As per the trend, developers have always tried to keep the web running through open-source technologies (php, mysql, ruby on rails are some of the examples), however, there wasn’t any other technology that we could say would be able to replace Adobe Flash until Microsoft launched SilverLight. That’s a different thing that Microsoft itself uses Adobe Flash even after SilverLight was released!

Ogg Vorbis has been around for a while, however it literally lost the competition in the hands of MP3 format, although because of its open nature, developers have worked on it and are trying their best to make it a better format for music and videos. One of the drawbacks of Ogg theora format is that it doesn’t support h.264 video compression that helps in making video size smaller and apt for sharing videos on the web and thus it wasn’t considered as web standard for videos on the web.

Although, the good news is that Google, one of the biggest supporter for open technologies is planning to integrate Ogg in Chrome browser, so as to ensure that no plugins will be required to run the videos that use Ogg file format. This means, that web developers will be able to embed videos (powered by OGG) in the webpages just like they used to embed images and links.

Interestingly, upcoming Firefox 3.5, latest versions of Opera and Apple Safari are supporting Ogg theora and since YouTube is owned by Google, we may see the transition once this open format will be much refined as compared to today’s standard. With all these developments, it seems to me that soon we’ll see the videos on the web running on Ogg format rather than Flash. What are your thoughts about it?

Recently, Twitter did censor some of the trending topic and ReadWriteWeb was quick to post about it too! (thanks Techmeme) however, we haven’t seen them moderate any other fun meme’s. I personally think that Twitter should moderate the trending topics and should allow the deserving topic to be in the trends, otherwise the positive value of twitter will only go down – as reported by TechCrunchers.

If at all, Twitter will start moderating the trending topics, I’m sure there will mixed reactions from the twitter users and there will be fun loving people who’d definitely hate to see that there trending topics or meme’s will not reach the trending topic and if at all it will, they’d see it go. However, there will be a great bunch of people who’d love to see this kind of feature, as I’ve seen many users who want tweet filter feature to avoid such “not-so-fun” meme’s.

Would you like to see Twitter moderate the trending topics or do you think Twitter should not interfere the way its users want to use the service?

Search just isn’t strategic to Microsoft, no matter how obsessed Steve Ballmer is with beating Google. Microsoft can’t do everything–no company can–and winning the search war is not critical to Microsoft’s long-term survival. Protecting its operating system and office suite monopoly is critical, however, and that business is also under attack.

Microsoft has already invested in Bing and have made it live as well for the world to use and comment on it. For your reference, here are some of the comments from industry’s best known pundits -

Here’s what Rafe Needleman has to say about Bing -

Google keeps improving in the area of in-search collation and display as well, but Bing makes Google look complacent, and that’s not good for Google. For the moment, Bing’s on top in this game. Try this search engine. I do not think you will regret it.

Michael Arrington shares similar thoughts -

“My thoughts on Bing: I like it. And I’d consider using it as my search engine. But like many people I’m used to Google and I know how to find the things I’m looking for. Bing returns very different results for a lot of queries, which is great. But it also means spending time learning how to use Bing to get what you need out of it. I’ll spend that time because it’s my job. But for most people, they’ll stick to what they know, and that’s Google….

I’ll sum up with this – whether Microsoft ultimately succeeds or not in “winning” the search war, the competition is very good for the rest of the Internet. Google needs to be pushed to try innovating new things.”

We’ve seen many attempts from many innovators to beat Google and haven’t seen anyone get close to it, rather we have only seen Google’s market share rise every month. So will the word “Fools” be apt for all those innovators & investors? I guess no. And if that be the case then we are accepting Google’s monopoly – then will we be able to believe Google for not being evil after that? I guess the answer will be no in this case too! So, should Microsoft continue to invest in Bing or do you think that Steve Ballmer should listen to Henry?

It has all the basic features of any Word Processor like spell check, document formatting, image insertion etc. Although, it fails to introduce the ability to export the documents in various other formats like PDF, OpenOffice.Org files or even Word itself. Now, one can easily live without this as all these features are present in Zoho Writer and Box.Net has integrated Zoho Writer with its online storage service.

Although, it keeps me wondering that why exactly Box.Net is wasting its resources in building another online processor when there are tons of processors available at the moment. I think they should rather use their resources in making various applications that will help integrate desktop computers with this service.

I have to say that if at all, Twitter starts to provide the same kind of features as provided by Tumblr then it will become the hot favorite service and will add more and more fans as it has now. I myself will switch my personal domain name to Twitter service. So, if you are one of the Tumblr user and flaunt an iPhone then you will surely love this application!

Talking about the applications for iPhone – here are the top blogging/iphone applications available on the internet -

WordPress for iPhone – While we are talking about blogging and iPhone application; how can we miss WordPress for iPhone. This official application by team automattic is one of the best wordpress application for iPhone.

LifeCast – This wonderful application lets you blog on the go and works with both blogger and wordpress based blogs. Its not that if Google isn’t interested in providing iPhone app for blogger then you’ll be left behind. You can very well use this application to make your blog posts.

VirtueSoft BlogWriter – This application covers almost all of the blogging platforms available on the internet. Be it, Blogger, WordPress.com or self hosted wordpress blogs, msn live space etc. – you will be able to blog using your iPhone. Sounds like a cool deal!

TypePad for iPhone – One of the official iPhone application for Typepad users. Without a doubt one of the applications with lots and lots of features inbuilt that iPhone/Typepad users will be able to flaunt!

