Recently there’s been stories going on at cnet news about a desktop application that uses YouTube content using the APIs.

This is interesting because I’ve been working on the same thing for a while. The 2 man team of Muziic have been working on it for 12 months and came up with a decent product on the market.

Mine is based on an idea at the moment – not design. I’m still working on the design.

Muziic is based on the design with a simple goal. At the moment they have a great product but already they have targeted a specific market that can easily cause them problems (the people who own the music).

Anyways, check the YouTube application im making here: http://www.ahassan.net/y/

Screenshot

Demo: http://ahassan.net/f/

I’ve been doing alot of programming for the past few months and came up with a cool Flickr Application.

You can search for images and view the images – for the moment.

It will show you thumbnails of the images and when you click on it, it will show you the larger image. So everything is click controlled.

To zoom out, just click – and you will see the thumbnails again.

I’ve used JQuery and it is really easy to program. 

It is still in development so things you expect might not be there but just let me know and I will add to it.

Enjoy

Screenshots:

When color screen mobile phones first came to the market in the early 2000’s, they were very expensive and people didn’t know what to make of it. People used mobile phones to make and receive calls and couldn’t understand the reason of having a screen let alone a color screen.

As time went by, not only did color screens started to become accepted, they were expected. Nobody in the 90’s imagined about a phone that had camera. It was however, possible to have those kinds of imaginations when color screens were introduced. People by now understand the need for a color screen on mobile. They could take pictures, record audio and video – in other words, the world of multimedia and the mobile phone were introduced.

A few years later, a mobile phone without a color screen just ins’t a mobile phone. The advancement of the mobile phone didn’t stop there. By now, we have connected the mobile to the internet.

We are now at the stage of developing mobile phones that are suited for the internet. The iPhone and Google’s G1 are the beginning of this advancements.

When color screens mobile phones first came out, it would have been impossible for ordinary Africans to own one. But now that the prices of color screens mobile have dropped significantly since their introduction, many Africans a mobile phone. Consider that some of the first color screen mobile phones were about £200 ($400 (@Dec. 08)) and now costing as little as £20 ($40).

The massive price drops (driven by competition) has meant that there are many more mobiles phones used than landlines in Africa.

We just have to wait a few years until internet suited mobile phones drop in prices (currently around £250 ($500)) for ordinary Africans to be connected on the go.

One of the major obstables of the mobile advancement in Africa is infustructure and governance. If western companies want to expand into Africa, they need to support the development of telecommunication infustructure and the security of those important infustructures.

Google and a few other companies have already took the initiative to develop high speed satelite broadband in Africa, which is a good start.

I’m just watching YouTube Live! and the first thing that it reminds me of are things like music awards, film awards and stuff like that. I’m sure those TV channels must’ve been making decent money for those few hours.

Just to make you aware of how much YouTube ads are, the costs of having an advert on the homepagage was just shy of $200,000 per day and around $200,000 for a customised channel in 2008. I’m not an expert but to advertise on YouTube seem very expensive.

But this is the internet we’re talking, and YouTube has millions of viewers per day. There are a lot of brands who are prepared to pay for these prices. YouTube Live might be another way Google could make money.

I’m sure it can be compared to a prime time tv  and as time goes on, YouTube may decide to give media companies like NBC, MTV etc live streaming capabilities and start to charge them for it. Who knows, Google is a smart company and I do think they will eventually get it right with YouTube.

I’m personally enthusiastic about YouTube Live because it is a real alternative to boring TV and I’m not the only one.

YouTube Live

This is a video I found of Youtube and the interesting thing about it is that it is an application that runs on the browser. The emphasis here is not the application itself but the technology used to create the application. The other emphasis is that the application runs on the internet – so that means you access it from anywhere.

Silverlight is a really powerful technology because you can create applications that run on the internet. Recently Microsoft announced that it was developing an operating system (code named Midori) that “is centred on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC”.

In the video, you can see an example of a Silverlight application. It is a simple video editing application that has a user-friendly interface. It also has windows, a desktop and a bin. It is very interactive but more importantly, has the potential to evolve into a full operating system.

It may seem like an idea that doesn’t make sense but imagine if Microsoft developed the Office Suite, a browser, a multimedia player and all the applications that you can think of for that operating system. And imagine if they allowed third party developers to develop their own applications for it and gave users the ability to save their stuff online. That would mean that you can save all your bookmarks and not worry about them being unavailable when you’re using another computer.

This could mean that users can access their new desktop from any computer that has internet connection. Not only will this benefit end users but also businesses. If you think about it, this is a large network (the internet) and all the desktops are connected to it. This will make collaboration much easier and cheaper.

I think this should be the way forward and we should maximise the potentiol of the internet to make our lives easier. The benifits of this are huge but with it come more problems: governments will want to access people’s files (everything) with/without their knowledge, the risk of data loss increases and there will always be people who would want to sabotage the system.

Today, O3b Networks announced plans to launch 16 satelites that will connect Africa, the Middle East and parts of Latin America to the internet. The project is backed by Google, Liberty Global and HSBC and is expected to cost around $750 million and so far has managed to raise only $65 million. The three lead backers in O3b Networks reserve the right to contribute further to the estimated $150 to $180 million of financing in equity financing that will be needed for the project – the remainder will be financed through debt. O3b stands for the “Other 3  billion”.

This is a really goods news for the developing countries because it means that they have access to information and can benifit from it in many ways. The technology is not new but the service will cost up to 95% less than what is available today.

I think this will be a especially good for Africa because so far, Africa makes up only 3.5% of the internet population and internet use has grown at a rate of 1,031.2 % (from 2000 to 2008) with Somalia having the highest growth rate.

What makes this news interesting is that Google is backing this initiative – indicating that it wants to increase the internet population so that it can benifit from it. A win-win situation.

However, the worrying thing is that this service will be resold to users by ISPs so users could get ripped off. Or even worse, the service might be delivered with a lot faults and limitations. But lets hope for the better.

Currently I have the ambition to develop a Silverlight application for Flickr. Because I’m new to programming, I will start with a simple function such as displaying a picture using the Flickr API.

I’m planning to use the FlickrNet Library. So far I little knowledge about API’s, but we’ll see how I get on.

This is my first post. I have created this blog to keep track of my progress and maybe get ideas/input from the internet (people actually). However, this might change.

I’m a young student from London and have interests in compyter software and the internet.

A small part of the Internet (the top 20 most interconnected autonomous systems) visualized with aiSee. The graph comprises 19822 nodes and 42496 edges. Courtesy of Jared Mauch.