impl.emented» FriendFeed

From Yahoo Search BOSS to Rocking Fractals [Best of July '08 #2]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:57:06 +0000

Lots of interesting stuff the past week (July 7-13 2008):

Yahoo continues their open strategy with the launch of Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service). This is a different offering than SearchMonkey, which just allowed you to enhance the presentation of the search results. The new service has quite liberal terms. It allows you to re-order the search results and mix in other results as you see fit. These are desired options I wrote about in my first post on this blog. The terms also have a no-attribution requirement, which expressively requires you not to mention Yahoo in your search offering. Still you are not allowed to use the search index data in any way you might want to. You must provide a search service, with a search box, and only query the index in response to a search performed by a real user of your service. Also, considering the current uncertainty of the future of Yahoo, building a business on top of BOSS seems a bit risky.
Tags: search, Yahoo
From the security department, there was much talk about a potential, yet unexploited flaw in the Domain Name System, DNS, the "address book" of the internet, which translates human friendly URLs to IP addresses. Dan Kaminsky, who discovered the flaw, secretly informed the major vendors without talking to the security community, which has spawned some speculation about the significance of the discovery. The details of the vulnerability will not be publicly disclosed until August 7. Though, it is likely related to insufficient randomness provided by the 16 bit session ID of DNS. In that respect, the vulnerability is rooted in the same problem domain as the OpenSLL flaw I wrote about in May.
Tags: security
Two news from the virtual world(s): Google launches a customizable and embeddable virtual world called Lively. Second Life, the hitherto largest virtual world, reported on the first successful teleportation of an avatar between two (experimental) virtual worlds. They also recorded a video of the event.
Tags: virtual worlds
Ars Technica writes about recent speculations about a new non-Windows operating system in development at Microsoft, code name Midori. To be released some 9 years from now, probably beyond Windows 8.
Tags: Windows
The new URL shortening service bit.ly, has a host of innovative features, including an API, as reported by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Dave Winer is one of the brains behind the service.
Tags: URLs, tools
Soon we might be able to program Flash using C, meaning a speed boost that is useful in gaming applications, for example.
Tags: Flash
Moopz, a FriendFeed conversation aggregator reviewed by Sarah Perez. Among the features are item threading, noise reduction and automatic summary and tag generation. Only items containing a link are considered, thus reducing the noise. First impression is that it's a useful service. (Btw. I'm jobol on FriendFeed.)
Tags: aggregation, FriendFeed
Josh Catone is back to blogging. Now at SitePoint, a resource site for web developers and designers, where he is running the News & Trends blog. Glad to have him back.
Tags: Josh Catone
Finally, a bonus video on the math theme featuring fractals, found via Brad Feld.

Google is for Geeks - Microsoft for Nerds [Best of June '08 #4]

Jonas Bolinder — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:32:32 +0000

This week started slowly, but turned out really interesting (June 23-30 2008):

Working at Google vs. Microsoft:

I left [Google] because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me. [...] I like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less.
[...] the culture at Google values 'coolness' tremendously, and the quality of service not as much.

In other words, Google is for geeks and Microsoft for nerds.
Tags: Google, Microsoft
The next version of Windows, code name "Windows 7", seems to build on the same core architecture as Windows Vista, which is a problem according to Randall Stross of the NY Times, since: "[Windows] has become an obese monolith built on an ancient frame. Adding features, plugging security holes, fixing bugs, fixing the fixes that never worked properly, all while maintaining compatibility with older software and hardware".
Tags: Windows 7
A recent study challenges the Long Tail theory and suggests that the real money is in the head, writes Matt Asay. The study may have some flaws though.
Tags: business
More news on the problems webmasters are facing with the antivirus software AVG 8.0. The pre-scanning of the links from a web search, that the software does, is now even more difficult to distinguish from a real user, writes the Register. I'm still using AVG 7, and it seems to continue to update its database, despite the updating was supposed to end June 25th. The annoying upgrade messages have also stopped.
Tags: web analytics
NoiseRiver, a FriendFeed filtering service reviewed by Louis Gray.
Tags: news filtering, FriendFeed
Top-level domains are finally set free, and will soon (in 2009) be available for registration by anyone that can present a business plan, writes the BBC. However, the cost will be high, probably around $100.000.
Tags: domains
Twitter died June 27th, according to Dave Winer: "So the conversation moves to FriendFeed. True, I am ignoring the flow I have on Twitter. Easy come easy go. The flow there is pointless."
Tags: Twitter
This week's bonus video, a perfect elevator pitch delivered by 15-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky for his startup Teens in Tech.

Tags: teens

News and Noise [Best of May '08 #3]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:15:23 +0000

This week turned out interestingly too (May 12-18 2008):

Robert Scoble has been blogging actively recently, and has an interesting post about news and noise. As he says: "The news is in the noise," which makes places like Twitter and FriendFeed interesting for the makers of news. The news items appearing on Google News and Techmeme are filtered out of the noise, which makes these news sites essentially noise free, and in some sense less interesting. Google News only tracks large well-known sites with multiple editors, which further reduces the noise, and also blocks individual bloggers from being covered. Getting on Techmeme is still feasible for an unestablished individual blogger, but it requires several "votes" by elite bloggers, as Scoble explains. On Techmeme's item selection process, Robert writes:

TechMeme: watches signaling from key members on Twitter and Google Reader. If enough people who are on the TechMeme Leaderboard Twitter and share an item on Google Reader you’ll see the item pulled onto the page.

