At 1pm PST Google is hosting an event to launch a new Gmail feature they’re calling the “next evolution of 20% time.” They say it will be a change in their development process and “users will be able to influence Gmail’s design.” Mike, Mark and Steve Gillmor are on the way to the event and we’ll be updating this post with live video and pictures.

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Gabe Rivera finally added search to Techmeme last month. But already he is making it much better. Rivera just added a nice prospective search feature to the site.

Anytime you search Techmeme, you can subscribe to future search results for the same term through an RSS feed. Just click on the RSS icon in your browser after you do a search, and you will get a feed for stories that appear on Techmeme with that term. So you can keep track of breaking Techmeme news about that particular subject in your feed reader.

By default, the feed only includes stories with your search term in the headline or first few sentences, but you can opt for any mention of the term throughout the story as well. This is a good way to keep track of breaking news on companies or products. For instance, you could subscribe to a feed for the term “iPhone” or “Google” or “Twitter.” In fact, we already incorporate a Techmeme feed or this very purpose in our Crunchbase profiles. (The image above is the latest feed in the sidebar of Techmeme’s page).

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Who knew Duncan Riley was such a Greasemonkey? My former colleague just made FriendFeed a lot more useful for people on Firefox. Using Greasemonkey, an add-on to Firefox that lets developers customize Webpages through the browser, he created some scripts that add tabs to FriendFeed and that make it even more of a super start page than it already is.

He got the idea from this app called FriendFeed Tabs that lets you add Techmeme as a tab. When you click on the tab, news aggregator site Techmeme appears within FriendFeed.

Duncan went further and added scripts to add tabs that show Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Netvibes, Plurk, ReadBurner, and his own version of a Techmeme tab inside of FriendFeed. He also created scripts for TechCrunch and CrunchGear. (Thanks, Duncan!) You need to add Greasemonkey to Firefox before you can install any of these scripts. But once you do, and relaunch your browser, whenever you go to FriendFeed the tabs will appear and you can scroll through the sites at your leisure.

Some of these tabs are redundant with FriendFeed itself, which lets you bring in RSS feeds and your Twitter feed, for instance. But the tabs let you access these sites and services in a more traditional view, and you can always toggle back to the FriendFeed stream. And now, for people who check more than one of these sites on a daily basis, they can simply access them all from FriendFeed. (Note: these scripts are essentially a hack, and there may be some issues, which Duncan describes in this post).

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I want to love the search apps in Yahoo’s newly opened Search Gallery. I really do. Opening up its search engine to outside developers is an idea worth applauding (although it could still do more). That’s why I was excited when Yahoo announced its SearchMonkey platform, which essentially allows outside developers to create their own search “applications” that changes the display of search results.

Today, Yahoo publicly launched a gallery of these apps, which Yahoo members can add as customizations to Yahoo search. Some of these include apps that are supposed to highlight public LinkedIn profiles, Yelp reviews, Epicurious recipes, Digg stats, and music info from Last.fm. When you perform a related search, a little icon and customized detail information is supposed to appear within the search results. Think of these as Firefox search add-ons, but all in one place.

Well, that’s the idea. But after putting some of these enhancements through a quick test drive this morning, I am completely underwhelmed. The following searches failed to produce any enhanced results: “fried snapper,” “baked ziti,” “U2″ (got the regular Yahoo Music shortcut, but not any Last.fm results), “Rolling Stones” (same). “White Stripes” (same), several current headlines on Digg (nothing).

The LinkedIn app seemed to work okay for famous tech CEOS like “Reid Hoffman” and “Max Levchin,” but it didn’t prioritize the LinkedIn results in any way. For Levchin it was No. 6, even though I told Yahoo by adding the LinkedIn enhancement that I want to see those results. But SearchMonkey only lets developers change the display, not the order of the results.

Then I put in a very specific search for something I know is listed on Yelp: “bar tabac brooklyn restaurant.” Nothing. Or, rather, too specific. When I tried just “bar tabac,” I finally got this enhanced result:

So it kind of works, but you shouldn’t have to hunt and peck to find these enhanced results. And you’d think that the more specific your search query, the more likely you are to find one. But the reverse is true.

I’m not sure if this is Yahoo’s fault or the fault of the developers. What I do know is that SearchMonkey apps have along way to go before they create a better search experience.

