Panic has released Coda, a new web development app for OS X. Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser describes it thusly:
We build websites by hand, with code, and we've long since dreamed of streamlining the experience, bringing together all of the tools that we needed into a single, elegant window. While you can certainly pair up your favorite text editor with Transmit today, and then maybe have Safari open for previews, and maybe use Terminal for running queries directly or a CSS editor for editing your style sheets, we dreamed of a place where all of that can happen in one place.
Ever since I switched to a Mac, I've been seeking a suitable replacement/upgrade for Homesite. I limped along unsatisfied with BBEdit and am finally getting into the groove with TextMate, but the inter-app switching -- especially between the editor, FTP client, and the terminal -- was really getting me down. John Gruber has a nice preview/review of Coda:
Each of Coda's components offers decidedly fewer features than the leading standalone apps dedicated to those tasks. (With the possible exception of the terminal - I mean, come on, it's a terminal.) This isn't a dirty secret, or the unfortunate downside of Coda only being a 1.0. Surely Coda will sprout many new features in the future, but it's never going to pursue any of these individual apps in terms of feature parity.
The appeal of Coda cannot be expressed solely by any comparison of features. The point is not what it does, but it how it feels to use it. The essential aspects of Coda aren't features in its components, but rather the connections between components.
Panic's implicit argument with Coda is that there are limits to the experience of using a collection of separate apps; that they can offer a better experience - at least in certain regards - by writing a meta app comprising separate components than they could even by writing their own entire suite of standalone web apps. Ignore, for the moment, the time and resource limitations of a small company such as Panic, and imagine a Panic text editor app, a Panic CSS editor app, a Panic web browser, a Panic file transfer/file browser app - add them all together and you'd wind up with more features, but you'd miss the entire point.
Panic co-founders Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser both weigh in on the launch. Has anyone given Coda a shot yet? How do you find it? I'm hoping to find some time later today to check it out and will attempt to report back.
Marc Hedlund, founder of the intriguing Wesabe, recently made this interesting observation:
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.
A slightly related way of thinking about how to choose web projects is to take something that everyone does with their friends and make it public and permanent. (Permanent as in permalinked.) Examples:
- Blogger, 1999. Blog posts = public email messages. Instead of "Dear Bob, Check out this movie." it's "Dear People I May or May Not Know Who Are Interested in Film Noir, Check out this movie and if you like it, maybe we can be friends."
- Twitter, 2006. Twitter = public IM. I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the people responsible for Blogger is also responsible for Twitter.
- Flickr, 2004. Flickr = public photo sharing. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake said in a recent interview: "When we started the company, there were dozens of other photosharing companies such as Shutterfly, but on those sites there was no such thing as a public photograph -- it didn't even exist as a concept -- so the idea of something 'public' changed the whole idea of Flickr."
- YouTube, 2005. YouTube = public home videos. Bob Saget was onto something.
Not that this approach leads naturally to success. Several companies are exploring music sharing (and musical opinion sharing), but no one's gotten it just right yet, due in no small measure to the rights issues around much recorded music.
As I mentioned the other day, I recently joined Twitter. I've been poking around its nooks and crannies ever since. Here are some observations, presented in Twitter-sized chunks:
Playing with Twitter reminds me of blogging circa 2000. Back then, all weblogs were personal in nature and most people used them to communicate with their friends and family. If I wanted to know what my friends were up to back then, I read their blogs. Now I follow Twitter (and Flickr and Vox).
The reaction to Twitter mirrors the initial reaction to weblogs...the same tired "this is going to ruin the web" and "who cares what you ate for dinner" arguments.
Also like blogs, everyone has their own unique definition of what Twitter is (stripped down blogs, public IM, Dodgeball++, etc.), and to some extent, everyone is correct. Maybe that's when you know how you've got a winner: when people use it like mad but can't fully explain the appeal of it to others. See also: weblogs, Flickr.
For people with little time, Twitter functions like an extremely stripped-down version of MySpace. Instead of customized pages, animated badges, custom music, top 8 friends, and all that crap, Twitter is just-the-facts-ma'am: where are my friends and what are they up to?
Twitter's like Flickr without the images.
When one thing (i.e. Twitter) is easier than something else (i.e. blogging) and offers almost the same benefits, people will use it.
Twitter brings back the "type words in one box and press submit" thing that made Blogger so popular back in the day. Compare with current blogging systems. To publish a post in MT, I've got to fiddle with 7-9 different text boxes and options. See immediately above.
Let's not forget Dodgeball here, which was used extensively at SXSW in 2006. (In other words, all the Twittering at SXSW 2007 was not unprecedented. Chill.) It's more focused on location and SMS though...by allowing updates in more ways and being more flexible about the type of message allowed, Twitter is attractive to a wider group of people.
If your friends are not on Twitter, I can't imagine it would be that interesting.
Twitterholic tracks the top 100 Twitter users in terms of followers. I know, let's not turn absolutely everything on the web into a popularity contest!! We already know Scoble is a big blowhard and has weak ties to lots of people...let's move on, shall we?
I wonder what the average number of followers per person is? The folks with 5 zillion followers get all the attention, but as with blogging, those posting updates for their 20 friends form the bulk of the activity.
Lists of friends and followers are presented alphabetically. Does Anil attract more friends, on average, than Veen because he always shows up near the top of the listings?
I can see why Obvious dropped Odeo for Twitter. With podcasts, you've got all that data locked up in binary format (no easy cut-and-paste) and it takes you 20 listening minutes before you can react to it (by commenting, by linking, etc.). With blogs, the reaction time to a post is 1-2 minutes, with Flickr it's 5 seconds, and Twitter is 2-3 seconds. The barrier to entry for reacting to and remixing podcasts is just so much higher.
Twitter is the first thing on the web that I've been excited about in ages. Like years. The last thing was probably Flickr. (Talk about burying the lede.) It's just so damn simple but useful. Again, reminds me of weblogs in that way.
If you're on a Mac and using Twitter, download Twitterific, a little app that sits on your desktop and displays updates from your friends. My only complaint: it doesn't completely show updates, forcing you to the web to read the last 2-3 words of a longish message. Come on...it's only 140 characters, show them all!
Twittermap displays recent Twitter messages on Google Maps. All you do is send Twitter a message with your location -- like so...the "L:10003" is the important part -- and Twittermap will pick it up.
Even more mesmerizing is Twittervision...a world tour of recent Twitter messages. Just sit back and watch the updates come in one at a time, displayed on a world map. (This is in beta and Twitter's having some downtime issues right now, so the data may be less than fresh when you go.)
Twitter seems to work equally well for busy people and not-busy people. It allows folks with little time to keep up with what their friends are up to without having to email and IM with them all day. Those with a lot of time on their hands can spend a lot of time finding new people to follow, having back-and-forths with friends all day, and updating their status 40 times a day. Too many web apps fail because they only appeal to those with abundant free time.
I'm fascinated to see where Obvious takes this app once they get their scaling issues under control.
The default display of recent messages plus your own messages is genius. Makes it feel more like a conversation. The "with friends" display is great too...perfect for discovering other people to follow.
"Friends" still isn't the right word.
Not too many people are paying attention, but the Energy Policy Act of 2005 lengthened daylight saving time by four weeks in the US. Instead of beginning the first Sunday of April and running through the last Sunday in October, daylight saving time will now stretch from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. The Washington Post has an article today about the change and what impact it might have on automated systems:
The change takes effect this year -- on March 11 -- and it has angered airlines, delighted candy makers and sent thousands of technicians scrambling to make sure countless automated systems switch their clocks at the right moment. Unless changed by one method or another, many systems will remain programmed to read the calendar and start daylight saving time on its old date in April, not its new one in March.
The article mentions that older Microsoft products like Windows XP SP1 and Windows NT4 might require manual updates and Daring Fireball has had a few updates about how the switch effects Mac users, including this piece at TidBITS. But what about everything else? Is the version of Movable Type I'm using going to make the adjustment? What about Wordpress? Perl? Ruby? PHP? Java? Linux? I'm sure the current versions of all these programs and languages address the issue, but are there fixes and patches for those running old versions of Perl on their server?
If you've got any information about programs, applications, and languages affected by the change and how to address the problem, leave a comment on this thread. I'll update the post as information comes in.
