Mozilla is currently taking suggestions for features to include in Firefox 3 (and all future versions) in a public wiki. It’s already packed with suggestions, some really good, and some not so. There are lots of different categories, from chrome to bookmark management, but one of the big themes running through the categories is a desire for UI improvement. My view of the Firefox UI is that it is very functional, more so than IE6 or IE7, but that it displays little original innovation, unlike other areas of Firefox. An innovation of the scale of the Ribbon in Office 2007 (but certainly not a copy of it) would help take Firefox to the next level.

This wiki is a great example of why Firefox continues to be better than its rivals; the size of the discussion means that there will be some great ideas put forward, and by opening it to everyone it avoids the typical open source problem of ‘designed by developers, for developers’. Yet again, well done Mozilla!

[via Ars Technica]

The Official Google Blog has news that both of the YouTube music deals (Warner and Sony BMG) have now also been signed for Google Video.

This means that not only will music videos from Warner and Sony BMG be viewable (ad-supported but for free) on YouTube, but the recent Google acquisition means that they have acquired the benefits of these deals.

There’s not much to say about this, but it interesting that Google are certainly not finished with Google Video yet and they are still marketing it as an alternative video service to YouTube.

BusinessWeek has an article where Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer speaks out about, among other things, the recent Google-YouTube acquisition.

He is quite critical of Google’s decision, stating that it was a bad move, because apparently YouTube hasn’t got a viable business model.

Is there a business model? Right now, there’s no business model for YouTube that would justify $1.6 billion. And what about the rights holders? At the end of the day, a lot of the content that’s up there is owned by somebody else.

But he goes on to make an interesting point which, if true, could well affect all the acquisition rumours (with $1bn+ price tags) that fly around everywhere.

Look, there are only [a few] buyers who can buy anything over a billion dollars in this space. There’s us [Microsoft]. There’s eBay. There’s Yahoo. And there’s Google. I don’t think there’s anybody else. Even Amazon has a market cap of only $13 billion. I don’t think they’re going to do too many $1 billion deals. So you’ve got maybe four guys who will buy in that range. And there’s the public market.

It’s quite an interesting interview to read through, and while I most definitely don’t agree with most of the things Ballmer says, he raises some interesting points.

This is a big day for online office today, with the Office 2.0 conference getting underway. To coincide with the conference, two companies have decided to unveil new offerings, Zoho and Google.

Zoho Virtual Office

Zoho is launching later today with ZohoX, an online office suite which integrates many of their current services into one online application. I’m a big fan of Zoho, and have been constantly impressed by the speed at which they bring innovative, useful programs to market. According to Techcrunch , ZohoX will also have webmail and calendaring software and will cost nothing for individual users and $9 per user for SMBs, a group which Zoho sees as their core market (hence the name ‘Zoho’, derived from SoHo’). I can’t get into the service at the moment, but hope to be able to do a review later today.

In other Zoho news, the excellent Zoho Projects is out of beta. We use projects to plan PodDev, and whilst it is not perfect I think it is better than the competition and is a very strong product.

Google Docs

This news is less significant, but Google have combined Writely and Spreadsheets to produce Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I am writing this post from it now Blog posting doesn’t work, but hey, its beta! It’s got a a simple interface with joint management for both documents and spreadsheet. This marks the final transition of Writely to Google, and is certainly the right approach for Google. They aren’t making the mistake that Zoho made by not integrating early. Integration is important because it encourages people to use all your products and makes it easy to have central management, something that people have come to expect with desktop office apps. The only negative point I can see thus far is that it is a lag when typing in, which they will need to fix.

The rumours were true; Google has indeed bought YouTube in an all stock deal worth $1.65. Whether this is a good idea will remain to be seen, but we discussed the various pros and cons of the deal in PodDev. Other details of the deal are:

• YouTube will retain its branding. This is a no-brainer; Google Video is no comparison to the YouTube brand.
• YouTube employees will remain at their current headquarters. This suggests that YouTube will be operating fairly independently from the rest of Google. I think this also makes sense, because YouTube is clearly doing well. Google can provide money and expertise to solve the ‘copyright problem’, without interfering with the day to day running.
• Google Video is ‘going nowhere’, according to Eric Schmidt, as reported by Arrington.
• Google says it wants to share revenues with those who provide videos to the site, a la Revver. This was reported on the 10 O’clock news on the BBC.

