impl.emented» Flash http://impl.emented.com — tracking the Web Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:12:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Google's SearchWiki - a "PR nightmare" [Best of November '08 #2-3] http://impl.emented.com/2008/11/24/googles-searchwiki-a-pr-nightmare/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/11/24/googles-searchwiki-a-pr-nightmare/#comments Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:25:38 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=59 A few tidbits from mid November blogging (Nov 10-23 2008):

  • PR-guru Steve Rubel outcries over Google's new experimental search service SearchWiki, which allows people to comment, vote and reorder search results, provided they are logged in with their Google account. The reordering should only be privately visible, but voting and comments are public to others. Rubel calls this a "PR nightmare", as there is no community moderation of the comments like in Wikipedia for example, and he continues:

    of course people are going to run amok on the world's biggest online stage! That's like turning a kid with a massive sweet tooth loose in a giant candy store. It's going to be a haven for spam.

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  • Tangible mediaIn another piece a couple of weeks ago Steve Rubel foresaw the end of tangible media by 2014, by tangible meaning all physical media like newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games. Like Rubel, I'm already almost free of tangible media, keeping only a subscription to Dr Dobb's Journal, which I'll probably quit next year. I'm also buying a handful of books each year, but once there's a Kindle-like device available in this country, at a reasonable price, I'll probably go completely digital.
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  • Google's virtual world experiment Lively, which I wrote about at launch in July, will be discontinued at the end of the year. Apparently, the experiment never took off, though Google states that the reason is to focus more on their core search, ads and apps business.
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  • Adobe labs has announced Alchemy, a research project that aims to bring the wealth of existing C and C++ code to Flash. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 bytecode that runs on Flash Player 10 or AIR 1.5. Alchemy is ideally suited for computation-intensive tasks and can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0, though still 2-10 times slower than native C/C++ code.
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  • Josh Catone writes that Yahoo has officially launched their browser extension BrowserPlus, which back in July was suggested as part of a Web 3.0 trend. BrowserPlus offers web developers a number of services, such as drag-and-drop, file browsing, image processing and persistent storage, just to name a few.
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  • A final note on two social media apps: SocialToo, a service that allows you to automatically follow and unfollow people on Twitter, now has a polling feature.
    Tarpipe lets you automate your social media publishing via a Yahoo Pipes-like user interface. Tarpipe supports a number of social services, comes with an API, and supports OpenID, OAuth and Microformats, writes ReadWriteWeb.
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]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/11/24/googles-searchwiki-a-pr-nightmare/feed/ 0 How to Count to Windows 7 (and a few more) [Best of October '08 #2-3] http://impl.emented.com/2008/10/21/how-to-count-to-windows-7-and-a-few-more/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/10/21/how-to-count-to-windows-7-and-a-few-more/#comments Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:31:15 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=56 Catching up on two weeks of web news (October 6-19 2008):

  • Windows 7The next version of Windows will be called simply Windows 7, Microsoft's Mike Nash explains how they came up with that particular number. Interestingly, Windows XP isn't counted as a major release, just a 5.1 release, with Windows 2000 being 5.0. Windows Vista is 6.0, and Windows 7 is actually version 6.1!
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  • Kongregate, the online Flash games site, where the boys are, according to Rafe Needleman, has put up a tutorial series aimed at beginning Flash game developers. The tutorials show how to build a basic space shooting game using Adobe Flash CS3 and ActionScript 2.0, and there is an accompanying developer competition.
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  • Experienced, but mainstream, Yahoo users don't get OpenID, shows a usability study released by Yahoo Developer Network. If you own a domain you can run your own OpenId server using phpMyID, as I do on the emented.com domain.
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  • If you want to use IIS on a Windows server, instead of Apache, to run popular open source PHP applications like Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress, you're in luck, as Microsoft just has released a Web Platform Installer tool, which simplifies the deployment process to almost a click of a button.
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  • Opera released some Web statistics obtained by their "Metadata Analysis and Mining Application", MAMA: 

    MAMA is a structural Web-page search engine—it trawls Web pages and returns results detailing page structures, including what HTML, CSS, and script is used on it, as well as whether the HTML validates.