Back when I wrote about how a WebOS might work (basically XHTML/JS web apps that run on the desktop as well), I got a lot of responses along the lines of: with internet access becoming more ubiquitous (broadband, wifi, wireless broadband, WiMax, etc.), there will be less and less need for applications that don't need a connection to the network to function. When you can literally get a fast, cheap internet connection anywhere, you don't need a version of Gmail that works offline and so that's not going to drive the development of this WebOS thing you're talking about.
I've been thinking for several weeks about why I think that's wrong and I've come up with a couple ideas.
1. Fast, cheap internet everywhere? Hoo boy, wake me when that happens...you'll likely find me driving my hydrogen-powered hovercar with ESP to my paperless office.
2. For many people, the more you get used to having access to your applications/data/etc., the more important that access becomes. Let's say 98% of the applications you use are entirely on the web (with no offline capabilities) and you're online almost all the time wherever you go. Then the network winks out for 1/2 an hour. Or Salesforce.com is down for a couple hours. That last little inch is going to be painful. And no use telling me that sounds insane because I've seen the madness and fear in people's eyes while they clutch their Crackberries, furiously reading email mere minutes away from the office and the full-speed, full-screen experience.
3. The offline thing is a good way for companies to bootstrap the WebOS. I think most people have a sense that the apps they use in their browser are more alive, more social, more connected, even if they can't articulate that feeling. And whether it's true or not (Gmail isn't actually more "connected" than Outlook), companies can market the "aliveness" of their web apps (even when they run offline) versus the "deadness" of desktop apps.
Quite a few folks are pointing to the results of this survey (graph here) about what features people want on their most frequently used mobile devices. The results are interesting but also probably misleading in about 1000 different ways (text messaging didn't even make the list). But it got me thinking about how I use my most frequently used digital device, my mobile phone. In order of a combination of most usage and importance, here's what I use my phone for:
- Clock. I don't wear a watch, so I look at my phone all the time to check the time.
- Taking pictures + sending them to Flickr.
- Voice. I dislike talking on the phone, but when you gotta, you gotta.
- Text messaging. Texting is preferable to voice in many instances and many friends text more often than they call nowadays.
- Taking pictures. I think of this as distinct from the photo + Flickr usage above. The camera on my phone just isn't that important to me without the ability to easily publish them to the Web.
Stuff I don't want on my phone:
- Music. I am unconvinced of the wisdom of cramming a music player into a phone. The user experience needs to be solved first.
- Email. I still use client-side spam filtering so reading my mail on a phone would be a painful exercise. And I can send email from my phone and that's enough...I can handle not reading my email for hours on end.
- Web browsing. I love the Web, but my preferred portable device for accessing it is my laptop. Not worth the extra expense of adding it to my service plan.
What's your most-used portable device and what do you use it for? Feel free to comment here or link to a post on your site.
Perhaps this is impossible or unfair, but can we have a discussion about where technology and user experience on the web are headed without using any of the following words or concepts:
Ajax, web services, weblogs, Google, del.icio.us, Flickr, folksonomy, tags, hacks, podcasting, wikis, bottom-up, RSS, citizen journalism, mobile, TiVo, the Long Tail, and convergence.
That all seems like the present and past, not the future, no? "Web 2.0" arrived a year or two ago at least and we're still talking about it like it's just around the corner. What else is out there? Anything? (Note: This is not an attempt to bring the current "is it really Web 2.0?" discussion (I could care less) here. I'm genuinely interesting in what's out there, if anything.)
Word on the street (via waxy) is that Google is set to release a PayPal competitor called Google Wallet. A thread at Techdirt notes that Yahoo!, Microsoft, and eBay have all tried to launch similar services that met with little or no success in the face of competition with PayPal.
I doubt Google is focused on competing with PayPal, at least in the short term. This move, if true, makes a lot of sense for Google. They already have an internal payment system set up to collect and distribute AdSense revenues, a store selling t-shirts, bean bags, search hardware, they sell software, and they've indicated that with Google Video, people will be able to charge others to view videos uploaded to Google's servers (with Google taking a small cut). Taking the core of that internal payment system, it would probably be technologically trivial** for them to open it up for anyone to pay money to anyone else (instead of just individual --> Google or Google --> individual). The line above about their Google Video plans -- "people will be able to charge others to view videos uploaded to Google's servers (with Google taking a small cut)" -- already sounds a lot like what PayPal does. This is the Andre Torrez school of product development...build something that solves a problem you're having and it'll probably be useful to a bunch of other people if you let them use it too.
Plus it leverages their existing user base. If you've already got an AdSense account or are going to charge for your video through Google Video, you're already a GWallet user...and signing people up through their GMail/Orkut/Blogger accounts would probably be pretty easy as well. This move may also indicate that Google is planning to charge a wider range of people for products/services -- maybe a "pro" version of Gmail, a robust, commercial API to their search results, or even a music store? GWallet would be needed infrastructure for ramping up from paying relatively few AdSense users to (potentially) anyone who uses Google. It makes sense for them beyond trying to gain a foothold in the online payments space.
** Getting the banking stuff sorted out is another story though...but as PayPal has shown, if you can get that set up, there's plenty of revenue to be had.
After reading Janice's piece, It's a Whole New Internet, I didn't really know how to feel about it. It is an exciting time on the web right now, but it doesn't seem any more exciting than 2-3 years ago. At that time, blogs were really taking off, people were paying more attention to structured data in the form of RSS & XHTML/CSS, and using web services to paste together various apps and bits of data from around the web into new and useful services. But after thinking about it for a couple of days, what bothered me about it was echoed by Andre Torrez, who puts it a tad stronger (and funnier) than I would have:
Anyway, yes, there's more money that seems to be available for people who have been building these apps, but the suggestion that people who make these sites are only now springing to life when money is available is kind of disappointing. I hate the equation that $1 million in funding == EXCITING OPPORTUNITIES. It's how you fools lathered yourselves into the last bubble.
If your focus is on the neat technology shoehorned into some idea to make money then you're going to be up to your ass in sock puppets again.
When the dot com economy was crumbling in 2000 and 2001, I remember thinking at the time that although everyone I knew was out of work (myself included), that is was a good thing for the long term. One of the more pleasant side effects of the dot com boom was that billions of dollars were spent training indivduals how to design web sites, program, write, etc. In the years following the bust, when all those people were suddenly unemployed or stuck in high-paying jobs that they didn't care for very much but needed to pay the bills, they responded by starting to tinker around with all sorts of neat things, just for the hell of it. Because they could, because they wanted to, not because they had an artificial deadline to reach or some arbitrary client requests to satisfy.
They made apps and services that they wanted to use or thought that others would like to use, not only apps for which there was money available to build. There was no pressure...these people had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Out of this period came All Consuming, Movable Type, Amazon Light, millions of blogs, thousands of very active blog communities, the first consumer-grade newsreaders, Wikipedia (and thousands of other wikis), Firefox, FilePile, lots of social software (admittedly much of it of dubious value), Muxway (which became del.icio.us), a huge push toward XHTML/CSS-only sites, and a billion other things I'm forgetting, all when no one was putting any money into anything.
If you're buying low and selling high, the time to buy optimism was two to four years ago, not now. That was when a small group of friends looked at a horrible economy and saw an opportunity to educate their clients and the rest of us about the value of user-centered design. When a husband and wife decided to build their own blog tool in their spare time because they wanted to use it. When an entreprenuer gambled that you could make money publishing weblogs. When a few folks decided that people needed a place to share their photos with friends. When a loose collective of designers showed us the possibilities of semantically correct standards-based web design. There's still lots of opportunity these days, but it's more expensive with less return.
Now that the money is back, the focus will necessarily shift even though, as Janice notes, we'll be a little wiser about it this time around. There will be less innovation and activity from individuals because they'll be snapped up by companies to work on their projects for their customers. The information flowing out of companies, even those that are pretty open, will be limited because of competitive and legal concerns. A person who -- when she was unemployed 3 years ago -- could spend a couple weeks in releasing a neat web app for anyone to use because she wanted to or could say what she wanted on her blog will now be putting all her coding energies into an application that serves a few customers & needs to be cash-flow positive and won't have the time to post anything to her blog (and can't say much about what she's working on anyway unless all her readers want to sign NDAs). (Not saying this is bad...this is just what companies are for. But what's good for companies, their shareholders, and their customers isn't necessarily what's good for environment those companies inhabit. On the other hand, everyone I know has more work than they know what to do with and that's a good thing too.)
