It shouldn’t be surprising that I’m making lots of comparison to Facebook which is the defacto social networking standard right now.

What’s cool:

1. The hangout feature is the clear differentiator – multi user video conferencing, ability to share media, and VERY COOL is the ability to watch media clips together as a group! It also switches ‘attention’ depending on what’s happening in the conversation, that’s awesome too.
2. Circles is a great way of organizing and separating feeds; unlike Facebook’s fire-hose in your face approach. Also the group management user interface and experience is far better than anything Facebook offers.
3. A new profile feature that will probably replace Google’s current profile (I am not sure about this though)
4. The +1 I figure will eventually end up deep inside Google’s ecosystem and will be included in the page-rank algorithm; it ties very well to their core business of search, a million individuals working with the +1 button might give Google the edge in providing human context to search.
5. Sparks – the content search mechanism is unlike anything I’ve seen; enter an interest into the box and Google fetches web elements that might be related to the interest. You can create an interest list in this way, adding stuff you like as you go along.
6. Huddle – this was something I was looking for; finally a group messaging system that works across Android, iPhone, and SMS.
7. User interface and user experience are unlike any other Google service I’ve used so far – quite simple and intuitive; it is evident Google has spent significant time and money working this out for Plus.

Some questions that came to my mind were:

1. What about integration with twitter, google reader and other web services?
2. What about the data, will there be an API in the near future?
3. How will this evolve, considering Google’s products seem to be in a continuous beta?

Does it compare to Facebook? I’d say yes, will the masses leave Facebook and embrace +(Plus)? That’s hard question to answer at this point, time will tell. Have you tried it? Will this make a better tool for learning than Facebook is?

Leave comments please.

We’ve been experiementing with Swiffy for a few hours now and it seems to do quite a decent job of converting SWF files. It’s also able to deal with embeddeded/nested movie clips, which is quite cool and allows for complex animations that would otherwise be a struggle to create using HTML5’s canvas element. File sizes also seem to be very small; perhaps because of the plain text nature of HTML5.

If you create flash animations, you want to try it and see how your animations look ported to HTML5, and possibly running on an iOS device.

Google calls it ‘What Do You Love?’. It’s a strange and quirky way to look at search results. Stranger still there is no mention of this on Google’s blog.  I love Lego, so that’s what I typed into the search box. The results aggregated across a host of google services, and included pictures, video, and a lots more.

Try it out, it’s cool!

2. 3-D Tabletop Display – We’ve often visualized glass-free 3D device after watching the 3D movie – Avatar. The interaction concept is great.

3. Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web – An interesting read on semantic web.

4. How To Convert The Toughest SME – Cathy Moore talks about building rapport with SMEs. A very crucial step in developing quality learning content is getting the SME on board. Great tips in this post on how.

5. Why America Needs To Start Educating Its Workforce Again – A nice TechCrunch post that gives some insights in to workforce-development practices of 24 leading companies in India. It also links up to the report on which the post was based which is detailed and gives some serious food for thought. Download the report here.

2. A Collection of Social Media Infographics – Helpful to use infographics in presentations, reports, articles, etc. A cool resource, these graphics also give great ideas on how data can be represented visually.

3. Tashkeel – This tool adds missing diacritics to Arabic text. Diacritics describe how arabic text is pronounced and are usually omitted in writing. Adding diacritics is an important pre-step to several text processing applications.

4. Sport Technology – This is about teaching sports! Interesting to see universities get involved in creating technology that goes beyond conventional learning tools.
“Students gain experience in designing realistic and practical embedded and mobile systems, as well as other applications that can enhance the training, coaching, playing, broadcasting, safety and viewing of various sports.”

5. Text 2.0 – An application featuring eye tracking, follows your progress and also indicates where you were when you return. Translates and explains words on the fly, reads words if you don’t know how to pronounce and much more.

2. A mobile moodle for iPhone. – It’s finally ready and the launch imminent, Moodle provides a iPhone app to access moodle resources. Open source, the code will be released shortly. Keep an eye out for this one.

3. OpenGL 4.0 – Technology standards keep changing and OpenGL is one that’s been around ‘forever’. The latest version is OpenGL 4.0 and its just been announced at GDC. The battle for graphics on the mobile platform is just beginning and OpenGL has made a head start, Microsoft’s DirectX vying for such too.

4. Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world – Interesting TED talk by Jane McGonigal about harnessing gamer power to solve real-world problems. Lots of interesting insights about games and gamers.

5. Data, data everywhere – The Economist magazine has a special report on the information overload. Worth a read as the explosion of data and managing and filtering it has enormous implications for learning and human performance.

To put it more plainly, the Android NDK r3 gives developers more options to take advantage of an Android device’s powers, especially in the graphics department.

2. Socialight – With their new Socialight Community Platform, anyone can create networks which are accessible via the web, a WAP site or an iPhone app.

3. Unified Media Server – is basically an interactive Flash® media server – but adds H.264 support for other devices. Let’s users deliver content from one encode simultaneously to multiple clients on the desktop, mobile and the set-top box.

4. Build Native Apps for Desktop, Mobile & iPad – Titanium allows developers to build mobile and desktop applications using standard web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The new version of Titanium now supports both iPhone and Android with RIM Blackberry and Apple iPad support just around the corner.

5. BigBlueButton – An Opensource web conferencing tool

6. Enhanced Editions – Tailor-make ebooks for the iphone the way nature intended. Easy-to-use features, and hours of multimedia extras, but crafted with the editorial insight that only publishers can bring to a book.

7. Amplify – is a service for engaging in conversation around web pages, paragraphs, images, videos or original ideas that make people think. A clean interface and integration with twitter and facebook add value. Worth some trial usage.

2. Real Time Language Translation Over Phone – A cool demo of technology that might eventually truly end the language barrier. The aim is to achieve reasonable cross-language communication in the absence of any means of communication. Tremendous applications in learning and development, it’ll be interesting to keep an eye on developments in this space.

3.  Ribbon Hero – Ribbon Hero is a game for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel 2007 and 2010, designed to help you boost your Office skills and knowledge. Play games (aka “challenges”), score points, and compete with your friends while improving your productivity with Office. As a concept test, this add-in is not supported, but is an opportunity for you to try out an idea we are working on and let us know what you think. A nice way to encourage learning.

4. Socialcast – Socialcast is offering a collaboration tool plug-in for MS-Outlook. Unlike Basecamp and other tools, it works right inside Outlook and works on top of Socialcast EASE – Enterprise Activity Stream Engine offered by Socialcast.

5. Bloomfire – A cool service that’ll launch middle of the month. Let’s anyone create a course, let’s anyone take it. It allows for a large number of informal, social-learning opportunities can be dedicated to any subject. Check out the videos on the site explaining their service idea, should be interesting to use when it launches.

• Video gaming improves visual perception, processing and attention.
• Internet use engages more neural circuitry than book reading in the digital generation.
• Sizes of three structures in the brain can predict a video gamer’s success.
• Learning environments of video games can educate children effectively.
• Building computer games promotes critical thinking and creative thinking skills.

2. Recognizr: Facial Recognition Coming to Android Phones – More great technology hitting smart phone platforms. Originally built as a software concept, the Android app called “Recongnizr” is a mobile prototype that allows you to use your phone in order to “see” who a person is and what web services and social networks they’re connected to. App users can also associate traditional address book details with their profile like their full name, address, phone number and email.

3. Relevance in Twitter – Feedtrace picks content that is relevant to you from Twitter. It takes the noise out and gives you the stuff you really care or enjoy. Feedtrace studies the links you have shared before, does some complex math, and selects a list of real-time stories (news, articles, videos, etc) that you should like. This process (algorithm) is in constant improvement, so you should see better results every week.

This sort of system has obvious implications in eLearning. I’d imagine an intelligent agent of this sort constantly dealing with the fire-hoses of information, picking out content that is interesting and aids in learning or adds value to performance in some way.

4. An HTML5 framework – SproutCore is an open-source platform for building fast rich cloud applications on the web. Specifically, the tools we develop are suitable for building large-scale applications that scale to many millions of users across many different devices. The first of many HTML5 frameworks to come. Great to try building some HTML5 applications.

