TR10: Offline Web Applications
Nice to see AIR get some recognition as an emerging trend.
Now give us AIR 1.0 already! :)
...Hardly earth-shattering predictions, but other than within my particular unit, my organization isn't that hip to web trends.
There's no doubt that individuals store more data online these days than they used to because of the rise of applications like Facebook, Flickr, and Google Calendar. Any data that has a social aspect to it gains value by being "out there" for others to view and interact with.
There are also business processes that involve collaboration with other business partners, where arrangements are made to exchange information or tangible goods via a buyer/seller dynamic. Again, it makes sense that the data and even the applications that power such collaborations could be managed and hosted by a third party.
But there will always be a desire to keep certain data close to the vest, even if that means maintaining an internal hardware and network infrastructure. Colleges and universities are not going to outsource their student data to a third party, and medical institutions are obligated by law to safeguard medical information. Banks will probably take a pass on shared data hosting as well. Even if cloud computing becomes more accepted and reliable, there will always be groups and individuals unwilling to give up that control despite any cost savings.
If you're not familiar with this latest trend, the article is definitely a good read:
Software's Future: Melding the Web and the Desktop
Listening to the news last night, it sounded like the VT administration used every channel of communication at their disposal: the campus website, mass e-mails, broadcast phone messages to all campus phones, and a siren system. The university I work at (the University of Maryland) also has all of those means of getting the word out.
The one communication channel that wasn't mentioned, however, was cell phones. That's not surprising: I suspect few universities specifically collect cell phone numbers from their students, and most students would probably be hesitant to give their cell number to the university out of privacy concerns.
But in light of yesterday's events, maybe universities should rethink that issue. Messages sent to land-line phones and e-mail addresses are only received if the recipient is at their phone or is actively checking e-mail. A message sent to a cell phone, which folks usually carry with them, has a much better chance of getting the recipient's attention immediately, even if they are walking between classes. While not every student owns a cell phone, those that did and received the message could spread the word to the people around them, getting the word out much faster.
So let's assume universities offered to send emergency messages (and only emergency messages) to students who provided a cell phone number to contact: how would the university broadcast an alert to those phones?
A long-term solution would be to put a SMS messaging system in place at the university designed specifically for this purpose (universities like mine that run ColdFusion 7, for example, could build an application using the SMS Gateway service provided by the ColdFusion server).
A short-term solution could be Twitter. Twitter is a social networking tool where you can receive short messages from friends via a web page, IM, or via SMS.
A university could set up a Twitter account to use to send out emergency messages, then instruct students to get a Twitter account (which is free) and "follow" the university Twitter account. The students can then control whether they receive updates from the university Twitter account via their phone or not.
Granted, this is not what Twitter was designed for, but I think it could serve as a stop-gap measure for getting warnings out until a more robust system is put in place.
Then I heard about it again on the TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast, and when they described it in their typical simple and straighforward manner, I got it: this was something truly unique, and very cool to boot.
So what is it? Yahoo Pipes (pipes.yahoo.com) is a web application that lets you build custom news/information feeds out of numerous existing feeds using drag-and-drop objects. Think of it as a mashup system for RSS and Atom feeds. Instead of using a news aggregator program to pull down several different RSS feeds about technology, you could build a pipe using Yahoo Pipes that would combine all of those feeds together into one. You could even apply a filter to it: you could configure it so it would only display the items from those feeds containing "ColdFusion" in the title or the body of the articles/posts.
The graphical interface is truly incredible. Programmers and non-programmers alike can build their pipes simply by adding action modules and tying them together. It's hard to describe in words, but you could build a simply pipe by starting with a Fetch module that fetches the feed from a URL you supply, tying it to a Filter module which you configure to only permit items containing your search term through, and then tying the Filter module to the Pipe Output module which returns the results. Once you've finished creating your pipe, you can save it so you can access it via a unique URL and even publish it for public consumption.
I encourage everyone to go check it out. I think I'm going to create a pipe that search the generic tech sites for postings about ColdFusion and Flex. If I do, I may post a link to that pipe in my Links module on the right.