Consider Six Apart as an example of what I'm talking about. 6A is like a black hole for creative people. Folks who, a year or two ago, were among the leading voices in the discussion of how weblogs were changing our culture, were coding all sorts of useful plug-ins for Movable Type, or were pushing the edges of web design are now focused on making software that generates revenue and aren't saying a whole lot about it. (Sort of ironic that working for 6A kills the weblogs of their employees, isn't it?) That's great for them, for Six Apart, their customers, and their partners, but it kinda sucks for the community as a whole.
(And just to head off some of the obvious criticism here, of course companies contribute to the common good (some more than others), competition creates opportunity, investment isn't evil, Ajax is cool, innovation is still happening, etc., etc.)
Bill Brown has uncovered some interesting Slashdot comments by an Apple employee about Spotlight and future Apple's future plans. (Ed note: it's unclear whether As Seen On TV (ASOT) is indeed an Apple employee, but even if he/she isn't, the thoughts are still interesting.) In this comment, ASOT talks about the future direction for Spotlight, Apple's new finder (not Finder, but it seems clear that as Spotlight matures, it will become the de-facto way people use OS X), specifically about speech-to-text capabilities:
Example: You're doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type "meeting in San Jose" into Spotlight, and it'll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week's meeting in San Jose.
and "anything" relationships:
Take two files, any two files. Say it's a PDF representing an invoice and a Photoshop file representing a poster you designed. You drag the invoice over the Photoshop file and a marking menu appears, giving you the option of establishing a relationship between the two files. If you want you can annotate the relationship. If you don't, you don't have to. The computer will simply note that a relationship exists.
Now extend that idea. Instead of it being two files, it can be two ANYTHING. Drag a contact from Address Book to a Pages document; up pops a marking menu asking you if you want to establish a relationship. Or an song from iTunes to a picture of your girlfriend. Or your daughter's birth certificate to her birthday in iCal.
Sounds like there's more than a little Quicksilver and Spring in there. And then here, ASOT talks about adding GPS data into the mix:
What's next? We're going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata. Here's one we've been talking about a lot: Your laptop has a GPS receiver in it. Tiny thing, about the size of a pencil eraser. At all times, your laptop knows where it is on the face of the Earth, accurate to about thirty feet.
Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That's on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.
Say you go on a business trip to Seattle. A year later, you can search your laptop for that e-mail you sent to your coworker Tom while you were in Seattle.
S/he also notes that "It's going to be a while before we start shipping GPS-enabled Powerbooks...but it's on the drawing board." And you thought that gestural control of applications with the Powerbook's accelerometer was fun.
As you might expect from a story with design, media, and technology angles, Adobe's impending acquisition of Macromedia has resulted in much reaction from a big chunk of the blogosphere. Here are what some technologists, designers, and pundits have had to say about the deal so far:
Mike Chambers, a Product Manager at Macromedia, had a few things to say about the acquisition on his blog. He can't say too much because of legal constraints around the deal, but he specifically mentions Macromedia's "culture of openness and participation" as one of the reasons that Adobe was interested in the company.
Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect for Macromedia, posted what sounds like a press release about the deal on his site. He's very hopeful about the future of the combined company.
Macromedia MX evangelist John Dowdell notes that Macromedia is "doing a lot of hiring these days" and points to Google Video's coverage of the deal.
(Note: if you're keeping score, that's three employees of Macromedia chiming in about the acquisition on their blogs. And many more MM employees keep active blogs, so I'm sure we'll be hearing more from that side of the fence (although because of the legal stuff, it looks like posts about this need to be approved). On the other side, I've never heard of an Adobe employee that keeps a blog. Anyone?)
Marc Canter, one of the founders of the company that eventually became Macromedia, wants his name back, along with Director because MM "more or less have abandoned it". Marc seems fairly negative about Macromedia ("Lord knows they [can] teach a class in how NOT to run a software company") and thinks that maybe Adobe can turn things around, but only if they can shed the software-in-a-box paradigm and start making multi-user, community-based software with online components that don't rely on patent protection.
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said in the announcement conference call that 9/11 was a bit of a catalyst for the deal: "after 9/11, we both realized that being enemies didn't make sense". Zuh? But the new company still has enemies worth fighting, even in a post-9/11 world...here's what Chizen had to say in an interview a year ago: "Microsoft is the competitor, and it's the one that keeps me up at night."
Tim Bray, co-author of XML and Director of Web Technologies at Sun, thinks that Adobe got Macromedia for their web products. Unlike most other commentary I've seen, Bray feels that "Macromedia's DreamWeaver is the single most important Web-design product" and that "Flash is a distraction" that Adobe may drop because "near as [Bray] can tell, Macromedia has never made any serious money with Flash". What's the alternative for web developers? Ajax.
Dave Shea, well-known and respected web designer, echoes the thoughts of many in saying that Adobe bought Macromedia for their web products and savvy...and Flash in particular. Shea also wonders "what will become of Adobe's long-standing commitment to SVG, now that Flash is in the fold", names Microsoft as Adobe's main competition now (MS seems to fighting on several fronts now...the Google/Yahoo/Jeeves, Apple, and now this), but is also worried about the loss of competition in the design space: "the combined Macromedia and Adobe stable of design software is industry standard; with this buyout, Adobe essentially has a monopoly over the design world. (Quark aside. Very far aside.)" Flash/web developer Todd Dominey echoes many of Shea's comments in his post about the deal.
Dave Winer, who has his fingers in too many pies to summarize, compares the Adobe/MM acquisition to MM's purchase of Allaire: "Remember all the hooplah over the Allaire-Macromedia acquisition, and all the synergies that were supposed to happen. Hmmm. Did any happen? BusinessWeek didn't think so. Will any happen here? Heh. Slightly more exciting than Microsoft's acquisition of Groove."
TidBITS has a good overview of the evolution and history of the relationship between Macromedia and Adobe by Glenn Fleishman.
Broadband pundit Om Malik calls it a Web 1.0 (or even a desktop publishing) merger: "They are becoming increasingly irrelevant in digital worlds where free programs like iPhoto and Picasa are setting the tone on the desktop. Don't expect innovation as a result of this deal - this is a deal to boost the revenues and maybe profits."
Russell Beattie, who works for Yahoo! on mobile products and services, is heartened to see Adobe's focus on mobile cited in their reasoning for the merger and "can see a combined Flash/SVG player (Flash Lite 1.1?) from Adobe becoming a really viable platform". But Beattie also notes that "Adobe will always be the company that had a researcher *thrown in jail* for publicly explaining flaws in their product" (see here for details). Back to mobile, a commenter on Beattie's thread warns, "PDF is the dog that can bring a 2GhZ PC to its knees to display a text file. not the kind of attitude thats right for mobile."
Don Makoviney is looking forward to the stabilization in the tools competition: "As a working designer and developer of enterprise applications, I am tired of the battle over tools. When a carpenter buys a hammer, he doesn't have to change the way he builds houses based on the hammer he buys."
From the survey of all the commentary out there, the general feeling seems to be that Photoshop will kill Fireworks, Illustrator will kill Freehand, and Dreamweaver will kill GoLive. This seems to be confirmed by Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen's thoughts in a statement about the deal.
Mark notes that this is the second time Adobe has purchased Freehand. :)
The Macromedia XML News Aggregator (time for a new name?), which is a good place to keep up with all of the news and commentary about this deal, also displays a list of recent searches. There aren't many searches about the deal right now, but just after the deal was announced yesterday morning, the most recent search terms were "suck adobe", "adobe rape mm", "adobe ruin flash", "f._.ck adobe", "really upset", "stop adobe", "against adobe", and "hate adobe". I'm detecting a tiny bit of anti-Adobe sentiment here...
The financial markets didn't seem to react too well to the deal. Adobe's stock price fell 8+% while Macromedia, which was offered $41.86 per share, only saw a rise to 36.72.
BusinessWeek has excerpts of a conversation with the CEOs of Adobe and Macromedia.
Jeremy Allaire, former CTO of Macromedia, had this to say about the acquisition: "Macromedia lost the enterprise publishing race to Adobe, and Adobe lost it with the Web publishing community. So the deal combines the best of both worlds. It gives Macromedia a huge sales channel, especially on the enterprise side. This will probably make the channels as strong as say Microsoft has."
