Ajax Girl

I had a chance to drop in on a session of the class being taught at Stanford this quarter for students who want to learn about developing applications for Facebook (briefly mentioned here). Today’s session was a bit unique since the students were expected to give presentations about the applications they have developed so far.

Of course, the existence of this class is now a bit ironic, since today more news emerged about Google’s OpenSocial, a new alliance that, among other things, allows application creation with basic HTML and JavaScript skills. With Facebook, developers need to learn a new markup language called FBML, thus, part of the need for a class. That said, much of the Stanford class is dedicated to the concepts that are pertinent to application development on any social network platform. For that reason, the class is hardly invalidated - and is perhaps reinforced - by recent developments with OpenSocial.

All in all, I learned about 25 applications for about two and a half minutes each. Most of them were quite simple, as their assignment had been to create applications that drew the largest number of users (their next assignment will be to focus on user engagement). Like Facebook apps in general, the majority of the Stanford apps were also intended for diversionary (dare I say trivial?) activities. That’s not necessarily a knock against them since many - and perhaps most - users obsess with Facebook because it simply amuses them. Plus, it’s impressive that these students were able to put applications together with any decent functionality in the time they were allotted.

Here’s a rundown of the applications created by Stanford students listed in the order they were presented. Links to most of them have been provided since they are actually live on Facebook now, but keep in mind that these are still in development so they may not work completely, or at all for that matter.

(more…)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/178546239/

Wikipedia is used by millions worldwide each day, draws in billions of page views each month, and often takes the top slot on Google searches. But the truly amazing fact is that it’s stayed ad-free. This is because the mega encyclopedia and its sister sites run on borrowed time, borrowed servers, and — most importantly — public donations.

That’s why Wikpedia’s parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, has been running their annual fundraiser to support their effort to spread free knowledge. Most of their revenue comes from private individuals, with donations averaging around $25. Founder Jimmy Wales makes a personal request for donations and outlines future plans in a video below. Over the past nine days they’ve attracted over 10,000 donations (they’re also donating a lot of fan photos as well). The 10,000th one came from a contributor in Finland, who donated 10 Euros at 8:58 UTC (4.58 ET). And there’s still time for plenty more. The drive runs all the way through December 22.

You can donate money here. You can get a banner to help promote donations here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/178510058/

When Google was asked during the press conference earlier today if they had invited Facebook into OpenSocial, the answer was “yes,” and then changed to “we can’t comment, followed by “we have reached out to virtually everyone in this space” (quotes are rough, I was taking notes but not recording). Whichever one is the correct answer, the clear indication was that Google was reaching out to Facebook to join the club.

Facebook, however, says they haven’t had the pleasure. When we asked them if they were planning on joining, Brandee Barker, Director of corporate ommunications at Facebook, responded:

Despite reports, Facebook has still not been briefed on OpenSocial. When we have had a chance to understand the technology, then Facebook will evaluate participation relative to the benefits to its 50 million users and 100,000 platform developers.

My bet is that they join. Because suddenly Facebook is being painted as the closed outsider while everyone else is allowing the use of non proprietary coding platforms (Facebook requires the use of FBML, not HTML) and portability of applications.

How did they turn into the bad guys so quickly? As Erick says, it’s their move. But no matter what they do, Google has pulled off an absolute coup.

For their part, Google will certainly want Facebook’s participation. But they had to get everyone else on board first, before Facebook would even consider it. An open platform means no social network has any advantage over any other when it comes to third party applications. The playing field has been evened, and no one wins. Except Google. They always win.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/178467422/

I keep hearing more and more buzz about open-source hardware. One of the most ambitious open-source hardware startups is Bug Labs. The company is creating a Lego-like hardware platform that tinkerers and engineers can use to create their own digital devices. I visited their offices in New York earlier this week and played around with a prototype. It starts with a BUGBase, which is a general-purpose Linux computer about the size of a PlayStation Portable, encased in white plastic. This has four connectors that plug right into the motherboard. The company will also make a variety of modules that can plug into the computer—like an LCD screen, a digital camera, a GPS unit, a motion sensor, a keyboard, an EVDO modem, and a 3G GSM modem. (There are also places to add USB, Ethernet, WiFi, and serial ports). Bug Labs is planning on making 80 modules over time, and hopes outside companies and developers will create their own.

CEO Peter Semmelhack hopes to make possible the “long tail of gadgets.” With Bug Labs, the idea is that an engineer or entrepreneur can now create a digital device customized to their exact needs even if the market for that device is only 10 people, or only one. This could be great for making prototypes on the cheap—no need to tool up a factory or find one in China that wants a couple million dollars to do your first production run. Soon, designers will be able to just order a Bug Labs kit with the modules they need and write the software to tell the device what to do. This product is aimed squarely at engineers. But making a gadget will become a lot easier—maybe as easy as creating a Web 2.0 site.

