6 Technologies to use now as of Wired

Wired has an article about 6 new web technologies of 2008 you need to use now and I have to agree. It’s nothing earth shattering for most people here on this blog but it is an interesting list and I would like to add a few comments.

1\. Identity Management : They are talking about OpenID, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect here even though they are slightly different things. The thing is that Google and Facebook are trying to be the central location where your friends graph, your social graph, are stored. Whenever you log in somewhere they want to know and will allow you to use your social graph within any service, taking your friends with you. But your friends would still belong to Google and Facebook. OpenID wants to be a standard for you to log in everywhere with one identity. There is no social graph bit there.

So there is not really one solution there, but identity is an important thing and it would be best if you control it somehow. I recently wrote about Address Book Sync and about Self Generated Content Infrastructure which is connected to this. It probably warrants another post. What is your identity online and are you at risk of loosing it?

2\. HTML 5 : Agreed, very important but I know one or two security experts that are not all too thrilled about future features in things like HTML and JavaScript. But who am I to talk. We’ll all here enough about this when things start getting more concrete.

3\. Lifestreaming : This is what my SGCI post was about. I am running Noserub already, but I actually need it in a little bit different form, to really log my lifestream, because like blogging, I want my stuff searchable. And you need to make sure that whatever you use to generate your lifestream, you need to be able to get it out. Changing your status via Twitter is a good thing as it can be imported into Facebook and so on, but using Facebook would mean that you can hardly get it out again, so not into Twitter.

4\. Firefox 3 : Yes, my most used browser, even though I am trying to get a bit more use out of Safari just because it is faster, but I tend to gravitate back to Firefox. I am looking forward to using Google Chrome (their point 5) on OS X though.

6\. Location Awareness : This is slowly getting into the mainstream but will really take some time to really get there in terms of people sharing their current location. I like Aroundme as an iPhone app and it is really becoming one of my favorites and I co-founded Ormigo for a reason. For sharing your location the best I found up till now is Brightkite because they got the security part just right.