I'm a bit wary about throwing myself in the middle of the whole Google Toolbar AutoLink business (Dan Gillmor has a good summary and lots of trackbacks to opinions, pro and con), but I'm sort of dumbfounded that so many people are so vehemently against it...at least for the reasons being given. The three main points I've heard articulated by those opposed to the feature are:
1. Browsers and toolbars should not modify the content or layout of Web pages...they should render them only as stored on the Web server.
2. Microsoft tried to do this with Smart Tags in Windows XP and everyone hated it so why are we willing to give Google a pass with a similar feature?
3. Google can unfairly use their growing clout to exploit AutoLink users.
I'll address the second point first because it's sort of beside the point and not an argument at all. One of the big reasons why people were so upset about Smart Tags is that Smart Tags were on by default in early preview releases of IE. The browser was automatically rewriting every single page you loaded, adding links here and there. I agree that this sucks (although users may become used to things like this in the future and not think it's such a big deal), but AutoLink is not on by default. It's optional...you have to specifically push a button to make something happen.
But the main reason people seem to be up in arms about AutoLink is that Google is modifying the content and display of other people's content and that browsers and toolbars should not be allowed to do that. Aside from the first part of that statement being factually incorrect (more on that below), browsers and toolbars already modify other people's content and no one really complains about it. In fact, people love it:
- Firefox, Safari, Google Toolbar, IE, and several other browsers/toolbars all give end users the option to block JavaScript popups, which typically contain ads. This very much goes against the intention of the content provider and is a clear example of software that modifies a site from how it was intended to be displayed. But users love it so browser/toolbar makers include the feature.
- Browsers allow users to use custom stylesheets when browsing sites, turn off JavaScript on pages, and browse without viewing images or other multimedia files.
- There are tons of bookmarklets and browser extensions that let people modify the page they're viewing in interesting ways (this one inserts links to Feedster on NY Times and WaPo article pages).
- Since the early days of the web right on up to the present, browsers have purposely misrendered badly written HTML so that people could view the pages instead of getting junk or a blank page.
All of these features break the supposedly cardinal sin of "thou shalt not modify the content providers content from the way it was intended by them to be viewed" and I don't hear anyone complaining about it. The fact is, once a user downloads a copy of a content provider's web page from their server, the page becomes just that, a copy. As a user, I should be able to use whatever software is available to me to manipulate, modify, or otherwise remix that copy which I've downloaded for my own personal use. If I can, for my own personal use, photocopy magazine articles, rip my CDs to mp3, make backup copies of my DVDs, and scribble in the margins of books, surely I can do the same with copies of web pages I've downloaded.
Now, if you're against AutoLink because you think Google is becoming too big, they're evil, they're abusing their power, or they bought another blog company instead of yours, then that's fine. Just be up front about why you're upset. It's a trust issue. Do you trust Google's software to do what it says its going to do and not take advantage of you? If the answer is no, don't use it. But if you're saying that Google should not provide this feature at all and that consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes can't choose to use the feature themselves, I don't think that's a good deal for the users. As content providers, let's not try and reach into our readers' computers and dictate what they can or can't do with the copies of our content that they've downloaded for their personal use...let's leave that sort of wishful thinking to the nutballs in Hollywood.
Just took a quick look at what browsers people are using to hit the site this month:
Mozilla: 45%
IE: 31%
Everything else: 24%
This is a quick and dirty calculation so the numbers for Mozilla and IE are likely slightly higher than indicated. The breakdown on the Mozilla figure is about 30% Windows and 16% Mac (which includes Safari). Update: As someone pointed out in the comments, Safari's stats should not be lumped into the Mozilla category (Safari uses the KHTML rendering engine). I'll try to get my stupid stats package to sort that out.
This corresponds pretty closely with BoingBoing's stats:
IE 36.8%
Firefox 36.7%
Safari 8.4%
Unknown 7.7%
Mozilla 4.3%
Netscape 1.6%
Roughly 37% for IE, 51% for the various Mozillas. Stats for Digital Web indicate even higher penetration for Mozilla and 37 Signals noted that Firefox was making a move for #1 back in October. This compares to mainstream usage (as reported by CNN): IE 90% and Firefox 5%.
How are your numbers looking?
I've been using the Saft plugin for Safari for a week now. I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but I'm finding it indispensable so far. At any one time, I typically have about four browser windows open with 10-15 tabs in each, so the auto-save and restore tabs feature is a life-saver and worth the $12 cost. Check out the site for more features.
Now, someone make something like this for Mail.app...just a few small features here and there would really make it a whole lot better.
Several months ago, I spent an afternoon tinkering with rsync so that I could back up my Powerbook to my web server over SSH and vice versa. Got it working perfectly...or so I thought. The other day, I actually took the time to look at what was actually being backed up. The web server --> Powerbook backup was fine, but the Powerbook --> web server was trying to backup everything from August 2004 to the present. When I looked on the web server, sure enough, nothing had been backed up for months. After a few moments of panic, I found out I'd been using the "-n" option while doing the Powerbook backup:
-n, show what would have been transferred
So it looked like it had been working, but actually hadn't been doing anything. Anyway, all the files on my Powerbook are now whizzing their way to the web server and I shall once more be properly backed up. (You do back your files up, yes? You're not waiting until you lose everything to find religion, are you? If so, I say unto you: back thy stuff up now!)
In NYC, when you don't have a car and you need to move stuff that won't fit in a taxi and isn't enough that you need an entire huge moving van, you call a "man with a van".** I recently used the services of a guy named Paul, recommended by a friend of a friend. After packing the back of his truck with my things, we set off for our destination, chatting along the way. He asked me how I'd found him and we eventually got to talking about craigslist.
Paul told me that these days, he got most of his jobs from CL and only one or two a week from personal referrals. I found that surprising and when I pressed him further, he told me that because of CL, he's been able to do pursue moving (which he really likes doing) as a full-time career. I can't remember the exact quote, but Paul said something to the effect that he can't believe he's getting away with starting a full-time business on CL without it costing him a single dime.
I'd never really thought about it before, but in some ways, CL helps lots of people build businesses cheaper and more effectively than more "robust", complex, and expensive enterprise software solutions. Movers are just one example. CL can help you find employees for your business. If you've got a van, you can pick up free furniture and electronics around the city, fix or refurbish, and sell it. You can start a business doing computer troubleshooting, piano lessons, buying and fixing up old motorcycles, or escort and sensual massage services. And if you need something done for your business but don't have the money to pay for it, you can always barter goods or services in exchange. These are just the obvious examples. Does anyone know of anyone using craigslist in more creative ways to make a living or other examples of people succeeding in business using CL?
** Don't know how this evolved, but folks in the "man with a van" profession like to rhyme the names of their businesses. My guy was "Call Paul to Haul", but you will also probably find "Chuck/Buck with a Truck", "Cory with a Lorry", "Schmuck with a Truck", "Call Jack to Pack", and so on. (Oh, I'd recommend using Paul if you need a man with a van...check here for his info.)
Since two Fridays ago, I have been unable to sleep past 7:30 in the morning, no matter what time I go to sleep or what time I am required to get up. In the months prior to that, I can count on one hand the number of times I awoke before my alarm at 7:45. I have no idea what's causing this.
Finally got the chance to check out Daisy May's BBQ with a friend last night. We wandered over to the restaurant, but I would recommend getting delivery instead (there are no tables, just a small counter), which according to to CitySearch, is free anywhere in the city. I had a beef brisket sandwich with pickles and onions (yummy!) while Nichol had a whole, like, 2 quarts of creamed spinach which she completely finished so it must have been good.
While I was waiting outside Daisy May's for my companion to arrive, a horse-drawn carriage sped by on 11th Ave. His horse at a full trot, the driver loudly sang the chorus to "Zombie" by the Cranberries:
In your head, in your head,
Zombie, zombie, zombie,
Hey, hey, hey. What's in your head,
In your head,
Zombie, zombie, zombie?
Hey, hey, hey, hey, oh, dou, dou, dou, dou, dou...
It's been in my head (in my head, zombie...) ever since.
Earlier in the evening, I saw the largest blue screen of death ever near Times Square. I tried not to take it as a sign of something.