Twitterrific – Ad-supported application allows you to post tweets in the most simple manner. It is also available as native mac application, so you’ll love using it on your mac as well as iPhone.

I was pretty surprised to see that Google has already released Picasa for Mac, although they are not talking about it on the Picasa Web Albums. They are still promoting the old plugin for iPhoto or just the web album uploader. They are not talking about the full-fledged Picasa for Mac.

The software is pretty similar to its windows counterpart and has all the features that you can see in the windows version. It syncs pretty nicely with iPhoto and thus becomes a must use for every mac user. I’m more than impressed with Picasa and I believe that most of the mac users will simply drop iPhoto, once they’ll use Picasa for Mac. However, one small thing that will not make many mac users happy is that it’s not a universal software and thus is available only for Intel based Macs.

The software is available for download over here – Picasa for Mac.

People use Gmail to get stuff done, so we’ve added a lightweight way to keep track of what you need to do, right from within Gmail.

Well, this is indeed a great news for those who are using GMail as the main interface to check email, however I’m still going to keep myself to Apple’s Mail program as I found it way more convenient and fast as compared to using the web interface. Well, this sure is a good news, however it seems to me that it surely is a bad news for the Remember the Milk team.

Remember the Milk is an online get things done (GTD) application which was doing really well as the team behind this wonderful application leveraged on Google’s applications like GMail, Google Calendar, iGoogle by integrating itself with the help of various firefox based plugins.

With the launch of GMail tasks and the amount of coverage it’s getting (Tech.Blorge, Lisa’s comparison of both applications, Techcrunch), I’m sure it will become difficult for RTM team to enjoy the same benefits. Honestly, I think those who have used Remember the milk will surely stick to it as it has got much more features and options as compared to the GMail tasks and not to forget that RTM is compatible with various other devices like Blackberry, iPhone/iPod touch etc.

Well, apart from this there is one suggestion which I’d love to give to RTM team. If somehow they can ensure that GMail tasks and RTM plugin can sync together, then it will benefit those who don’t have notebooks and use various other computers to access their mails. This way, they will have good enough flexibility and will always stick to RTM.

I tried a search for “apple ipod reviews” on both Google and Cuil and surprisingly, the pages suggested by Cuil were more helpful than Google.

However, in the test done by my for the terms – “beautiful wordpress themes“, it was Google which gave much varied and better results as compared to Cuil, which showed various links which were pointing to one particular post and had similar heading.

I have to agree to Amit that Cuil’s interface is definitely impressive or rather we may call it refreshing and a pretty welcome change. Apart from that, it also gives various search suggestions in the right hand column and helps you reach the desired result quickly or if you are doing a research, then it will help even more.

It’s interesting to see that Cuil claims that it has indexed 3 times more web pages as compared to any other search engine, however it’s sad to see that they couldn’t display varied search results. Probably, they forget to drop the low quality pages from their index and that’s why they have such fat index.

Where exactly Cuil will really head then?

We really can’t say that if Cuil is giving better results (at least, to me it looked stupid) or if it’s giving good results (as found by Amit), however it is for sure that they will surely have pretty tough time until and unless they grab some deals with various browsers or they come up with interesting marketing strategies.

I personally think that Cuil will be acquired by some either of the internet giants. Cuil has this wonderful technology which allows them to have a much larger index and that too with almost 1/10 of the resources as compared to the competition. Probably, it will look good to Microsoft, although they have already acquired Powerset, so I wonder if they will be interested in Cuil.

The Windows 7 team is doing a wonderful job by including features that’ll help the users in coming out of the trouble situations or rather to avoid themselves from putting in trouble situations.

By default, Windows opens up folders in one single process, however with the upcoming Windows 7, they’ll allow users to open folders in a new process. This will ensure that in case the process gets stuck and you want to kill it, you can safely do it, without ruining other processes and that will ensure that you won’t have to reboot the whole windows because of one stuck process.

You’ll notice various other new options in the context menu (as shown in the image) that will help you do various things pretty quickly. I’m particularly interested in the feature which will allow us to open the command prompt with the simple right click menu on the very same folder. This will surely save some time, if you want to go to the folder that is around 10 folders in the hierarchy.

One fact that I love about Windows XP is that Microsoft kept pretty simple strategy with it and they only had 2 main versions of it i.e. Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition. As reported by WinFuture, a German Magazine, Windows 7 may be coming up in various flavors that will be customized according to the country you are in. For e.g. if you are in France, you’ll get French version of Windows 7 and if you are in Germany then you’ll get German version of Windows 7.

I wonder that why exactly Microsoft is again creating the confusion? Why don’t they keep it in simplest of way and that is if they can come up with only two version or maximum three versions and let the users decide that which locale they are interested in and that they can setup the whole thing while installing Windows 7.

The possible reasons of this move are –

1. To stop the piracy – I highly doubt this as a simple search on Torrents will give all the possible versions of Windows 7 and it won’t matter if they are in X language.

2. To reduce the size of installation – Well, Windows 7 comes in a DVD and takes a lot of space. I think, it should be available in such a way that all the languages are present in the DVD and when a person chooses a different language or a specific country where English isn’t that common then it should install that particular version and not the English version of Windows 7.

What are you thoughts on the same? Do you think Microsoft’s idea of coming up with various editions of Windows 7 is good or how about this statement “I give a damn!, I’m going to install that free Windows 7 anyway” ?

Update – Good guys at Windows 7 news have found out that Microsoft may be coming up with a flavor called Windows 7 Small Business Edition.