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Microsoft’s top technical executive, Ray Ozzie, has recently said that Google success in finding in advertising revenue “was a wake-up call within Microsoft”. But he said Microsoft plans to do more than simply mimic Google by rolling out Web-based versions of desktop programs or following its particular search and advertising model.

Instead of jumping belatedly into the fray with Web-only programs, he said Microsoft will pursue a mix of software loaded on PCs and Internet services that also work with the growing array of mobile devices, a strategy he called ‘’software-plus-service'’.

He said he sees free, Web-based, ad-supported software as a way to extend Microsoft Office’s reach, but gave no specifics. ‘’Advertisers do want a targeted audience,'’ he said. If Microsoft can deliver it, ‘’I don’t see a reason why advertisers won’t move'’. What comes next? Only time will tell.

Just a few days from being launched and Yahoo Pipes is putting lots of minds to work:

- five cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes

- New York Times thru flickr

- del.icio.us flavored web search

- YMI Podcasting MegaFeed

- Amazon price watch

- eBay price watch

- Google Blog Search

- Cricket on YouTube

Lots else. What comes next? Only time will tell.

Yahoo! has just launched a new service called Yahoo Pipes which offers users the ability to easily create data mashups from remixing popular feed types, including Yahoo! Search, Google Base, Flickr photos and any RSS feed on the web. Yahoo! describes it as an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that allows you to create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.

Pipes also provides a set of functional modules to let users manipulate and transform data in oder to get the desired output. This set includes a powerful content analyzer, several data formatters, sorting modules and even translating services using BabelFish translating engine.

All these modules are integrated in an easy-to-use visual drag and drop editor that simplifies the job of building a mashup without writing a single line of code. The resulting feed can be for private use or shared with the Internet community. As Tim O’Reilly has defined it:

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.

According to Google, their mission is to organize the information. In this case Yahoo! has won a battle letting the users create more organized, filtered and useful information by theirselves. Could it be a step towards Web3.0 in which users not only contribute but can take advantage of the rest of information their own way and share it? What comes next? Only time will tell.

According to Wikipedia, a firewall is an information technology security device whose basic task is to control traffic between computer networks with different zones of trust.

By definition, network traffic is bidirectional which means that your personal firewall should protect your private home network from both, inbound traffic and outbound traffic. Whereas the former type of traffic has been generally thought to be a potential danger since the Internet was born, the latter one had not been considered a real danger until the proliferation of malware during the last few years. Right now outbound traffic have become a real danger.

Nevertheless while this seems obvious for everybody it looks like Microsoft disagrees. Windows XP’s built-in firewall, the current most-extended personal firewall, has no protection at all for outbound traffic giving users a false sense of security.

It was expected to be solved in brand-new Windows Vista as Microsoft states that new Vista’s firewall is now two-way. And it is true, but a closer look at the way it works reveals a particular way to understand security. By default, most firewalls, the good ones, allow no outbound connection unless explicitly authorized by the user, usually presenting a convenient wizard to program a particular rule the first time an application tries to connect to the Internet.

On the other hand, Windows Vista’s firewall by default allows all outbound connection until a rule is explicitly created to deny it by the user. Even worse, configuring these rules is no piece of cake at all. What does Microsoft say about this decision? Well, according to Matt Parreta, a spokesperson for Microsoft’s PR agency, they think that having to walk through the many wizard-driven pop-ups that would occur shortly after the first time Vista gets installed would be a poor out-of-the-box experience.

A false sense of security again, this time in the name of a “better user experience”. What comes next? Only time will tell.

Krugle (pronounced ‘kroogle’) is a search engine for software developers that helps in finding source code among open source projects or public code in the web. It also allows to find particular projects or to search over technical documents.

Besides the common search engine capabilities, this web application presents a great usability as users can keep their search results and browse over other related searches without losing the results in a tabbed-IDE-style way (IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, a well known interface among their potential users). Furthermore, Krugle also offers capabilities to add comments to the code that users can share among the community in a web2.0-manner.

Launched in early 2006, Krugle has become an essential tool for developers and, despite its phonetic similarity with ‘Google’, they both have nothing to do with each other. Google, on their side, is developing a similar application that still stays as a ‘lab project‘. It is called Google Code Search.

Nevertheless, Google Code Search is far from being a real competitor for Krugle. It lacks many of Krugle’s functionality and only adds regular expression based search. But we all know what happens when Google is second best. Just remember YouTube. What comes next? Only time will tell.