I'm not a hot shot programmer by any means, but I've done quite a bit of playing around with getting data in and out of databases programmatically. Something that's always confused me is the near-religion of data normalization among programmers and database admins. Every developer I've ever worked with has told me that when you're building a database, you need to normalize your data -- basically this means organizing your data in such a way that removes redundancy -- and failure to do so would result in public ridicule and possible revocation of access to any computing device. But I've always wondered, given that hard drives are cheap and getting cheaper, what's the problem with using more storage space in exchange for greater speed?
I was delighted when I read Cal Henderson's take on normalized data from a recent talk he gave about Flickr (from page 27):
- Normalised data is for sissies
- Keep multiple copies of data around
- Makes searching faster
- Have to ensure consistency in the application logic
To which I would add: hard drives are cheap.
Cal presents normalization as a trade-off that, depending on your circumstances, might be worth looking at...which is a much more useful way of approaching the situation than what I've typically heard (normalize or die!). Want faster access to your data? Replicate it in the database but be aware that it'll cost you some storage space and you'll need to keep track of the extra data in your application (which can be a pain in the ass). In Flickr's case, they have 13 SELECTs for every INSERT, DELETE, and UPDATE statement hitting their database. Normalization can slow SELECT speed down while denormalization makes your I/D/Us more complicated and slower. Since the application part of Flickr depends so heavily on SELECTs from the database, it makes sense for them to denormalize their data somewhat to speed things up.
Here's an analogy for the smokers in the audience...what sucks worse than realizing you left your lighter at home and you're stuck in traffic on the way to the office? The solution is to buy a bunch of lighters, one for your car, one for your coat pocket, one for the drawer in your office, one for your purse, etc. It's a trade-off. Your initial cash investment is greater (but lighters, like hard drives, are cheap) and you need to be diligent about leaving each lighter in its proper place, but you're never without a lighter when you need one.
(Rambling ahead...) Google Desktop beta. Early impressions anyone? I think it's pretty damn cool...a baby step towards the GooOS. Do a regular Google search and GD results are inlined right at the top (see screenshots for how it all works). How are they doing that technically?
I've cranked up the size of my browser cache...now that GD can index every page I've ever viewed in my browser, can I afford to throw any of it away? This one-ups what A9 is doing in caching visited sites and searching past search results.
Could this be Google's portal play? If they've got info on all the files on my computer, why not display my latest calendar items, emails, online buddies, etc. right on Google's home page?
But then there's the privacy issues. Is Google using information from my local drive to improve my search results? Should they? "Mr. Kottke, I see you've mentioned 'President Bush' in a recent email. Here are some Google News stories on that topic." Useful, but well, you know.
A co-worker wants to put Google Desktop on a Web server and use that as a search engine for a Web site. Not sure if that would work, but it's an interesting idea. I'm sure some smart hacker will soon figure out how to expose his/her GD search results to the outside world.
I like to learn from my mistakes, so I'm partial to Cmd-Z. Judging by how much I use it during the course of the day, I must be learning a lot. Either that or Cmd-Tab...my productivity in OS X jumped dramatically when they finally got that feature working correctly.
Following up on last month's speculation on Google building their own Web browser:
Last summer, Anil Dash suggested that it would be a good move for Google to develop a Google browser based on Mozilla. Give that kid a gold star because it looks more than plausible. Mozilla Developer Day 2004 was recently held at the Google Campus. Google is investing heavily in JavaScript-powered desktop-like web apps like Gmail and Blogger (the posting inferface is now WYSIWYG). Google could use their JavaScript expertise (in the form of Gmail ubercoder Chris Wetherell) to build Mozilla applications. Built-in blogging tools. Built-in Gmail tools. Built-in search tools. A search pane that watches what you're browsing and suggests related pages and search queries or watches what you're blogging and suggests related pages, news items, or emails you've written. Google Toolbar++. You get the idea.
On April 26, 2004, Google registered gbrowser.com. Here's the relevent bit of the WHOIS for gbrowser.com:
Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-1278108)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US
Domain Name: gbrowser.com
Created on..............: 2004-Apr-26.
Expires on..............: 2006-Apr-26.
Record last updated on..: 2004-Apr-26 16:46:39.
Thanks to Dave for the tip. Additionally, this NY Post article notes that Google is hiring folks formerly of Microsoft's IE team as well as other people that would be good bets to work on a browser.
Update: There was a bug in Mozilla's bug tracking system that was closed because "this is a duplicate of a private bug about working with Google. So closing this one." More info at Blogzilla. Thx, Phil.
A few months ago, a blogger at Everything Hurts (everythinghurts.com) posted a quick and very useful Windows security checklist. The site and the checklist have since disappeared, but I managed to find a copy of the original list which I have reproduced below in the hopes that it will help you out as it has several friends and coworkers. If your machine is being hosed by spyware, virii, and malicious popups, this list is a good place to start.
8 steps to better Windows security
1. Run Windows Update regularly.
2. Install ZoneAlarm (Firewall)
3. Buy and install NOD32 (Anti-Virus)
4. Install WinPatrol (Anti-Hijack)
5. Buy and install AdMuncher (Ad and Popup Blocker)
6. Install and run AdAware (Anti-Spyware)
7. Replace Internet Explorer and Outlook Express with Firefox & Thunderbird
8. Disable Autorun.
Thanks and apologies to the original author of this list.
In the discussion of Flickr and Feedburner's spliced RSS/Atom files, Harold said:
I'm beginning to think that feeds (and content tagging) should be the starting point, not an offshoot. Until now, our tools have produced web pages then feeds. I'm thinking we need tools that create feeds and then let us combine them into web pages.
To put this another way, a distributed data storage system would take the place of a local storage system. And not just data storage, but data processing/filtering/formatting. Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad to write a weblog entry; Flickr to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your .Mac account); use GMail for email; use TypeKey or Flickr's authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai; you let Feedburner "listen" for new content from all those sources, transform/aggregate/filter it all, and publish it to your Web space; and you manage all this on the Web at each individual Web site or with a Watson-ish desktop client.
Think of it like Unix...small pieces loosely joined. Each specific service handles what it's good at. Gmail for mail, iCal for calendars, TypePad for short bits of text, etc. Web client, desktop client, it doesn't much matter...whatever the user is most comfortable with. Then you just (just! ha!) pipe all these together however you want with services (or desktop apps) handling any filtering/processing that you need, and output it to the file/device/service of your choice. New services can be inserted into the process as they become available. You don't need to wait for Gmail to output RSS...just pipe your email to Feedburner and they'll hook you up.
There are, of course, plenty of hurdles to overcome:
- Currently a bit hard on wallet. When you're paying $5-20 per month for each one of these services (in addition to $50/mo for broadband and $45/mo for your cell phone), living the connected lifestyle is expensive. If a company like Google can offer bundles of these services, it might get cheaper.
- Data needs to be portable. If Flickr starts to suck, you should be able to easily move all of your photos to a better service.
- Redundancy and failing gracefully. What if Blogger is unavailable when I want to rebuild my Web site after my Flickr photostream has been updated (see my MTAmazon plug-in problem)? Does the rebuild just fail or is the data cached somewhere?
- You need to get everyone to agree on interop/formats/etc. Fortunately, it seems like companies are a lot more willing to do this than 4-5 years ago (Amazon, Google, Flickr, Upcoming, & TypePad all have APIs or allow data output via RSS/Atom).
- Security. Lots of passwords and personal information will have to be passed around for all this to work. How about some commitment from these companies to keep this data as secure as they can?
This, then, is the promise of Web services. Nothing new, but it's nice to see things continue to head in this direction.
Related reading:
- GooOS, the Google Operating System (kottke.org)
- Inventing the Future (Tim O'Reilly)
- The Web as a Platform (John Battelle)
- Deepleap was an early attempt at some of this stuff (Lane Becker)
Interesting post over at Gulfstream (no permalink, sorry) about free software that doesn't seem so free from a company called Sveasoft:
Sveasoft have produced a new firmware for a Linksys wireless router. The software, like the original software, is based on Linux, and is licensed under the GPL: once you own a copy, you're free to give it to anyone you want. However, Sveasoft themselves will only give you a copy of "pre-release" version of their software if you pay to "subscribe" to this service. Ordinarily they wouldn't be able to charge very much for their software, because once one person has a copy of the software, they are legally allowed to give it to all their friends. (They could also sell it for less than Sveasoft charges.) However, the deal with Sveasoft is that if you do this, they won't sell you newer versions of their software. According to the FSF, this is quite okay.
