The blogosphere is all abuzz over Google's launch of Lively, an in browser virtual world, similar to Second Life.

However, the bigger news for RIA developers, and especially Flex developers, is the technology that they used to build it. From this Flickr screenshot, it appears as though Google is using Flex to develop the UI for Lively. This assumption is also supported by the minimum system requirements, which list Flash [Player] 9 or higher. (Flex applications can only run in Flash Player 9 or higher because of the new VM requirements.)

Since Lively only runs on Windows machines (and not in VMWare) I can't personally test this out - can anyone verify the Flickr screenshot?

Today Adobe announced that they've made a special version of the Flash Player available to Google and Yahoo that allows them to fully index rich Internet applications and other SWF content. The content in rich Internet applications is now available to Google, and that means that RIAs should be easier to find in Google. This is one of the main issues that people ask about when talking about rich Internet applications, so its great to see Google, Yahoo and Adobe working together to solve this problem.

More at the official Google blog and on TechCrunch.

In the past day, both Google and Yahoo have launched new browser plugins that enhance the functionality of the browser. Google in fact has two plugins - Gears (renamed from Google Gears), and a new plugin for Google Earth. Yahoo launched a new plugin called Yahoo BrowserPlus, which will one day allow developers to enhance the functionality of browser based applications by supporting things like drag and drop, desktop notifications etc.. BrowserPlus has a list of plugins or services that it currently enables.

While these companies certainly have the right intentions of improving the user experience, I see end users being the real losers here. The great thing about the web is that when you go to a webpage, you can view the content on it immediately. Remember how frustrating it was when Microsoft introduced HTML specific tags to IE? The same thing is happening again, except this time with plugins from various companies. Want to use this offline application from Google? Need to install the Gears plugin. Want to drag and drop a photo to Flickr? You need the Yahoo plugin. Want to see this 3D map? You need the Google Earth plugin, and you need to be on Windows.

I appreciate the intent of these companies that want to improve the user experience, but forcing users to install new pieces of software is not making things better. Its switching one problem (user experience) for another (installing and managing plugins).

Google launched the Google App Engine at Campfire One last night, a service that allows developers to run web applications on Google's infrastructure. TechCrunch's Mike Arrington has a great overview of Google App Engine, which competes with Amazon's S3, EC2 and SimpleDB services. Unlike Amazon's services, the Google App Engine is an all in one solution that includes Python servers, database access through Google's BigTable, and Google File System data storage.

The first 10,000 developers to sign up for the service will be allowed to deploy applications, which will be served initially at no charge. Developers can store up to 500 MB of data and have enough processing power and bandwidth to serve an application that equates to about 5 M pageviews / month.

This is another step forward to reducing the time to market for Internet start ups. There's now another option available to developers who want to build out an online application. They no longer need to worry about hosting the application, or buying servers to host it.

Essentially what this does is continue to make application hosting and storage a commodity whose price is approaching zero, removing that as a competitive differentiator. In my mind, this increases the need for a great user experience - and this user experience will likely be the competitive difference for Internet applications. That's where the value will come from. The performance of an application will now be taken for granted - it can run on hosted infrastructure that (in theory) should always be available. The difference for these applications will have to come from something else - and that something else is likely to be the user experience.

How easy is it to use your application? How engaging is the experience for your users? If you haven't thought about that, you should. Because that's where the money is going to come from moving forward.

More information at the Google App Engine blog, ReadWriteWeb and O'Reilly Radar.

SearchMe is a new visual search engine that shows search results as visual images of the webpages, in a style similar to Apple's cover flow in iTunes. It launched in a private beta yesterday, and was covered on TechCrunch and All Things Digital yesterday.

SearchMe was built in collaboration with Adobe and uses Adobe Flex 3. They've posted two videos of the application in action that you can see below.

Scribd launched a new platform today called iPaper, which converts documents in the most popular formats into Flash. That's the big news, as covered on such well known blogs like Read Write Web, GigaOm and TechCrunch. However, the biggest news for RIA developers is that the content in those documents is matched to Google ads, allowing owners of those documents to make money from Google. This is the first known instance of Google ads being embedded in anything other than an HTML page.

This is great news for RIA developers. Scribd's Flex application allows writers to monetize their documents. Let's hope that Google opens up the API to allow other RIA developers to monetize their user's content as well.

