HTML 5 – as-yet unreleased, but shaping up well – contains a specification for finding the current location of the user. The API, if your browser supports it and you grant the web application access, returns your latitude, longitude, elevation, speed and some other details. (If your web-capable device doesn’t have GPS, these details will be estimated using your IP address and other factors.)

A couple of weeks ago, I created a page to test this feature. If your browser is geo capable, this will reveal exactly what data about your location is being sent to web applications that ask for it.

If you’re a developer, here’s how I created the page.

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In advance of the announcement later today, I Started Something have uncovered videos about the new Microsoft Office suite.

Microsoft Office turns to the web

As anticipated, Office 2010 includes web-based versions of applications contained in the suite. These don’t have the complete feature set, but are designed so that company employees can create and make changes to documents (including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations) on the road.

Web applications: now running in the enterprise

Centralized cloud applications have a difficult time gaining traction in most enterprise environments, and Microsoft have wisely taken note of this: it appears that the web-based versions are installed as part of Sharepoint. By doing this, they’ve allowed organizations to keep tight control of their data, as well as legitimizing web-based applications in the enterprise and revitalizing Sharepoint as an organizational product. In other words this is big news, with sweeping implications across the entire software industry.

Open standards must work for everyone

This is another reason why all open web standards must be browser agnostic. I always argue hard for a transparent browser: one that contains support for web standards, but doesn’t carry any extra baggage for any specific purpose. As web applications move into the enterprise, it’s important that a standard that works on a souped-up Firefox or Chrome browser also works great in Internet Explorer. By integrating web applications into Sharepoint, Microsoft are actually leading the industry, and have made themselves relevant on the web again. In doing so, they’ve opened up an important market, and that can’t be ignored.

Here’s a video introduction (although it keeps going down for me): See What’s New in Microsoft Web Applications 2010.

I believe a truly decentralized social web is required to fulfill the web’s potential as a platform for business collaboration, and I’m very interested in helping to push the technical and conceptual boundaries in that direction. I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about that, but I think it’s also important to remember that a huge amount is possible using the technologies, standards and ideas that we can currently pick up and use.

Creating a new web tool, or adapting one for your own use, can be a bit like pitching a movie: a lot of people come to me and say things like, “it’s like Delicious meets Youtube, but for the iPhone”. That’s great, and can result in some very interesting ideas, but I think it’s always best to go back to first principles and ask why you need the tool to begin with. My post The Internet is People addressed some key points on this:

• Your tool must plug into an existing network of users, or be useful for user 1 (the first user to sign up). Delicious lets you save your bookmarks into the cloud; Flickr lets you easily upload photos so other people can see them. Both services come into their own when you connect with other users, but the core of the site is useful before you’ve done so. Facebook is different, but it had the Harvard real-world social network to plug in – and it now acts as a useful aggregation of your other activity on the web, which arguably is useful for user 1.
• You can’t build a site and assume people will come and use it. It’s a lot of hard work, even when the technology is ready for launch; you need to lead by example, constantly adding content and using the site as you would like it to be used. Not to mention the hours you have to put in promoting it elsewhere.

The feature set itself should be tightly focused:

As each tool should focus on one particular network, or at least type of network, I’d argue that the exact feature set should be dictated by the needs of that network. Educational social networks might need some coursework delivery tools; a network for bakers might need a way to share bread recipes. The one common feature in any social network is people; even profiles may not be entirely necessary.

I mention at the end of the post that these principles were the guiding ideas behind the design of the Elgg architecture. They’re now the principles behind the tools and strategy I develop for my clients.

In this blog you’ll find lots of talk about new technologies, innovative approaches and the ethics of social media. These allow us to build interesting new tools, but they always sit on a firm foundation: the Internet is just people connecting and sharing with each other, and the purpose of web tools is to make that as easy as possible.

Atlas is a project that attempts to make developing web applications similar to developing on the Mac. (The actual platform is called Cappuccino.) They’ve even created a preprocessor for Javascript, Objective-J, that works in a similar way to the Mac’s Objective-C.

280 Slides, by the same company, can be thought of as a tech demo for the platform.

As James at Liquidicity says:

When you think of what Adobe is doing, attempting to make it easier for design professionals to get building applications on the web and the desktop (via AIR), this puts them to shame. The web will be a better place with more web apps built on open source technologies like Cappuccino. If the next round of web apps are anything like 280 Slides, then things are going to get very exciting around here.

These kinds of technologies are going to allow for different kinds of web applications, which will push the envelope of what’s commonly accepted as possible. (Now all we need are some open standards to share data between them …)