And if someone comes up with a winning combination of hardware features, the guts can be easily repackaged into a slimmer, better designed case and manufactured in the thousands or millions like any other device. So there is a way to ramp from hardware curiosity to consumer gadget. Still, it is unclear that a long-tail approach to gadgets will ever create the scale and demand necessary to support a hardware business. Time will tell. (Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is an investor)

The Bug won’t be on sale until December at the earliest, but below are pictures of what they will look like. The modules literally click together like Legos, and you can put them anywhere you want. For a GPS camera, for instance, you would put the LCD screen on the back, the camera on the front, and the GPS module in one of the other slots. Rearrange the modules or swap in new ones to create an entirely different device. I want one. Don’t you?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/178460717/

Last night, the New York Times quietly launched Blogrunner on the technology section of its main site. Blogrunner was one of many techmeme copycat sites, until the New York Times bought it last year. Like Techmeme, Blogrunner is a service that keeps track of the latest news and blog posts on a range of topics (Politics, Technology, Media, Business, Economy, Law, Health, Movies, Books, Religion, Iraq, Entertainment). Now those links are appearing on the New York Time’s main site, starting with the technology section, in a middle column titled “Technology Headlines from Around the Web.” It is also on the bottom-right of the Health section in a column called “Health Around the Web.” And links from Blogrunner will appear at the bottom of individual stories, giving readers a choice between related articles from the New York Times and related articles from around the Web (much like some sites use Sphere).

Says New York Times editor (and Bits blogger) Saul Hansell: ” Unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren’t trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts.” But the NYT would like nothing better than to displace those two news crawlers.

At first glance, it looks like it is Techmeme for a mainstream audience. TechCrunch happens to be at the top of both the NYT Blogrunner and Techmeme right now. It will be interesting to see which one delivers more traffic. We will report on the results tomorrow.

TechMeme

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/178434137/

Not so fast, Mike. The anti-Facebook coalition piling onto Google’s OpenSocial platform does not constitute checkmate for Google just quite yet. These are developer announcements. No actual consumers have changed their social networking habits because of OpenSocial. Facebook still has all the momentum with consumers (and, thus, with the developers who want to reach them). It can afford to wait and see how this whole OpenSocial thing plays out.

It just cannot wait too long before deciding its next move. And the very best move may very well be, as you suggest, Mike, to join the coalition itself. (Not that Google has asked it to). Otherwise, it risks becoming the Apple of the social networking world (the old Apple of the 1980s, which always offered a nicer, more controlled experience than Windows, but ceded application momentum). Because if apps are easier to develop for OpenSocial, and those apps can be spread across all the OpenSocial partner sites (including MySpace) in a write once, run anywhere fashion, developers will end up writing for both OpenSocial and Facebook. And if their OpenSocial apps start to gain more traction because they have more functionality, they may just start to put those Facebook projects on the back burner. (With OpenSocial, for instance, full applications can run on members’ profile pages, whereas on Facebook there are substantial restrictions on what developers can do on those profile pages).

Facebook may have started the ball rolling, but OpenSocial could very well win over developers rapidly. As Marc Andreesen, whose DIY social network startup Ning is an anti-Facebook coalition member, puts it:

Open Social — by making this exact same kind of opportunity available to any other social network or container and every app developer and site on the web, in an open and compatible way — will prevent Facebook from having any kind of long-term proprietary developer lock-in. Developers will easily write to both Facebook and Open Social, and have every reason to do so — in fact, 100+ million reasons to do so.

If you’re Facebook, you’d probably prefer to have that proprietary lock-in, and so this announcement may not make you that happy. However, all is not bad for Facebook, because a big part of what’s happening today is market expansion, and Open Social will definitely help fuel market expansion, which is in everyone’s interest, including Facebook’s.

Finally, note that Facebook can easily support Open Social any time they want. They probably won’t do so right away, but in the long run, it will probably be a no-brainer for them, because then they will pick up whatever Open Social app developers who aren’t also Facebook developers.

Make that much more than 100 million reasons. MySpace alone had 107 million unique visitors globally in September (compared to 73.5 million for Facebook), according to comScore data (see table). Six Apart had 39 million, Hi5 had 35 million,and Bebo had 20 million. There is some duplication there, but you get the idea.

Joining OpenSocial could actually be a brilliant move for Facebook, especially if it can become the advertising network of choice for social apps. If Facebook can make it easy for Facebook developers to port their apps elsewhere and power those apps with Facebook ads, why wouldn’t it do so? Checkmate, indeed.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/178416586/

Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle.

This was reported by Silicon Valley Insider earlier today, and we have confirmed it from a source as well: MySpace will announce that it is joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative.

Google will be making an announcement today. MySpace joins Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as announced Google partners. No word on whether MySpace will continue with efforts to complete its own recently announced platform, but the answer is probably yes. They are likely to simply do both.

