Applications News & Articles

Facebook has been all about socializing and sharing content. However, this interaction has a time-bound aspect to it. Your set of friends and colleagues today might be different from a few years ago. Your activities, likes, preferences and social status will definitely change through time. With this in mind, Facebook has been cooking up a new profile interface that will not only feature what you've been up to lately, but the entire span of your life -- at least the parts that are online.

The world of Enterprise Content Management saw the beginning of a possible new direction last week when Mark Lewis, president of EMC’s (news, site) Content Management and Archiving division took the stage at EMC World 2009.

Lewis’ main argument was that the majority of present day information is a total mess (that's nothing new). He specifically focused on the dangers of unstructured data floating around without hide nor hair of an application or database. After all, vagrant infomation is like kryptonite for both business efficiency and security.

In order to nip this super-sized problem in the bud, Lewis suggested moving away from application-centric management in favor of information-centric management:

“…creating a flexible, adaptive information environment requires moving beyond the typical content management platform to focus on a composition platform that accelerates application development," he said.

Lewis specifically cited composition, business process automation, integrated archiving and cloud computing as key areas through which the value of information management technologies can be maximized.

Interested in the vision? Check out Lewis' full keynote here. 

Mozilla Labs is at it again (aren’t they always?). This time the dream team is aiming to streamline Firefox users’ experiences with extensions.

Say what? We thought the whole extension process was already pretty easy. After all, it doesn’t take much brain power to click an install button and reboot a browser. But…what if you didn’t have to reboot your browser? What if it were as simple as just clicking the install button? Well, now it is. Enter: Mozilla Jetpack. Blast off.

What’s better than free? We sure can’t come up with anything, which is at least one reason the new EMC Documentum Developer Edition will likely earn a few double takes.

The new resource for application developers interested in utilizing the Enterprise CMS platform was released as a free download earlier this month, along with the announcement of a new developer-oriented community.

We’ve seen tons of people try “cracking the event nut” in app-world. But this start-up, dubbed ImThere, is one of a fresh wellspring of attempts to segment the online events market — focusing on major launches versus wee dinner party-type stuff — and build local userbases without forsaking its own scalability.

Users are actually able to search for events on ImThere based on popularity, region, artist or other components. This means local communities can actually cluster around stuff most relevant to them. And it also plays nicely with mobile, which certainly can’t hurt any.

See demo here. As TC points out, the service might go stagnant in a month, but if it can build critical mass right now it could join the group of online miracles (can you count them?).

At present, ImThere’s radar is focused on the release of Leopard (the latest Mac OS X for Apple). Images of platform geeks waiting in line are included.

Good to know it’s got a demographic in mind.

Everybody’s gone widget and app-wild, but few are helping rein in the beast. With good eyes for a new niche, MindTouch has today released Deki Wiki “Hayes,” a free open source (licensed under GPL v2) and wiki-centric platform that pinches together all the APIs running awry.