Sometimes you come across something on the web that really makes you sit up and take notice. I bumped into YouOS via the RSS feed to Ray Schroeder's informative Online Learning Update which I keep an eye on. YouOS is the work of Jeff Mellen, Joe Wong, Sam Hsiung, and Srini Panguluri, of a Palo Alto start-up company called WebShaka. (WebShaka was originally funded on a very modest basis by Y Combinator, which does what looks to be semi-benevolent small-scale seed-funding for startups.)
YouOS describes itself as:
"a web operating system that lets you run diverse applications within a web browser. Small applications like sticky notes or clocks. Large applications like word processing, mp3 players, and instant messaging. Even better, it's very easy to tweak an existing application or write your own."
There is a longer piece about it - basically a 3 page "manifesto" - which is worth taking the time to read in full.
Easily the most striking thing for me about YouOS (though the programming technicalities are beyond me) is that YouOS provides an environment in which users can create applications that run in YouOS; and that these applications are available for other users to rate, reuse, extend, and improve; with a set of tools available to help them do it. Think of it as a Wikipedia-style open source software development environment.
One of the reasons why the World Wide Web took off was that users could "view source" in their browsers to see the HTML behind a page, and they could reuse, extend, and improve it - essentially you could teach yourself how to produce web content by looking and experimenting. And programmers could do the same with "scripts" (that is programmes) written in Perl. (For much more on this see Tim O'Reilly's 1999 essay "Where the Web Leads Us".)
YouOS takes the same approach.
Of course at the moment, YouOS is not a fully functioning environment. It is only a few months old. Its owners describe it as experimental. It is probably being run on a shoe-string, though you would guess that investors are now knocking at WebShaka Inc.'s doors. But my instinct is that YouOS shows one way in which the Internet, and the services that are provided across it, will develop, with user-generated software, as well as content. Try the YouOS demonstration, or create yourself an account.
Afterthoughts
- A Virtual Learning Environment made in YouOS would certainly be in rather strong contrast to Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, or Sakai.
- You could imagine an interesting tie-up between the One Laptop Per Child and YouOS, especially in countries like Ethiopia that are investing heavily in network infrastructure.
I especially liked your 2. afterthought! I just HAD to link to this posting - another brief comment can be found over at my del.icio.us page. Your 'FM' gives casual readers like me a nice view into online learning R&D - with very good signal/noise ratio! Please keep it up!
Posted by: André Torkveen | 29/12/2006 at 12:18