Interestingly, the first I heard of the news was from the BBC 10 O’Clock News - yet another example of the BBC embracing new media, and proof that there is no reason that old media can’t be fast off the blocks. I got details from lots of other places, obviously, like Techcrunch and YouMakeMedia. The official Google press release is here.

bbPress is a project to build a new forum/discussion board software system. It’s made by the same people who built WordPress (quick disclaimer: both Gizbuzz and my personal blog run on WordPress) and its aims are stated (from the offical site) as:

1. Open Source, always and forever
2. Less (code) is more
3. Simplicity is a feature
4. Speed and security are the foundation of any good user experience
5. Put the user first

Now while they haven’t made an official release yet, and the software still is very much in an alpha-quality state, I thought it would be worth taking bbPress for a spin and giving a quick Gizbuzz review.

Just for reference - this review is of the nightly build version for 09/10/2006. All the nightly builds are freely downloadable here.

(more…)

Yesterday we recorded the third episode of PodDev, and I think its a great show.

The highlight of the show was an interview we did with Josh Jones, head honcho over at Dreamhost, one of the most popular webhosts on the internet which has recently announced an exciting and innovative new service. Listen to find out what it was:

We also talked about:

• - PayPerPost - what exactly is wrong with it? Is accepting money for a post on your blog always wrong, or is it OK if it is fully disclosed and no editorial responsibility is claimed? It’s an interesting debate, and one that I think the blogosphere needs to have.
• - The Google/YouTube acquisition; would it be good for Google and YouTube, and what would Google do with it once it had bought it? Would it rebrand it as Google Video, and if not, what would they do with it?
• - I talk a bit about why to offer RSS on sites other than a blog, and knock down some of the arguments like ‘loss of pageviews’, and share some secrets about how to get the most out of a feedreader.

PodDev needs some more listeners, so go spread the word; blog it, tell your friends about it, subscribe to it. While you’re at it, tell them about the Gizbuzz Podcast as well, which with any luck be recording its next episode really soon.

Ken Fisher has posted an article at Ars Technica which is quite a backlash at a previous blog post by James Gaskin of ITworld.com.

The original post made some quite strong claims that Vista would “cost between $3,250 and $5,000″ for each user that upgraded. These numbers do seem quite abnormally high and the Ars Technica article called the ITworld post “so deeply flawed and sensationalistic that I’m reticent to even address it”.

What this throws up is that while the figures in the ITworld article are quite high, I thought it was still worth pointing out that the Vista upgrade will cost businesses quite a lot. But it will probably take quite a while for businesses to actually make the move.

Businesses don’t like upgrading, because, as I mentioned, it’s expensive, it’s a long process and they don’t like upgrading to new software before it’s been fully tested. Certainly over here in the UK, most businesses and organisations have only quite recently made the move to Windows XP.

My point here is that it’s going to be very difficult to make accurate estimates about the cost of moving, because by the time most businesses consider doing it, hardware will likely have been replaced and we can’t really guess about the costs yet.

We won’t really know the impact of Vista in the enterprise sector for a few years yet, so there’s not much point in guessing at it.

TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube are in talks with Google over a potential acquisition by Google of the video sharing site.

There are rumours flying around everywhere and apparenty the asking price is somewhere in the region of $1.6 billion.

I think there’s a fairly good chance that this might actually go through and that we’ll end up with a Google YouTube. But in that case, what will happen with Google Video? We could well end up with a hybrid YouTube/Google Video, or one could merge into the other.

Personally I’d prefer to see Google Video merged into YouTube if that were to happen and I think that is more likely. The YouTube brand is very strong and Google would be making a mistake to simply axe it and merge everything with Google Video.

Another issue here if the acquisition does go through is what Google will do with the sign in process. No doubt they will want to integrate YouTube with Google Accounts and the login system that provides, but that will take quite a long time and it will be interesting to see how they handle this.

Of course, nothing’s final yet and you’ll hear about it if this does go through.

Google have released Code Search, a search service specifically targeted at developers searching for source code.

The reason this has come about is that standard Google Search won’t search for the special characters used in a lot of programming languages (for example, curly brackets { and } which are heavily used in C, C++, C#, PHP, Java etc.). This means that a search query for something within programming will be searched for with the special symbols stripped out, and the programmer ends up with completely irrelavant content.

Code Search attemps to alleviate this problem by not only allowing support for these characters, but also offering regular expression support (a kind of geeky advanced search thing), sorting and filtering by licence and the software the code is for.

Google are putting an emphasis on using this for finding open source code, but there is certainly a potential for accidentally (or otherwise) leaked proprietary code and Google may well find itself in hot water if this does happen. The potential issue is that once some code that shouldn’t be there enters Google’s index, it is very difficult to get it out again.

While this doesn’t have much use for people that aren’t into coding, it certainly has a value for finding that code snippet you need or if like me, you constantly forget how to do something in a particular language and need to search to remind yourself. Programmers, enjoy.