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I was about to help today a younger friend who is at high school and needs to do a little research about operating systems. So we went directly to Google and typed in "Operating Systems". Guess what we got? I was amazed when I saw the first result: www.linux.org.

Not too far behind I got Debian, solaris, FreeBSD and it was then when Windows arrived, just before gnu.org and Apple MacOS X.

There is nothing being implied here, I am just amazed at the results and the order in which they are presented. On the contrary, when I tried in Yahoo! I got very different results. Most were links to definitions and not to particular instances of the concept.

So what do you think is a better result? What would you expect of such a query? I think Yahoo gets the credit this time, instead of PageRank, but hey, that's just my opinion.

I was so glad when I read Jeremy Zawodny's personal opinion about all this DoJ vs. Google stuff. In spite of being a Yahoo! employee, he sincerely expresses his opinion on this matter, and he explicitely states that he's speaking for himself, and not on behalf of his employer. I like what he said and I mostly agree with it, as you could figure out by reading my original post about this issue.

Only one thing though: Why is he disappointed in the Government? People are disappointed when they get a response they didn't expect. I would have been disappointed if Google would have given all that information to the Justice Department, and I am disappointed because Yahoo and the others did. I would feel disappointed if my best friend stabs me in the back, but I would not feel that way if my worst enemy does.

So why would someone feel disappointed in the US government? Those kind of things are exactly what I always expect from them, so it's no surprise. No surprise at all.

Less than a month ago I wrote about Opera integration with its own community site, so that it would be a great advantage for those of us members of the community. But I suspected nothing on how this idea can be scaled up to be related with the notion of an online operating system based on the browser and other "connected" applications. I was actually thinking small when I wrote that.

And this (rather outdated) post over here depicts a similar but scaled scenario, that would be great if Opera (the company) would dare to implement. The author talks about how he thinks an online (web-based) operating system might be, and I pretty much agree with him. Perhaps something like this is what Opera needs to become the real killer application that it should be. Opera is currently the best browser out there in terms of features, speed, accessibility, standards support, functionality, stability, security, etc. But it should be evident for most of us Opera supporters, that in the world of today, even all these is not enough. It doesn't generates the hype that could get this piece of software to the place it belongs to.

I have to admit though, that the most likely to develop something like this is Google and perhaps Yahoo. But Opera has to do something, because today is the aggregated value the one that matters the most, not the intrinsic real value. Take for instance the Google search engine. Google is not a search company anymore, they're more like an advertising company. The vision of "organizing the world's information" is just a facade. What does gtalk has to do with that? Now take Opera. The vision of being "the fastest browser on earth" is not enough. And the small (albeit loyal) user base that we are, will not maintain the company.

And going a little bit off topic now (but no so much). Today I've spent a little bit more time on the Internet than usual, perhaps because I've been out of it for most of the last two weeks, busy with the celebrations and all that. And I've been reading a lot of new things about the not-so-new concept of a web-based operating system. It seems that the arrival of the new year has awaken the dreams of many people claiming that, in spite of the exciting year that passed away, 2006 will be even more exiting in terms of web technologies, trends and all that. We are witnessing (live) the rebirth of a whole set of technologies with enormous social, cultural and political implications. The web is reshaping herself just in front of us.

Things like tagging, social software, folksonomy, standards, simple over complicated, small dedicated applications over one-app-fits-all-needs, feeds, communities, wisdom of the crowds, user-generated content, decentralization of web publishing, etc. All these and other stuff are becoming more and more an integral part of our daily experience and interaction with what started up being just a markup language.

I feel like there has been an explosion of cool, AJAX-ed, web2.0-ish services in the last few months. Everyone seems to be eager to show up their skills in this new innovative web field, not just from a technological standpoint, but also with new and improved layouts, organization schemes and usability of richer user interfaces, as well as on generating ideas of new original and useful services, or better implementations of existing ones. These web-based rich-client applications are meant to be the word of order in the web of today, like the dot-com's were a few years ago.

Services are of different well-defined categories, like wikis, file sharing, pictures and video sharing, news-feeds aggregators, social bookmarking, personalized homepages serving as a web entry-point, users communities, robotized news and blog crawlers that select the best from the web and present it summarized for you in a homepage, user-centered news sources like digg, emulators of window managers and desktop interfaces, pod-casting and vloging tools, and a few more I guess, including combinations of all these, and combined with other more traditional services like web-mail, calendaring, on-line dating, IM, etc.

I recently talked about some of these categories mentioned above, but I decided to expand a little bit the spectrum because almost everyday, when I sit down at my aggregator in the morning and fetch from all my feeds of choice, I find out about at least one new service I never previously knew about. And I repeat, at least one, because occasionally two or more appear in a single morning!

To better justify these claims I could go on and enumerate here a few examples, like flickr, songbird, netvibes, riya, glide, boltfolio or 23. And not even the big ones are escaping from the phenomenon. Google perhaps was the starter, with Gmail prompting an interest of web developers on Ajax techniques. They now have Gmail, Google Reader, Google Maps and their personalized homepage.

Yahoo! was prompted by Google's success, and they improved their services to keep up with the competition. They now have Instant Search and they're also redesigning the web-mail interface (see previous post). And last but not least, Microsoft, the giant of software is also being pushed into it. Windows Live is a live example of what I mean.

As you can see, there are both big ones and small ones. The big ones are trying to maintain/strenghten their dominance, and the small ones are fighting to stand up in between the mainstream providers, or trying to be noticed and be acquired by one of the giants.

If you want to be regularly updated about new services, improvements on old ones, alliances or any other related stuff, be sure to add TechCrunch's feed or some other web2.0 workgroup blog to your aggregator. For instance, directly from TechCrunch's about,

TechCrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new web 2.0 products and companies.

Seriously, I don't know how this Mike Arrington is able to keep himself informed, but is great to have him informing the rest of us. Thanks!

Is funny to see how the same argument is used in two different contexts to support opposite ideas. Jeremy Zawodny supports Yahoo's approach of placing blog search results along news search results, arguing that the line in between news and blogs will become even more blurry in the future than it is today. In contrast, Dave Winer mentions exactly this, using exactly the same word, to support exactly the contrary.

Apparently Dave Winer is contradicting himself, but I understand him. As I also understand Zawodny's point of view. He is right in that it wasn't any good to create Yet Another Blog Search, of which there are too many. On one hand, stablishing a relationship between traditional news media results and private citizen's blogs makes a lot of sense. But the problem is not there. Winer mentioned something that kept me thinking, because it was something I knew somehow.

Blogs don't belong in the margin, they belong in the main results.

And that is exactly the problem with Yahoo's approach. The place where blog results are shown make them look like second class citizens. Anyway, I can criticize this, but I can't propose a solution. I wish I had one, because Yahoo might hire me then.