According to a research by comScore, around 81% of the online videos on the internet are watched on Adobe’s Flash technology. Also 98% of the desktops having internet connection, contains Adobe Flash Player software. These stats show the level of popularity of Adobe’s player which continues to grow. The company is also offering two important components of the Adobe Flash Player which are Media Interactive Server 3.5 software and Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3.5 software.

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Awhile back, I talked about a nifty up-and-coming web conferencing utility for Microsoft SharedView, a decent alternative for GotoMeeting or WebEx.

Yet another great alternative, Yugma is an online web conferencing tool similar to GotoMeeting or WebEx in that it offers an easy way to create and share your desktop to other remote users across the Internet.

Granted, there are freeware AND paid variations, with certain limitations imposed on the free version (you get the 'pro' features for 15 days after signing up).

Performance seems more than adequate, and you do get free teleconferencing capability (long distance charges apply) even with the free version.

Features for the free version include 10 participant max, the aforementioned free teleconferencing, Skype compatibility, Desktop Sharing, etc. - unfortunately, changing presenter or scheduling sessions online is not part of the included free features.

Using the Yugma interface is not unlike GotoMeeting, with controls in all the right spots (screen sharing, record/playback session, annotation tools, change presenter, etc.).  Everything is laid out just where you would expect it.

The only issues that I have with Yugma is that you need to create a Yugma account to join a session, when you share your desktop, you share your Yugma interface (which I would consider to be a major issue).

Alternates:

• Mikogo
• ConferencingNow
• Yuuguu

Reading the come-on to prospective entrants provides some insight into the pressures biotech and pharma generally are facing these days to impress potential investors, analysts and the scientific community (from whence comes the brainpower it needs for survival’s sake):

“Take advantage of this opportunity to showcase your organization’s efforts and talents, and contribute to the industry’s broader knowledge base.

EARLY BIRD DEADLINE (No Fee): December 18, 2008
FINAL DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES: January 21, 2009

Benefits of participation:

* Gain Peer Recognition: Spotlight the talent of your team, and position your organization as a thought leader, among an elite group of life science professionals.
* Heighten Visibility: Use creative positioning to add another layer of credibility in the industry. Entries, nominees and especially winners receive recognition at the Gala Dinner, in widely-distributed press releases, in the Best Practices issue of Bio-IT World magazine, as well as continued coverage on Bio-ITWorld.com and in the Best Practices Compendium of entries.
* Leverage Exposure: Showcase your expertise and unique solutions, and use the exposure as a conduit to valuable connections, investors, sales leads, job candidates, and other external audiences.

Well, it is working with me so far!! I get the magazine and there is always something interesting about how modern science is conducted and the results disseminated.

It was interesting to read what fields are covered in competition:

* Basic Research & Biological Research: Disease pathway research, applied and basic research
* Drug Discovery & Development: Compound-focused research, drug safety
* Clinical Trials & Research: Trial design, eCTD
* Translational Medicine: Feedback loops, predictive technologies
* Personalized Medicine: Responders/non-responders, biomarkers
* IT & Informatics: LIMS, High Performance Computing, storage, data visualization, imaging technologies
* Knowledge Management: Data mining, idea/expertise mining, text mining, collaboration, resource optimization
* Health-IT: ePrescribing, RHIOs, EMR/PHR
* Manufacturing & Bioprocessing: Mass production, continuous manufacturing

I decided to take a look at what was showcased in 2008 and perusing many of the articles linked to is a good way to see how big pharma and big government science are adapting to the world of Science 2.0.

Here is an interesting article for example: Connecting the Cancer Community caBIG Time

Now this is an ambitious undertaking that I had not heard about before. Here is some of what I read here:

caBIG™ stands for the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™. caBIG™ is an information network enabling all constituencies in the cancer community – researchers, physicians, and patients – to share data and knowledge. The components of caBIG™ are widely applicable beyond cancer as well.

The mission of caBIG™ is to develop a truly collaborative information network that accelerates the discovery of new approaches for the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer, ultimately improving patient outcomes.

