This week I was at Berlin's Web 2.0 Expo.  Amongst the throng of people show casing their social networking and/or collaboration services, a system that really stood out from crowd, was a desktop application called Wuala.  Wuala is the result of 3 years of R&D out of ETH University in Zurich and is currently getting some close attention from some serious players including Google. And for good reason, as it appears Wuala is about to take P2P file sharing truely mainstream.

Wuala - Rise of the rich client

Unlike other P2P file sharing systems, Wuala offers persistent storage of files across a virtual global filing system.  To use Wuala you download a desktop client, create an account and log in.  Once logged in users can upload and download files from public, group or private folders.  The system has some basic collaboration and networking functionality and integrates with both Facebook and Skype, with promises for support for other social networking services.  Users can map physical drives in their OS to paths within Wuala's system and interact with files using their OS file explorer.  Files sent to Wuala are securely encrypted on the client side. These encrypted files are then distributed across nodes in a P2P network using algoirthms similiar to those used in RAID hard disk systems to ensure file availability.  Wuala's architecture looks very promising and may deliver one of the most secure and reliable file systems ever built for public distribution. 

The final keynote of the conference was delievered by Don Tapscott.  He gave a very interesting speech about the evolution of society and the internet in which he made reference to the famous alleged quote from the former CEO of IBM - Thomas J. Watson...

"I think there is a world market for about five computers"

He remarked that Thomas Watson was actually quite close in his assessment, as he was only off by four computers.  I.e. the world actually only needs one computer and that computer is what the internet is currently evolving into - a global web of interconnected services.  If that is so perhaps one day Wuala will be that computer's hard disk.

You may be thinking what a desktop application has to do with a Web 2.0 expo and why I would find it be its highlight ?  Web 2.0 is a rather nebulous term which means a lot of things to different people.  O'Reilly Media originally coined the term "Web 2.0" when they announced the inaugural Web 2.0 conference in 2004.  As such, Tim Oreilly would probably be the authority on what Web 2.0 exactly is, the most succinct definition I've heard him give is...

"...after the .COM bubble, which was really a stock market phenomena, everyone thought the web was over, and we saw it was still going and so Web 2.0 refers not so much to a new technology so much as to the 2nd coming of world wide web as an important technological phenomena."

By important I guess he meant financially rewarding. So in summary Web 2.0 is just a marketing term.

Although Wuala is a desktop application it also offers integration with Facebook and Skype (another desktop application with web integration).  I see applications like Wuala, Skype and Photosynth as well as the emerging proliferation of rich client desktop technologies such as .NET 3.0's WPF/Silverlight, Adobe Flash and now Suns JavaFX technology beginning to redefine the web as being something more than HTML and Javascript.  With service based architectures required for AJAX in HTML driven Web Applications, I think the time is ripe for a new boom in rich client non-HTML applications consuming or augmenting these services.  Perhaps these sorts of applications should be called Web 3.0 applications, where Web 3.0 is the resurgence of rich client technologies to deliver live connected richer than HTML web experiences. 

Ghost (Global Hosted Operating System) was another system on show at the expo and is another example of the potential of rich client technology.  Ghost runs on adobe flash and provides a virtual hosted operating system.  This client side virtual operating system, provides basic functions, such as filing, email, listening to and watching media files and can be loaded from any web browser (on an OS with the flash plugin).  An interesting aspect of Ghost's architecture is that it aims for a zero-footprint on Ghost server machines with the majority of the virtual OS functions utilising third party services.  Ghost uses Amazon's Web Services such as S3 storeage service to provide virtual storage for files and documents created within it's operating system, EC2 for computing and SQS for messaging.  Office applications like email and word processing utilise online services such as Google docs.  Ghost architecture is a good example of sort of architecture I see becoming more prevalent over the next few years - rich client and service oriented.

Google's OpenSocial

Whilst Wuala received a fair amount of attention, Google's OpenSocial platform for social networking sites received at least equal or more attention.  Google's OpenSocial API is a Javascript API social networking sites such as MySpace and Google's Orkut can expose, enabling third parties to develop plugins and widgets that will operate across different social networking web sites. 

From what I saw of Google's OpenSocial API it only reaffirmed my belief that Javascript is an absolutely terrible medium for application development, the code looked complicated, buggy and less than compelling.  To be fair to Google I think their OpenSocial API has been put to market very early, its still very much a work in progress.  What is interesting is that it really doesn't matter that their SDK in a little unstable, as unlike traditional SDK's that are shipped, Google's OpenSocial SDK is all hosted online, they can update the scripts and documentation without having to re-release packages.  When you think about it, this is actually pretty cool and a subtle new way of thinking about software development.

Firefox 3.0

Tristan Nitot (from Mozilla Europe) gave a way too brief presentation where he showed off an alpha version of FireFox 3.0.  Tristan didn't actually give a live demo of FireFox 3.0a passing the ACID2 test, however he did show a screenshot which suggested it now passes.  So Firefox 3.0 promises improvements in CSS/HTML standards compliance.  Triston also mentioned big improvements in memory management and a reorganisation of Firefoxe's architecture to enable them to deliver a lightweight Firefox for mobile devices.  Bookmarks in Firefox has been replaced by "Places", which is a combination of tags and bookmarks.  Apparently their address bar is no more and it has been replaced by something called an "Awesomebar", which takes a bit of explaining, but basically it now autocompletes not just on history but also on your bookmarks as well as tags.  One of the features that got an ooh ahh and clap from the audience was Firefox's handling of cursive fonts.  For the most this is just eye candy, but this feature would definitely be attractive to those using languages such as Arabic which extensively use such fonts.

What about Microsoft?

I was a little disappointed not to hear more from Microsoft at a more technical level in the conference as I know they have a lot coming in the pipeline that applies to the internet dev space.  Microsoft wasn't absent from the conference by any means, Neil Holloway (vice President for Business Strategy) was interviewed by Tim O'Reilly at the start of the conference.  Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft Live Labs was also there showing off Photosynth, which he announced would be going into full release a few months from now.  Microsoft was also present in the main Expo hall showing off Sharepoint - the market leading product in the corporate collaboration space.