I recently read the book, “33 Million People in the Room” by Juliette Powell. The subtitle inspired me to get rich quick: “How to Create, Influence, and Run a Successful Business with Social Networking.” Sounds good, huh? I read this 154-page book, with wide margins and large type, in about two hours. I probably would have read it quicker if I didn’t stop to reply to email.

The book provides several case studies of those who used social network sites to increase sales, boost awareness, and to become micro-celebrities. As a developer, it should inspire you to create the next great application, and then promote it shamelessly on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Orkut, hi5, and a few others. If you’ve never joined a social networking site, and you have no idea how they work, this book might serve as a good starting point.

The basic premise of the book, just like any other book directed to entrepreneurs, is to come up with a business idea that you’re genuinely interested in, put your own unique spin on it, and then market it and sell it. Simple, isn’t it? Why don’t we all do it? Because like all get-rich-quick schemes, it’s not that easy, but here are some quick pointers to get you started:

• Place yourself in the center of your network to gain the most amount of information. The more information you have, the better decisions you can make.
• Get out there as much as you can. Attend meetings and conferences, while you’re there, take photos of yourself with influential people. Later, upload the photos and tag yourself.
• If content is King, then distribution is Queen. Learn how business development works and how to market your application; doing this provides aces in the hole.
• The book recommends providing free favors to people who can pay you back twice as much later.

This last point flies directly in the face of everything I’ve ever learned. If you give your applications away for free, then people will expect free applications in the future. The only time I see giving away something for free as a good thing, is if you’re giving away an iPhone application with embedded advertising. In that case, you’ll probably make a lot of money; especially if your free app shows up on social networking sites.

Game developers take note: the future of video games is all about casual, social games that women and grandparents like to play; think Facebook and the Wii. Hardcore games like Grand Theft Auto will still have a place in the industry; they will just move into a dark corner. So said Bernie Stolar, aka the “King of Content,” during a Keynote interview at a Microsoft-hosted event in Mt. View, CA last week during which a who’s who of the industry discussed the future of video game development.

Why should you believe Stolar? Because his impact in the video game industry is deep and far-reaching. His credentials include former Game Evangelist at Google, former CEO at Mattel Interactive, former President and COO of SEGA, and EVP at Sony for the launch of the Playstation. During the Keynote interview (with some big names—Activision/Blizzard, THQ, and Electronic Arts—in attendance), Bernie carved the headstone for the anticipated death of the hardcore game and couldn’t say enough about the future of casual gaming.

To secure a place in the future of game development, you need to make the games fun and ignore gender and age limitations. Social gaming has broadened the demographics away from the 18 to 35-year-old male. Game demographics are now 50 percent women in their late 30’s and 40’s and that does not include grandparents and grandchildren who are playing video games. This new game demographic are playing games on Facebook and bowling on the Wii (Reuters is reporting that 800,000 Wii’s were sold over the Thanksgiving weekend).

Facebook is now a viable gaming platform, as are all social networks. If a developer creates a multi-player (MP) Facebook game that connects to the iPhone, that game is almost guaranteed success. Take golf as an example of an iPhone/Facebook/MP game. For the game to work, players use the accelerometer on their iPhones to swing their clubs, they see their actions through Facebook, and they compete against other players online. Mobile games are going multi-player as well; if you develop it, they will come.

If developing mobile games isn’t your forte, then the future for you most likely includes Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), social communities, and cloud computing. In terms of developing games for the cloud, you need to remove the computing from the client and put it on the server, which allows for a much larger-scale community, easier updates, and simplified creation of new environments. Cloud gaming reduces retail and packaging costs, increases the life span of a game through easy updates, and allows for micro transactions.

Anne-Marie Roussel, Microsoft's Director of Strategic and Emerging Business, presented MS’s vision for the future of video games during the conference. Roussel mentioned that the third version of XNA is now available to the community and is geared towards developing games with a social community. She expressed the need to democratize video game development and the importance of nurturing a creative community. Microsoft boasts 12 million subscribers to its Xbox Live services, which they will continue to grow (think of Xbox Live growing from one station to a multitude of stations; just like how TV channels evolved).

Video gaming is a $30-37 billion business, and it’s not going away anytime soon. In the future, more and more independent game startups are likely to emerge, which is a great way for the big publishers to find new talent.