The goals of caBIG™ are to:

* Connect scientists and practitioners through a shareable and interoperable infrastructure
* Develop standard rules and a common language to more easily share information
* Build or adapt tools for collecting, analyzing, integrating, and disseminating information associated with cancer research and care.

Since its inception, caBIG™ has committed to the following cornerstones:

* Federated: caBIG™ software and resources are widely distributed, interlinked, and available to everyone in the cancer research community, but institutions maintain local control over their own resources and data.
* Open-development: caBIG™ tools and infrastructure are being developed through an open, participatory process. caBIG™ leverages existing resources whenever possible, rather than building new tools in every case.
* Open-access:caBIG™ resources are freely obtainable by the cancer community to ensure broad data-sharing and collaboration.
* Open-source: The caBIG™ source code is available to view, alter, and redistribute.

Whoa! That is a pretty sweeping mandate and game plan! This is one heck of a gargantuan undertaking, but when you read about the dynamo behind it and look at how far it has come in a few years you start to have real faith in big government science and realize that within massive research organizations there are some damn impressive people who want to take a machete to stultifying processes and stodgy mindsets that have unnecessarily impeded scientific progress for too long. One such intellectual powerhouse is profiled thus:

Kenneth H. Buetow, Ph.D., is the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Associate Director for Bioinformatics and Information Technology and the Director of the NCI Center for Bioinformatics (NCICB). As Director of the NCICB, Dr. Buetow oversees coordination and deployment of informatics in support of NCI research initiatives and the Center’s participation in the evaluation and prioritization of the NCI’s biomedical informatics research portfolio. Dr. Buetow initiated the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid™ (caBIG™) pilot project and oversees its activities.

Go, Dr. Buetow, go! Keep the good work! The hope, apparently, is to create a model in the case of cancer that will engender like networks throughout medicine. A worthy, noble goal.

By contrast, to the culture of openness Dr. Buetow exemplifies here is a case of really bad marketing. As I write this column, I am clicking around some of the links in the original Bio-IT World article. I wanted to see to check out what sorts of conferences were advertised for those in the biomedical field. I was rather intrigued by the idea of writing here about the 4th Annual World Healthcare Innovation and Technology Congress. But to get a brochure, you have to register — give me a break! How lame is that?

And then to compound the image of troglodyte thinking and the utter incapacity to grasp the revolution that is Web 2.0 that healthcare IT already has in the rest of the tech world, here is the wording on the press page.

“World Congress press credentials are available to full-time editorial staff writers employed by a trade publication, mainstream media outlet (newspaper, radio, TV, etc.), or online magazines. Freelance writers or contributing editors may request press credentials if the event is being covered for a specific publication.”

Grrrrrrrr. That pretty much excludes tech bloggers who produce some of the best coverage of IT around. If I were in charge of a major tech conference, I would not hire Patrick Golden to be my director of communications. But then I am just a little tech blogger and he has bigger fish to fry. But dissing the tech blogosphere is not the act of a smart person in the age of Web 2.0. No wonder the bright young minds of tech give healthcare a pass so very often–much to my continuing dismay, as someone who works in healthcare.

And guess what? Google's dependence on advertising notwithstanding, one of the extension examples the company points to is the ability to block advertisements.

The Chrome extensions document, spotlighted Saturday by Google programmer Aaron Boodman, doesn't include a timeline, but it does shed light on why the project is a priority for Chromium, the open-source project behind Chrome.

"Chromium can't be everything to all people," according to the document. "User-created extensions have been proposed to solve these problems: the addition of features that have specific or limited appeal; users coming from other browsers who are used to certain extensions that they can't live without; bundling partners who would like to add features to Chromium specific to their bundle."

When Google launched Chrome three months ago, it promised a Chrome extensions framework. Extensions are a popular feature of Chrome's most likely rival, Mozilla's Firefox, and one very popular extension is AdBlock Plus.