    It's a vast resource for Web nerds, with results ranging from the least and most popular HTML elements to Flash and AJAX usage per country. Some key findings: Apache is used by 68% of web servers, IIS by 26%. The ratio of HTML to XHTML usage is about 2 to 1. The "table" element is more popular than "div", 8th vs. 14th place, respectively. 33% of web pages use Flash. Only 4% of URLs pass the W3C markup validation test. When testing my site, 38 errors were reported, so nobody is perfect. I guess Wordpress is to blame for a lot of those errors.
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  • Yahoo continues the roll-out of their Open Strategy, dubbed Y!OS. The latest release is a new universal profile page.
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  • Ars reports on benchmarking results for the new Flash 10 player compared to Flash 9. On Mac and Linux platforms there are substantial performance improvements up to a factor of 4. The Flash performance on those platforms are still far behind the performance on Windows though. Sporting the same hardware, Flash 10 on Vista outperformed Flash on Mac by a factor of nearly two.
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  • FailNonconformist blogger Ted Dziuba has relaunched his rebellious Web 2.0 blog Uncov, after recently leaving his startup Pressflip. It's mostly fun reading, as he tries to be a thorn in the side of the Web 2.0 aristocracy. Additionally, the accompanying pics of Fail and other misfortunes makes it a worthwhile read. On a somewhat related note, Christopher Beam writes here about the popularity of the word Fail.
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]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/10/21/how-to-count-to-windows-7-and-a-few-more/feed/ 0 Adobe CTO on Open Source and Flash, EU and Web 3.0 and More [Best of September '08 #4] http://impl.emented.com/2008/09/30/adobe-cto-on-open-source-and-flash-eu-and-web-30/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/09/30/adobe-cto-on-open-source-and-flash-eu-and-web-30/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:04:51 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=54 Some interesting posts this week (September 22-29 2008):

  • eWeek has a long interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, covering areas such as the open source aspects of Flash, the competition Adobe Air is facing from Google Chrome, Gears and possibly from Microsoft and Silverlight, and a bit about new features of Creative Suite 4 (CS4). Josh Catone does a good job of covering the Adobe Air part and the competition from Google Gears and Silverlight. In conclusion Josh thinks that Microsoft might play an important part in the cloud computing/rich Internet application (RIA) arena, something that Adobe's Kevin Lynch doesn't fully recognize.

    On open source, Lynch points out how Abobe is gradually embracing the open source movement, and he gives several examples of Adobe's contribution to OSS:

    We already open source the core of Flash, the virtual machine, Tamarin. Ten years ago we published the format that Flash uses called SWF. And for a while that format had a license agreement around it where we asked that people not make their own Flash players. And the goal of that was to maintain consistency of the runtime. [...]
    we actually removed the license restriction this year from the SWF format. So anyone can go create anything they want around that format, including a player if they want to. [...]
    But we need to balance openness and consistency. So we're very open about what goes into Flash Player, the bugs in Flash Player, the code and scripting engine in Flash, the format with Flash, the protocols with Flash. 

    On completely opening up of the Flash player Lynch is more hesitant:

    [That] would be somewhat challenging in that there are some codices in Flash that we don't have the rights to all the source to. That's one challenge with that. The other is that I think in terms of what's best here for consistency of Flash on the Web, having multiple implementations and having forking and splintering of that code would be a big loss for the Web in terms of that consistency.

    Well, there might be some truth in that, but there for sure are a multitude of OSS projects that have managed to keep control of the core development, without sacrificing consistency.

    In August I wrote about new directions in the development of ECMAScript, which is the parent language of JavaScript, ActionScript and a few other languages. The ECMAScript Harmony agreement implied a step back for the group working with the more ambitious ECMAScript 4 specification, including Adobe. Kevin Lynch, however, did not express too much worry about this development, saying:

    I think the amount of innovation that we were trying to do with ECMAScript 4 perhaps was too big of a leap for some and they wanted to see a more collaborative approach on that. So the standards process is a collaborative one where there are lots of points of view. And we're happy to continue working in the process to advance ECMAScript. But we're hoping that innovation can happen faster and that we can raise the level of scripting on the Web. So we're going to continue innovating in Flash Player. We're not removing features that we've already deployed because people are relying on them and we think they're good. And we'll keep developing it further. And at the same time we'll keep working with the standards process.