Developers, it’s time to get your social game on.

Social networking is about to take a new turn in the coming months. Yahoo! is in the process of releasing its Open Strategy with the goal of connecting more people in more ways than ever before.

There are more social networking sites on the web than any one person could use or keep up with. There’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, not to mention Netflix, eBay, or other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, or Reddit, and that doesn’t even cover the various mail and address book services like Gmail, MSN, and Yahoo.

On the surface, Facebook and eBay do not appear to have anything in common, but they do: they both involve social activity on the web. But there’s nothing linking them together. If you want to tell your wife you outbid the competition for a brand new football-shaped lamp for the bedroom, you can’t tell her through eBay, you have to switch to your email and copy and paste links. Or let’s say you read about a movie you think your mom might enjoy. You can’t contact her directly through Netflix to make your recommendation. Once again, you have to open your email account.

Yahoo wants to change all that through a revolutionary transformation by breaking down barriers and unifying the web. Speaking of unification, did you realize that Yahoo sits on Google’s OpenSocial board, and they meet once a week?

Yahoo! is rolling out a platform approach for the web that combines online activities through a unified identity, connects users, and provides activity updates—all through an access layer—regardless of whether you and your friends are on Yahoo or not.

For this to work, the following must happen:

1. Developers like you need to create the applications.
2. Yahoo and the third-party sites need to approve the applications.
3. Users need to find and use the applications.
4. Most importantly, the users' friends must reciprocate.

To help developers meet the first requirement, Yahoo released YQL (Yahoo Query Language), which is basically the same as SQL except that it is extended to model and fit web services. This week, Yahoo is revealing more about the developer side of this social transformation.

Users already meet the third and fourth requirements all the time. For example, would you be on Facebook if your friends weren’t there? Would you have an e-mail program if you had no one to send e-mail to? So why wouldn't Yahoo's platform work?

For a glimpse of what is to come, download and install Instant Messenger Beta 9. This latest version has a bunch of new options. For example, if you use Blogger or Facebook, you can add a PingBox, which allows you to support an IM application. The thing works great. I installed it on a personal blog of mine this morning, asked a friend to test it, and the next thing I knew, he added it to his blog.

I could go on and on about this, but I’ll let Cody Simms’, Senior Director, Product Management for the Yahoo Open Strategy, blog do all the talking. There’s a presentation there to help developers get to work.

I had the opportunity to attend Yahoo’s second Open Hack Day at the Sunnyvale, CA campus. This was my first time visiting and I was impressed. It’s a big campus, with several buildings, a cafeteria with better food than some restaurants, free sodas, a fitness center that could rival certain fitness chains, and of course, purple chairs with yellow trim. How could you ask for anything more?

How about a 24-hour hack fest complete with kegs, old-school video games, an outdoor concert, and an open, collaborative, community atmosphere for developing the next great application? That’s what Open Hack Day is all about. Over 400 attendees registered for the event and 40 of them signed up for a camping spot on the Yahoo lawn. Walking around on Friday afternoon, I spotted giant bins filled with purple Frisbees, basketballs, and racks of T-shirts and pullovers. Yahoo really pulled out all the stops to keep the developers entertained while they worked (they call this work?) on their hacks.

During the press conference, Yahoo executives updated the media on the Yahoo Developer Network. The short of it is: Yahoo is alive and kicking. The executives presented us with a laundry list of API’s and applications that developers can use in their every day work—some of which I had no idea Yahoo even owned.

Let me list just a few: MyBlogLog, Delicious, FireEagle, SearchMonkey, BOSS, Flickr, and YUI. A developer can build a fairly sophisticated web site using the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, which is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. An extremely brief demonstration left me impressed.

During my visit, I was handed a map of the Yahoo Developer Network. I found it interesting that Yahoo lists Open Social, My Space, and Google on their map. Yahoo connects to Google through Yahoo’s address book APIs, MyBlogLog, and Yap. Why would Yahoo advertise Google on a list of their web services? Perhaps Yahoo truly does want to foster open, collaborative, community-oriented development for the web.

Check out Yodel Anecdotal for more information on Open Hack Day, including a link to the list of winners.