Suddenly, within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/178329081/

Brian Dillard has a great write-up about the newest release of Songbird, the Mozilla-based platform for building Web media mash-ups:

If you’ve yet to experience Songbird, a little background is in order. The project is run by Pioneers of the Inevitable, a Bay Area company founded by veterans of Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine. Building on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform and the VLC media player, Songbird aims to unite a web browser, a media jukebox and an online media player into a skinnable, extensible, open-source application. At this stage, the app is a long way from challenging the likes of Windows Media Player, let alone iTunes. But as it grows, it promises to cultivate the same kind of fervent user and developer communities as Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla projects.

While Songbird has a desktop media player aspect to it, I think the biggest attraction to developers will be the rich JavaScript API which will allow you to build media mashups. Brian provided an interesting view of how he might leverage it:

As an Ajax developer and huge music nerd, I’m looking forward to playing with the JavaScript API. It promises seamless integration between webapps running in the Songbird browser and the media player itself. Imagine iTunes, but instead of a built-in browser that only supports the iTunes store, you’ve got a Firefox clone that plays well with music vendors, P2P networks, MP3 blogs and any other internet music resource

This looks to have huge potential and well worth investigating further. Brian said it best, “Why aren’t Ajax folks more geeked about “the Firefox of media players”?“

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/178327252/songbird-v03-api-for-media-mashups

In Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay does make-overs on failing restaurants and turns them into respectable enterprises through a combination of cuisine guidance, managerial pruning, and loads of swearing when things fail to meet his standards.

It’s a fantastic show that gives grim insight to the scary state of affairs of the chosen spots, but it also goes beyond the schadenfreude and saves these places from going out of business.

What makes Ramsay’s approach to restaurant revamping so interesting, though, is how applicable it feels to software design. The characteristics of a failing eatery ring remarkably similar to those of a poorly-run software product:

Everything to no one
Almost all Ramsay’s cases feature an overstuffed menu derived from a misguided notion that more choice is always better and that making every dish under the sun will broaden the appeal of the restaurant. The first order for the cuisine is to trim the choices and go from thirty-some dishes to ten or twelve.

Compare this to a piece of software overflowing with features. None of them particularly tasty, none of them particularly well done, all of them burdening the user with a learning curve and all of them cluttering the interface to the point of mediocracy.

You don’t tickle patron’s taste buds by all the dishes you can make that they don’t eat and you don’t delight users by spreading yourself thin over all the features they won’t use.

Cook what you know
British chefs slicing Japanese Sushi or Indian chefs cooking traditional American cuisine are two examples that Ramsay cracked down on under the banner of Cook What You Know. If you don’t have a strong history of eating and living with certain ingredients and styles of cuisine, it’s much, much harder to reach the upper echelon’s of taste. And why bother? Pick your native ingredients, those in season, and make what you know and can personally appreciate.

The same is true for software. When you create products for yourself, you’ll have a much easier job and most likely be much better at it too. It’s hard to make good food if you don’t know what excellence should taste like and it’s equally hard to craft good software if you can’t appreciate what brilliance looks like.

Passion for your environment
Great chefs care about their tools and their environment. Poor chefs let their kitchens go and don’t cleanup the messes they create. In the world of food that’s not just sloppy, but dangerous as well. One of Ramsay’s common shocks come in the form of “I fucking ate this!!” when he looks at the ingredients and machinery that produced his welcoming meal.

Great programmers are like great chefs. They care about having a clean, productive environment. They surround themselves with beautiful code that they craft with tools that they enjoy. You can’t disregard your tools and think that you can still produce great work. It doesn’t work in cooking and it doesn’t work in programming.

That’s just a small taste of the similarities. Ramsay has plenty of additional lessons to teach software creators about vision, simplicity, and executing on the basics beautifully. I highly recommend setting your DVR to pick up the American version of Kitchen Nightmares on Fox every Wednesday from 8pm. The original British ones from BBC are great as well.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/686-what-gordon-ramsay-can-teach-software-developers

Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room.

RSS vs email

Media descriptions

Roll the dice

Mark I.	Jamis, you’ll appreciate this: My 10 year old wrote a program to roll dice and is using it to play D&D by himself.
Mark I.	It’s actually more accurate to say that he has several programs. One for each die type.
Jamis B.	ha! awesome
Jamis B.	tell me he wrote it in Ruby!
Mark I.	Of course.
Mark I.	Using Hackety Hack.
Jamis B.	very cool!
Mark I.	It’s fun to watch. He swears it’s faster for him to load up the program and run it than it is to just roll dice. Of course, he’s delusional.

Russian spam

Mark I.	Incidentally, I came across a filtering rule for email that has completely eliminated all the Russian spam I used to get.
Mark I.	Matches: (в OR и) Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it
Mark I.	If I got legitimate Russian mail, that wouldn’t work. But since I don’t speak Russian anyhow, I figure I’m safe.
Jamis B.	lol, awesome

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/664-fly-on-the-wall-rss-vs-email-media-descriptions-roll-the-dice-and-russian-spam