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  • Microsoft is embracing jQuery, a popular open source JavaScript library, and intend to support it natively in Visual Studio alongside its own ASP.NET AJAX library.
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  • Watch out US, the European Union (EU) wants to take the lead in the development of the next generation of the Web, aka Web 3.0. EU Commissioner Viviane Reding says: 

    Web 3.0 means seamless 'anytime, anywhere' business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines. It signals a tenfold quantum leap in the scale of the digital universe by 2015. Europe has the know-how and the network capacity to lead this transformation. We must make sure that Web 3.0 is made and used in Europe.

    For other definitions of Web 3.0, check out my review from April.
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  • Automattic, the parent company behind Wordpress, acquires commenting system IntenseDebate, writes ReadWriteWeb, who also reviews Habari, a blogging platform and potential competitor to Wordpress. Habari uses the Atom Syndication Format for feeds and the Atom Publishing Protocol for web site communication. It also builds on PHP, and makes use of PHP Data Objects (PDO) for database access, and it supports MySQL and other databases.
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  • Ringside Networks, offering a "Social Application Server", which I wrote about in March, is closing up shop. Bad luck and timing could be the reasons.
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  • Royal Pingdom has a list of ten less known operating systems. For example, MenuetOS is written entirely in assembly language and is designed to be lightweight and responsive, and it fits on a floppy disk (1.44 MB).
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]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/09/30/adobe-cto-on-open-source-and-flash-eu-and-web-30/feed/ 0 From Yahoo Search BOSS to Rocking Fractals [Best of July '08 #2] http://impl.emented.com/2008/07/14/from-yahoo-search-boss-to-rocking-fractals/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/07/14/from-yahoo-search-boss-to-rocking-fractals/#comments Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:57:06 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=41 Lots of interesting stuff the past week (July 7-13 2008):

]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/07/14/from-yahoo-search-boss-to-rocking-fractals/feed/ 0 Identica Microblogging and Gnip Pinging Services [Best of July '08 #1] http://impl.emented.com/2008/07/08/identica-microblogging-and-gnip-pinging-services/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/07/08/identica-microblogging-and-gnip-pinging-services/#comments Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:40:11 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=40 This week's interesting posts (July 1-6 2008):

]]> http://impl.emented.com/2008/07/08/identica-microblogging-and-gnip-pinging-services/feed/ 0 Twitter Noise, Techmeme and Popfly Games [Best of May '08 #1] http://impl.emented.com/2008/05/05/twitter-noise-techmeme-and-popfly-games/ http://impl.emented.com/2008/05/05/twitter-noise-techmeme-and-popfly-games/#comments Mon, 05 May 2008 10:49:10 +0000 Jonas Bolinder http://impl.emented.com/?p=29 How to define Twitter noise and breaking into Techmeme were among the interesting subjects this week (April 28 - May 4 2008):

  • How to define the Twitter noise ratio, which was highlighted last week, continued to be discussed this week. There are a few related indices, e.g. Stowe Boyd's Conversational Index = (number of tweets / number of replies made by followers), Dave Winer's Twitter Spewage = (number of updates * number of followers) and the Follow factor = (number of following / number of followers). My thought on this, which has also been expressed by others, is that the noise ratio must be based on the number of tweets or updates in a time period of fixed length, e.g. in the past week, not the number of tweets since the user signed up to Twitter.
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  • How to break into Techmeme 100 as a solo blogger was discussed by Hutch Carpenter, who suggested three possibilities: 1. Long Slog (slow and steady), 2. Big Events (e.g. recognition by bigger bloggers), 3. Celebrity (e.g. Marc Andreessen). As for me, I am contented with just showing up on Techmeme, which was accomplished by a big event. Apparently, despite linking to three articles currently on Techmeme, my Microsoft-Yahoo post didn't make it.
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  • Adobe announced the opening up of the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv files).
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  • Robert Scoble thinks that the most interesting page of a FriendFeed user is the discussion page, like http://friendfeed.com/user/discussion. Louis Gray's success on Techmeme can be attributed to his frequent commenting on others' contributions.
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  • YackTrack tracks the conversation around a blog post at disparate sources like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress.
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  • Popfly Game Creator was released in alpha this week, a service based on Microsoft's Silverlight technology. It is aimed at non-programmers, and could possibly be something for my 7-year-old nephew, who is heavily into online flash based games at sites like miniclip.
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