At a lunch conference yesterday, Yahoo! released Fire Eagle out of beta. This API allows you to broadcast your location to whomever you want, automatically or manually via your phone. You can post your location on your blog or other various sites. To me, and certain segments of the population, this sounds like a nightmare. To other segments of the population, this sounds way-cool. The latter segment is the same population that thinks email is ancient technology. How secure does today’s youth feel that they want people to know exactly—to the address—of their current location?

At yesterday’s press conference, I saw three different demos of this type of application. The first was from Pownce. The 25-year old co-founder presented Pownce as a means to “send stuff to your friends” because who has time for email and all that spam? Pownce uses Fire Eagle and tells all your friends where you are, in case you want them to join you, without courtesy of an invite or a phone call. Because, you know, phone calls and invitations take so much time what with all the dialing, ringing, and having to leave a voice mail… and then you have to wait for someone to call you back. Who has time for that?

Moveable Type, Six Apart’s flagship product, was the second demo and also featured Fire Eagle. You guessed it, this application allows you to post your current location on your blog. Just in case you want anyone who happens to read your blog to stop by and say hello, or mug you, or something…

The last demo was the most useful looking, to me. Outside.in Radar brings you local blogging news. Based on the concept that you are concerned about the pot hole on your street and not concerned about the pot hole in the next city, Outside.in Radar tells you who is blogging what within 1000 feet of your zip code (you manually provide your zip code). I gave it a test drive and I learned that someone wrote a review of a restaurant that is within walking distance of my home. The site provided more links to more information about this restaurant—and several others in the area—that I don’t think I’ll ever have time to click on them all. It also allows you to track all future news items about this restaurant. It is information overload at it’s finest. Talk about a time suck. I could seriously get lost on this site.

As for me using Fire Eagle, I think I’ll put it on hold. I’m very comfortable without people knowing exactly where I am at all times. Unexpected visits do not sound all that appealing to me. But then again, I think email is still useful, so I am probably not the targeted audience for this API.

The semantic web turned me into a flip-flopper. I’ve heard from both the positive and negative camps. The positive camp thinks the semantic web will revolutionize the web. The negative camp thinks the semantic web is nothing more than fancy metadata. I have yet to hear from anyone sitting in the middle. I think I might be the only one...

At first, I leaned toward the negative camp. I wasn’t seeing any real applications and the conferences I attended didn’t help much. Then came along SearchMonkey and OpenCalais and I was square in the positive camp. I officially flip-flopped and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

While researching SearchMonkey, I was led to Swoogle. I became excited about Swoogle for a couple of reasons: 1. It is a semantic search engine; 2. It came out of my alma mater, UMBC. I was thrilled to learn that my medium-sized, liberal arts school grew up to be an Honor’s University researching semantic web technologies. I felt like I just reconnected to one of my former lives…

That reconnect was quickly lost. After reading the multitude of web pages that discuss Swoogle, I found a web page that states the project ended in December 2006. Was Swoogle a victim of being ahead of its time? Did it fail? I have no idea because no one from Swoogle replied to my inquiry. I tried contacting a Swoogle researcher and was rewarded with silence. What happened to Swoogle? I started slowly leaning back to the negative camp.

And then along comes CrunchBase, who released what some have called an “awesome API.” I learned about the CrunchBase API from reading a blog post with the title, “Semantic Web by Example.” A title like that always catches my attention. As I’ve said before in this blog, we need more examples of semantic web technologies. And it looks like developers are heeding the call.

I’ve decided to ride the semantic web fence. Where do you side with semantic web technologies? Are you in the positive camp or the negative camp? Share your thoughts in the comments.

When I started with DevX, I knew nothing of the Semantic Web and the technologies that surround it. As I researched the subject, I realized that while a segment of the developer community was heavily touting semantic technologies (ST), that everyday use was still three-quarters of a mile out of reach. One of the main issues surrounding ST is a lack of available functionality for the user. Sure, I’ve seen lots of examples, and lots of demos, but nothing grabbed me that made me say, this is way cool, this is something I could use. That is, until now.

