Thursday 20 August 2009

Two new services for the web

One of the nicest things of the recent year’s development in the web has been the increasing availability of structured web services for specific needs, low cost, nice and easy to use. Some of these allow the providers of web sites and web applications to provide a richer service to their customers with little effort from the development/design point of view.
Two well known examples of such services which we use are Google Analytics and UserVoice. What they provide is quite different, but they share the fact that they require a minimal effort to get the service running, and they provide a lot of functionality in a friendly environment.

This actually has been happening for many years, but recently there are more and more, of good quality. I guess it is one of the features that vaguely contribute to the “Web 2.0 – web as a platform”.

We recently decided that we will not just be users of such services, but we will start providing our own. So what we are now developing in Open Lab? Well, we are actually creating two new such services, which could be useful for all designers, developers and providers of web sites and web applications. One will help improve the services offered and the interactivity of any web site, the other will ease feedback from your web applications. In both cases, we will require little effort to the web site designer/developer, and offer something which should be beautiful.

A major part of Open Lab is working on these new services, in particular Matteo Bicocchi: see

http://www.open-lab.com/mb.ideas

for some of the graphic features that our new services will use.

We hope to launch the beta program for this services before this autumn’s end; we'll announce it also here on the blog.