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What happens when two former Apple employees - one from the iPhone team and one from the iTunes Store team - go off and start their own Y Combinator-backed startup? Apparently they come up with an online slideshow tool that looks highly reminiscent of Keynote.

280 North first presented 280 Slides (now available in public beta) earlier this Spring at YC’s biannual demo day. In their presentation, the three founders emphasized two reasons why 280 Slides would take off when other browser-based PowerPoint clones had failed.

First, 280 North has been designed to make users forget that they aren’t using a desktop application. And they do a good job sustaining that illusion, even though the application is based in JavaScript not Flash. 280 North has actually built out an entire JavaScript framework called Cappuccino that it plans to release as open source soon. Competitors who are also trying to recreate the desktop experience in the browser, such as Empressr and SlideRocket, have been built in Flash (and Flex in particular).

Secondly, 280 North touts how easy it is to download your slideshows in PowerPoint format. They figure that most people shy away from using online tools because ultimately they need to share their slideshows with friends. While Google Docs can also export to PowerPoint, 280 Slides puts this functionality front and center.

Overall, this is a simple application that has been designed to work and work right. You won’t find a lot of advanced features related to charts, styling, effects or collaboration, but fundamental stuff like keyboard strokes work just the way it should. Among the features 280 Slides does boast is the ability to publish on SlideShare, grab color combos from Adobe Kuler, add videos and photos from the likes of YouTube and Flickr, and embed on other sites.

It would be good to see auto-saves (my Safari crashed once, causing me to back up a bit - this is beta after all). More themes and controls over default settings (the default font, in particular) would be welcome, too. But overall, 280 Slides does enough to appeal to basic users, and it certainly presents the most intuitive user interface of them all.

Sample slideshow after the jump - it may break on Firefox 2…

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TotSpot, the site that we described as a “social network for babies”, has launched in public beta. The site gives parents a way to securely share pictures, videos, and important milestones of their children with selected friends and family.

The term “social network” isn’t really appropriate for TotSpot - this isn’t a place for parents to connect with other people. Instead, it’s meant to help parents share updates regarding their children with the people they know. The site’s founders recognize how protective most parents are of their children, and have implemented privacy settings to ensure that their baby’s profiles are secure. Only invited friends and family members are allowed to view profiles, and parents can actually see who has visited their profile in the past week - a feature that would be creepy on any other site, but is perfectly reasonable here.

Beyond the sharing features, the site gives parents a way to document the growth and accomplishments of their child. Parents can list their child’s favorite things, dates and descriptions for milestones, and keep track of a child’s size using a growth chart. Everything is time stamped, which allows TotSpot to generate an Ad-Libesque story of a child’s life.

Best of all, TotSpot will let parents order physical baby books containing their photos, their mile stones, journal entries, and growth charts. These won’t be available until later this summer, but TotSpot’s founders say that they should be significantly more personalized than the traditional baby books found in retail stores.

TotSpot has created a unique (and potentially lucrative) niche for themselves. The site is very easy to use, and has a simple interface that will appeal to even the least tech-savy parents. That said, they’ll see competition from a plethora of other baby sites that offer similar features, including BabySpot, Bundlo, and Parentricity.

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Last week we looked at how some browsers and plug-ins were adopting storage-related API’s that are a part of the new HTML5 draft specification. While Gears, Opera and Webkit have implemented structured storage API’s, the remainder of the HTML5 spec currently remains mostly unimplemented and also in a state of flux. HTML5 is a super-sized effort to bring all the browsers under a single, standard markup language and set of API’s - but with Microsoft, Adobe and others racing ahead with their own next-gen web technologies, will we ever see a real HTML5 standard?

Learning From History

In terms of the scope and effort, the HTML5 effort has an earlier historical analogy in the HTML 3.0 spec. Back in April of 1995, the HTML 3.0 spec was drafted as a backwards-compatible way of adding new features (such as tables) to HTML 2.0. The W3C had only just formed, and HTML 3.0 was one of the first specs to be produced by the new working group. At the time the browser wars were just around the corner, as Navigator had been out for only five months and had already built up 80% market share. Microsoft had taken notice and were rushing out Internet Explorer 1.0 which would be released a few short months later.