Sveasoft will give you their pre-release software for free and allow you to distribute it, but if you do, you can't get support or buy future versions of the pre-release software. When I first read about this, it seemed to run counter to the free software philosophy, but upon further reflection, I don't see any real technical or philosophical objections to what Sveasoft is doing.
A bit of advice for companies and individuals who make software with a UI:
1. Provide many screenshots of your application in action.
2. Place a clearly named link to those screenshots in a prominent place on your Web site.
If a picture is worth a 1000 words, a screenshot is worth at least 10,000 words.
In response to concerns by their customers (as well as non-customers, Slashdot readers, and pretty much anyone with a blog and an opinion), Six Apart has modified the pricing structure for the Personal Edition of Movable Type 3. A couple of quick thoughts on this:
1. Six Apart is listening to their customers. Based on the specific concerns of their customers, they updated their pricing in just two days time. That Six Apart has sincerely listened to their customers in the past and continues to do so as a quickly growing company seeking to sustain itself is worth some goodwill on our part toward 6A. Many other companies wouldn't have bothered.
2. The tiered personal pricing still doesn't make sense. Mena writes:
Our best explanation for the tiering is that we feel a personal user who sets up weblogs for 50 of his friends should pay more for a license than one who uses only one weblog for himself.
Someone hosting 50 people should pay more, but that should be handled as a non-personal situation on a case-by-case basis. What I feel is happening instead is that 6A is offloading a business problem of theirs that concerns only a small portion of their user base (i.e. the folks hosting 50 friends on one install) to all of their customers. Because of a few potential offenders, customers have to deal with pricing tiers, definitions of weblogs and users, keeping track of how many active weblogs and users they have, upgrading their licenses when they add authors or weblogs, etc. We shouldn't have to do that. I don't want to get out my credit card every time I want to add a guest author to my weblog. Do I get a refund if I purchase a 13 weblog/13 author license but 10 of those authors and 7 of those weblogs are inactive after 90 days?**
The solution is to make it as straightforward as possible for customers. In addition to the free version (1 author, 3 weblogs), offer the Personal Edition for $70-$100 for unlimited weblogs and authors with the condition that too many (10? 20?) "weblogs for friends" will be considered non-personal use of the software and will be subject to extra fees. That way, the customer's ownership of the product is vastly simplified and the burden of dealing with the non-personal use of the Personal Edition shifts back to 6A where it belongs.
** The license states that after 90 days of inactivity, weblogs and authors don't count toward the pricing limits.
In all the hullabaloo about Six Apart's new pricing structure for Movable Type (check out the announcement from Mena -- with what has to be a record 373 Trackbacks -- for some idea of what people are whining about), the best and most concise comment I've seen comes from Dave Winer today:
Yesterday we saw people complain about spending $60 for a big useful piece of software like Movable Type. I paid $60 for a cab ride in Geneva. A good dinner is $100. A hotel room $150. You want the software, find a way to help companies like Six Apart instead of making them miserable. You've now got the tools to communicate. Use them well. Use them better.
The bottom line, as Dave suggests, is that MT 3.0 is worth charging money for. Period. The fact that it was free up until now is largely irrelevant...except that for 2 1/2 years Six Apart has provided people with a very powerful, flexible piece of software for free and will continue to do so in the future. Those bastards!
The one thing I do think 6A got wrong is the pricing structure for personal users. Tiered pricing of software based on the number of users was designed to make sure large companies paid more for software than did small companies...so that a company like Wal-Mart pays $3 million for a database application for 20,000 users and a smaller company like Nantucket Nectars pays $30,000 for the same software with 250 users. The same pricing structure doesn't make sense for personal users. I know they priced it that way so that someone can't install MT and then host weblogs for 50 of their friends. I can understand that...that seems like an abuse of the "personal" license to me.
But in my case, I have 10 weblogs and 22 authors on my MT install. All of those weblogs are primarily mine except for one group weblog (which is not public at this time). All of the weblogs can be found on one domain (no subdomains), although some are password-protected. Most of the authors in the system are part-time...they aren't actively posting to weblogs nor will they in the future, but they need to remain in the system to retain authorship of their posts. By my reckoning, I'm one person using MT in a exclusively personal manner to maintain one Web site. But looking at the pricing chart, there's not even an option on there for me and the highest option they do offer is $190 for 9 users and 10 weblogs. How much would 22 authors (and counting...) cost me? $250? Or would I have to move to a commercial license for $700?
Why not make the personal edition a flat fee of ~$60 for unlimited users and weblogs (in addition to the free version with 1 author/3 weblogs)? Here's the reasoning. Tiered personal use (per above) doesn't make much sense. Trust that people using the personal edition will use it in a personal way. The guy offering 50 of his friends MT weblogs on subdomains isn't going to pay for MT, not what you want him to pay anyway. If people start using it in that way, suggest an upgrade to the non-personal edition might be appropriate. If they refuse, they weren't going to pay you anyway.
In exchange for lowering the price on the high-end, you get community goodwill and, more importantly, you get people using your software in a freewheeling way. When people, particular the power users that will be attracted to MT, have the freedom to use your software however they wish (and not having to choose, for instance, between paying $50-$90 extra and not having guest authors on their site or not starting that extra weblog to keep track of the books they've been reading), you get a picture of what your software is really for. And since MT is ultimately the backend for TypePad (a for-pay service), that knowledge is valuable. My feeling is that susidizing freewheeling personal use of MT is an investment that will pay off handsomely in the future.
In the meantime, I've got options. My copy of MT (v2.63, for which I donated $45) isn't any less flexible or powerful than it was yesterday. It works just fine for my current needs, it will continue to work well into the foreseeable future, and I remain a satified customer of Six Apart.
Overheard at work today regarding the number of mail accounts on our system:
We've got more email groups [eg. marketingteam@example.com] than we do user accounts [eg. jim@example.com], by a factor of more than 2 to 1.
Bit of a lesson in that statement for software developers, I think. If you've got N users on your system, those N users can form ~2^N groups. For example, a system containing 50 users can form ~1,120,000,000,000,000 groups for a total of ~1,120,000,000,000,050 different entities in the system. If your feature set, interface, and performance metrics only cater to the 50 users, you're ignoring most of the possible entities. In developing software, build features for groups and watch your garden grow.
Note: this also easily applies to mp3 players (N songs, 2^N playlists), weblog software (N posts, 2^N "categories"), and newsreaders (N feeds, 2^N feed collections and/or N posts, 2^N post collections).
Another note: thanks to Stephen, Simon, and Graham for correcting my poor back-of-the-envelope math. It's 2^N, not N^2.
"Syndication" (via RSS and Atom) is about to hit the big time. It's getting a lot of coverage in on/offline technical publications and will soon be covered in more mainstream glossy magazines and newspapers. Millions of people are now using RSS and Atom to syndicate their Web sites. Large media organizations like the BBC are syndicating their content via RSS. Amazon is syndicating lists of their bestselling items via RSS. Syndication is booming. Syndication is why RSS and Atom use is skyrocketing. Say it with me: syndication!
But is syndication really what everyone's all excited about? I don't believe so.
When the BBC (for example) provides content (headlines with story summaries, dates, and links back to full stories) for publication on other sites, that's syndication. This is what's happening with RSS on My Yahoo! and the purpose for which RSS was first developed at Netscape. Weather.com syndicates their five-day forecast (for a fee). Offline (where the syndication idea originated), United Media syndicates comics like Dilbert to hundreds of newspapers. Republishing is a distinguishing feature of syndication. When content is syndicated, the reader is getting the content from someone other than the producer. The BBC provides content to an online regional UK newspaper which is then read by that newspaper's readers.
BBC content --> regional UK newspaper --> readers
But things have changed since Netscape introduced RSS. RSS and Atom feeds are now largely read directly by people with newsreaders. The BBC provides their content in RSS format, a reader accesses the file from the BBC's server, and reads it.
BBC content --> readers
Hmm. So, people access documents written in a markup language that have been published on a Web server with a software application. If this seems familiar to you, it should. It's called Web browsing and has nothing to do with syndication. RSS readers and newsreaders are just specialized Web browsers, nascent microcontent browsers if you will**.
