Web 2.0 - The Convergence

It's happening for real - for years Corporate types have touted Convergence. What they mean was that we would all have to come to them.

There are sign sof a new convergence based in interoperability. People who are thoughful are ensuring that their software "naturally" links and works with others - Google - Skype - Socialtext etc. Those that create exclusive software will fail as the trend for natural connection accelerates.

Here is Ross on this -

Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel.  Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.

This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0.  In a box. Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises.  Extensible because we've all supported open APIs.  Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations.  SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

Here is Tech Crunch on Skype 3.0

This week saw the launch of Skype 3.0 (beta) and on the surface there is very little new to get excited about other than a new plug-in manager. The real changes in this new version seem to have taken place under the hood where Skype has been working on Skype4Java and Skype4COM, new wrapper libraries that use the Skype API.

“Skype4Java enables developers to create plug-ins on multiple platforms and use good IDEs, libraries, and frameworks. With Skype4COM, you can program for Skype in any ActiveX environment, such as Visual Studio and Delphi, and use a range of scripting languages, such as Visual Basic, JavaScript, and PHP.

In release 1.1, Skype4COM added a security layer to enable you to add Skype features to Internet Explorer web pages. This feature introduces a number of windows to manage and customize Internet Explorer security settings. The new XPCOM wrapper will extend this ability to Mozilla Firefox® browsers and will be available soon for beta testing.”

It is these changes to Skype 3.0 which I believe make this beta release so important to the future success of Skype. With these changes, Skype has positioned itself to become a multi-OS communication platform for IM developers with a strong third party [add-in] ecosystem. Basically with Skype 3.0 third parties can now easily create add-ins and mashups using the Skype protocol and services to create newer P2P based applications.

This for me is the new development context.