Blogging

Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we explored: next gen apps outside the browser, uses for wikis, Facebook’s usefulness (or lack thereof), the public launch of Google Health, and 4 promising mobile social networks. On the trends side we analyzed: the Mobile Web, how to utilize Social Media in education and social change, and the state of the URL. Last but not least we covered this week’s SemTech conference, about the Semantic Web.

Web Apps

Next Gen Apps Won’t Be Pushed Around By the Browser

The invention of the browser was a huge boon to the internet and a substantial amount of computing now goes on through that interface we’ve grown to love. The internet is not a place where innovation takes a break, though, and a new generation of applications are emerging that have a different relationship with the web browser.

From taking control of the browser to connecting to the web outside of it, there are a number of new strategies being implemented by startups these days. In the following post we discuss seven different ways that new apps are telling browsers “you ‘aint the boss of me now!” Some you’ll be familiar with, but some you may not be.

Wikis Are Now Serious Business

Only a handful of years ago, it was common to hear people laugh at Wikipedia. Anyone can edit it! How could you take it seriously? These days, just as blogs are, wikis are on their way to winning a reputation as serious publishing platforms.

Free hosted wiki provider Wetpaint announced last night that it’s now raised a total of $40 million in venture capital. To celebrate this major financial validation of the wiki world, we thought we’d offer a brief survey of some of the most interesting ways that wikis are being put to serious use today.

How to Make Facebook Useful Again

Oh the heels of some of Facebook’s missteps (ahem, Beacon) and the proliferation of a myriad of useless, silly, and time-wasting apps, some former Facebook users decided to quit the site for good this year. However, a handful of early adopter angst doesn’t have Facebook worried. Why is that? Because Facebook has a whole generation of users who grew up using their site for everything social back when it was just a way to network with their high school or college friends. So what are the everyday Facebook users doing that keeps them engaged in the service? It’s not throwing sheep, apparently. For many Facebook users, there are still useful apps to be found and ways to use the service that the rest of us could learn from.

See also: Why There Should Be Web Search on Facebook and Facebook Censoring User Messaging: Spam Prevention or Unaccountable Control of Conversation?

Google Health Launches - Cautious, Non-Innovative Entry into Health 2.0

This week Google announced the public availability of Google Health, after initially launching as a closed beta back in February. It is described as “a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage [your] medical records and health information online” and is being positioned as a way for users to control their own medical records.

Google Health is a decent entry into the game-changing (and potentially hugely profitable) world of health 2.0. But in comparison with other health startups, Google Health has a limited scope and is not as innovative a service as we’ve come to expect from Google…

The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services

Recently we discussed some of the problems plaguing mobile social networks. These problems include location, marketing strategies and compatibility issues. Our readers also contributed their thoughts on hardware compatibility and GPS. While no network is perfect, in this post we profile some of the key players in the market. Here’s a look at four mobile social networks that may have what it takes.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Report: The Mobile Web is the New Hangout

According to Opera’s survey of the more 11.9 million Opera Mini users in March, almost 41% of mobile traffic now goes to social networking — up to 60% in some countries, including the US. Compare that to about 6% of total web traffic for social networks outside of the mobile web. That’s not overly surprising, though, given the recent proliferation of new smartphones aimed at consumers (or at least phones that can view the full web), made ultra-chic over the past year by Apple’s iPhone. Says Opera, 3/4ths of mobile web traffic is now to the full web, rather than WAP or .mobi sites, which are quickly becoming out-moded.

See Also: To Beat Google, Beat Google to the Mobile Web

Do you use the mobile web? Remember to vote in our poll below.

Social Media U: Take a Class in Social Media

Social media. Web 2.0. You know what these things are and you take advantage of them every day on the net. Whether you’re socializing on Facebook, updating Twitter, or just adding a new bookmark to Ma.gnolia, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s something that everyone innately understands or knows how to use - especially when it comes to using it for marketing, PR, or other business-related purposes. That’s why many of today’s colleges and universities are now offering “social media” classes as an option for their students.

How to Use Social Media for Social Change

Did you participate in the Twit-Out this week? Do you even know what that is? To get you up to speed, a handful of Twitter users, fed up with the regular outages of their favorite service, decided to band together to show Twitter some tough love by boycotting the service for a day. (Unfortunately, despite having fewer users on the service, Twitter still went down). However, in light of recent world events, it’s a shame that the cause the tech community has chosen to rally around is that of Twitter’s instability. Aren’t there more important things going on right now?

