone industry. The level of competition is very high, timelines can be long, and there is little margin for error.

The decisions that are being made now will affect mobile phone design, of course. The telecoms then have to sort through competing standards and schemes to create valuable calling plans and packages.

What operating systems will end up on handsets? Google is developing Android. Microsoft has Windows Mobile. Apple has adapted OS X for its mobile phones. Many mobile phones run Java.

As I mentioned on 20 February 2008, Symbian has more users than any of these competitors combined.

What features and file formats will be supported? Users want music and video, and web applications. Companies want enterprise applications, built-in security, and cost management features.

At a higher level, what systems will be used to serve, store and send data from the Internet to mobile phones? Users and companies want to work with current, relevant data. But local data storage is limited on small devices. Storing data on the Internet provides automatic backup and retention.
Java and Flash are battling at the network level, while Microsoft deploys Silverlight. Google is adapting its Gears API to support mobile phones, while Android will support cloud computing from day one.

From the New York Times, here’s a report about the booming gray market for iPhones in China. iPhones are manufactured in Taiwan, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apple doesn’t sell the iPhone in Taiwan or in Communist China because no Chinese telecom operator will meet Apple’s demands. So there’s not legal way to buy an iPhone in Taiwan or China.

No carrier? No support? No problem.

It’s relatively easy to unlock an iPhone and use it with on a GSM network. Third-party software is available to localize the screens and provide missing features. When Apple updates the iPhone’s firmware, these unlocks tend to break. This article from Business Week mentions that Prague is a major center for iPhone hacking.
But someone who is using an iPhone in China may not care that much about these new features. As more iPhones enter the gray market, more programmers join the effort to jailbreak the device.

This makes me wonder what might have happened if Apple sold unlocked GSM iPhones online and in its retail stores, and told AT&T, T-Mobile and every other GSM carrier in the world to just deal with it. The customer service problems might be significant, which explains why Apple has decided not to break the rules… yet.

I also wonder how many iPhones have been purchased in Honolulu and then shipped outside the United States.

Silicon Hutong predicted over a year ago that Apple would wait to introduce the iPhone in China. Looks like he was right!

See my earlier posts about the iPhone:

• 31 January 2008: Applications are coming for the iPhone
• 26 January 2008: iPhone helps AT&T add more wireless customers
• 13 January 2008: The story of the iPhone
• 20 November 2007: An iPhone for China?
• 14 November 2007: No iPhone for you, China