impl.emented» open source

Microsoft Plummets on Search - Android in Trouble [Best of July '08 #3]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:48:39 +0000

This week featured some troubling news for Microsoft and Google (July 14-20 2008):

Recent data from Hitwise shows that Microsoft has lost almost 50 percent of its market share in search from June 2007 to June 2008. In the U.S. the drop is from 9.8 % market share to 5.5 %. In the U.K. the drop is from 5.7 % to 3.7 %, and in Australia a dramatic fall from 14.7 % to 6.7 %. Google is the great winner, while Yahoo shows a minor drop and Ask a minor gain. Ask is now almost as big as Microsoft on search in the U.S. As it seems, to remain a major player in the search field, Microsoft desperately needs to get hold of Yahoo's search service.
Tags: Microsoft, search
Google's supposedly open mobile platform Android, loses in credibility among developers, as it was revealed this week that a few select top contestants of the Android Developer Challenge were given access, under the counter, to an updated version of the SDK. Additionally, the code was provided under a non-disclosure clause, rhyming poorly with the promise of open, though technically Google has done nothing wrong.
There seems to be a lack of communication from the part of Google. As suggested by AndroidGuys, more frequent updates to the official Android blog would certainly calm down some hard feelings among developers. It will be interesting to see in the coming year what impact Android will make on the mobile phone market, which currently is overwhelmed, in terms of buzz at least, by the new iPhone.
Tags: Android
Gnip, the notification proxy service, finally hooks up to the XMPP firehose of Twitter. Does this mark the beginning of the end of the troubles of Twitter?
Tags: Gnip, Twitter
OStatic points to an "executive summary of Open Source", a white paper challenging 10 Open Source Myths. Some examples of myths covered: "Open source is free", "Open source equals open standards", "Open source is not for mission-critical functions", "Open source is for non-conformists" and "Open source software is lower quality".
Tags: open source
5 tips on using Twitter to improve your online-reputation. Some examples: "Start conversations with notable peers", "Share valuable industry news" and "Monitor your Twitter reputation".
Tags: online reputation, Twitter
IPv6, the next generation internet protocol, about to replace the current IPv4 in a couple of years, might pose a security risk, writes the Wired. The problem is that it is enabled by default in many operating systems, and lots of applications may not yet be up-to-date to handle the new protocol. Affected operating systems include Windows Vista and Mac OS X. Windows XP is however safe, i.e. IPv6 is not enabled by default. You can test here which IP protocols are supported by your computer.
Tags: IPv6, security

Identica Microblogging and Gnip Pinging Services [Best of July '08 #1]

Jonas Bolinder — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:40:11 +0000

This week's interesting posts (July 1-6 2008):

Identi.ca, a new open source microblogging service discovered by ReadWriteWeb has a host of attractive features like support for OpenID and the OpenMicroBlogging specification, which allows for publishing of notices across microblogging services. Identi.ca builds on the open source code laconi.ca, with reportedly a number of installations across the web, building a promise of a distributed alternative to Twitter. The code may have some flaws, e.g. the core architecture more resembles a content management system (CMS) than a messaging system, though since it is open source that can certainly get fixed.
Tags: microblogging, open source
Gnip — ping backwards, is a new free service for data providers and consumers, acting as a proxy between the two, taking API load off providers while increasing the update notification speed for consumers. More features are in the planning as anticipated by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Brad Feld has a detailed story about his evolving partnership with Gnip and MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier, from the first IM from Eric in 2004 to working as partners today.
Tags: proxy services
Blogged — a blog directory and human powered news aggregator. A potential Techmeme killer, had it only got rss feeds ...
Tags: blog directory, news aggregator
Ars Technica points to a browser wishlist initiative of the OpenAjax Alliance, "an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax". Among the most requested features of the next generation browsers are native JSON parsing, persistent connections, 2D graphics, video support and CSS features.
Tags: web development
Google learns to crawl Flash, for better or worse. After all, less Flash content is something I'd rather see. Visiting a Flash heavy site usually is a noisy experience for me as the CPU fan starts spinning due to the increased CPU usage and temperature.
Tags: Flash

Twitter is Cooling Off, but Noise is Heating Up [Best of June '08 #1]

Jonas Bolinder — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:46:07 +0000

Some of the interesting posts this week (June 2-8 2008):

The much hyped messaging/micro-publishing service Twitter is losing in interest among its users, partly due to the frequent and prolonged outages of the service. Dave Winer, for example, writes that Twitter is a ghost town:

[...] the upward momentum is gone, the new idea every 24 hours that so inspired us is a distant memory. Now we're going the other way. When I log onto Twitter these days, it's empty, quiet, a ghost town.