The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search

Last week Josh Catone was watching TV and saw something that really caught his eye. It was a commercial for Special K, the breakfast cereal from Kellogg, and rather than end with a plug for the product’s web site — SpecialK.com — it advised people to search Yahoo! for “Special K” instead. He started to wonder two things: 1. is Yahoo! paying Special K for tack-on advertising? and 2. has searching really become so natural that it is more effective to tell people to search for your site than it is to tell them to visit directly?

SemTech Panel: Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses

How will the Semantic Web make the jump to the mainstream? That was the topic of a panel at the SemTech 2008 Conference that happened this week in San Jose. The panel was moderated by Carla Thomson from Guidewire Group and featured Josh Dilworth from Porter Novelli,
Tom Tague, who heads the Calais initiative at Reuters, and Mark Johnson, who is a product manager at Powerset.
This post is based on notes from that panel.

See also: SemTech Panel: Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Excerpted from:
Weekly Wrapup, 19-23 May 2008

Google has launched its personal health portal, Google Health. It’s a clear and straightforward hub where users can store their medical information, and look up information on conditions and medications relevant to them. See the video for the pitch from product manager Roni Zeiger, a physician who left his practice to run this project (although he still keeps his hand in, as it were, by doing urgent care medicine on weekends).

Google Health is an important initiative, if only because it shows users how completely broken medical record-keeping is right now. But this product comes with a warning label.

The good

If you want to track all the drugs you’ve been prescribed (and the ones you self-prescribe), all the medical diagnoses you’ve received, all the lab results done on you, it’s a clean place to record that information. It does smart things with the data, too: if you look up drug that has a dangerous interaction with one that’s already in your profile, Google Health will alert you.

Hardly anyone, of course, actually has all their medical records at hand, nor the time or expertise to enter in everything in their file accurately. The idea with Google Health is that you get the data from your medical providers–your doctors, your pharmacy, and your lab. Google has a few relationships with diagnostic (lab) companies, some pharmacies, and a few medical centers. But at the moment, chances are that your family physician is not in the system.

But assuming they get there, once you pull in your data, you’ll be able to annotate or add to it as you wish. (But not modify it.) When you head off to another doctor or hospital, you can then give them your complete online record, saving time, money (in duplicated lab tests), and potentially your life (if there’s data in there about prior conditions, allergies, etc.). This is exactly what a medical record is supposed to do for you already, but the portability of medical data has never been very good; Google is trying to fix that.

You’ll also be able to push your medical data to services that analyze it for you. For example, there’s a heart attack risk calculator from the American Heart Association, and pill-taking reminder service.

The platform is somewhat open: there’s an API that developers can write to use the medical data that users open up to them. Zeiger joked with me that the “When am I going to die?” button will be added within days.

So what’s not to love?

The worry

In a word: privacy. Google VP Marissa Mayer told a crowd of reporters that the health data is stored on new super-hardened servers. That’s all well and good, but access to Google Health is via your standard Gmail/Google login, and plenty of people (like me until an hour ago) have old or weak passwords on their accounts. User security on this product is the weak link.

User-input data on conditions like allergies is good, but what you really want is to read in your physician's records.

More importantly is the relationship of online medical records to the elephant in the room: the insurance industry. Your insurance carrier likely holds more medical data about you than your doctor (whether it’s accurate is another story). I do not expect that the carriers will open up their databases to consumers, since that would enable a level of scrutiny on bills that the companies so far have been able to brush off. It’s telling that no insurance companies or HMOs are partners with Google on this project.

My bigger concern is that insurance carriers will begin to give financial benefits to patients and client companies if they allow data to go the other way: if patients grant carriers access to their online medical records. In the guise of keeping patients safe, that makes sense. But giving insurance companies access to detailed health profiles on all their clients also lets them mine the data, carve out small insurance groups, and selectively apply elevated rates to people who, through no fault of their own, are at greater risk of requiring insurance company payouts. I would not be surprised to see rate premiums lowered for people or groups who gave the carriers access to their data. But heed my warning on this: it’s a trap.

Yes, I sound paranoid. But I think it’s fair to say that consumers and health insurance companies have long been locked in an adversarial relationship in the U.S., and that the carriers will find a way to use the Google Health data to increase their profitability foremost. We can hold out hope that in doing so they also increase the level of patient care, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Unproven results

I’m in favor of any product that helps patients understand health care in general and their own situation in particular, and Google Health is a great step in that direction. But due to the divisive economics of health care in our country, I can see this remedy having some nasty side effects.

See also: Microsoft HealthVault.

Read the original:
Google Health: Great idea, but scary as all get out