Today, DevX posted an article by James Leigh that describes how to get started with OpenCalais and SearchMonkey. These tools offer functionality that could be used by developers and the public. The OpenCalais tool (OpenCalais 2.1 just went live), offers a means to create metadata that describes a document’s content. And who of us in this blogging world, who realizes that content is king, would not find something like that useful? Especially if it means that authors and editors no longer have to manually create metadata, and instead, a tool can extract it for us. To me, that’s awesome.

SearchMonkey, as we all know by now, can enhance how your site appears in search results. And who in this business-minded world does not want control of their marketing and branding; especially in a front-line environment like search engines? Stay tuned to DevX for an upcoming article from Peter Mika entitled, Semantic Search Arrives to the Web.

With the advent of Calais 2.1 and SearchMonkey, it appears that ST can become a must-have tool in a developer’s war chest. I encourage you to read James’ article and to research these tools more.

Warning: this may be considered free advertising—or then again—it might just be considered entertaining and educational.

The FiveRuns and RailsEnvy guys created videos for the Rails Conference, which just ended. They showed one of the videos before every keynote (you might remember last year’s Mac vs. PC / Rails vs. PHP ads too, which were also hilarious). You might come away thinking these guys are too-cool-for-school, but then again, they just might be on to something.

• MVC #1: Controller Obesity
• MVC #2: The Importance of Tests
• MVC #3: Keeping Views Stupid
• MVC #4: Staying RESTful

I’ve been stewing over this one for over a week now. I can’t believe it’s even necessary to write a post on this topic. What am I even talking about? Well, there are folks out there that want to control content on the web. I’m not talking about editors checking for grammar or typos. I’m not talking about YouTube checking for copyright violations. I’m talking about this consultant I met who wants to track the folks that take content off a site, use it for their own purpose, and then continue to track that content to see how it’s used. On the face of it, that does sound interesting to see who does what to your stuff.

The part I’m stewing over is that this consultant wants to be paid for what you do with their stuff. Yeah, it’s financial gain this consultant wants for himself and his clients. No, they don’t care about collaboration, education, and the free-spirit of the Internet. What they care about is getting paid. They want to post their music (or whatever) online and get paid for you listening to it. They want to get paid if you take it. They want to get paid if you change it. They want to get paid if you republish it somewhere else. They want to get paid, paid, paid. And paid some more. It is just greedy behavior.

The consultant claims that the artist’s hard work is stolen off the web and others are gaining from it. Well, then don’t post it on the web if you don’t want others to use it. The web needs to be a source for collaboration, to be open, and free to share and be shared. People should be happy that their content is found and that someone else likes it enough to use it for something else.

So, if you’re a developer and a consultant approaches you to develop applications that track the movement of content, please ask them what their end goal is. And if that end goal has anything to do with getting paid because someone uses something they found online to do another thing with it, then Just Say No.

The 2008 Semantic Technologies conference wrapped up this week and I walked away with a feeling of (yawn) nothing much going on here. True, the conference did have a record-breaking 1000 attendees, and Oracle was a major sponsor, but where was IBM, where was Google? Yahoo was there in strength and had a few sessions. But from what I saw on the registration list, Google only sent a couple of scientists and IBM sent a small handful of researchers. This tells me that the majority of big players are keeping an eye on things but are not committing their front-line grunts to anything, at least not yet, and the conference is going on four years running now. In tech years, that’s like a 100 years.

I don’t think I’m the only one not getting it…

To paraphrase a few conversations I overheard in the hall, “They’re trying to link this language with this technology, but I don’t see why when you can do it easier with something else.”

To paraphrase a lunch conversation, “RDF is way too complicated. Only top scientists and A+ students are really working with it right now. There’s far too steep a learning curve for the average developer to pick this up and run with it.”

Even with a lack of Big Names and a reputation of being complex, the folks who did attend are calling for semantic technologies to reach critical mass. That’s putting the horse behind the cart. The industry needs to show functional applications that are easy to implement. If they can do that, then critical mass will follow. If you have to ask for critical mass, it won’t come, it has to come to you.

I heard a few challenges put out there for companies to start releasing applications, not just in theory, but in functionality. Hopefully, Radar Networks will do that with Twine in the Fall, and maybe MySpace might actually make some real announcements. But the real challenges, as I understand them, is to lower the learning curve and bring front-line developers into the fold.