Though a recent announcement from Twitter infused Dave with some hope for the service.
Tags: Twitter
Marshall Kirkpatrick has an interesting article about noise in news, and why it might be a good idea not to filter the flow of information coming at you. For example, a study by Sanda Erdelez shows that "the more total information our minds are exposed to, the more particular items we'll be able to recall in the future." Marshall also refers to a post by Hutch Carpenter, who defines people as "signalists" or "discoverers" based on whether they "filter in" or "filter out" information with a certain content. For example, a signalist would read only content about Apple, whereas a discoverer would read all content except about Apple, for example.
Tags: news filtering
Marshall at ReadWriteWeb listened to my request last week for a comment policy, and wrote a post about how to comment without being spammy. In short: Be transparent about who you are, be super humble, and add value to the discussion. Then it's OK to provide a link to your own business.
Regarding the question of comment ownership, Dave Winer weighs in, and suggests that "I own the collection of comments on my blog, and you own the comments you've placed on my blog and all others," which is in line with my opinion on the subject.
Tags: comments
Facebook released part of their platform code as open source this week, and hardly nobody notices. A reason could be the unusual choice of license, CPAL (Common Public Attribution License), which Mike Gunderloy at the OStatic blog gives a good description of. CPAL is based on the more familiar Mozilla Public License, with a couple of modifications. One being an attribution requirement, which acts as a "poison pill" according to Mike.
Tags: open source
Mike Gunderloy in another post reports on Wikia Search, which promises to be a truly open search engine, with not only the underlying software being open source, but also the search results themselves being open to editing. A paradise for black hat SEOs and spammers as it sounds, but hopefully that could be fought back with a strong community. After all, Wikipedia manages to be fairly spam free, despite the open editing features.
Tags: open source, search
Alex Iskold writes about Zemanta, a "lazy man's" semantic blogging tool that automatically suggests related content – images, articles, videos and links as you type. Fred Wilson currently tries Zemanta, and I decided to try the provided WordPress plugin too. I had some issues with the service updating too frequently, which hangs the UI temporarily and makes the experience frustrating. It would be really nice to be able to disable the automatic updating.
Tags: blogging, Semantic Web

Trendrr, Scalr and Bork, Bork, Bork! [Best of April '08 #1]

Jonas Bolinder — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:28:08 +0000

Two Sweden-related posts in this week's roundup of interesting posts (April 1-6 2008):

Trendrr Makes Data Mashups A Breeze – Josh Catone
Trendrr, a potentially useful service for tracking and graphing data. Comes with an API.
Tags: graphing
Scalr: The Auto-Scaling Open-Source Amazon EC2 Effort – Henry Work
An open source initiative for managing Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.
Tags: cloud computing, open source
Google Gears, a Software Update for the Web – Ionut Alex Chitu
An embedded Google TechTalk video about what's new with Google Gears - "An open-source mechanism for updating the Web." HTML 5 and Gears have a lot in common.
Tags: Google Gears
Europe-Focused Blog Search Engine Twingly Goes Into Private Beta – Michael Arrington
A Sweden-based blog search engine.
Tags: blog search
How to Disagree – Paul Graham
A disagreement hierarchy in 7 levels: DH0. Name-calling DH1. Ad Hominem DH2. Responding to Tone DH3. Contradiction DH4. Counterargument DH5. Refutation DH6. Refuting the Central Point
Tags: blogging
Not Your Ordinary Google Interface – Ionut Alex Chitu
The Google interface in unusual languages, including "Bork, bork, bork!", the language of my favourite Muppet Show character: The Swedish Chef.
Tags: humor

Building the Mesh, Tradera API and Ringside [Best of March '08 #4]

Jonas Bolinder — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:29:25 +0000

Interesting posts this week (March 24-30 2008):

How to build the mesh - #1: ID, Social Graphs and Groups – Marc Canter
"A strategy for the open web." A summary of where we stand today, and a road map for the future.
Tags: mesh
Tradera släpper publikt API – Martin Persson
The swedish auction site Tradera (now own by eBay) finally releases a public API.
Tags: API
Ringside to offer first open-source 'social-application server' – Matt Asay
Allows web site owners to build social applications that operate with existing web site content, while seamlessly integrating with social networks such as Facebook.
Tags: open source, social applications
The Lifestreaming Backlash – Josh Catone
Activity streams are leading to information overload and need to be filtered. Facebook is already doing this.
Tags: activity streams
Quotably: The Perfect Tool To Make Sense Of Twitter – Michael Arrington
A new service that reformats Twitter messages into threaded conversations.
Tags: Twitter