Web 2.5 Application Ideas

Yesterday I posted over on Marketspace Advisor on the recent Edgeio launch.  I suggested this was an example of an application that reflected some of the principles of Structured Collaboration that I described in an earlier post.  This got me thinking about other ideas for "Web 2.5" applications, which I think of as Web 2.0 apps that apply Structured Collaboration thinking.

This morning on the drive in I listened to an IT Conversations podcast of an interview of Lisa Dusseault by Scott Mace at ApacheCon.  Lisa works on calendaring applications and standards at OSAF.  I had several impressions.  First, Lisa is very smart.  Second, she is working on a very tough problem, for which previous mooted solutions (iCal) have collapsed of their own weight. 

It's occurred to me that calendaring is an excellent example of a Structured Collaboration challenge.  Information about who will do what, when, and where, is a valuable thing for people to share.  People are more likely to share (publish and consume) this information in groups defined by affinity -- organizations, businesses, families.  And, the easier it is to share this information -- via a calendar, as opposed to via text messages -- the more sharing will happen.

A while back I posted on an RSS extension called the Event Share Framework, or ESF.  ESF is a simple, XML-based way of aggregating and syndicating calendar information.  I thought it was really cool, with some potentially interesting business ideas I described in my post, but it hasn't taken off as far as I can tell.

Now, having seen Edgeio, I got to thinking:  if a "listing" tag for a blog post enables a service like Edgeio to parse posts for items for sale, why couldn't and "event" tag be used to parse posts for calendar events?  And then, if a service like Edgeio can come up with a clean, clever interface to help people find listings, why couldn't someone do the same for a problem in which the canonical interface (day, week, month, year calendar views) already exists?  And, if a tool like Newsgator can sit in my Outlook client and aggregate blog posts, and a tool like Anagram can help me parse events out of text messages so I can post them to my Outlook calendar, why couldn't a hybrid of those two consume an RSS feed from an Edgeio-like service and get it into my Outlook calendar?

Like all the big ideas I have, this one's been thought of before.  See, for example, http://eventful.com/.  Any others?

Comments

[Chandan Maruthi]

Web2.0 is all about collective participation.

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here-> http://chandanscorner.blogspot.com