As it remains today, in 1995 the different browsers all supported a different set of markup. With their new 1.1 release, Netscape had raced ahead and implemented tables, floating images, and other navigational elements (such as visited links). IE 1 was a complete hack of a browser that had an approach of rendering at all cost, meaning that if it couldn’t work out what the user had intended with the HTML, it would do its best to have a guess and present anything. This resulted in issues such as being able to mix tags (eg. <b><p>Header</b></p>) which allowed developers to be lazier as IE would compensate for mistakes.

With the market share of Internet Explorer steadily rising, and with frequent point releases and updates from both Netscape and Microsoft, the two browsers steadily diverged further as the market was also segmented into two firm camps. The HTML specification effort, which had previously taken the form of RFC’s, was supposed to re-unite the browsers and formalize new features that browsers had already introduced. There was often significant tension amongst contributors to the spec about which browser, Netscape or Explorer, had a better implementation of each new feature. For example, Netscape and Explorer had very different approaches to image maps, where they were not compatible with one another. Microsoft were also responsible for making up random HTML tags, such as <top> and <bottom> to define static areas of a page (which would later become the very unfriendly frameset tags thanks to Netscape).

The problem was not that these new features were already out in the wild, but that there were two fiercely competitive products each implementing their own version of the web in order to either protect their market share or to gain control of more of it. Eventually both Netscape and Microsoft gave up on implementing a proper HTML 3.0 spec, for example from Netscape:

Netscape remains committed to supporting HTML 3.0. To that end, we’ve gone ahead and implemented several of the more stable proposals, in expectation that they will be approved. We believe that Netscape Navigator 2.0 supports more of the HTML 3.0 specifications than any other commercial client.

In addition, we’ve also added several new areas of HTML functionality to Netscape Navigator that are not currently in the HTML 3.0 specification. We think they belong there, and as part of the standards process, we are proposing them for inclusion

and Microsoft were left playing catchup in terms of supporting HTML:

Netscape has enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the browser market (about 90% according to some estimates), and this has allowed it to consolidate its position still further by introducing unofficial or ‘extended’ HTML tags. As a result, the Web is littered with pages that only work effectively if viewed in Navigator. By the time other browsers catch up, Netscape has made even more additions.

but that didn’t last long and Microsoft tired of playing that game. Further releases didn’t even mention HTML anymore and instead talked about a web built on Microsoft technology:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 is the first Internet client to integrate ActiveXTM technologies, which enable developers to create highly interactive applications and content for the Internet. These technologies allow a World Wide Web site to be as rich and interactive as an action game, a multimedia encyclopedia or a productivity application. For the first time, a Web site will be limited only by its author’s imagination, not by the limitations of the technology.

In a very quick year the browser wars had progressed from fighting over HTML tag support and towards the formats and languages that would produce richer client-side applications. The battle between Javascript (the Netscape proprietary client-side scripting language) and ActiveX (the Microsoft proprietary object container) was just around the corner with the release of Internet Explorer 3.0 in August of 1996.

The rest of the story where Microsoft wins, and more importantly, how they won, the browser war is common history. The web had fractured in a big way, with repercussions that would last for over a decade as thousands of developer hours go to waste producing cross-browser hacks and libraries. Despite Microsoft gaining dominance in the browser market and promoting multiple tiers of proprietary technology for building web applications, somehow simple HTML, Javascript and CSS eventually won over and Web 2.0 wasn’t built on ActiveX.

Fast Forward Ten Years

While Netscape has disappeared and been replaced with Firefox, the battle for the web today is not only between browsers but also one between new web platforms and technologies. The market share of Internet Explorer has by some estimates been notched down to 78% (from a high in 2004 of 95%), with Firefox at 16% and Safari, Opera and others making up the remaining 6%.  HTML 4.01 was published in December of 1999 and went on to become an ISO standard as the major browsers built in support for the spec. HTML 4.01 still remains the most widely and best supported HTML standard, but the problems today have migrated to other parts of the web technology stack, specifically with CSS and DOM access.

In what is now referred to as Web 2.0, thousands of rich web applications have been developed using HTML, CSS and XML - more commonly referred to as Ajax (ironically the a and x parts of Ajax started as a proprietary add-on to Internet Explorer in the form of xmlhttprequest). Ajax applications quickly reached limitations of what can be done with current technologies, but they had shortened the gap between desktop and web applications. A number of vendor-backed web client platforms such as Flash from Adobe and Silverlight from Microsoft have been released as a layer above the browser, presenting developers with a very rich desktop-like development environment for web applications. These new platforms work by extending existing browsers through plugins, and while these commercial solutions have already launched there is currently no suitable open source and open standards based alternative that extends beyond Ajax.