Tags: news, Techmeme
Calais, the semantic markup service, is out with an improved version that recognizes terms from areas other than business, like media, music, entertainment, sports, medicine and healthcare. Calais also announced the release of WordPress and Drupal plugins.
Tags: Semantic Web
Robert Scoble also has a recent post stating 9 reasons why FriendFeed won't go mainstream, a few of them being: "Normal people don’t like noise", "FriendFeed doesn’t work well on mobile phones", and "Comments get fragmented, even inside FriendFeed." Honestly, Robert in a companion post states 9 reasons why FriendFeed will go main stream.
Tags: FriendFeed
The OStatic blog, one of my recent subscribes, tips about the Google Doctype project, an "open encyclopedia and reference library for developers of web applications", with resources on Web security, DOM manipulation, CSS and more.
Tags: web development
Yahoo! Search's open platform SearchMonkey is released to developers and site owners. Developers are allowed to create small applications that enhance the info about the URLs returned from a Yahoo search (but are not allowed to reorder the search results). The applications trigger on the returned search URL, e.g. I could build an application that enhance the search results from this domain (http://impl.emented.com). The structured data available to developers for enhancing the results come from core and semantic data gathered by the Yahoo crawler (called Slurp), special data feeds submitted by site owners to Yahoo and custom data services that you could create yourself.
Once developed, the applications are to be used by people searching the web with Yahoo Search. Obviously, an application that only triggers for a site which seldom show up the search results, will have difficulties to attract users.

Site owners are allowed to contribute with structured data about their site in a few different ways: By submitting Atom feeds to Yahoo, by using semantic markup or by creating custom web services.

Tags: search, Yahoo
Google Friend Connect was released this week, and caused some controversy about what the service really is. For example, Marc Andreessen thinks it is not a competitor to Ning, but "a mechanism that provides the embedding capability for Open Social gadgets to be used all throughout the web -- with the added benefit that with a Friend Connect-enabled Open Social gadget, the user gets her social context anywhere she goes." Robert Scoble on the other hand thought that Friend Connect could be a competitor of Ning. The Friend Connect site says that the service provides "a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing." The member gadget is said to provide core social features for the site, like sign-in, invite and activity showing to other social networks, member browsing across social networks, and on-site friend connect. A site owner can also easily add OpenSocial applications to the site.
Thus, an existing site can easily be socially enabled, and as such potentially compete with a Ning social network aimed at the same audience. Also, someone considering to start a new social network now has the choice of building an own site and using Friend Connect, instead of using Ning. Building an own site is of course somewhat more complicated, but it gives a much greater degree of control. So, in conclusion I think that Friend Connect could compete with some of Ning's audience, and also provide an alternative for some social network builders. Note that for really serious social network builders interesting in implementing OpenSocial, there is still the option of using Shindig.

Tags: OpenSocial, social networks
Jeff Atwood criticizes the frequent use of XML, due to its verbosity and poor human readability. Alternatives could be YAML or JSON.
Tags: programming
RSSmeme, an aggregator for Google Reader shared items, has released an API, which makes it possible to get all kinds of specialized feeds out of the service.
Tags: aggregation

Fun with Phun and Scratch [Best of May '08 #2]

Jonas Bolinder — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:02:44 +0000

Visual programming tools for kids, and a few more topics caught my eye this week (May 5-11 2008):

Steve Rubel thinks that FriendFeed is more valuable as an RSS and search tool than a social activity aggregator, and highlights the importance of FriendFeed's imaginary friend feature.
Tags: FriendFeed
Continuing the theme on visual programming tools, which in last week's highlights featured Popfly Game Creator, here's two more great free tools for learning kids (of all ages) about programming and physics: The 2D visual physics simulator Phun (see video below), written by Swedish MSc student Emil Ernerfeldt. The visual programming tool Scratch, aimed at kids 8 and up, with an impressive range of language constructs like loops and conditional statements, as well as simple event and message handling! Even though the possibilities seems relatively advanced, I've got the impression that Scratch is more accessible and rewarding to younger kids than Popfly Game Creator.

Tags: visual programming, kids' stuff
Bernard Lunn comes with some old-school sales tips, including "Close on every call", "Expect mutual effort", "Selling happens face-to-face" and "Ask for the order"
Tags: entrepreneurial, marketing
Google Translate now supports 23 languages including Swedish, which according to Google Translate translates into "Google Translate stöder nu 23 språk inklusive svenska" in Swedish, which is pretty accurate.
Tags: translations
Piwik, an open source web analytics software based on PHP and MySQL, an alternative to Google Analytics.
Tags: web analytics
There have been discussions on creating an open decentralized Twitter, mainly led by Dave Winer. The idea is motivated by the importance some people attribute to the service, and that a single company should not own it. Some even suggest creating a Twitter equivalent of the Domain Name System (DNS).
Tags: Twitter

Twitter Noise, Techmeme and Popfly Games [Best of May '08 #1]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:49:10 +0000

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.
Tags: Twitter
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.
Tags: blogging, Techmeme
Adobe announced the opening up of the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv files).
Tags: Flash
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.
Tags: blogging, FriendFeed
YackTrack tracks the conversation around a blog post at disparate sources like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress.
Tags: comments
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.
Tags: online games