If not syndication, then what makes RSS and Atom so compelling in comparison to plain old HTML pages? The data contained in an RSS/Atom file is more specialized and structured than in an HTML file***. An HTML page has a title, maybe a header, some paragraphs, and perhaps a couple of lists. That's all a page can tell the browser about its information. When a newsreader loads an RSS file, it knows quite a bit more about the content contained therein. It knows the file contains 15 items (an item is typically a news story or weblog post) and each of those items has a title, a description, a link, maybe some categories, when the item was published, etc.
Using this information, the newsreader can then display the content in these files in various ways that are helpful to the reader. It can tell you at a glance that you have 68 unread news items; it can aggregate items from several RSS files into a new "feed" (perhaps a feed on biotech); it allows you to skim literally thousands of different items from hundreds of different sources sliced and diced in a myriad of ways. RSS and Atom treat the items contained within a file as first-class citizens.
So, that's the big deal about RSS and Atom, not syndication (although RSS/Atom can be used for syndication). I figure that if we technologists, publishers, and journalists are going to get all excited about this stuff and evangelize it to others, we should make sure we know exactly what we're so excited about.
**As an aside, what are now called RSS readers and newsreaders will eventually evolve into microcontent browsers (bad name for a good idea). I talked about such applications last year in relation to Safari and Sherlock:
A web browser is a tool for people to get information from the web. Much recent effort has gone into developing other interfaces through which to do just that. With Watson, Sherlock, and NetNewsWire, you "browse" the web for specific kinds of information with interfaces custom built for each task. Why the distinction between regular web browsing and web browsing using specialized interfaces for structured data?
With Amazon offering product information and the availability of other non-news information via RSS and Atom, the term newsreader is already a misnomer. When more people start publishing content that doesn't fit the title/description/url format (recipes, movie reviews, photos, music playlists, etc.), "standard" formats will start to spring up (some have already) and the browsers will need to support them in some fashion. (This requires that the publishing tools support these new formats as well, which they eventually will. The whole ecosystem -- readers, publishing software, publishers, browsers -- will move along in fits and starts, just like it did with RSS.)
***This isn't strictly true. Valid XHTML files are XML and there's no reason why you can't make an XHTML file that contains headlines, dates, and summaries and use them like people are using RSS/Atom files. Tantek and co. are discussing something similar with XOXO, using XHTML to "semantically [express] Outlines and Blogroll-like subscriptions in an XML format that is both renderable by browsers and parsable by strict xml engines". But for now, let's assume that RSS/Atom files are more specialized and structured than HTML/XHTML files, if only because of current convention.
Great post about what Google is up to by Rich Skrenta. He argues that Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anything that's been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly:
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?
I was thrilled reading this today because I had been thinking along the same lines as I wondered about Gmail (and the 1GB of storage in particular)...and that Skrenta had made the argument so well. This weekend, as I hacked through a bunch of XHTML and CSS for an upcoming site redesign, I jotted down a few notes for a follow-up on a post I made over a year ago called Google is not a search company. I was going to call it "GooOS, the Google Operating System".
My notes contained two of Skrenta's main points: the importance of the supercomputer and the scores of Ph.Ds being Google's main assets. A third key asset for Google is the data that they're storing on those 100,000 computers. As I said in that post:
Google's money won't be made with search...that's small peanuts compared to selling access to the world's biggest, best, and most cleverly-utilized map of the web.
So. They have this huge map of the Web and are aware of how people move around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfect place to store this map (one of the world's largest computers that's all but incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading this map. Google knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop for, they know who wants to advertise and how effective those advertisements are, and they're about to know how we communicate with friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.
Tim O'Reilly has talked about various bits from the Web morphing into "the emergent Internet operating system"; the small pieces loosely joining, if you will. Google seems to be heading there already, all by themselves. By building and then joining a bunch of the small pieces by themselves, Google can take full advantage of the economies of scale and avoid the difficulties of interop.
Google isn't worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft's search efforts...although the media's focus on that is probably to their advantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world's fastest computer running the smartest operating system? Mobile devices don't need big, bloated OSes...they'll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS. Using Gnome and Linux as a starting point, Google should design an OS for desktop computers that's modified to use the GooOS and sell it right alongside Windows ($200) at CompUSA for $10/apiece (available free online of course). Google Office (Goffice?) will be built in, with all your data stored locally, backed up remotely, and available to whomever it needs to be (SubEthaEdit-style collaboration on Word/Excel/PowerPoint-esque documents is only the beginning). Email, shopping, games, music, news, personal publishing, etc.; all the stuff that people use their computers for, it's all there.
Even though everyone's down on Google these days, they remain the most interesting company in the world and I'm optimistic about their potential and success (while also apprehensive about the prospect of using Google for absolutely everything someday...I'll be cursing the Google monopoly in 5 years time). If they stay on target with their plans to leverage their three core assets (which, if Gmail is any indication, they will), I predict Google will be the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years.
Overwhelmed by the amount of work necessary to keep up with all my friendships on Friendster, Orkut, and all the other social networking sites, I've posted a job opening over on craigslist for a personal social coordinator:
Permanent full-time position for a personal social coordinator for a New York-based web designer.
Your primary responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.
There's even room to grow in the position:
Future duties may include discouraging companies and individuals from starting new social networking sites so that additional staff won't be necessary in the future. Past employment as a bouncer, "heavy", or hired goon may be helpful in this regard.
Or maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong. Perhaps we just need a web service for managing relationships on the social networking sites. A meta Friendster; Micrsoft Passport for social networking. We could call it, oh, I don't know, Metaster...or Sterster. Sign in to all the sites with one username and password. Invite metafriends to all the sites with a single click. Manage a single profile across all the sites.
Of course, the marketplace won't be content with just one metaster site. Multiple sites will spring up and we'll then require a metametaster site to manage the information in all the metaster sites. Of course, the marketplace won't be content with just one metametaster site. Multiple sites will spring up and we'll then require a metametametaster site to manage the information in all the metametaster sites. Of course, the marketplace won't be content with just one metametametaster site. Multiple sites will spring up and we'll then require a metametametametaster site to manage the information in all the metametametaster sites. Of course, the marketplace won't be content with just one metametametametaster site...
(And yes, it's turtles all the way down.)
When Apple announced iLife '04 a couple of weeks ago, a common reaction was moaning over the price, which went from free to $49. Which is ridiculous...$49 is a steal for that bundle of software. After playing around with GarageBand this morning, I can report that GB alone is worth the price. I've never had this much fun with a piece of software before...I got my money's worth after 30 minutes.
(And I'd like to post the song I made -- the finest techno banjo tune (w/80s synth) ever!! -- but the vast extent of my musical talent is just too much for the world to experience in such a direct fashion. Alas.)
Apple's new OS X update, Panther, has been out for a few days now, and many are cooing over the Exposé feature which allows the user, with a single keystroke (and then some mouse motion & clicking or a few more keystrokes), to navigate to any open window they desire. I think it's a nice feature in theory but clunky in its implementation.
Apple also improved the Command-Tab switching between applications, pretty much mimicking the behavior of Windows by displaying in the middle of the screen a palette with the icons of all open applications which you can tab through until you can get to the one you want. Which is a godsend for an old Windows hand like me because in my experience, Cmd-Tab switching is the one of fastest ways to switch between open applications.
While some are saying that Apple unfairly ripped off the Cmd-Tab feature from an application called LiteSwitch X (Proteron is obviously ignoring that they ripped it off from Windows), I think they missed a chance to take Cmd-Tab to the next level while, at the same time, making Exposé truly useful.
Here's what I propose. Ditch the existing clunky Exposé behavior (perhaps except for the "Show Desktop" keystroke) in favor of a combined Cmd-Tab/Exposé behavior. Hitting Cmd-Tab would bring up a palette of all the open windows (not just applications) and would also Exposé all open windows. Continuing to hold down Cmd and hitting Tab would cycle through each icon in the palette (which would need to be smaller to not overpower the Exposéd windows) but would also highlight the corresponding Exposéd window. When you reach the window you need, you let go of the Cmd key and the window pops open. Click on the image to the right to see a full-size screenshot of how this would work (*roughly*). You could certainly augment that basic behavior with existing Exposé features like the ability to use the mouse to navigate to the window of choice or to quit an app by Cmd-Qing while the focus is on that app's window, but for the basic functionality that will be used 90% of the time, all you need is Cmd-Tab.