And AdBlock makes a specific appearance on the list of extension uses that Google said it would like to support eventually:

• Bookmarking/navigation tools: Delicious Toolbar, StumbleUpon, Web-based history, new tab page clipboard accelerators.

• Content enhancements: Skype extension (clickable phone numbers), RealPlayer extension (save video), Autolink (generic microformat data--addresses, phone numbers, etc.)

• Content filtering: AdBlock, Flashblock, privacy control, parental control

• Download helpers: video helpers, download accelerators, DownThemAll, FlashGot

• Features: ForecastFox, FoxyTunes, Web Of Trust, GooglePreview, BugMeNot

Demand for extensions is real.

In an unscientific CNET News poll about why people don't use Chrome, about 19 percent pointed to the lack of an extensions feature. And on Google's issue tracking site for Chromium, a Chrome extensions feature is the top-requested item.

"Of all the Firefox plug-ins, this is the one essential one," said Firefox user Ole Eichhorn. "Chrome is faster until you factor in all the cruft that gets downloaded as ads, then it isn't faster anymore. When Chrome supports AdBlock, it will be the winner, but until it does, Firefox is the only choice."

In its document, Google described some of its goals for Chrome extensions. The extensions should silently update, just like Chrome does. They should be isolated for security reasons and only get access to resources it's entitled to use. Installation should be easy, taking only two clicks.

They should permit rich user interface options--rich enough to implement some parts of Chrome as extensions, Google said. Among the interface options should be "toolbars, sidebars, content scripts (for Greasemonkey-like functionality), and content filtering (for parental filters, malware filters, or AdBlock-like functionality)," Google said. Some interfaces will require the user to grant specific permissions, such as "access to the history database" or "access to mail.google.com," Google said.

Google will play a major role in extensions, providing a central service that can be used to issue updates and to blacklist "malicious or harmful extensions" so the browser won't use them.

"It's likely in the future we may want to provide a consumer front-end which would allow users to more easily find the most popular, highest quality and trustworthy extensions," Google also said.

Adobe’s research laboratory has been working on an interactive video object manipulation system which contains some cool editing features. Now the new technology lets you draw anything on the video and that drawing will move with the object in the video. You can also add interactive annotations in a better way. The research is a joint project of Adobe and the University of Washington. Dan Goldman describes the some of the new technologies in the video above.

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Twitter Classification Script for Greasemonkey

One of the most effective ways of quickly gauging the quality of someone you discover on Twitter (maybe you got a notice that they were following you, for instance), is their follower count.  Now almost every account grows its followers over time, so the ratio of following to followers can be a nice metric.  Michael Klier of Splitbrain created a really neat script for Greasemonkey that displays the ratio above each profile you visit.

There is a scale to determine just how good each user is in terms of their “crowdsourced” quality.  If a user is following a lot of other users and has very few followers, the label at the top will tell you that they are a spammer.  If the converse is true, they are a “twittercaster.”  You can use the script to set goals for yourself or simply add a little more information to the profiles of those you are following.

Twuffer - The Twitter Buffer

Sometimes you’re sitting at your computer and think “Man, I need to send some tweets out today, but this is the only time I’ll be at the terminal.”  Well if you don’t want to spam out your entire day’s tweets in a single burst, try Twuffer.  Twuffer provides a kind of buffer for your tweets so you can spread out your updates.

Also, it can be programmed to send out tweets hourly, weekly, or on any date in the future.  The interface is slick and Ajaxy so it’s a nice user experience.  It stores your personal preferences in a cookie (I believe), so keep that in mind.  You will be asked for your password, by the way, so if that freaks you out, Twuffer might not be the one for you.  It is required for the API though, so it’s not their fault.

I love how one of the suggested uses is “appear to never sleep.”

iTweet

I really like iTweet.  Talk about slick interfaces, this Twitter rehash has it ALL.  The standard tweeting functions are all there, but they are based on an Ajax system so everything flows smooth as silk.  Links and @replies are linkified, but so are hash codes, for easy searching.  In fact, the search feature is very well done.  It doesn’t even require a page-load.  Retweeting, favoriting, and @replying all have their own buttons.  Another nice feature is a feed of all your followers, so you can catch up with some of the people you may not want to follow full-time.