Google has launched a Flex version of their Searchmash website. The site includes image previews from Snap, similar to what I used to have on this site (I took them down because they were too annoying on the mouse over of links). Using them on the right hand side of the page is a nice touch.

There are a few interesting things about this Flex application. First of all, for video searches you can play the videos right in the search results, without having to visit the site. A nice touch, though the way they've implemented it it could be done in an HTML page as well (the videos play on the right side of the results - it would be neat to play the search results themselves).

The second interesting thing that they've done is embed Google Maps in their Flex application. I haven't had time to figure out how they've done this (are they overlaying the HTML over the Flex application, or have they built a Flex version of Google Maps), but either solution would be really cool.

In any event, nice to see a company like Google jumping on the Flex bandwagon, even while sites like TechCrunch question the use of Flash and Flex.

Google launched an Ajax based presentation tool yesterday called Presently. Available now at Google Docs, the application has a very simple and intuitive interface for creating applications. Unfortunately for me, it doesn't work well in Safari (v. 3.0.3) - I couldn't edit any text in any of the slides at all. The top of the application also has a nice note for me: "Presentation features are not fully supported on your browser. Please consider upgrading to the latest version of your browser or switching to a supported browser." Unfortunately, they don't tell me what a supported browser is, but I assume that IE and Firefox work fine.

Personally, and I know I'm biased, but Sliderocket blows this application out of the water. First of all, its built with Flex, so it will work in Safari, and all the other browsers. More importantly, it has all the graphical elements that I like from PowerPoint and Keynote. I prefer to create stunning presentations with nice graphics and transitions. Presently appears to be geared towards those people who are need to create basic slideshows easily and quickly.

Duncan Riley at TechCrunch agrees with me, though he prefers the simplified UI to what's available in PowerPoint. "Presently doesn’t have all the bells and whistles PowerPoint has, but that’s in part the appeal... Presently, like Docs and Spreadsheets before it is straight to the point." I guess I don't think it has to be one or the other - I'd like something easy to use that let's me create really great presentations, like Keynote does. And from what I've seen, Sliderocket fits the bill.

Having said that, I haven't used the application enough to try any other other features it has, like the collaboration elements. Try it out, and let me know if I'm wrong.

Via TechCrunch

Google yesterday announced a new library called Google Gears that helps developers take their Ajax applications offline. Gears includes 3 main things: a local server that stores application pages for working off line, a database (based on SQLite) for storing (and accessing) data, and a "WorkerPool" that does most of the work, including synchronizing data between the server and the application. As a developer, your Ajax code will always hit the local server, and the WorkerPool class will take care of managing the data between the client and server.

The question on a lot of people's minds today is what does this mean for rich Internet application developers. David Mitchell Smith, Web analyst for Gartner, says that this actually reduces the need for RIAs and rich clients, and Ryan Stewart seems to agree, saying that this will likely mean fewer applications built on Apollo.

They may be right. Google is certainly pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the browser with this release, as they have for the past few years. Ajax development is difficult, but their GWT toolkit is making it easier (at least for Java developers). I'm sure a few developers will be looking at this as a solution to many of their problems. However, I'm not really sure that the main problem for Ajax developers right now is offline access - I don't think that's the holy grail (David HH agrees).

I think in order for this to be truly successful Gears is going to have to be installed in browsers by default. The installation process right now is fine for developers, but my mom won't be too happy to have to install an extension to Safari in order to get something to work. Time will tell if Apple and Microsoft agree to install this by default in their browsers (Firefox including it is a no brainer). That is going to take a long time to happen, likely a few years, if it happens at all.

There's a lot of coverage on this today. Here's what I would recommend reading: Slashdot, Ryan Stewart, Information Week, O'Reilly, and TechCrunch.

The Guardian has a very interesting interview with Google's Dan Crow, who is the product manager of crawl services at Google. A few highlights that might be interesting for rich Internet application developers building solutions with Flash and Flex:
BJ: Are you working with Adobe to build better crawling data into applications like Flash?
DC: I can't talk about that.
BJ: Because Flex and Apollo would offer a new chance to find a baseline.
DC: Absolutely. That's not an unsensible observation. We clearly need to figure this out... it's not been the highest on our priority list, but in the last six months it has become more so.

Nice. Can't wait to see what they come up with.