5. AS3 Lib for Yammer – An AS3 Yammer API library that communicates with the Yammer service. The as3yammerlib is hosted on GitHub and the source code is publicly available. To use the library you will need your own consumer key and secret for the Yammer API available from Yammer’s developer site. The library is also dependent on the as3corelib for doing JSON parsing and as3-signals for broadcasting events. A cool way to integrate Yammer into your learning applications.

2. AR App Development: Metaio Releases Unifeye Mobile SDK
This new augmented reality development framework is offering developers a chance to experiment with feature tracking, 3D animation rendering and real-time interaction. A probable competitor for Layar, we’re keeping an eye on whether we can deploy learning applications using this

3. Dotsopt
A portable blog posting system where blogs called Dots can be altered by anyone who interacts with them. Dots are instant blogs, and can contain anything (text, pictures, video, media, embeds) Dots are wiki-like, but their creator has to approve all edits, assuring each dot evolves along a consistent point-of-view. Dots can be connected to quotes, paragraphs of text in the news and are distributed globally into all related articles. Dots can be voted on and carry a usefulness rating

4. Meego
Nokia and Intel have just announced the creation of MeeGo, a new Linux-based operating system designed for portable devices including netbooks and smartphones as well as other non-desktop platforms like connected TVs and vehicles. The new OS is a combination of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin, both Linux-based computing environments.

5. Learning Styles Wither Away
“We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base…” This extract from the report says it all.

6. BlackBerry’s Webkit Based Browser
This week at MWC BlackBerry managed to bust out one surprise – a demo of the company’s new WebKit-based BlackBerry browser. The early build shown off on-screen looks pretty solid, rendering Amazon.com quickly and scoring a full 100/100 on the Acid3 test. Unfortunately, there’s no word on when BlackBerry users will actually be able to get their hands on this.

2. Google Buzz
Google has announced Buzz a new social media service that would be integrated within Gmail. Using Buzz you can connect to the other social media services like Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google reader. More information on how we might use it in elearning can be found in this post on our blog.

3. SIRI
A personal assistant for mobile phone. Siri understands what you say, accomplishes tasks for you and adapts to your preferences over time. Siri can help you find and plan things to do. You can ask Siri to find a place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie. Imagine what an agent like this might do for learning, quite impressive.

4. Sketchpad
A Web-based drawing tool, which outputs the drawing as PNG file. Interesting that it’s fully developed in HTML5 and features tools like patterns, gradient, spirographs – generally found in big editors like Photoshop etc. It seems a promising step towards a Flash-less web.

5. IBM Academic Initiative
A cool initiative by IBM to promote open source software in academia. Institutions that are eligible and signup get no-charge access to hardware, full-version software, professionally developed courseware, tools, training, books, and discounts.

2. Open Classroom Servers
The OpenClassroom Server (OCS) places the teacher in control of an easily managed local Web 2.0 environment. The OCS lets the teacher and students carry out research, communication, collaboration, publication, and other network-based functions through an intuitive interface and provides classroom-level management and control. The OCS can be connected to a network that is also connected to the Internet, which allows students to search the OCS and the Internet simultaneously.

3. SublimeVideo [HTML5 Video Player]
It’s an HTML5 video player that will allow you to easily embed videos in any page, blog or site using the latest modern web standards. Browsers makers are still working on fully supporting the HTML5 video specification, so at the moment SublimeVideo is still in experimental state and only works on a limited number of browsers. But the long term goal is to make it work on all modern browsers. SublimeVideo will be soon released for free (at least for non-commercial use). Its key features are Full-window mode, Full-screen mode, HTML5 video [no flash plugin required].

4. WordPress for Android and Blackberry
WordPress for Android and Blackberry is an Open Source app that empowers you to write new posts, edit content, and manage comments with built-in notifications. Download it now if you use either platform and get blogging in no time.

5. Symbian OS now fully open source
The Symbian Foundation has offered up the full Symbian Smartphone platform to open source. The Symbian 3 platform, including applications, middleware, and the kernel itself, will be offered under terms of the Eclipse Public License and other open source licenses. “You can download it, you can modify it,” said Larry Berkin, head of global alliances for the foundation. Previously, the kernel was made available via open source. End-users will see, ideally, differentiated devices, converged devices that are based on Symbian that range from smartphones [to converged devices],” such as cameras or a phone that is a gaming device.