One word of caution.  Each time you “do” something on iTweet, the server has to call Twitter’s servers and it uses up one of your API requests.  There is a handy counter on the front panel to keep track, but you’ll be amazed how a little bit of hardcore twittering will use up all your calls.  Don’t worry too much though, they reset at a regular interval (every 30 minutes at the moment).

Twitt(url)y

With the advent of URL shorteners like TinyURL, a lot of links are obscured in Twitter until you click them.  This unique service seeks to alleviate some of the irritation shortened URLs cause.

Simply enter any user’s name onto the end of this address (my own address, “loyaleagle,” is a placeholder and a preview) and you’ll see a reworked list of everything they have EVER linked to.  The page layout is superb and there each link’s title has been retrieved from the page it goes to.

You can also see which links have got a lot of attention recently and who linked to them.  It’s almost (dare I say it?) the Digg of Twitter!  I mean there is an obvous social bookmarking aspect to it, you can tweet any link with the click of a button, and each link has a very comprehensive history of it’s use throughout the entire history of Twitter.  Don’t underestimate this one!

Mr.Tweet

This last webapp is a new one to me.  I stuck it on here because it has a nice, clean interface (in fact this whole list faired pretty well in that respect) and a simple function.

Mr. Tweet is a Twitter bot that follows you after you follow it.  Once you do so, it begins to analyze your history and followers.  Once it is ready, it messages you.  Mr. Tweet offers up a list of people in your extended network that you might consider following as well as people who are following you that deserve a second look (assuming you gave them a first one).

What I really like about Mr. Tweet is the added data about each user.  It shows not only their follower count and such, but also if they are likely to reply to non-followers and if they typically follow people who follow them.  When you are trying to grow your account, these are excellent statistics to know.  Better yet, Mr. Tweet will show you quite a few posts from their feed so that you can preview their content without having to click through (which can become quite tedious).  Try it out and if it doesn’t do much for you, unfollow and you’re done with it.  So simple!

There are so many new Twitter applications popping up every day, it can be hard to keep on top of them.  Recently we’ve got a few people saying we talk about Twitter apps too much.  If you like lists like this one, let us know (in the comments)!  We’ll probably be scaling them back a bit otherwise. We really do listen to you guys, we swear.

Oh one last thing, if you can spare a follow (don’t want to mess up your ratio!), here is MakeUseOf’s Twitter account and here is my lowly Twitter account. Follow the rest of the MakeUseOf authors as well if you like!

(By) Jimmy Rogers is a biology major at George Mason University and an avid freelance tech blogger. Check out his blog, Mason Tech Beat.

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Whatever the case is, Facebook Connect has continued to rollout on a number of sites over the past month and that trend will continue. Almost a month ago Facebook announced that they would begin accepting site submissions. Unfortunately since then we have had few updates on the status of site submissions and what developers’ experience had been.

So far none of the sites mentioned in the New York Times article appear to have live versions of Facebook Connect. Mike Arrington is saying that yesterday was the day that Facebook began making their full court press on the media but the only indication we’ve seen of that is the New York Times article. Congrats to Facebook on a large print article in the New York Times, I’m sure it’s well deserved!

One interesting tidbit coming out of Arrington’s article is that Twitter is going to hold off on MySpace Data Portability integration until they have rolled out their Facebook Connect support. I’m not sure what additional benefits their will be over the existing Twitter Facebook application. It’s clear that the battle for major partners is ramping up and so far the clear winner is Facebook as no large partners have publicly rolled out their implementation of MySpace’s previously announced Data Portability service.

If most partners decide to use Facebook Connect over MySpace’s service, Google’s Friend Connect service is going to face an uphill battle expanding its reach. When Facebook rolled out their platform last year, they became the default social platform for developers. That trend looks like it will continue as social networks race to expand their identity management service to the rest of the web.