Frustrated by the lack of progress with HTML5 at the W3, a group of browser developers split off and formed WHATWG to further develop the specification. The primary mission of HTML5 was to recognize that the web has changed since the original HTML specs, as web applications were now capable of presenting very complex user interfaces and could make use of more advanced system functions (for the interface, Silverlight uses XAML while Flex/Flash uses MXML). The spec began as Web Applications 1.0, which was an umbrella term to describe not only the new HTML5 spec but other associated specifications such as CSS2, DOM5, ECMAv4 and new API calls (such as local browser storage).

The WHATWG working group spec was eventually (after 4 years) folded back into W3, and Microsoft joined the effort again. In the interim, developers searching for a rich web app platform beyond Ajax had little option other than to join either the Microsoft or Adobe universe. Progress on implementing the HTML5 spec was still very slow, until Google recognised the threat of a Microsoft or Adobe dominated web and stepped in by creating Gears. Gears is Google’s way of hurrying up implementation of HTML5 features in browsers, and they have backed it at each step by having their own applications such as Gmail and Reader support the new API calls.

Apple is another company who are fully backing the open, HTML5 alternative for rich internet applications. It was only a few years ago that a visitor to the Apple homepage would find a page dominated by Flash and PDF files. Today Apple have their own open-standards based browser with Safari and back the Webkit open source project. They have also backed up their support for both the free and open alternative by re-engineering their websites and applications to use Ajax over proprietary alternatives such as Flash.

We are back in 1996 again and HTML5 is the new HTML 3.0, but instead of two major browser manufacturers today there are numerous parties with interest in determining what the new web API and virtual machine will look like. In the 1990’s version of events, the open standards eventually won over - which both Microsoft and Adobe have recognized as they have released source code and API details for some parts of their platforms.

Web history teaches us that there is usually a single winner, as all users steadily migrate to the single winning solution which imposes itself as a standard (recall that many of today’s ’standards’ began life as proprietary technologies). There is a big difference though between a standard such as the Windows operating system, and an open standard such as HTML5 - and a repeat dose of the former is the biggest threat that companies such as Google and Apple currently face.

You can read the previous Next-Gen Web post about local browser storage here.

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Nile Guide, a sophisticated travel planning site that launched just over a month ago, has raised $8 million in Series B from Austin Ventures, Lehman Brothers, and existing investors Draper Richards and KPG Ventures. The round brings Nile Guide’s total to over $9.5 million.

We’re told that since launch, the site has added support for 5 more destinations: Istanbul, Vienna, Sedona, New Orleans, and Cusco. The homepage has been simplified so you can select destinations from a list. And Nile Guide now suggests particular neighborhoods that it thinks you should check out when visiting a destination.

Internet Explorer 6 support is planned for July 1st, as is support for Moscow, Shanghai, Vail, Calgary/Canadian Rockies, and Costa Rica. No word yet on when the site will work in Safari.

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With all this talk about lightweight video cameras, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Sanyo has updated its lightweight Xacti line. The HD1010 records in 1080i HD and offers 300 frame-per-second slow motion recording along with 12-subject face recognition. Sure it will cost $799.99 in July, but just think of the elevator pitches Erick could record. Quick tip: Lay off the pancake make-up and get some botox, entrepreneurs, because we’re all going to look ugly in 1920 x 1080 pixels. Read more about the camera on CrunchGear.

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According to survey of 300 senior IT staff, smart phones pose more of a threat to business security than laptops, largely due to user mentality; for one reason or another, many smart phones just don’t seem to be getting the protection their lap dwelling counterparts might.

While 4 out of 10 (that’s it?) IT guys were encrypting the crucial stuff on company laptops, 9 out of 10 smart phones had access to the company network without any security past what is inherently part of the protocol, and 81% of those purportedly had no access restrictions at all. Sure, there’s no such thing as the perfect lock - but even a basic password might keep Joe Commonthief from digging around before getting frustrated and trashing the device.

Read more…

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