Social Networked Mobile App Store: Emerging Trend

They say last decade belonged to “e” and this decade is going to belong to “m”. No wonder, as mobile is the personal device almost everyone possesses now a days. The word “m” has amazing potential to change the world and there is little doubt that it is going impact our life more and more in coming future.

In the “e” decade, Social Networks emerged as the hot trends. Social Networks like Facebook, and Twitter grown like everything. These are the places people started visiting regularly. Even e-mails are left behind by the social networks in terms of usage.

Then came "m" decade. With the emergence of Mobile Phones, another concept emerged called “App Store”. Apple’s iPhone lead the show with one single place to download and purchase applications. It simplified download and purchase process. Then there came more App Stores like Google’s Android store and Nokia’s OVI store.

I see an interesting trend will emerge in future. I will call it Social Networked App Store (or Just "Social Store"). App Stores are the places all mobile users are already visiting frequently now a days. In future, these App Stores will expand to full flagged Social Networks. Or in a simple language Social Networks and App Stores will converge to each other.

App Stores have many advantages over current social networks (or at least  can fulfill the gaps) like Facebook as follows –

1. They have integrated payment system. We know that Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter are still in search of a right revenue model. They are struggling in making money. This gap can be easily fulfilled by the App Stores in the form of integrated billing and one click payment.
2. Mobile Phones already have friends list with them in the form of phone address book. Friend’s list is one of the key element of a social network. Future Social Stores will start utilizing this contact information and start building the networks.

Power of integrated billing and access to friend-list makes App Store future of Social Networks. Either the current social networks will have to converge to App Stores or there will be emergence of new kind of Social Networks in future which I call "Social Stores".

What is your opinion? Do you see anything like Social Stores emerging in future?

AJAX Black Book – A Quick Review

While searching information on a specific topic today, I got my hands on a book that I purchased some time back. I generally buy a lot of books, but this book somehow I didn't read earlier. Name of the book is “AJAX Black Book”. Book is published by “Dreamtech Press” and author(s) name is not mentioned. TOC tells us that the book covers following topics –

AJAX, XMLHttpRequest, JavaScript, AJAX Frameworks (jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, DWR, Yahoo UI Library, Google Web Toolkit), Maps in AJAX (Google Maps, Yahoo Maps), ASP.NET and AJAX, PHP and AJAX, AJAX with JSF, AJAX with Struts, JSON in AJAX, AJAX Patterns, Consuming Web Services in AJAX, Securing AJAX Applications, Debugging the AJAX Application, Comet, Ruby on Rails etc.

Impressive, isn’t it? Or just look like a huge list of buzzwords? For me, I feel disappointed after going through the book. First of all, I don’t know why I bought this book. A book covering so many topics can not detail on the topic. Most of the time basic information is well covered by the product websites itself and you do not need any book for first level of information.

Moreover, author(s) names are missing. No good author will allow published to publishing their work without giving them credit. This is generally the first criteria for me while buying the book and that is the reason I wonder why I bought this book at very first place. I like the way Wrox/ Wiley published photograph on the book author on the front page of the book itself.

The book is not worth the money. None of topics are given enough details so that a reader can develop enough confidence. Expected user level is mentioned as “Intermediate to Advanced” on book but the detail is not enough for a school student.

There is no highlighting for important points. Summary of the important points is also missing. Examples are missing altogether. Looks more like a book on “History” or “Geography” than “development” to me. All in all, I would not recommend spending your money on this book. With so many good books available on this topic, you should definitely stay away from this book. I also learnt a lesson that we should be careful while purchasing books by “Dreamtech Press.” I guess “Dreamtech Press” books are available only in India.

You can read limited preview on Google Books.

  

eXo raises $6M to strengthen US Market

eXo Platform, the company being eXo Portal and eXo CMS, has brought in $6 million in a first round of funding. As per the press release, the objective is to strengthen sales and marketing in US.

eXo already has a strong-presence in France, and with this eXo is all set for US.

Congrats Benjamin. Should I say beware Liferay? ;-)

ColdFusion supports JSR 168/ JSR 286 now

Today Adobe annouced ColdFusion 9. I worked on ColdFusion long back and I am sure that it has changed a lot since then. I have not used Coldfusion for a long time now, but what caught my attention today is the support for JSR 168 and JSR 286 portlet standards.

Support for JSR 168/ JSR 286 in Coldfusion means that Coldfusion users can use readily available portlets like SyncEx with Coldfusion. It gives Coldfusion users more pluggable components as well as give portlet vendors like SyncEx a little more market :-)

eXo Portal Merges into JBoss Community

Just now heard that eXo Platform merged portal software development into JBoss Community. I am watching open source portals for a long time and here is my understanding of what it means to everybody -

What it means to eXo
- eXo will be able to expand in USA where it was struggling for a long time

What it means to JBoss
- In absence of any real apps, JBoss Portal was more of a portlet container rather than a full flegged portal. JBoss suited as a middleware platform, but really lacked features (portlets/ apps) required for a portal. By this partnership JBoss will be able to get CMS, Groupware and couple of other applications that will make it competitive in open source portal market.

What it means to eXo-JBoss
- eXo-JBoss will be able to compete Sun-Liferay that was gaining market-share day by day.

What is means to everyone
- Open source portal market will become more competitive and hence we will se better open source portals in future.

I want to congratulate Benjamin, Julien and everybody involve in this partnerhip. Way to go.

Here is the press release for more information -
Partnership announcement press release