That's it. Two keys for fast, easy switching between open windows that combines the best of both the existing Cmd-Tab and Exposé approaches...no mousing, clicking, or switching keystrokes required. There are a number of potential problems with this approach (such as the icon palette partially obscuring the Exposéd windows, which really isn't that big of a deal because the minimized windows are essentially acting as icons and therefore don't need to be fully shown...plus the tiny windows all look the same anyway), but I believe the simplicity would more than make up for them.
Some random notes from my three days at the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine:
- The substrate of complexity is irrelevant, whether it's carbon or silicon. That is, a computer is a computer is a computer, be it a Powerbook or a human being. The level of complexity is the important part.
- Patent clerks spend an average of 4-6 hours per patent on a prior art search. Yikes.
- Lessig imagines an 18th century DMCA: the (D)aguerre (M)achine (C)ontrol (A)ct. I've seen Larry speak three times now; it's interesting to see how he's refined his argument.
- URLs cribbed from Golan's presentation: Danny Rozin's Wooden Mirror and Kelly Heaton's Furby wall.
- Audience member on the Jewish perspective on stem cell research: "A fetus is a fetus is a fetus until it becomes a lawyer."
- Cloning + embryonic stem cells is a powerful combination. Cloning takes "old cells" back in time, creating identical young cells. Embryonic stem cells can then be harvested from the cloned embryo and used to create new cells and organs for the original organism. Wild stuff.
- The Methuselah Mouse Prize is encouraging work on anti-aging, giving out prizes for the longest-lived lab mouse.
- Q from the audience about humans possessing indefinite life spans: "But doesn't this mean there won't be any children?" Answer from Aubrey de Grey in a most straight-forward tone: "Yes, it would mean a world without children." At that point, a chill went up my spine.
- A population pyramid for the US from the US Census Bureau's IDB Population Pyramid page.
- The shortest summary of the past 100 years I've ever heard: "the 20th century had its ups and downs." - Clay Shirky
- James Kunstler: "We are creating places we don't care about [living in]"
- Overheard about Virginia Postrel's talk on the Age of Aesthetics: "for someone who thinks aesthetics is so important, you'd think she would have used something better for her slides than Comic Sans on light purple." That and her increasing shrillness toward the end of her talk turned much of the audience off her argument I think.
- David Martin raised a question I've been preoccupied with for a couple of years now: "How much of the global economy is just an hallucination?"
- Geoffrey Ballard on the future: 12% of the population is currently ruining the planet. What happens when the other 88% get involved?
- Here are the goals that the 191 United Nations Member States have committed to meet in the next 12 years.
- An audience member asked space architect Constance Adams about sex is space (within the context of designing habitats for procreation), and she indicated that erections in space are difficult to achieve because in zero gravity, blood tends to collect in the head and feet.
- Robert Wright, author of the excellent Nonzero, is tall, handsome, witty, so very smart, and possesses impeccable timing. I think I am in love.
According to news.com, Google is discontinuing Blogger Pro and folding the Pro features back into their free version of the software:
Google-owned Web log-creation site Blogger is eliminating its paid version and folding premium functions into its free service, bucking a trend toward making people pay for Web site extras.
The creation of Blogger Pro, which cost subscribers a yearly fee of $35, came about as a result of financial necessity, Blogger co-founder Evan Williams wrote in an e-mail to subscribers. Now that Google owns the service, that need has passed.
It's a good move...Pro never offered significant improvement over the free version and the proliferation of Blogger's various options (Blogger, Blogger Pro, Blog*Spot, ad-free Blog*Spot, etc.) was confusing.
But as I mentioned back in May, it makes me nervous when a big company releases for free software for which other smaller companies are charging. Just as Microsoft buried Netscape with a free browser (resulting in stagnation in overall browser development), Google could give away blogging tools and services (to what end?), make it difficult for Six Apart, UserLand, etc. to sell their products & services, and in two years time, we've got a single dominant blogging platform and innovation in blogging software goes to zero. Fortunately, the general excellence and feature-richness of TypePad and Movable Type in particular and Blogger's continuing uptime and support problems will probably override any advantage Blogger has in price.
So, when I fix it so I can control my TiVo via the web and buy an Apple iSight camera & point it at the television, I can watch Junkyard Wars and Family Guy at work via iChat AV, right?
Also, at next year's O'Reilly Etech conference, someone** will do something with iSight/iChat AV that will allow people attending one panel to tune into the other two concurrent panels (much like Hydra let people textally eavesdrop on concurrent panels last year). The really cool thing? The organizers of the conference won't have to do anything to make this happen, aside from providing the wireless network. No setting up a streaming, teleconferencing, blah-de-blah server, no renting of video cameras or microphones, no A/V people. Just give people a medium for communication & collaboration and they'll figure it out for themselves.
** Here's a suggestion: a presenter could mic him/herself, make the audio available over iChat AV, and make the presentation available on the web so that anyone who has iChat can follow along from anywhere in the conference area. Add in real-time stenography with Hydra and you can enjoy the conference entirely from the bar or one of the sofas in the lobby.
Now that people have had a couple of weeks to tinker with it, it's become apparent that in iTunes, Apple has created their own little Napster. Well, half of Napster anyway. Just like with Napster or Kazaa, users of iTunes can share their music libraries with anyone with anyone they want. Several public sites and applications have already sprung up to help people find folks who are sharing their music, most notably ShareiTunes and SpyMac.
The catch is that you can't save songs from someone else's library to your local library using iTunes. However, a few enterprising developers looked at how iTunes shares music and have been building applications that provide the other half of the Napster experience, the downloading of music from remote libraries. iLeech is a very simple, tiny program that lets you download music from any publically available iTunes library (and there are other apps that do similar things).
Conventional wisdom is that Apple seriously fucked up, the RIAA is going to sue Apple's pants off, and Apple's new iTunes Music Store will be shut down by the some seriously pissed off record companies.
I'd like to believe an alternative theory. Apple had to know what they were doing with iTunes. Their engineers aren't stupid. They left the whole thing wide open and had to know how trivial it would be for developers to figure out the protocol and write apps to download the music directly. Maybe Apple is taking a stand here, saying that this type of software is not illegal and that it is individual users who choose to break the law. Apple knows that it's in our nature to want to share music, photos, and movies with each other and is building applications (social software?) to support that behavior. Apple wants to make a business out of this and maybe they're daring the RIAA to sue them over it. Or daring the RIAA not to sue them. After all, Apple and the record companies are all buddy-buddy now with the iTunes Music Store...are they willing to sue Apple right after getting Jobs on the cover of Fortune with Sheryl Crow? If Apple is in fact taking a stand here, I say, go Apple!
Edward Tufte has a new 24-page pamphlet out called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint on how to improve your PowerPoint presentations:
In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
I love the cover image.
I love the current escalation in the battle of the search engines. Since Google came out of nowhere a few years ago and ate all the other search engines for lunch, the response from that camp has been less than impressive. With their recent efforts, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves have finally figured out what it is that makes Google so successful (and Microsoft wants to take a stab at it too).
It's the user experience, stupid.
Advances on the internet and the web are typically heralded as technology-driven. Robert Morris from IBM argued last year at Etech 2002 that -- and I'm paraphrasing from memory here -- most significant advances in software are actually advances in user experience, not in technology. Mosaic was not an advancement in technology over TBL's original browser. Blogger is a highly-specialized FTP client. IM is IRC++ (or IRC for Dummies, depending on your POV). The advantages that these applications offered people were user experience-oriented, not technology-oriented.
Google's success in the search space due to their focus on user experience has lent significant credibility to this way of thinking, so much so that their competitors are now scrambling to catch up on those terms. As someone who deals with user experience professionally, it's great to see this happening.
Proving only that he hasn't talked to an actual software developer in a coon's age, Larry Ellison predicts that Linux is going to eventually eat Microsoft for lunch. On the desktop, except for a few dedicated followers of the Church of Apple and Unix-lovin' software developers, Microsoft owns this space and will for a long time.
In developer land, having been recently reintroduced to the ins and out of Microsoft development, I'm reminded how differently Unix developers and Microsoft developers approach software development. If Unix development philosophy is small pieces loosely joined, Microsoft's philosophy is big chunks tightly coupled. Microsoft developers aren't going to suddenly jump ship to a completely different platform and way of developing...there's a lot of friction and inertia there (not to mention Microsoft's considerable marketing efforts) that will tend to prevent that.