Dean Allemang gave an extremely informative talk at JavaOne today in the session, “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist.” I walked away thinking the term Semantic Web is misnamed. And that alone can sum up the major issues surrounding the Semantic Web. Using the term ‘Semantic Web’ implies that the technologies and the concepts can work on the public web. Think for a quick second on how large the web is—it might not be as large as the universe we live in—but it might as well be. Think of all the different ways words are used, think of all the different languages, think of all the misuse of words, think of the general destruction language itself suffers through and then try and build technologies that rely on using language and words to compile information and present it in a usable fashion. You might as well re-invent language itself, teach the entire web-using world how to speak that language, and then insist that everyone uses that language consistently. Then you would have a workable Semantic Web. I don’t easily say that something is impossible, but the very idea of a Semantic Web makes me come very close to saying, this is impossible.

Semantic technologies, on the other hand, are something very different. Forget about compiling public information from all corners of the web into a centralized location. Instead, think about a closed database in which a controlled ontology exists. For semantic technologies to work you need terms clearly defined and used consistently. And when that happens you do have the power to create mash ups and applications that use databases in effective manners. This idea of revitalizing the usage of databases is itself remarkable with what can be accomplished.

If you place these semantic applications on the web, I guess you could call it the Semantic Web, it does sound a little more official that way. But is that accurate? And doesn’t that sum up, once again, the problem with the term, Semantic Web?

The “Developing Semantic Web Application on the Java Platform” session just wrapped up at the Moscone Center. Did the panel discuss Java to the audience of Java developers in attendance? No, not really. Did it matter? No, not really. The nearly full room remained nearly full through the hour-long session. And that was a good sign.

The panel discussed real-life applications and four out of five panelists related Semantic Web technologies to social networking. MySpace, Facebook, Del.icio.us, and iTunes were all mentioned (and Amazon as well) in regards to how the Semantic Web can take full advantage of the data on those sites. To paraphrase a panelist, ‘The data is out there and Semantic Web technologies will serve it up to you.’

There was an announcement of sorts, which I thought was rather old news, that Yahoo! will begin officially supporting Semantic Technologies (they have always supported Semantic Technologies) on May 15. I guess the date of May 15 is the new news. The excitement behind this is that Yahoo! should begin creating API’s with the  Semantic Web in mind. It was touted that with Yahoo's support, this should be the year for the Semantic Web to take off.

Using the well-established notion of social networking on the web as a foundation for the Semantic Web was a key point from the panelists. The formula for using Semantic Web technologies was, ‘where is the data, how do we process it, and how do we bring it in?’ GRDDL, RDF, and database technologies appear to be the answers for, ‘how do we bring it in.’

The hard part—which was quickly discussed at the very end of the session—was the necessity of logical links that can be accessed. All of the sample applications the panel discussed were basically the same thing: one-stop shop access to all of your friend’s data, no matter where on the web the data originated. This one-stop shop allows for single sign on access and eliminates the need to visit several different sites to catch up with your friends and family. The Semantic Web technologies use URL’s to gather the data. What is needed are logical links that can be accessed to compile the data. The data is out there—the technologies to compile the data exist—the tough part is putting the two together. Is it possible and will it work?

Yesterday at JavaOne, Sun Microsystems announced support for the BDLive.com Developer’s disc. So, what is BD Live? It consists of software and network services that allow the quick creation of user-friendly DVD-like experiences. You can find a link to the free developer disc on www.apifinder.com (supplies are limited).

The developer disc includes sample code, definition of available API’s, and allows for collaboration. This includes the ability for developers to download each other’s applications to their home theater.

The Semantic Web is a vision, an idea, a base-set of technologies. It's not something Dad picks up at the computer store. It's not something the press understands very well. It's certainly not on the minds of the general public. It's not even something my brother-the-developer fully understands. Lots of head nods from that one as I describe it's several aspects. 

A great example of Semantic Web technologies at work is the calendar on the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference site. While it's main purpose is a calendar—it also has a favorite's feature—but ultimately it's a search function on overdrive. The calendar contains a little of this and a little of that; which compliments the many aspects of Semantic Web technologies. And that's awesome to have a clear-cut example of a real-life application. We need more.

It's time the Semantic Web moves out of the idea phase and moves into the application phase. And that leads to a clearer understanding for everyone.